The Rebuilding Year (33 page)

So Ryan was on watch for the approach of news vultures. The two people on the porch weren’t accompanied by lights and cameras, though. John, coming from the workshop, was just behind him as he reached for the door.

“I would have got that,” John scolded.

“I needed to move around a bit.” Ryan pulled the door open. “Well, Detective Carstairs. Would you like to come in?”

“No, I planned to just stand here on your porch in the snow,” she said sarcastically. She indicated the man behind her. “Detective Francis. He’s working on the Crosby case with me. Hey, I brought you something.” She held out his cane.

John reached around and took it for him. “That’s pretty beat up,” he said, examining the deep gashes in the wood where broken glass had scored it. “I was planning to make you another one anyway. You overpaid me the first time.”

“No such thing as overpaid for that cane,” Ryan said. “Don’t you dare lose it.”

John gave him a quirk of a smile, and stood it in the usual corner.

Carstairs was watching them. Ryan swung the door wide. “Come on in. Coffee?”

“I wouldn’t say no.” The detective’s eyes were bloodshot, and her clothes had the look of being worn too long. Ryan led the way to the kitchen, and balanced on one crutch to fill the kettle.

“Is Mark in?” Carstairs asked John.

“Upstairs.” John nodded at the staircase. “That’s him playing.”

They were silent for a moment. The sounds of a guitar piece, fast and complex, drifted down.

“He’s not bad,” Carstairs said.

John’s lip twitched. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

“Sounds like he doesn’t need me to tell him he’s good,” she said. “Anyway, I have a tin ear. Can you ask him to come down for a minute?”

“Sure. I’ll get him.”

Ryan set the coffee dripping into the thermos while John climbed the stairs. He opened the fridge for milk, balancing awkwardly. Carstairs glanced at him. “How’s the leg?”

“Mostly annoying,” Ryan said. “It’ll heal.”

“Good.” She tilted her head. “Your roommate and his kid doing okay too?”

Ryan smiled. “
My boyfriend
and his kid are fine, Detective.”

John, coming back in with Mark, caught the remark. The brightness of his eyes was reward enough for that admission.

Carstairs turned to Mark. “Can you sit down for us?” she asked. “We want to show you a set of photos, and see if you can pick out the man you saw in the lab.”

He sat obediently but looked doubtful. “I can try.”

The other detective set six photos out on the table in two rows of three. All showed pictures of middle-aged men with dark hair and glasses. Mark pored over them intently. After a minute he pulled out three. “Those are wrong. The two guys are too fat, and the other one has that big bald forehead. But I don’t know about the other three. He might be one of those, or even someone else that’s not in the pictures. I’m sorry.”

Carstairs nodded, and at a flick of her fingers, her associate picked up the cards. “Pity,” she said. “If we ever get him, we’ll try a lineup. Maybe when you see him move, it’ll ring a bell.”

“
If
you get him?” John asked.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. “Listen, give me a big mug of that great coffee and I’ll tell you what we know.”

“Done.” Ryan’s curiosity was killing him. He and John had hashed the thing to death without making sense of it. He had refused to spend the night in the hospital, and John had finally consented to bring him home. For the first time since Mark’s arrival, they had spent the night in the big bed, just holding each other. They hadn’t talked much, maybe a few short sentences about mundane things. Like,
we need to run by the grocery store tomorrow.
The important stuff was all said with touch, in the darkness. Mark had woken twice with screaming nightmares, and John went in to reassure him each time. Ryan hadn’t slept enough to dream.

Carstairs took a long pull on the hot drink, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction. “My candidate for sainthood is the guy who invented coffee,” she said. “So. Crosby. We’ve been going through his computer, and talking to people and I think we have most of the story.

