He retreated back to the central part of the lab, where Shirley and Helene had been checking the scintillation cultures.
“Have you seen the animals?” Jason asked Shirley with disgust.
“Unfortunately. When Curran was here. Don’t remind me.”
“Did the GHP authorize those experiments?” Jason demanded.
“No,” Shirley said. “We never questioned Hayes. We never thought we had to.”
“The power of celebrity,” Jason said cynically.
“The animals were part of Dr. Hayes’s growth hormone work,” Helene said defensively.
“Whatever,” Jason said. He was not interested in any ethical argument with Helene at the moment. “At any rate, they’re all dead.”
“All of them?” Shirley questioned. “How bizarre. What do you think happened?”
“Poison,” Jason said grimly. “Though why anyone searching for drugs would bother to kill lab animals beats me.”
“Do you have any explanation for all of this?” Shirley said angrily, turning to Helene.
The younger woman shook her head, her eyes darting nervously about the room.
Shirley continued to stare at Helene, who was now shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Jason watched, intrigued by Shirley’s suddenly aggressive behavior.
“You’d better cooperate,” she was saying, “or you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. Dr. Howard is convinced you’re keeping something from us. If that’s true and we find out, I hope you realize what that can do to your career.”
Helene’s anxiety was finally apparent. “I just followed Dr. Hayes’s orders,” she said, her voice breaking.
“What orders?” Shirley asked, lowering her voice threateningly.
“We did some free-lance work here…”
“What kind?”
“Dr. Hayes moonlighted for a company called Gene, Inc. We developed a recombinant strain of E. coli to produce a hormone for them.”
“Were you aware that moonlighting was specifically forbidden under Dr. Hayes’s contract?”
“That’s what he told me,” Helene admitted.
Shirley glared at Helene for another minute. Finally she said, “I don’t want you to speak of this to anyone. I want you to make a detailed list of every animal and item missing or damaged in this lab and bring it directly to me. Do you understand?”
Helene nodded.
Jason followed Shirley out of the lab. She had obviously succeeded where he had failed, in breaking through Helene’s facade. But she hadn’t asked the right questions.
“Why didn’t you press her about Hayes’s breakthrough?” he said as they arrived at the elevator. Shirley hit the down button repeatedly, obviously furious.
“I didn’t think of it. Every time I think the Hayes problem is under control, something new comes up. I had specifically demanded the no-moonlighting clause in his contract.”
“It doesn’t much matter now,” Jason said, boarding the elevator after Shirley. “The man is dead.”
She sighed. “You’re right. Maybe I’m overreacting. I just wish this whole affair was over.”
“I still think Helene knows more than she’s telling.”
“I’ll talk to her again.”
“And after seeing those animals, you don’t think you should call the police?”
“With the police come the newspapers,” Shirley reminded him. “With the newspapers comes trouble. Aside from the animals, it doesn’t appear that anything terribly valuable is damaged.”
Jason held his tongue. Obviously, reporting the break-in was an administrative decision. He was more concerned about discovering Hayes’s breakthrough, and he knew the police and newspapers wouldn’t help in finding that. He wondered if the breakthrough could have involved the monstrous animals. The thought gave him a shiver.
Jason started rounds with Matthew Cowen. Unfortunately, there’d been a new development. Besides his other problems, Matthew was now acting bizarrely. Only a few minutes earlier the nurses had found him wandering in the halls, mumbling nonsense to himself. When Jason entered the room he was restrained in the bed, regarding Jason as a stranger. The man was acutely disoriented as to time, place, and person. As far as Jason was concerned, that could have meant only one thing. The man had thrown emboli, probably blood clots, from his injured heart valves into his brain. In other words he’d had a stroke or perhaps even multiple strokes.
Without delay, Jason placed a call for a neurology consult. He also called the cardiac surgeon who’d seen the case. Although he debated immediate anticoagulation, he decided to wait for the neurologist’s opinion. In the interim, he started the patient on aspirin and Persantine to reduce platelet adhesiveness. Strokes were a disturbing development and a very bad sign.
Jason did the rest of his rounds quickly and was about to leave for home and for some much-needed sleep when he was paged by the emergency room for one of his patients. Cursing under his breath, he ran downstairs, hoping whatever the problem was, it could be easily solved. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case.
Arriving breathless in the main treatment room, he found a group of residents giving CPR to a comatose patient. A quick look at the monitor screen told him there was no cardiac activity at all.
Jason stepped over to Judith Reinhart, who told him the patient had been found unconscious by her husband when he tried to waken her in the morning.
“Did the EMTs see any cardiac or respiratory activity?”
“None,” Judith said. “In fact, she feels cold to me.”
Jason touched the woman’s leg and agreed. Her face was turned away from him.
“What’s the patient’s name?” Jason asked, intuitively bracing himself for the blow.
“Holly Jennings.”
Jason felt like he’d been hit in the stomach. “My God!” he murmured.
“Are you all right?” Judith asked.
Jason nodded, but he insisted that the ER team maintain the CPR long past any reasonable time. He’d suspected trouble when he’d seen Holly on Thursday, but not this. He just couldn’t accept the fact that, like Cedric Harring, Holly would die less than a month after her fancy GHP physical told her she was okay, and two days after he’d seen her again.
Shaken, Jason picked up the phone and called Margaret Danforth.
“So once again there’s no cardiac history?” Margaret asked him.
“That’s correct.”
“What are you people doing down there?” Margaret demanded.
Jason didn’t answer. He wanted Margaret to release the case so they could do the autopsy at GHP, but Margaret hesitated.
“We’ll do the case today,” Jason said. “You’ll have a report early next week.”
“I’m sorry,” Margaret said, making a decision.
“There are questions in my mind, and I think I’m obligated by law to do the autopsy.”
“I understand. But I suppose you wouldn’t mind supplying us with specimens so we can process them here as well.”
“I suppose,” Margaret said without enthusiasm. “To tell the truth, I don’t even know the legality. But I’ll find out. I’d rather not wait two weeks for the microscopic.”
Jason went home and fell into bed. He slept for four hours, interrupted by a call from the neurologist concerning Matthew. He wanted to anti-coagulate and CAT-scan the patient. Jason implored him to do whatever he thought was best.
Jason tried to go back to sleep, but he couldn’t. He felt shell-shocked and anxious. He got up. It was a gloomy, late fall day with a slight drizzle that made Boston look dreadful. Fighting a depression, he paced his apartment, searching for something to occupy his mind. Realizing he couldn’t stay there, he put on casual clothes and went down to his car. Knowing he was probably asking for trouble, he drove over to Beacon Street and parked in front of Carol’s apartment.