Fatal Care (25 page)

“Not really,” Green replied.

“Did it have any similarities to the rhabdomyosarcoma or astroblastoma we saw in the initial two patients?”

Green shook his head. “They were totally different tumors. But they all looked nasty as hell.”

“And they’re all one hundred percent fatal,” Joanna added.

“That, too.”

Lori McKay came into the laboratory carrying a stack of medical records and sucking on a cherry-flavored lollipop. She plopped the charts on a countertop and moved the lollipop over to the side of her mouth. “We’ve got more bad news.”

“Don’t tell me we have another patient with cancer,” Joanna said quickly.

“Nope.” Lori sat on the countertop and let her legs dangle. “But still bad news. One of the patients who received the enzyme preparation has reclogged his coronary arteries.”

“So soon?”

“Ten months after the procedure,” Lori said. “He’s being admitted to the CCU for observation now.”

Green said, “Well, nobody thought the treatment would be perfect.”

“And nobody thought it would cause cancer, either.”

Joanna walked over to the blackboard, pointed at patient number three, and then said to Lori, “Dennis has just come from the OR where they’re operating on this man. He has a definite renal malignancy.”

“Shit,” Lori hissed under her breath. “That’s three out of thirty patients for sure. And more to come.”

“I’m reviewing the enzyme preparations that these three patients received,” Joanna went on. “And I saw something a little unusual. Maybe you can explain it.”

Lori leaned forward, studying the blackboard. “I’ll try.”

“Direct your attention to the column that deals with the preservative in the enzyme preparation.”

“Okay.”

“The spaces are blank.”

Lori slowly nodded. “That means none was present.”

“But I was told they used benzyl alcohol as a preservative in their enzyme preparations.”

“Not in those batches they didn’t,” Lori informed her. “We didn’t detect alcohol or any other preservative.”

“I wonder why.”

Joanna thought about preservatives and their uses. They were added to either stabilize patients or to prevent contamination with microorganisms. In the case of the enzyme preparations, it would be used to kill any microorganisms that might be present. “Why leave it out?” She put the question more to herself than to the others.

Lori shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t needed. They could have purified the preparation by other means, such as ultrafiltration.”

“Maybe,” Joanna said, making a mental note to ask Brennerman about it. But, she reminded herself, the absence of something wasn’t going to help her with the problem. It was something
in
the enzyme preparation that was causing the cancers. But what?

Green pushed himself up from the swivel chair. “Well, it’s back to the coal mines for me.”

Joanna walked back over to the blackboards and studied them. Carefully she scrutinized the data on the patients and the enzyme preparations. Why did they develop those cancers? What set it off? Maybe the enzyme itself was a carcinogen. Maybe with time each of the patients who had received it would develop a bizarre malignancy. Joanna shuddered at the thought.

There was a loud knock at the door.

Joanna turned as Jake Sinclair entered the laboratory. He was carrying a cardboard box under his arm.

“Got a minute?” Jake asked.

“Sure,” Joanna said, eyeing the box Jake had set down on the countertop. “What do you have?”

“Pajamas and stuff.”

Lori looked up at the detective, hoping that he’d let her stay in the room, but knowing he wouldn’t. He tended to exclude her from the special cases he and Joanna worked together. He considered her a novice, someone who never really contributed. And then there was the personal problem between them. From day one, Sinclair hadn’t liked her, nor she him. Screw it! She had plenty of other things to do. She began to push herself off the countertop. “I guess you’d like me to leave?”

Jake glanced over at Joanna. “Does she know about the Mirren case?”

“Every detail.”

Jake motioned Lori back down. “Stick around.”

Lori sat and quickly removed the lollipop from her mouth, placing it in a nearby glass mug. Jake Sinclair opened the cardboard box. He took out two sheets of paper and laid them side by side on the countertop.

Each sheet was plain white paper with a large square drawn in the center. Within the squares were scattered red dots. One sheet was labeled SMV, the other CC.

Joanna studied the papers carefully, trying to decipher what they represented. “What are they?”

“Sheets of paper I found hidden under some shirts in Mirren’s closet,” Jake said.

“Hidden, you say?”

