Obsessed (26 page)

I
WAS
sitting at a table at the Stavros Diner, waiting for Shands, munching on one of their excellent olives. The sting of the brine reminded me that I had a cut lip. The place was always pretty empty at that time of day. I couldn't see Annie, but I knew she was listening to me breathe as she sat at the far end of the counter that wrapped from one end of the diner to the other. I was wired.

Jimmy, the owner of the place, was cleaning the grill. When we'd arrived he'd rushed over, making appropriately sympathetic noises. With my swollen face, I looked as if I'd gotten into an argument with a revolving door. He was ignoring Annie only because we'd told him he had to. She'd tied back her hair, pulled a baseball cap low over her forehead, and propped a newspaper in front of her face so if Shands happened to wander into that end of the diner, he wouldn't recognize her.

Shands arrived, still in his lab coat. He looked frazzled, his hair not quite its usual Grecian perfection. When he saw me, his face fell another notch. He came over.

“I feel just terrible about this,” he said, his eyes searching my face. He was an amazing actor.

He sat and ordered some coffee. I ordered a Coke. I slid my copy of the Pearce safety manual over to him. He opened it, his eyes flicking over the table of contents.

“We really are very careful, too, you know,” he said, “And we have our own safety procedures.”

“I know you do. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember when I brought a patient, John O'Neill, over to you for an MRI?”

“Of course I remember him. A shame his family pulled him out of the study.”

“I'll bet you were disappointed.”

Shands blinked back at me from behind his expensive wire-rimmed glasses. From up close the teeth looked too perfect, as if they were capped. “I was. But I have to say, I don't much like your tone.”

“Mr. O'Neill almost died two days after you gave him an MRI. You'd think that would be unusual, but it's not. An awful lot of patients on your treatment protocol die within a few days of coming in to have an MRI.”

“We deal with sick, often elderly patients. Death is…”

“Inevitable?” I said, supplying the word. “Perhaps. Then why not just wait for them to die?”

“What are you suggesting?” He gave me a self-righteous glare.

“Frank Mosticcio?”

“He…”

“Anna Abels?” I reeled off the names of a half-dozen more patients. I laid Annie's copy of the list on the table. “These patients all died of pneumonia, or lung infections, or—”

“That's what old people die of,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.

“Dr. Philbrick collected death notices of all these patients. And he called me the night before we brought Mr. O'Neill in to you for testing. I never talked to him, but I suspect he was trying to warn me. He never got the chance because, as you may recall, he was killed.”

“But this is absurd,” Shands said.

“And what about Kyle Ronan?”

Now Shands was giving me a blank look, as if the name didn't register.

“The man whom Emily supposedly ran down with her car? I think he was killed because of something he saw—or something that he should have seen and didn't. There he is, following Emily, waiting in the garage for her to return to her car the morning Dr. Philbrick was killed. He sees Emily arrive. He sees the police. He sees me.”

Jimmy delivered Shands's coffee and my Coke.

“But he never sees you,” I said. “I wonder why not, because when I arrived you were already there.” The silence of the diner was broken by the whirring of the milkshake machine. “And isn't that precisely what made him so dangerous?”

I expected to see a flash of anger, the shifting eyes of someone who's cornered. But what I saw in Shands's face was confusion. His jaw had gone slack.

He pushed the coffee away. “Do you have any idea how horrendous this disease is?” he asked. “The data we're collecting is extraordinary.” His face became animated. “We're so close to understanding. So close to preventing. Have you any idea how painful it is to watch someone you love become so tortured?” Real emotion, tears even had sprung to his eyes. “How it destroys, crushes the intellect, wipes out personality.” He swallowed. “And all you can do is stand by and watch.”

That's when it hit me. This passion for his research—Shands had come by it the hard way. He'd lost someone he cared about to Lewy body dementia.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“What?”

“And how old was your father when he started to lose his mind? When he began to show symptoms of dementia? This cure you're looking for. It's personal, isn't it? Your bid to survive. When you look at your own brain scan, what do you see? How long do you figure you have?”

Shands took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “My father was only fifty-nine when he started to become forgetful. His brother was in his early sixties.” Shands gave me a hard look. He raised his hand and pointed a finger at me. “I figure I have just a few years less than you do.” Was there a slight tremor in his hand, or was I seeing what I expected to see?

