Cited to Death (7 page)

“Nothing. I did meet one of the other authors at my friend’s funeral. He said he was my friend’s boyfriend. He didn’t say anything about articles.”

Blake was chomping away on his gum. Maybe it helped him think. “Boyfriend, huh? You think this is some kind of weird gay thing?”

Oh brother
. “No.”

“Hmph.” Blake sounded like he was going to reserve judgment on that point for now.
Probably conjuring up a gang of murderous gay hackers based in West Hollywood.
He looked back at the titles in Dan's letter. "Stem cell research, huh?"

"Yeah. I've read the second one, but I’m waiting for the first one to come through interlibrary loan."

"What language is that?"

"Welsh."

"Weird. Okay. And so far, nothing has turned up in the article that seems...worthy of instigating computer sabotage?"

"No. Not at all. And the authors of the article aren't affiliated with UCLA. They're at Cedars and they're on the clinical faculty at USC."

“Okay.” Another stick of Dentyne disappeared into Blake’s jaw. Where was he putting it all? “Let’s shift gears. Tell me more about Ms. DeLong.”

“She was in library school with me and Dan. The guy who died. She’s the librarian at Pasadena High. She’s…” I realized I didn’t really know all that much about Diane. “She’s a friend.” That sounded lame even to me.

Blake drummed his fingers on his desk for a minute. "Okay. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to take your computer with me and see what's been done to it, and I’ll have a chat with your friend, Ms. DeLong. In the meantime, can you switch the computers you use every day?"

I winced. "Yeah...it'll be inconvenient, but I can do it."

"Good." Blake slapped his knees and stood up. "Let’s get this thing taken apart."

I heaved the tower off the floor, and we unhooked everything. Blake picked it up. “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Okay, thank you.” I saw him out.

Finally, I had time to start repairing the mess that the burglar had made. I got busy replacing books on my shelves, which lined the room. I created a pile with the loose papers and file folders. I’d address those at some other time. I was kicking up a lot of dust, and I didn’t want to start wheezing. But I did want to get the books re-shelved – the natural obsessive-compulsive tendencies of a librarian to organize, I guess. I finished that and took a puff from my inhaler that I kept in my desk drawer. It was getting low; I’d have to bring a replacement next week.

It was time for my reference shift. Right on time, Clinton appeared at the reference desk. I wasn’t busy at that moment, and he walked right up to me.

“Hi, Clinton.”

He looked at me gravely. “The word of the day is
chrestomathy
.”

I had to ask him how to spell that one. I wrote it on a card; he bowed and walked away. I looked it up. It meant
a collection of selected literary passages
.

Ooo-kay
. Not sure I could use that one in a sentence by the end of the day.

Once I was done at reference, I finished re-shelving in my office, then decided to do a quick Google check on the authors of both of the articles. The Americans were easy to find. Tristan Oliver, MD, PhD, and Alana Wray, MD, were the medical directors of Fertility Research. Benjamin Goldstein, MD, was apparently their employee. Fertility Research seemed to be a small, privately-funded organization, renting space in one of the medical office buildings adjacent to Cedars. Its website was pretty basic, but it did include the doctors’ credentials and a list of their publications.

Oliver, Wray, and Goldstein were graduates of US medical schools. Oliver had done a stint at Cambridge University, doing post-fellowship work in stem cell research back in 2002-3. Then he’d come to LA and joined forces with Wray, who had done postdoctoral training at NIH. They applied for a grant to open their own lab; a year after that, they’d published their first of many articles. The 2007 article that I now had was their big breakthrough. Both doctors were listed as clinical faculty at USC medical school, but I couldn’t find any evidence that they actually taught anything. Maybe they taught stem cell research. Goldstein, for his part, had co-written articles with Wray and Oliver since the 2007 paper, but hadn’t gone to work for the lab until 2010, when he’d finished his OB-GYN residency at USC.

After the publication of the 2007 article, Oliver and Wray’s lab had no difficulties in getting funded. At least every other month, Oliver was pictured accepting a very large check from a “sponsor.” Oliver’s name was in the “Living” section of the LA Times a couple of times a year. He and his wife hosted fundraisers at their Bel-Air home for various charities. Everyone looked tastefully wealthy. Wray’s name turned up more often in the results of West Coast triathlons, finishing in the top three in her age group, 40-45. One article had a blurry picture of her crossing a finish line, but her face was covered with a ball cap and it wasn’t possible to tell what she looked like. There was a feature article from 2009 on the lab itself; Oliver was pictured, and Wray spoke movingly about her lifelong quest for better answers to the problem of infertility.

Benjamin Goldstein didn’t turn up in any news at all other than his appointment to the lab.

The Welsh authors were a different story. David Hughes and Marc Llewellyn had been researchers at a similar lab at Oxford until mid-2003. They had also published a series of papers, but none of them were breakthroughs. The papers had been published in decreasingly prestigious journals, until their last article, the one cited by Dan in his letter, had appeared in the Welsh Medical Journal. The funding for the lab dried up, and it was closed. Neither man had ever published again. Interestingly, the existence of Hughes and Llewellyn’s lab overlapped in time with Tristan Oliver’s years at Cambridge. Oliver might have known Hughes and Llewellyn. It wasn’t unusual for researchers with a narrow specialty to be professionally incestuous. Everyone in a unique subspecialty knew everyone else, whether it was Celtic warrior queen Boudicca (the subject of my doctoral dissertation) or stem cell fertility research.

