Cited to Death (17 page)

I locked the car and went inside.

I took the stairs to the third floor. If anything bad was happening, I wanted to be able to come in through the back of the lab. I eased the door open and stuck my head through. The hallway was deserted. I could only see enough of the back door of the lab to see that there were lights on in there. The door to Dr. Oliver's office was to my immediate right; I tested the handle. Locked. I crossed the hall and put my ear to the door of the lab. I could hear voices, although I couldn't make out what they were saying.

There were two voices. One was male - low, calm. Pete's voice.

The other voice was raised and agitated.

And it was female.

Oh, shit
.

I tried the handle of the door, very slowly and quietly. It didn't turn. I was going to have to go to the front door of the lab.

I sent Kevin another text. "I'm at lab. Can hear Pete and a woman. She sounds upset. I'm going in." I turned my phone to silent mode and slid it into my pocket.

I went to the front door of the lab and tested the doorknob. It turned. I slowly, quietly eased the door open a crack and peeked in.

And found myself looking right down the barrel of a gun.

The door opened the rest of the way. Alana Wray backed up, keeping the pistol she was holding leveled at my face. "Finally. Get in here."

I went in.

"Turn around. Hands on your head."

I did what she said. She stuck the barrel of the gun right at the base of my skull, kicked the door closed and locked it.

What I saw sent a paralyzing jolt through me.

Ben Goldstein was slumped in the far corner of the lab, covered in blood from a head wound. Pete was in the center of the room, his wrists handcuffed behind him, locked around a supporting beam.

I looked at Pete. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head very slightly.
Don't do anything stupid.

Wray gave me a little shove in the back. "Move. Down that aisle." She motioned me to the aisle one over from where Pete was chained to the post. "Turn around."

I turned and noted that Wray was wearing latex gloves. Wonderful. I took another look at the gun. A small .38. It occurred to me at that moment that we might not make it out of this. I prayed that Kevin was on his way.

Because Alana Wray was pissed. She was breathing fast and sweating and her face was flushed. She glared at me and yelled, practically spitting. "This is all
your fault
!"

"
My
fault?"

"Yes,
your
fault! You and Christensen! You...you...
fucking librarians!
You couldn't leave well enough alone, could you? Either one of you? Had to go snooping around in things that weren't your business. No one was getting hurt, no crimes were committed, but the two of you just couldn’t let it
go!
"

I tried to look with my peripheral vision for anything I could use as a weapon. There was some glassware sitting on the countertops. Maybe I could palm something. "You've sure committed some crimes now. How did you kill Dan?"

"I injected him with potassium. Right through one of the holes left over from those ridiculous piercings. That should have ended it." She was pacing a little bit now, but not lowering the gun. I still didn't think I could make a move to do anything without getting shot. "How did you find out about it, anyway?"

I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her. "He mailed me a letter with the two citations and asked me to look into it."

She stopped pacing for a second and pointed the gun back directly at me. "I was monitoring all the mail going out of his office. How did he get it to you?"

"The postmark was Malibu."

She snorted. "Mailed from Ben's house. Should have known." She started pacing again, muttering to herself.

I needed to keep her talking, to try to keep her off balance if I could. But I didn't want to make her so mad that she'd just shoot me. "Who is Andy Mitchell to you?"

She stopped, surprised, then sneered. "Well, aren't you the smart one. Andy is my nephew. My older sister’s son. For a little extra cash he was more than happy to monitor your computer for me."

"UCLA knows about that. He's going to lose his job."

She waved the gun, almost airily. "Not my problem."

So much for family ties. "What did Ben find out?"

"He found out that I'd been married before. And that my previous married name was Collinsworth. And that there had been an Alana Collinsworth doing a postdoctoral fellowship in fertility medicine in Oxford in 2002."

Damn
. It hadn't occurred to me to investigate her background that closely. "How'd he find that out?"

"Tristan told him, the old fool."

"Where is Dr. Oliver? Do you have him tied up somewhere too?"

She laughed. "Of course not. I need him. He's gone to Seattle for the weekend."

"Does he know about the plagiarism?"

"Don't be ridiculous. That old fart wouldn't know a stem cell if it showed up in his oatmeal. I don’t think he even read the article we supposedly co-wrote. He's here for fundraising purposes, nothing else."

Wray was calming down, but she was also relaxing her guard a bit. I spotted a long test tube lying on the counter near the edge. If I could get her to look away from me, I could snatch it quickly. "Is Ben dead?"

She looked over at him; I swiftly palmed the test tube and tried to curl my fingers around it without being obvious. "No, he's still breathing. For now."

She was going to kill us, no doubt. I had to stall her. Kevin would come. "So what's your plan here?"

