Stretching, Jason got up from his desk. He was disappointed. He had hoped the package from Carol would offer a clearer picture of Hayes’s breakthrough, but except for the documentation of the controversy between Hayes and Gene, Inc., Jason knew little more than he had before opening the package. He did have the protocol for producing the Somatomedin E. coli strain, but that hardly seemed a major discovery, and all the other lab book outlined was failure.
Exhausted, Jason turned out the lights and went to bed. It had been a long, terrible day.
CHAPTER 11
Nightmares involving gross permutations of the terrible scene in Helene’s apartment drove Jason out of bed before the sun paled the eastern sky. He put on coffee and as he waited for it to filter through his machine, he picked up his paper and read about the double murder. There was nothing new. As he’d expected, the emphasis was on the rape. Putting the Gene, Inc., ledger in his briefcase, Jason started out for the hospital.
At least there was no traffic at that early hour as he drove to the GHP, and he had his choice of parking places. Even the surgeons who usually arrived at such an uncivilized hour were not there yet.
When he arrived at GHP, he went directly to his office. As he’d requested, his desk was piled with charts. He took off his jacket and began to go through them. Keeping in mind these were patients who had died within a month of getting a fairly clean bill of health from doctors who’d completed the most extensive physicals GHP had to offer, Jason searched for commonalities. Nothing caught his eye. He compared EKGs and the levels of cholesterol, fatty acids, immunoglobulins, and blood counts. No common group of compounds, elements, or enzymes varied from the normal in any predictable pattern. The only shared trait was most of the patients’ deaths occurred within a month of having the physical. More upsetting, Jason noticed, was that in the last three months the number of deaths increased dramatically.
Reading the twenty-sixth chart, one correlation suddenly occurred to Jason. Although the patients did not share physical symptoms, their charts showed a predominance of high-risk social habits. They were overweight, smoked heavily, used drugs, drank too much, and failed to exercise, or combined any and all of these unhealthy practices; they were men and women who were eventually destined to have severe medical problems. The shocking fact was that they deteriorated so quickly. And why the sudden upswing in deaths? People weren’t indulging in vices more than they were a year ago. Maybe it was a kind of statistical equalizing: they’d been lucky and now the numbers were catching up to them. But that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, for there seemed to be too many deaths. Jason was not an experienced statistician, so he decided to ask a better mathematician than he was to look at the numbers.
When he knew he wouldn’t be waking the patients, Jason left his office and made rounds. Nothing had changed. Back in his office and before he saw the first scheduled patient, he called Pathology and inquired about the dead animals from Hayes’s lab, and waited several minutes while the technician looked for the report.
“Here it is,” the woman said. “They all died of strychnine poisoning.”
Jason hung up and called Margaret Danforth at the city morgue. A technician answered, since Margaret was busy doing an autopsy. Jason asked if the toxicology on Gerald Farr revealed anything interesting.
“Toxicology was negative,” the tech said.
“One more question. Would strychnine have shown up?”
“Just a moment,” the technician said.
In the background Jason could hear the woman shouting to the medical examiner. She returned to the phone. “Dr. Danforth said yes, strychnine would have shown up if it had been present.”
“Thank you,” Jason said.
He hung up the phone, then stood up. At the window, he examined the developing day. He could see the traffic snarled on the Riverway from his window. The sky was light but overcast. It was early November. Not a pretty month for Boston. Jason felt restless and anxious and disconsolate. He thought about the parcel from Carol and wondered if he should turn it over to Curran. Yet for what purpose? They weren’t even investigating Hayes except as a drug pusher.
Walking back to the desk Jason took out his phone directory and looked up the phone number of Gene, Inc. He noted the company was located on Pioneer Street in east Cambridge next to the MIT campus. Impulsively, he sat down and dialed the number. The line was answered by a woman receptionist with an English accent. Jason asked for the head of the company.
“You mean Dr. Leonard Dawen, the president?”
“Dr. Dawen will be fine,” Jason said. He heard the extension ring. It was picked up by a secretary.
“Dr. Dawen’s office.”
“I’d like to speak to Dr. Dawen.”
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Dr. Jason Howard.” “May I tell him what this is in reference to?”
“It’s about a lab book I have. Tell Dr. Dawen I’m’ from the Good Health Plan and was a friend of the late Alvin Hayes.”
“Just a moment, please,” the secretary said in a voice that sounded like a recording.
Jason opened the center drawer to his desk and toyed with his collection of pencils. There was a click on the phone, then a powerful voice came over the line, “This is Leonard Dawen!”
Jason explained who he was and then described the lab book.
“May I ask how it came into your possession, sir?”
“I don’t think that’s important. The fact is I have it.” He was not about to implicate Carol.
“That book is our property,” Dr. Dawen said. His voice was calm but with a commanding and threatening undercurrent.
“I’ll be happy to turn the book over in exchange for some information about Dr. Hayes. Do you think we might meet?”
“When?”
“As soon as possible,” Jason said. “I could get over just before lunch.”
“Will you have the book with you?”
“I will indeed.”
For the rest of the morning Jason had trouble concentrating on the steady stream of patients. He was pleased Sally hadn’t scheduled him through lunch. The minute he finished his last exam, he hurried out to his car.
Reaching Cambridge, Jason threaded his way past MIT and among the new East Cambridge corporate skyscrapers, some with dramatically modem architecture that contrasted sharply with the older and more traditional New England brick structures. Making a final turn on Pioneer Street, Jason found Gene, Inc., housed in a startlingly modern building of polished black granite. Unlike its neighbors, the structure was only six floors high. Its windows were narrow slits alternating with circles of bronze mirrored glass. It had a solid, powerful look, like a castle in a science fiction movie.
Jason got out of his car with his briefcase and gazed up at the striking facade. After reading so much about recombinant DNA and seeing Hayes’s grossly deformed zoo, Jason was afraid he was about to enter a house of horrors. The front entrance was circular, defined by radiating spikes of granite, giving the illusion of a giant eye, the black doors being the pupil. The lobby was also black granite: walls, floor, even ceiling. In the center of the reception area was a dramatically illuminated modem sculpture of the double helix DNA molecule opening like a zipper.
Jason approached an attractive Korean woman sitting behind a glass wall and in front of a control panel that looked like something out of the Starship Enterprise. She wore a tiny earpiece along with a small microphone that snaked around from behind her neck. She greeted Jason by name and told him he was expected in the fourth-floor conference room. Her voice had a metallic sound as she spoke into the microphone.