The most surprising information about Hughes and Llewellyn was that they were both dead. David Hughes had died in 2006 of a heart attack while on his morning jog. He had been in his 60s. Marc Llewellyn had died in 2003, not long after the publication of his last article, in a horrific car crash on the M40 outside Oxford. I flinched involuntarily; I’d been on that stretch of road many times. The accident had been a hit-and-run; one car, driven by Llewellyn, had been nearly destroyed. The other was never found, and there were no witnesses, so the investigation had gone nowhere. Llewellyn wasn’t killed outright, but suffered severe head trauma and passed away the next day.

I considered what I had learned. Two articles, three dead men. Was it just bad luck? It didn’t seem to be bad luck for Oliver
et al.
They were doing just fine. Hughes’s death seemed ordinary enough, and on the surface, so did Dan’s. Llewellyn’s car accident was likely just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The article titles made more sense now. It was as I’d originally thought. Hughes and Llewellyn hadn’t been successful with their research, so they’d published their last article and given it up. Oliver had probably become aware of Hughes and Llewellyn’s work when he was in Cambridge, and had come back to the U.S. to continue the research in his own lab. A few years later, with better technology, Oliver and Wray figured out how to make it work and published their article. The breakthrough had brought the money pouring in, and the doctors were now reaping the rewards of their hard work. And Oliver and Wray had probably hired Benjamin Goldstein to give themselves more time away from the lab to raise money and host parties and compete in triathlons.

It all made perfect sense, except for one thing.

What had Dan wanted me to find out?

It was time to go home, and I still hadn’t done anything with the statistics in Oliver and Wray’s article. I wasn’t going to start anything now. Maybe I’d work on that over the weekend. I still didn’t have the Welsh article, so there wasn’t anything else to do until I got it. I decided to go home.

I was dragging as I walked across campus. What a week. It was only four days, and it felt like forty. I was exhausted.

There weren’t a lot of people around, even though it was early evening and still fully light. As I passed the intramural fields, it registered that someone was behind me. I didn’t think much of it until I crossed Gayley and the guy was still with me. It was a guy, that much I could tell, but I couldn’t see anything that would allow me to describe him in any more detail. He was wearing a ball cap, hoodie, and jeans. Just like 95% of the male students at the university.

I turned onto Landfair from Strathmore and headed south. My apartment was on Roebling, but if I was being followed, I didn’t want to lead the guy straight to it. I was considering passing up Roebling and crossing back onto campus when I got to the end of Landfair. I’d just about decided to do that when the guy turned off, into an apartment complex about three buildings up from Roebling.

Now who was paranoid? I chastised myself and promptly forgot all about it.

Saturday June 2

Saturday morning dawned with the promise of a beautiful day. Pete and Kevin had planned a day of hiking in Topanga Canyon, and I had decided to go along. Abby was going too, and my brother Jeff was taking a rare Saturday off to come with us.

Jeff was the oldest, a year older than Kevin and two years older than me. He was a veterinarian, and lived in Oceanside, the town where we'd grown up, with his wife Valerie and their two boys. He'd run cross country in high school and college and was still wiry. He'd stopped running to save his knees, but he still surfed and took the boys hiking at every opportunity. And, occasionally, he'd drive up the coast and join us on the trails for a day.

Jeff showed up at the apartment at the crack of dawn. I had just smacked the snooze button for the second time when I heard pounding on the door. I pulled on a pair of sweats and staggered into the living room. I could hear the shower running. It was probably Abby; she was one of
those
people. Morning people. I opened the door. "Good Lord. What time did you get up?"

"4:30. And I drove fast." Jeff gave me a hug. "How ya doin'?"

"Fine. How's everything at home?"

Jeff considered. "Fine, really. Colin’s decided he wants to go to space camp this summer, so we've got to find one. Is there anything at Cal Tech?"

"I don't know, but I can find out."

"Would you? And let me know. We'd rather not send him out of state at age ten."

"Right…" I scratched a note to myself on the refrigerator message board.

Kevin appeared, and the talk devolved into brotherly insults. Abby yelled out the door for us to shut up and load the car. So we did.

We all piled into Jeff's CRV and drove to Santa Monica to pick up Pete.

Pete lived in Santa Monica on 17th Street, just around the corner from Wilshire, in a townhouse he’d inherited from a great-uncle. The place was beautiful, and the location was great. Pete could walk to his teaching job at Santa Monica College and jog to the beach.

When we pulled up, I jumped out of the passenger seat and went to the door. Pete was ready, of course, meeting me at the door with his backpack in hand. He grinned and gave me a quick hug, which was a little surprising, but I hugged him back. "Come on, you get the front seat."

He laughed. "It pays to be the tallest."

"Ha ha." I lifted his backpack as he locked the door. "Holy shit, what do you have in here? Bricks?"

"Nah, concrete blocks today." He took it from me and did a couple of biceps curls with it. "That's not that heavy, you wuss."

"I'll show you wuss." I chased him down the sidewalk, where we proceeded to let Jeff and Kevin join in the teasing and friendly insults all the way to Topanga Canyon. By the time we got there, Abby was threatening to walk back home.