Jack was continuing to press the Ziploc bag against his bruise. By now the bag contained mostly water, but it was still cool enough to be of some benefit. He told her what had happened, and she was appropriately sympathetic for him and inappropriately critical of Craig.
"It wasn't his fault," Jack insisted. "I've been so consumed by this case for a variety of reasons that I never stopped to think of what a harebrained idea it was for me to go sneaking into his house. I mean, this is after someone else had broken into it and terrorized his kids to give him a message that they'd be back if I did an autopsy. And I just did the autopsy, for chrissake. What was I thinking?"
"But you were a houseguest. You'd think he'd make sure who he was hitting with a baseball bat."
"I wasn't a houseguest any longer. But let's drop it. Thank God no one got hurt any more than a shoulder contusion. At least I think it is just a contusion. I might have to get my clavicle x-rayed."
"Look on the positive side," Latasha said. "You certainly made sure he wasn't comatose, you know what I'm saying?"
Jack had to smile in spite of himself.
"What about the biomarker assay kit? Did you find out anything?"
"Nothing that raised the possibility he'd gotten a false positive. I think we have to assume it was a legitimate result."
"I suppose that's good," Latasha said. "It eliminates a lot of potential lethal agents." Her eyes swept over the books she had arranged around her.
"It looks like you've been busy."
"You have no idea. I got my second wind with the help of a few Diet Cokes. It's been like a great review course in toxicology. I haven't studied this stuff since forensic boards."
"What about Allan? Has he called you?"
"Several times, to be exact. But it's good. The more I hear his voice, the easier it is not to drag up old memories and get pissed."
"Has he had any luck?"
"Nope. Not at all. Apparently, he's trying to impress me, and you know something? He's not doing such a bad job. I mean, I knew he was smart and all back in college with his majoring in chem, math, and physics, but I didn't know he'd gone on to get a Ph.D. at MIT. I know that takes a few more brains than medical school, where perseverance is the major requirement."
"Did he say what kinds of things he's ruled out?"
"Most of the more common cardiotoxic agents that were not on the screen. He also explained to me some of the tricks he's using. The embalming chemicals are making it much harder with the tissue samples, like from the heart and liver, so he's concentrating on the fluids, where there's been less contamination."
"So what's with all these textbooks?"
"I started by reviewing cardiotoxic agents, a lot of which, I learned, could cause heart attacks or at least enough damage to the cardiac muscle so that clinically it would present as one even though there was no occlusion of cardiac vessels. I mean, that's what we've found from the autopsy. It's also what I found on the frozen sections we stained. I took a peek at a couple of the slides while you were gone. The capillaries look normal. I left the slide in the microscope in my office, if you'd like to take a peek."
"I'll take your word for it," Jack said. "I didn't expect we'd see anything as clear as the gross was."
"Now I've expanded from purely cardiotoxic agents to neurotoxic agents, since a lot of them do both. I tell you, it's fascinating stuff, especially how it dovetails with bioterrorism."
"Did you read the depositions?" Jack asked. He wanted to keep the conversation on track.
"Hey, you weren't gone that long. I think I've gotten a lot done. Give me a break!"
"We are running out of time. We have to stay focused."
"I'm focused, man," Latasha scoffed. "I'm not out driving around, learning something I essentially already knew, and getting beat on in the process."
Jack rubbed his face briskly with both hands in an attempt to dispel the cobwebs of fatigue that were interfering with his cognition and emotion. Being at all critical of Latasha was surely not his intent. "Where are those Diet Cokes? I could use a blast of caffeine."
Latasha pointed toward the door to the hall. "There's a vending machine in the lunchroom down on the left."
When the can of soda thudded down into the vending machine's opening, it was loud enough in the building's silence to make Jack jump. He was tired, but he was also tense, and he wasn't entirely sure why. It could have been because time was running out as far as the case was concerned, but it also could have been anxiety about returning to New York and all that it entailed. After flipping open the can of soda, Jack hesitated. Was caffeine advisable if he was already mildly uptight? Throwing caution to the wind, he downed the can, then burped. He rationalized that he needed his wits to be sharp, and for that, caffeine was what the doctor ordered.
Feeling a slight buzz since caffeine was not one of his vices, Jack reclaimed the seat across from Latasha and cherry-picked Craig's and Jordan's deposition transcripts from the debris around Latasha.
"I didn't read those depositions cover to cover," Latasha said. "But I did kinda breeze through them to make a list of Patience's symptoms."
"Really?" Jack questioned with interest. "That's what I was just about to do."
"I guessed as much, since that's what you suggested before your ill-fated drive out to the suburbs."
"Where is it?" Jack asked.
Latasha scrunched up her features in concentration while she riffled through some of the material in front of her. Eventually, she came up with a yellow legal pad. She handed it across to Jack.
Jack settled back in his chair. There was no order to the symptoms other than their being divided into two major groups: the morning of September eighth, and the late afternoon and early evening. The morning group included abdominal pain, increased productive cough, hot flashes, nasal congestion, insomnia, headache, flatulence, and general anxiety. The late afternoon/early evening group comprised chest pain, cyanosis, inability to talk, headache, difficulty walking, difficulty sitting up, numbness, a sensation of floating, nausea with a little vomiting, and generalized weakness.
"Is this all?" Jack asked, waving the pad in the air.
"You don't think that's enough? She sounds like most of my patients in third-year medical school."
"I just wanted to make sure it's all the symptoms mentioned in the depositions."
"It's all the ones I could find."
"Did you find any mention of diaphoresis?"
"No, I didn't, and I looked for it specifically."
"I did, too," Jack said. "Sweating is so typical of a heart attack, I couldn't believe it when I didn't see it on my first reading. I'm glad you didn't see it, either, because I thought maybe I'd just missed it."
Jack glanced back at the list. The trouble was that most of the entries had no modifiers, and the ones that did had modifiers that were too general and not descriptive enough. It was as if all the symptoms were equally important, which made it difficult to weigh each symptom's contribution to Patience's clinical state. Numbness, for instance, had little meaning without a description of location, extent, and duration, and whether it meant no feeling whatsoever or paresthesia, more commonly known as pins and needles. In such a circumstance, it was impossible for Jack to decide if the numbness was of neural or cardiovascular origin.
"You know what I find most interesting about this toxicology stuff?" Latasha said, looking up from a large textbook.
"No! What?" Jack said vaguely. He was preoccupied in deciding he would need to go back through the depositions himself and see what qualifiers existed for the symptoms mentioned.
"Reptiles," Latasha said. "It's a wonder how all their venoms evolved, and why there is such a difference in potency."