“The architect had bad taste, but the place has a great view,” Lucy said in reference to her home’s ultramodern design.
Julie rang the buzzer and waited. A moment later a voice came through the intercom.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Julie, I need to see you right away.”
There was no hesitation. The buzzer sounded to let Julie inside.
LUCY HAD been in the middle of a game of chess with an opponent from Seoul, who was not very good at keeping control of the board’s center, when her intercom sounded. One look at Julie’s pale and drawn complexion implied trouble. Her friend’s battered face suggested trouble on a large scale. Julie’s breathing was so erratic she practically had to spit out the words.
“Someone tried to kill us, Jordan and me, but we killed him, I mean Jordan did. Jordan’s in jail or he’s headed there, I don’t honestly know, and I need your help testing a tissue sample I took from a cadaver at Suburban West.”
Lucy blinked several times and kept quiet as she took it all in. Then she said in a calm voice, “Well now, that’s quite the conversation starter. Tell me again, who did you kill?”
“A security guard at Suburban West. He attacked us. But I don’t think he was real security, or if he was, he was there to kill us both.”
“What on earth were you doing at West?”
This puzzled Julie. “Allyson Brock.”
“Who?”
“The former CEO at West. She called me because of your note,” Julie said.
Lucy tilted her head to the side. “My note?”
“Did you send Allyson a note telling her to call us, that she could be of help with the tissue sample?”
Now it was Lucy who looked puzzled. “I did no such thing.”
Julie stared at Lucy with mouth agape.
“We need to talk,” Julie said.
Lucy led Julie over to a plush sofa in the center of a sparsely furnished and rather undecorated living room. She left only to pour them each a glass of Jameson. A few sips proved enough to calm Julie somewhat. Then it was Lucy who did the listening and Julie who did the talking.
Afterwards, Julie asked, “Do you believe me?” She sounded nervous.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Lucy said.
Julie looked bewildered. “Well, because of Shirley Mitchell, of course.”
Lucy waved her hand as though brushing the incident aside.
“I go by logic and facts,” Lucy said. “With Shirley Mitchell there was evidence to counter the narrative you supplied. In this case, I have nothing to go on but your word. And I do trust you. Why would you lie?”
“To convince you to test the tissue sample I took.”
Lucy patted Julie’s leg. “If that were the case, I’d help you out of respect for your creativity.”
Julie hefted the cooler she’d carried in. “I need to know what’s inside this sample. There is an allergy-causing antigen at work here and we need to find it. Whoever sent Allyson that note knows it, too. They just didn’t think we’d get out of there alive to test it.”
Lucy considered all possibilities. Logic dictated that if she believed Julie about the attack at Suburban West, about it being a trap, she also had to believe Julie’s claims about Shirley Mitchell. Which meant someone must have replaced saline with heparin. In Lucy’s mind, she was left with only one option.
“You may have been fired from White, but I wasn’t.” Lucy kept a deadpan expression.
“So?”
“So, to learn what’s in that tissue, you and I have to go to the lab.”
CHAPTER 48
Julie was in rough shape, so Lucy drove them to the hospital. On the way there, Julie tuned the radio to WBZ. A broadcaster reported breaking news of a homicide at Suburban West hospital. No names had been released, but the broadcaster said a suspect was currently in police custody.
Lucy took it all in. “I’m sorry,” she said to Julie.
“For what?”
“For ever doubting you.”
In transit, Julie used Lucy’s phone to call Allyson Brock. The conversation was tense, as expected. The snippets Lucy heard made it sound as if Allyson was more concerned for Allyson than anything else.
Julie ended the call with a look of disgust. “Well, I don’t think she set us up,” Julie said, “but I don’t think she cares what happens to us, either. Her biggest worry was that she was going to get arrested. I told her to wait for the police to show up, which they will, and tell them she gave Jordan her badge as a favor. It will back up Jordan’s story.”
“What’s the worst they can do to Allyson?” Lucy asked. “She’s already been fired from West.”
“That’s what I said. The most they can do is revoke her access privileges. Anyway, she’s going to try and figure out who the security guard was, when he was hired, who hired him, that sort of thing. Allyson still has the loyalty of the employees at West. She’ll get info. The guard told us it was his first day on the job, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.”
“If it is true,” Lucy said, “you realize that whoever pushed through his hire, or called in a favor, is probably the person who wanted you dead.”
They arrived at White a little after nine. It was dark, chilly enough for Lucy to lend Julie a warm jacket, which she wore in place of the bloodstained lab coat. And it was quiet. Everyone was with family, except for the sick and their caretakers.
Lucy parked in a rear lot reserved for staff and she and Julie made it to the lab without incident. A police officer, evidently unaware that Julie had been fired from White, waved as the two docs walked by. Jordan must have kept Julie’s name out of his conversations with the police. That would buy them some time.
The lab was empty, as expected for a holiday evening, and Lucy took her time getting the equipment set up. She enjoyed this part of the job so much that for a moment Lucy forgot where the sample had come from, and how it had come to her.
“The test is called an immunohistochemistry,” Lucy explained. “It’s a process we use to detect antigens, things like proteins, in tissue cells. We use this type of staining widely in the diagnosis of abnormal cells. Here we’ll be looking for a concentration of mast cells. I’ll be using immunophenotyping to understand the various proteins expressed in the cells.”
“Lucy, no offense, but I don’t think I care how you do it,” Julie said. “I just want to know what’s in that tissue.”
“No offense taken,” Lucy said with a shrug.
Others might have been put off by Julie’s candor, but Lucy appreciated it. No reason to explain something to someone not interested.
Julie used a website accessed from one of the lab’s computers to listen to news reports about Suburban West, while Lucy went about her work. She was not an expert in allergies by any stretch, though she knew sneezing and runny noses were symptoms. The reaction itself took place in the genes, and got expressed through the immune system. The process Lucy was using would allow her to identify the antibody in the tissue sample so she could reverse-engineer it into the corresponding allergy-causing antigen.
Gowned and gloved, Lucy prepared a sample by fixing the tissue in formaldehyde, and then embedded it in paraffin to maintain the natural shape. She used a machine called a microtome to section the tissue to five millimeters, a thickness required for the test. The slides she coated with a gelatin adhesive. The sections were dried in the oven.
“Staining and immunodetection is up next,” Lucy said after the initial tasks were done. Her voice was almost joyful; she so loved this work.
Julie was on the computer, no longer glancing at news sites about the murder, but instead researching causes of hives.