That got her mad again. "I had a plan, and your boyfriend here wrecked it! So now I have to get rid of all three of you!" She stopped and took a deep breath. "The plan was that Ben would text you, you would come here and identify him as the plagiarist, you and he would struggle, the gun would go off and kill Ben, and you'd be overcome by his cologne and die. He -" she waved the gun at Pete, "wasn't supposed to be involved at all. Now I have to come up with something else."

Pete hadn't spoken to this point; now he did. "Why not just shoot us all and flee the country?"

What the
fuck
was he thinking? I stared at him. He looked back at me and shook his head slightly again.

Wray focused on him. I used the opportunity to move a couple of feet closer to a rack full of test tubes on the counter to my right. "Because I have to keep the lab open. I can't let any of this interfere with my research."

Pete was using his calm, reasonable psychologist voice. "Aren't there easier ways to make money?"

Wray screamed so loudly it startled me and I almost dropped the large test tube. "
It's not about the money!
" If there was anyone in this end of the building, they'd hear her. Hell, they might have heard her in the parking lot.

Pete didn't raise his voice. "So what is it about?"

Wray advanced on Pete a bit. I took the chance of gently sliding the rack of test tubes closer to the edge of the counter. "It's about the
research!
The procedure will work! We're close! We just have to keep working at it, which means the lab has to stay open, which means I can't be implicated in any of this!"

Pete was taking over the conversation so I could move around more. "But..."

"
Shut up!
" More screaming. “Fucking
men
. You have no idea what it's like."

"What what's like? Tell me."

“Trying to keep me talking, eh?” She laughed bitterly. "Okay, fine. You have no idea what it's like to want a child. A child of your
own
. A child with your own genes. A child that isn't supposed to be possible because your ovaries were removed years ago." Her voice caught in a near-sob. "This research is my chance. If I can create ova from my own stem cells, I can have a child. My
own
child, in every way."

Whoa
. I figured it wouldn't be wise to suggest adoption. Pete asked, "So why plagiarize Hughes and Llewellyn's work? I don't understand why you couldn't have just built on their work rather than stealing it outright."

“Because I didn’t have
time!
” Yelling again. “The grant money was only going to fund us for two years. We needed results by that time or the funding would disappear. We were nowhere near producing results on our own. So I had to fake them, and it was easier to do it with Hughes’s article. It was in Welsh. No one would ever have known.” She waved the gun around some more. "Those fucking
bastards
wouldn't add me as an author on their pathetic article. I worked in that lab right along with them, and they gave me no credit for it whatsoever. They didn't want to tarnish my name with failure, they said. Bullshit! They had no imagination at all. I offered Llewellyn a job, here, and he wouldn't take it. I gave him two chances, and he said no to both of them. So it was
his
fault
.”

Accepting blame was not this woman’s strong suit. I suddenly realized something. “You killed Llewellyn, didn’t you?”

“The car accident killed him. I just ran him off the road. Hughes had the good graces to have a heart attack on his own before I published my article. Saved me the trouble of going back to Oxford to deal with him." She glared at me. "You're one of them, aren't you? Uptight Oxford misogynist bastards?"

"I went to Oxford. None of that other stuff." She was focusing back on me now. I moved to the other side of the aisle, away from Pete, and she circled around the end of the lab bench after me.

"Thought so. I think I’ll just kill you now." She reached into the pocket of her lab coat.

Shit
. I thought of one more tactic. “You learned a lot about me from my work computer, but you didn’t learn everything. Do you know that my brother is an LAPD homicide detective?”

Her head jerked up, and she stared at me, then laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, it’s true. You’re not so damn smart, as it turns out. My big brother is Detective Kevin Brodie, West LA division. And my boyfriend is his former partner. So you’re about to murder an ex-cop and the brother of a cop. LAPD is going to be on you like fleas on a dog. You won’t get away with killing us, so why do it?”

“Oh, I think I’ll get away with it.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and showed me a bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne.

I blanched, and she saw it. "Oh, yeah. The doctor that treated you in the emergency room was very thorough. This is exactly the same cologne that caused your attack last week." She seemed more relaxed now, and I didn’t think that was a good thing. "I’ve worked out what’s going to happen here. A ménage a trois. So sad. Ben, as it turns out, was our plagiarist. Dan found out about it and was investigating, so Ben killed him. But Dan had told you, and you uncovered the articles. Although you suspected Tristan, Ben was nervous. He decided he needed to get rid of you as well, so he lured you here. But Ferguson intercepted the text and thought you were meeting Ben for a tryst. He came to confront Ben, but Ben had a gun, forced boyfriend to handcuff himself to the post, then shot him. You arrived, found your boyfriend dead, went crazy, attacked Ben, and were overcome by his cologne.” She walked over to Ben and sprayed a considerable amount of the cologne on his upper body. The scent started wafting toward me, and I felt my airways start to react. “Ben, poor soul, faced with the carnage, knew he’d never get away with it, so he shot himself in the head.” She turned back to me and advanced, spraying as she came.