“Oh, yeah. They were in the back between cellophane-wrapped shirts,” Jake told her. “He didn’t want anybody to find them.”

“Why?”

Jake shrugged. “You tell me.”

Joanna studied the white sheets of paper again. The squares were really more like rectangles that had been drawn in blue ink. The red dots were also done in ink. There was no lettering or explanation other than the SMV and CC at the tops of the sheets.

Joanna held each sheet up to the light and inspected them at length. Then she turned the pages sideways, still holding them up to the light.

Jake asked, “What do you see?”

“Nothing,” Joanna reported. “I thought that maybe the dots were arranged in some sort of pattern or code.”

“They’re not,” Jake said. “We’ve already looked for that. And the people in the crime scene lab examined the dots and letters under a microscope. There’s no message or inscription in them.”

Joanna pointed at the letters at the top of each page. “That’s the key.”

“How do you know that?” Lori asked.

“Because it’s the title,” Joanna explained. “It tells us what the square represents. And he used—” She interrupted herself and turned to Jake. “Are we sure this is Mirren’s handwriting?”

Jake nodded. “We had an expert compare it to other things Mirren had written. It’s his handwriting.”

“Anyhow,” Joanna continued, “it seems as if Mirren used letters or abbreviations so that only he could decipher them.”

“Got any ideas?”

Joanna shrugged. “The initials most likely represent a person’s name or maybe an address. That’s just a guess, of course.”

“That’s what we figured, too,” Jake said, picking up the sheets. “We’re running it against the names of all the people he worked with at Memorial and Bio-Med to see if there’s a match.”

“It must have been really important to Mirren,” Joanna said thoughtfully.

“Oh, yeah,” Jake agreed. “It was doubly important. Not only did he write it in code, he tried his damnedest to hide it away.”

Lori asked, “Why didn’t he just put it in a safety deposit box?”

Jake hesitated for a moment, giving the question thought. “For some reason he didn’t want to.”

“Or maybe he did,” Joanna suggested. “Maybe there’s a copy in a bank deposit box.”

“And maybe,” Jake said, “there’s some clue in that deposit box that’ll tell us what these initials mean.” He looked over at Lori. “Good thinking.”

Lori beamed. She brought up a hand to cover her blush.

Jake reached back into the cardboard box and brought out a pair of black silk pajamas. On the top section, embroidered in yellow, was exquisite Japanese calligraphy. “What do you think of these?”

“Beautiful,” Joanna said admiringly. “Where did you get them?”

“From the top drawer of Mirren’s dresser.”

Joanna groaned. “Don’t tell me he was a cross-dresser, too.”

Lori choked back a laugh.

“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “They’re way too small for Mirren. And there’s a small laundry tag near the collar. It has the letters
NT
on it.”

“Jesus,” Joanna hissed. “This can’t possibly get any stranger.”

“What?” Jake asked.

“There’s a Japanese American technician whom I saw out at Bio-Med,” Joanna went on. “She worked under Alex Mirren and her name is Nancy Tanaka.”

Jake’s eyes brightened. “Is she kinky, too?”

Lori leaned in closer, not wanting to miss a word.

“I’d say not,” Joanna said carefully. “But who knows?”

Jake asked, “Did you get the feeling anything was going on between Mirren and this technician? You know, secret looks or subtle touching?”

Joanna shook her head. “It was just the opposite. He belittled and humiliated her in front of others. He was a real bastard.”

“Maybe that was part of the games they played,” Lori said. “You know, like a master-slave type thing.”

“Or maybe he really hated her,” Joanna said. “Maybe they were once lovers and she dumped him.”

Jake waved away the sexual speculations. “This is what we know for sure. Nancy Tanaka spent more than a few nights there. We found all sorts of feminine things in the bathroom, and she was seen a few times by neighbors. So we can figure that they were sleeping together. And people who sleep together talk a lot. This woman may know one hell of a lot about Alex Mirren.” Jake rubbed his palms together. “I think Nancy Tanaka and I are going to have a little chat.”

“I’d be very careful, Jake,” Joanna cautioned. “Women don’t like to talk with men about their sexual escapades.”

