It was three-thirty when he trudged up the stairs to his apartment and dutifully called his service. He hadn’t taken his beeper with him when he left to follow Carol Donner, and he hoped there had been no calls. He was too tired to handle an emergency. There was nothing from the hospital, but Shirley had left a message asking him to call the moment he got in, no matter what time. The page operator told him it was urgent.
Perplexed, Jason dialed. Shirley answered on the first ring. “Where on earth have you been?”
“That’s a story in itself.”
“I want you to do me a favor. Come over right now”.
“It’s three-thirty,” Jason pleaded.
“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”
Jason put on another jacket, returned to his car, and drove out to Brookline, wondering what emergency couldn’t have waited a little longer. The only certainty was that it involved Hayes.
Shirley lived on Lee Street, a road that curved around Brookline Reservoir and wound its way up into a residential area of fine old homes. Her house was a fieldstone building of comfortable proportions with a gambrel roof and twin gables. As Jason entered the cobblestone driveway, he saw that the house was ablaze with light. He pulled up across from the entrance, and by the time he was out of the car, Shirley had the door open.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, giving him a hug. She was dressed in a white cashmere sweater and faded jeans and seemed, for the first time since Jason had met her, totally distraught.
She led him into a large living room and introduced him to two GHP executives who also seemed visibly upset. Jason shook hands first with Bob Walthrow, a small, balding man, and then Fred Ingelnook, a Robert Redford lookalike.
“How about a cocktail?” Shirley asked. “You look like you need it.”
“Just soda,” Jason said. “I’m dead on my feet. What’s going on?”
“More trouble. I got a call from security. Hayes’s lab was broken into tonight and practically demolished.”
“Vandalism?”
“We’re not sure.”
“Hardly,” Bob Walthrow said. “It was searched.”
“Was anything taken?” Jason asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Shirley said. “But that’s not the problem. We want to keep this out of the papers. Good Health can’t take much more bad publicity. We have two large corporate clients on the fence about joining the Plan. They might be scared off if they hear that the police think Hayes’s lab was searched for drugs.”
“It’s possible,” Jason said. “The medical examiner told me Hayes had cocaine in his urine.”
“Shit,” Bob Walthrow said. “Let’s hope the newspapers don’t get ahold of this.”
“We’ve got to limit the damage!” Shirley said.
“How do you propose to do that?” Jason asked, wondering why he’d been called.
“The governing board wants us to keep this latest incident quiet.”
“That might be difficult,” Jason said, taking a sip of his soda. “The papers will probably get it from the police blotter.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Shirley said. “We’ve decided not to tell the police. But we wanted your opinion.”
“Mine?” Jason asked, surprised.
“Well,” Shirley said, “we want the opinion of the medical staff. You’re a current chief. We thought you could quietly find out how the others felt.”
“I suppose,” said Jason, wondering how he’d go about polling the other internists and still keep the episode undercover. “But if you want my personal opinion, I don’t think it’s a good idea at all. Besides, you won’t be able to collect insurance unless you inform the police.”
“That’s a point,” Fred Ingelnook said.
“True,” Shirley said, “but it’s still minor in relation to the public relations problem. For now we will not report it. But we’ll check with insurance and hear from the department chiefs.”
“Sounds good to me,” Fred Ingelnook said. “Fine,” Bob Walthrow said.
The conversation wound down and Shirley sent the two executives home. She held Jason back when he tried to follow, suggesting he meet her at eight o’clock that morning. “I’ve asked Helene to come in early. Maybe we can make some sense out of what’s going on.”
Jason nodded, still wondering why Shirley couldn’t have told him all this on the phone. But he was too tired to care, and after giving her a brief kiss on the cheek, he staggered back out to his car, hoping for two or three hours’ sleep.
CHAPTER 8
It was just after eight that Saturday morning when Jason, bleary-eyed, entered Shirley’s office. It was paneled in dark mahogany, with dark green carpet and brass fixtures, and looked more like it belonged to a banker than to the chief executive of a health care plan. Shirley was on the phone talking to an insurance adjuster, so Jason sat and waited. After she hung up she said, “You were right about the insurance. They have no intention of paying a claim unless the break-in is reported.”
“Then report it.”
“First let’s see how bad the damage is and what’s missing.”
They crossed into the outpatient building and took the elevator up to the sixth floor. A security guard was waiting for them and unlocked the inner door. They dispensed with the booties and white coat.
Like Hayes’s apartment, the lab was a mess. All the drawers and cabinets had been emptied onto the floor, but the high-tech equipment appeared untouched, so it was obvious to both of them that it had been a search and not a destructive visit. Jason glanced into Hayes’s office. It was equally littered, with the contents of the desk and several file cabinets strewn about the floor.
Helene Brennquivist appeared in the doorway to the animal room, her face white and drawn. Her hair was again severely pulled back from her face, but without her usual shapeless lab coat, Jason could see she had an attractive figure.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?” Shirley asked.
“Well, I don’t see my data books,” Helene said. “And some of the E. coli bacterial cultures are gone. But the worst is what’s happened to the animals.”
“What about them?” Jason asked, noting that her usually emotionless face was trembling with fear.
“Maybe you should look. They’ve all been killed!”
Jason stepped around Helene and through the steel door into the animal area. He was immediately confronted with a pungent, zoolike stench. He turned on the light. It was a larger room, some fifty feet long and thirty feet wide. The animal cages were organized in rows and stacked one on top of the other, sometimes as many as six high.
Jason started down the nearest row, glancing into individual cages. Behind him the door closed with a decisive click. Helene had not been exaggerating: all the animals that Jason saw were dead, hideously curled in contorted positions, often with bloodied tongues as if they’d chewed them in their final agony.
Suddenly Jason stopped short. Staring into a group of large cages, he saw something that made his stomach turn: rats the likes of which he had never seen. They were huge, almost the size of pigs, and their bald, whiplike tails were as thick as Jason’s wrists. Their exposed teeth were four inches long. Moving along, Jason came to rabbits the same size, and then white mice the size of small dogs.
This side of genetic engineering horrified Jason. Although he was afraid of what he might see, morbid curiosity drove him on. Slowly, he looked into other cages, seeing distortions of familiar creatures that made him sick. It was science gone mad: rabbits with several heads and mice with supernumerary extremities and extra sets of eyes. For Jason, genetic manipulation of primitive bacteria was one thing; distortion of mammals was quite another.