"But these are always kept in a locked drawer—" She stopped suddenly. "You think it was stolen?"
"Not really. I think Dr. Jarvis has it with him."
She opened her mouth, closed it again. "But he never takes his books out of the lab," she objected weakly.
Tirrell didn't bother trying to argue the point; she was certainly intelligent enough to see that he was making sense. "Do you have any idea what else he was working on, besides these?" he asked instead, waving at the stack of books.
"No... not really." She still looked troubled, as if she were betraying a confidence. "A lot of time he worked alone, or gave me routine sorts of tests to run. We'd all sit down together on Nultday morning and discuss the work he wanted to get done for the week, and I never heard him mention any project but these. Maybe he told one of the other assistants about it, though."
"I doubt it." Tirrell pondered a moment. Until Tonio got back from Ridge Harbor, he still wouldn't have anything Paxton would be willing to move on. But with a little ingenuity, perhaps he could circumvent the need to see Jarvis's project proposals or any other official records. "I'd like you to dig out all the supply and equipment requisition forms you can find for the past nine or ten months. Who's the best endocrinologist here after Dr. Jarvis?"
"Dr. Somerset," the woman said without hesitation.
"I'd like you to ask him to join us, too, if you would. We're going to try and figure out what exactly this special project is."
Somerset, though not especially enthusiastic about their chances, was nevertheless willing to help. Jarvis, fortunately, was the methodical sort who had kept copies of all his requisitions neatly filed in chronological order; but even so, it took Cam and Somerset the rest of the day to sort through them all. Tirrell, sitting off to one side, listened quietly and cultivated his patience.
Finally, at four-fifteen, Somerset put down his pencil and returned the last piece of paper to the pile. "I don't know, Detective," he said, pushing back his chair and stretching. "It's pretty obvious now that Matt did have something going on the side—there are drugs here that I know we haven't used on any of the other projects. But as to what that other thing is, I really can't tell you."
"Make an educated guess," Tirrell said. "Surely you can do that."
"I'm sure I can. But I'm not sure I should." Somerset eyed the detective thoughtfully. "After all, this is Matt's private work, and without an official police request, my telling you anything at all puts me on rather thin legal ice. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Perfectly," Tirrell nodded, forcing his voice to remain calm and reasonable. "At the same time, I'm sure you understand that in a police investigation time can be critically important. Of all of us here I'm probably the one most familiar with the laws concerning privacy—that's the main reason I asked Ms. Mbar to read me the dates in the lab books, instead of looking through them myself. If you'd prefer to wait the couple of days it'll take to get proper authorization, that is of course your right. But it would make things a lot easier if you could give me at least some idea of what Dr. Jarvis was doing."
He held his breath as Somerset and Cam exchanged glances, but they didn't call his bluff, at least not directly. "Why don't we call Dr. Jarvis and ask him about it?" Cam suggested. "I don't think even Dr, Ramsden could object to interrupting him for this."
"I don't think that would be a good idea," Tirrell shook his head, mind racing. The last thing he could afford was someone tipping off Jarvis that they knew he'd been running a secret project. At best, it would give him time to hide or destroy anything he didn't want seen; at worst, it could spook him into dropping into a hole so deep they might never find him. But it was clear he couldn't voice such thoughts here. "Radiophone conversations are by their nature more vulnerable to eavesdropping than regular phone calls," he said, choosing his words carefully. "If the wrong person heard what you said there could be real trouble."
Vague intimations had worked once before, but this time Somerset wasn't giving in quite so easily. "What sort of trouble?" he asked stubbornly. "You said yesterday you were trying to find this Oriana woman, but today you seem a lot more interested in Matt and his work. If we're going to help you, I think we're entitled to know what's going on."
Tirrell took a deep breath. Somerset unfortunately had a point. "All right. There's a possibility that Miribel Oriana is blackmailing Dr. Jarvis. Knowing what he's been working on may help us identify who's involved." Which was, the detective decided, as misleading a set of true statements as he'd ever heard.
And it had the desired effect. Somerset's expression ran the complete gamut from surprise to anger to determination; Cam's got stuck somewhere in the vicinity of outraged shock. "You'll understand now," Tirrell continued, "why I can't risk broadcasting any hint of my progress over the airwaves. In this game, the less your opponent knows of what you're doing, the better your chances of nailing him."
"Of course," Somerset nodded firmly. "All right. Basically, it looks like Matt was doing something involving the maturation process. Some of these drugs"—he indicated his list—"are known to slow down various aspects of puberty in earthstock lab animals. Others are synthetic androgens—male sex hormones—and some rather hard to isolate pituitary hormones, all of which seem to play a part in growth and puberty. Um... there are a couple of carriers here, too—those are relatively inert chemicals that can bond loosely to two or more complex molecules at a time. They're used when you want to get a drug to a specific but inaccessible area—the islets of the pancreas, for example—without flooding the whole system. If you choose the carrier's grabber properly, you can get the whole thing to link up with, say, the glucagon molecules in the islets' alpha cells. The drug then drops off and begins its work, while the carrier-grabber combination either disintegrates or also drops off, leaving the glucagon molecule undamaged."
Tirrell had caught about one word in five of all that, but the essence made it through the jargon. "Would this method also be useful if you wanted to get a drug within range of something spread through the whole body?" he asked carefully. "Those growth hormones, say?"
"Yes," Cam spoke up. "Dr. Jarvis has been doing that in some of his induced-hibernation work—using carriers to seek out thyroxin in the blood."
"I didn't know that," Somerset frowned.
She shrugged. "He said it was just an experiment, but it seemed to work pretty well."
Growth and puberty studies, several months for work without interruption... and Colin Brimmer, a boy whose teekay was just starting its rise. Something in the pit of Tirrell's stomach began a slow tumble. "Tell me," he said without thinking, "is it still accepted theory that the physical changes at puberty are what bring on Transition?"
The other two suddenly looked thoughtful, and Tirrell cursed his carelessness. He should have saved the question for later, when they wouldn't have been so quick to follow his line of thought. "Well," Somerset said slowly, "it's not really that simple. Transition does occur sometime during puberty, but it's not a direct result of the sex hormone activity—otherwise childhood castration should eliminate it. There's a theory that even with the testes removed the adrenal cortex puts out enough testosterone to trigger Transition, but that's never been proved." He shrugged. "But why would Matt be so secretive about working on something like that? Every endocrinologist on Tigris has taken a shot at figuring out what starts Transition. Matter of fact, he and I did some work on that four years ago."