“Are you saying women are more comfortable talking to other women about those things?”

“Exactly.”

“Makes sense,” Jake said, placing the pajamas back inside the box and closing the lid. “How’s nine o’clock tomorrow morning?”

“For what?”

“For me to pick you up and take you out to the Bio-Med plant?” Jake lifted the cardboard box and headed for the door. “You’re going to be the one who questions Nancy Tanaka.”

“What do you think?” Joanna asked.

“It looks like the perfect place to build a prison,” Jake said, glancing around the grounds at the Bio-Med plant.

“Because of its isolation?”

“It’s more than that,” Jake told her. “The land is flat with no place to hide. And there’s only one road in and out. Anybody on the move would stand out.”

“I guess a person could try the desert if he was desperate enough.”

Jake shook his head. “He’d be looking at a hundred miles of sand and certain death. There’s no water, no food, nothing to support life. And anybody dressed in ordinary clothing would die from exposure in a matter of days. Like I said, this is a perfect place for a prison.”

They walked across the parking lot, both hunched up against the chill. It was a cold, cloudy morning with a strong wind gusting in intermittently from the desert. They came to a pile of dog manure and stepped around it.

“Big dogs,” Jake commented. “And barbed-wire fences and armed guards. What the hell are they protecting out here?”

“Genetic research that’s worth billions of dollars,” Joanna said. “You’ll see some of their products when we go inside.”

They entered through the front door and went into the reception area, where a security guard awaited them. He handed them visitor’s cards and watched as they pinned them on. Then he led the way down a narrow corridor. An overhead surveillance camera made a whirring sound as it tracked them. At the end of the corridor the guard punched numbers into a panel on the wall. The door opened automatically.

Joanna and Jake walked through. The door closed silently behind them.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Jake said, taken aback by the lush vegetation growing inside the big glass cubicles. “What is all this?”

“The world of tomorrow.”

Joanna pointed out each of the genetically modified plants, including the coffee beans that grew free of caffeine and the tomatoes that resisted freezing because they contained a new gene that produced an antifreeze substance. The tomatoes interested Jake the most.

“How do they taste?”

“Pretty good,” Joanna replied, “according to Dr. Brennerman.”

They moved down to a new cubicle that was separate and much larger than the others. It took them a moment to realize that they were looking at a huge fish tank. Giant pink salmon were gracefully swimming around in it.

“Don’t tell me they’re growing these, too,” Jake said, awestruck.

“I guess.”

Joanna stared at the giant salmon, not liking what she saw. Genetically altering plants was one thing, but doing it to living creatures was another. And if they could do it to a fish, they could do it to humans.

“How do they grow them so big?” Jake asked.

“We genetically modify them,” Brennerman said, coming up behind them. “We splice a growth hormone gene into their DNA, and that doubles their growth rate.”

Jake watched a fish do a belly roll and then dive to the bottom for food. “Is there any limit to how big they can get?”

Brennerman considered the question carefully before answering. “We could probably double their size again if we wished.”

“And how the hell are giant fish like that going to feed themselves?”

“That’s a major limiting factor,” Brennerman said, surprised at the detective’s insight into a biological matter. “The bigger they become, the more food they require. Eventually they could eat so much that the smaller creatures in the food chain would suffer.”

Kind of like humans in Latin America, Jake was thinking. The big ones at the top ate so much there was damn little left for the others. He gave the fish a final look and then turned to Brennerman. “Thanks for seeing us on such short notice.”

“No problem,” Brennerman said, and then he glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was close enough to hear the conversation. “This Alex Mirren business is shocking beyond words. Can you even begin to envision the embarrassment to his family?”

“How much family has he got?” Jake asked.

“A divorced wife and a daughter living in Florida.”

“Well, with any luck the kinky details of his murder won’t reach the press there.”

“Murder!” Brennerman said loudly and then quickly looked around to see if anyone had overheard. The technicians still had their heads down, apparently busily working away. Brennerman lowered his voice. “No one said anything about murder.”

“Tune in the six o’clock news tonight,” Jake said, and brought out his notepad. “It seems somebody decided to strangle him while he was tied to his bed.”