“About seven years ago, Dr. Crosby was a little-known researcher in an obscure medical school. Then he found an antibiotic that showed a little promise against staph, and some other disease-causing bacteria. He did some animal studies, and the results were just good enough to get a big pharmaceutical firm interested. He probably had dollar signs flashing in his eyes. The potential pay-off is huge. All the early testing went well. Crosby applied for and received permission for the first human studies, the safety testing in healthy volunteers. If things panned out, he was set to move to the private sector and really cash in. That’s when he hit a snag.

“The drug in humans gradually caused side effects. People got dizzy, or disoriented, or started to hallucinate. Not at first, but after four or five days on the med, some reported it. Before ten days, most at least said the drug made them feel funny and some were hallucinating. Crosby tried altering the dose and the use schedule, but he couldn’t get effective levels in the body without the side effects. The drug company bowed out. All that money and fame, down the drain.

“But Crosby didn’t give up. He noticed that on the positive side, several of the safety-test subjects reported that their acne cleared up really well on the drug. So he decided to reformulate it into a skin gel. He figured it might work, without the side effects. Just putting it on the skin surface didn’t help in animals with skin infections, so he tried it mixed with something called…dimethyl…sulfo…ox.”

“DMSO,” Ryan suggested. “To make the medication penetrate better?”

“Yeah. That stuff. The problem was, he couldn’t get permission for a human trial. I guess two of the original testers almost died, one from a suicide attempt and one from wandering out into traffic. So the university was spooked. Crosby decided to go ahead on his own. He recruited four lab assistants with bad acne. One quit early. One, a Robert McClosky, turned out to be too unreliable. Crosby’s notes show the kid couldn’t follow a dosing schedule to save his life. The other two were Alice Tormel and Patrick Remington.”

“Who both began acting strange,” Ryan realized.

“Exactly. The stuff in the gel acted more slowly. The kids’ skin looked good, and Crosby was really optimistic. But the effects didn’t last if he stopped the medication, or spread out the doses. He tried long-term, low-dose use, and the acne was cured, but the kids began to act odd. Crosby tried adding a couple of things to the mix, like Naloxone and Diazepam, whatever they are.”

“Naloxone blocks receptors for narcotics like morphine,” Ryan said.
Hey, pharmacology class was paying off early.
“Diazepam is Valium, which prevents seizures. I guess he was trying to block the neurological side effects. I’m not sure either one would do much just put on the skin though.”

“Sure,” Carstairs said, making a note. “Anyway, it didn’t work, whatever his reasoning. The kids got acne when they were off the med, and got high when they were on it. Then Alice did her swan dive out of the tree and died.”

“She wasn’t knowingly taking drugs. It was the gel,” John said.

“Exactly. And Crosby got nervous. It wasn’t homicide, but he was implicated. At the least, he might lose his license for unauthorized human research. At worst he might face manslaughter charges. He began to think about winding things up, but he couldn’t resist one more try with Patrick and another formula. Meanwhile, Alice’s roommate Kristin must have suspected something. Crosby decided she was a threat.”

“It could have been as simple as Kristin going to Crosby and saying ‘I’m worried about this stuff Alice was using’,” Detective Francis put in. “Or she might have tried blackmail or threatened to report him.”

“He murdered her?” John asked.

“We’re not sure. It might have been accidental,” Carstairs said. “She died of a skull fracture. He could have pushed her and she fell, or he could have whacked her over the head intentionally. In any case, she was dead. He buried her, cleared out her room and left a computer-printed note about her not being able to handle it and going back home. She was over twenty-one, so the school didn’t follow up with her family. Which was lucky for him.”

“You’re sure it was Crosby?” Ryan asked.

“We found her stuff in garbage bags in his basement,” Francis said. “So yeah, we’re pretty sure.”

“Crosby thought he was safe,” Carstairs continued, “and he had his trial with Patrick, and a new lab assistant named Sharon, which was still running. Then you, Barrett, found the body. And then Patrick started showing the symptoms of the drug. His new formula wasn’t working and the risk of being discovered was getting higher.

