"We're in Quals!" Dr. Smith bellowed at the door. "Go on, Stacy."
"Those cells are resistant to both macrophage M-tropic and T-cell line…"
Again, there was a pounding at the door.
"Goddammit," Courtney Smith said, coming up out of her chair, charging the door like an NFL lineman, and yanking it open. "I said we're in Quals!"
"This is an emergency," the Assistant Professor said, pointing to the tear-stained girl beside him. "She needs to talk to Ms. Richardson."
Joanne moved into the office. She had stopped crying, but when she looked at Stacy, she choked slightly. "Max is dead," she blurted.
"What?" Stacy said, her voice too loud.
"He's dead. I just got the call. They couldn't reach you, so they called me."
"How?" Stacy's mind was jumbled. Already a wave of nausea had hit the pit of her stomach.
"They… the doctor said he shot himself."
"He what…?" Stacy's mind was reeling. She looked over at Wendell Kinney, who had his bushy leonine head in his hands. Then she happened to glance at Art Hickman, who had a total lack of expression on his face, as if his conflicting emotions over this news allowed him no reaction. His hands, she noticed, were spread in front of him, pushing against the desk, almost as if he were trying to get away.
"Suicide?" Stacy said, and now she started to feel a mixture of emotions too complex to even describe. There was fear and disbelief, terror, anger… loss. Then came the tears.
Joanne moved to her and put her arms around her sister-in-law. They stood there in the room full of microbiology professors and held on to each other.
"Are you sure? You're sure it was… real… not some horrible practical…" Stacy couldn't finish.
"I called back. I talked to a Colonel Laurence Chittick at Fort Detrick. He said… Max went into the backyard late last night. He sat on a kitchen chair and stuck a shotgun in his mouth and…" Now it was Joanne who couldn't finish.
Wendell Kinney got to his feet. He put an arm around Stacy. "Obviously," he said to the other doctors in the room, "we're postponing this exam."
They all nodded. Their faces were anguished. Except for Art, everybody had loved Max Richardson.
"Let's go to my office," Wendell said, and he led the two women out of Dr. Smith's office and down the hall.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and they were back in Max and Stacy's apartment on Alameda Boulevard, just off the University campus. It was a small, cluttered flat in a bad section of Los Angeles. USC was located in a high-crime area and living off campus was a calculated risk. The walls of the apartment were decorated with the modern art that Max liked to collect: Chagall and Picasso prints that only cost forty dollars apiece, but which Max had put in expensive frames to give the illusion of the real thing. He once told her if he ever won the Nobel he would blow a hundred grand and buy a small original. Their two offices were a testament to their different personalities. Max's was in the spare bedroom and was pin neat. Stacy had taken over the pantry and it looked like ground zero at a paper-shredding factory.
Everywhere she glanced she could see her dead husband… hear his voice or remember some funny, endearing moment. Augie, the Raccoon, sat in ceramic goofiness on a living-room shelf. Augie was a truly monstrous piece of pottery that Max had bought for her when she was pissed off about a paper she'd been assigned to write on new rabies strains in raccoons. "It's stupid science," she'd told him. Augie was up on his hindquarters, his little ceramic paws outstretched, as if he were soliciting a hug. Max bought him at a student's garage sale and named him Augie, after the Rabies Augmentation Study in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which was the jumping-off point for her paper. He had placed Augie on her desk one evening and said, "You're saving this adorable little guy with your 'stupid science.' Don't give up on the masked rodent."
She had gotten an A on the paper, which had speculated on the viability of using targeted bait to deliver different antivirus liquids into different species of raccoons in the wild. Her paper was published in Animal Science Magazine. "Whoopee," she'd said sarcastically, when she got the magazine's acceptance letter and a check for five hundred dollars. But she'd been ashamed of herself and embarrassed that Max had been so right. No science was stupid science if it pushed back a new boundary or asked a new question. All of it had value if it added to the information pool.
"He didn't commit suicide," Stacy said three or four times in the last hour, hanging on to it, as if that one possible inaccuracy would make the whole thing a lie.
"But they said he shot-"
"I don't give a shit what they said, Joanne," she interrupted, "he didn't commit suicide. I talked to him last night till almost one A. M. He was not fucking depressed!" Anger was now taking center stage inside her. Her lover and mentor had been snatched from her at some godforsaken military lab in Maryland, and that fact was now untenable and totally unacceptable.
Wendell sat in the living room, looking at the two distraught women. Joanne was still tearing up, but Stacy, after crying for an hour, had given in to her natural instinct, which was to come out swinging. She had replaced the tears with anger and a stubborn, iron-willed determination. Wendell wasn't an expert on grieving, but he knew that the first stage was denial. This insistence on Stacy's part that Max had not committed suicide sounded like a form of denial to him, but he wasn't quite sure how to deal with it.
"Look, Stace," he said softly, "I think we need to consider-"
"You were his friend, Wendell," she interrupted, her eyes glinting anger. "Do you honestly believe he blew his head off with a shotgun? Do you? It's bullshit!" She shook her head. "Maybe it wasn't even him." She looked at Joanne. "I mean, if his head was blown off, maybe they just think it was him, but it was somebody else."
"Stacy, I think the doctors at Fort Detrick wouldn't make that kind of mistake," Wendell said.
"Max told me last night that he didn't belong there. He said, 'I don't think they want me either.' " She looked up at Wendell.
"That could mean anything. Maybe they didn't accept some of his science. Or maybe he was just having a bad day."
"Bad day? Yeah, sure, that's gotta be it," she said, biting the words off one at a time.
She stood and moved into her bedroom, past the wall-mounted punching bag. Max had painted a frown face on the bag, and on each stitched section he had written a word: INFERENCE-CONCLUSION-ILLATION-JUDGMENT, the four pillars of deductive reason. When Max was stumped on some science problem, he'd stand in front of the bag and fire away. He had been on the boxing team at Stanford and could really get the bag going in a steady rhythm, his athletic body shining with sweat, while working on some brain-stumping hypothesis.
Stacy started throwing things in an overnight case, not even choosing outfits. It was just the act of packing, the feeling of doing something, that she needed.
Joanne and Wendell stood at the door, watching her flurry of activity.
"You're going to Fort Detrick?" Wendell asked.
"Yes," she said through clenched teeth, her emotions still coming in waves. Her anger could, in a matter of seconds, recede and be overtaken by grief so overpowering that it almost buckled her. She was trying desperately not to give in to it. Max was gone. A fact that was impossible for her to fully grasp. He had been her soul mate, her perfect fit. She would never replace him.
"You're going to go back there and accuse those people of misidentifying the body?" Wendell asked. His voice was gentle, sympathetic. "You think that's a good idea?"
"Wendell, someone has to claim Max's body. Someone has to bring him back for burial. That's my job. I'm his wife," she challenged. "And while I'm at it, I'm gonna ask a few bloody goddamn questions about why a guy who had no history of depression, no overriding negative perceptions on either his life or career, after just two months at fucking Fort Detrick, suddenly goes out into his backyard, sits on a kitchen chair, and… Oh God…" She shuddered like a spaniel coming out of the water. She shook herself, throwing her hair back, then bit her lip and held on until the moment passed. Then she straightened her shoulders. "Well, I don't buy it!" She slammed her suitcase shut without remembering to put in her toiletries.