“Crosby had been hedging his bets since Alice died. He’d gradually transferred money to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. He took out a home equity loan and transferred those funds too. If things went well, he could just bring the cash back home. When they went badly, well, he was prepared.”

“We think it was just chance that Patrick went to the lab the same night Crosby planned to get out,” Francis said. “But it’s possible that something Crosby said made the boy worried about getting hold of the drug in the future. Anyway, last night Crosby wiped out his home computer, packed his bags, and went to the lab. He went downstairs and shut off power and water to Smythe Hall, and cut the phone lines and disabled the alarm system. Then he went upstairs and started fires. He began on the fourth floor, where his office and the department offices were. Then he went up to the lab on the sixth.

“There he ran into Patrick, looking for the very thing that was the root of the problem. Crosby has a registered handgun, a .22. Presumably that was what he had with him and used on Patrick. The fire screwed up the evidence, but we think he hit Patrick once in the lab. That shot was probably the one that grazed the boy’s ribs, and then Patrick ran down the stairs. On the third floor landing, Crosby shot from above and got the boy through the gut. Patrick fell and looked dead. Crosby went back up to finish the arson in the lab.

“We figure he never knew Mark was there. But shooting Patrick and leaving him to burn to death is attempted murder. The boys were lucky you two were close by.”

“And thank God for cell phones,” Ryan muttered.

“Exactly. We traced Crosby to the airport. A couple of hours after we started looking for him, he was already on a flight to Cancun. We’ve contacted the Mexican authorities, but the chance they’ll lay hands on him is small. He has a good bankroll somewhere out there.”

“So you haven’t caught him,” John said.

“And probably won’t,” Carstairs said. “They didn’t get there in time to catch him coming off the flight. There’s no record of where he went next and I don’t get the feeling they’ll put a lot of resources into searching.”

“Do you think he’ll come back here?” Mark asked tentatively.

“I doubt it,” Francis said. “There’s nothing here for him. Out there he’s free and has money, here he’s at risk of jail and has nothing left to come back to. He’s not some psycho. This was always about the money. Well, maybe prestige too. But mainly about the money.”

“If you do catch him,” Ryan said, “can you convict him?”

“There’s a lot of evidence,” Carstairs said. “But no smoking gun on the heaviest charges. Especially if Mark can’t identify him from the lab. A lawyer would argue that Patrick’s identification is inadmissible, since he was on a drug that causes hallucinations. There were no usable fingerprints on the circuit breaker or main valve. Kristin’s stuff was at his house, but there’s no direct evidence on the body, and no fingerprints on the bags. I think we’d get him for something, but it would depend on the lawyers and the jury.”

“You know what’s ironic?” Francis told them. “We called the pharmaceutical company to get information, and they were interested in the idea of using the drug topically. So they just might take up Crosby’s research themselves. The thing could pan out after all.”

“Even though Alice and Kristin are dead?”

“Hey,” Carstairs said. “A real acne cure would be a million-seller. A few deaths wouldn’t deter a big pharma company from researching that that kind of potential profit.”

“Do you think they were involved?” Ryan asked. “Maybe they’re just going for deniability and they were in on the illegal testing all along.”

“I won’t say it’s impossible, but no,” Carstairs said. “I’d love to have someone out there to prosecute, but in this case, I think Crosby really was going it alone, and hoping to bring them back in for funding later.”

“You’ve found out a lot very quickly,” John mused.

Carstairs smiled tiredly. “I’m just that good. Also it helps that Crosby was a better biologist than computer scientist. Someone must have told him he needed to destroy computer records, not just erase them. Hence the fires. The stuff in his lab and office in Smythe was a dead loss. But he took an axe to his home computer without knowing what he was doing. He killed the housing, monitor and circuit boards. But the hard drive was sitting intact in the middle of the mess. Took our boys a couple of hours to get past his passwords and then we had it all.”

“Helpful.”

“Very.”

“And Patrick,” Mark asked. “Is he going to be okay?”