“Will I last that long?” I asked. “Or will I get sick, like all those other patients? Suddenly not feeling so well. Will I get to the hospital in time, or will I wait, assuming it's just the flu? Then by the time they put me on antibiotics, the infection is raging and nothing can be done.”

I put my palm down on the list of patients, all those people who'd been killed in order to save Shands from the same miserable fate. I pushed the list toward him.

“You're a researcher. Is it even remotely possible that chance alone could account for this number of deaths in this close proximity to a similar event—having an appointment at your lab?”

“What you're suggesting…” he began, his voice raspy. I could see the realization taking hold. “I would never, ever deliberately hurt one of our patients.”

He picked up the list of names and stared at it. He drew his finger carefully down it, then he gazed off into space.

“No,” he whispered. “It's not—” He paused and seemed to gather strength. He stood up suddenly, his chair scraping on the linoleum. “Where's the phone? I have to make a call.”

I looked at him, open-mouthed. What was happening?

“You can use my—” I started, taking out my cell phone. But he was already loping toward the pay phone at the back of the diner.

I followed. He barely noticed Annie as he hurried past. When he'd disappeared through the swinging doors marked
REST ROOMS
and
PHONE
, Annie gave me a discreet thumbs-up.

I went back to wait. I took a drink of Coke and fished out an ice cube to suck on. I thought about Shands's reactions. First surprise. Then denial. Finally what I thought might be horror. I crunched down on the ice. Was it possible that he didn't realize what was going on? I glanced toward the back of the diner.

I took another sip of Coke. Shands's coffee was growing tepid. Jimmy came over to me.

“Your friend?” he jerked a thumb in the direction of the rest room. “He left the back way.”

Annie must have heard because she came bolting from around the corner. She had her cell phone out. “It will take about thirty seconds for them to erase that whiteboard. An hour more to shred the files.”

She started out to the parking lot, dialing as she ran. I raced in front of her and opened my car. We both got in.

“He's not in his office?” Annie said into the phone. “Well, page him. It's important.”

I accelerated onto the road and almost immediately came to a halt at a red light.

“Mac? It's me, Annie.”

The light turned green. I took off again and moved into the left lane.

Annie put her hand on the dashboard to steady herself.

“You know that MRI lab in Cambridge where there was a murder a few weeks ago? Well, it turns out they're killing patients, too. They're making them sick so that they come down with an infection. Peter and I are headed over—” She paused. “Well, I know because I overheard a conversation—” There was another pause.

Now we were heading down a crowded Fresh Pond Parkway toward the river. Rush-hour traffic was starting to build. Cars backed up approaching the rotary—a torture device invented in the 1800s to manage horse-and-buggy traffic. Some drivers dither trying to enter, others just barrel ahead. I'm a barreler, and the guy in front of me was a ditherer. I leaned on the horn.

“Well, we
had
some evidence, a list with names and dates that makes it pretty obvious what's going on. But it got stolen.”

There was another pause. Annie listened, shaking her head as she stared the window. “What do I want you to do?” Annie said. “Meet us over there. If we don't move fast they'll destroy the records.”

Now we were merging onto Memorial Drive.

“Search warrant? Are you kidding? You know how long that's going to take. There was already a murder there. Can't you get a follow-up search, an extension of whatever search warrant you've already got?”

I accelerated as the light turned yellow at JFK Street, swerving around the crowd of pedestrians nudging their way into the crosswalk. A short distance later, we passed the big Shell sign, which that day was reading
HELL
.

“Yes, I know you can't turn on a dime. Uh-huh, probable cause.” Annie leaned her head against the window. “Right. I know you need evidence. But if we don't get over there now there won't be any.”

I wove my way through pothole-ridden streets lined with warehouses and pulled into the driveway of the Sidney Street garage.

“Damn,” Annie said, turning off her phone. “Bureaucratic bullshit.”

I pulled into a spot on the first level and we got out of the car. The elevator was open, waiting for us.

As we rode up Annie said, “Let's make sure that one of us comes away with enough information to jumpstart an investigation. Why don't I do patient records while you keep Shands and Pullaski occupied?”

“You've got the list?”

Annie nodded. She followed me across the lobby to the MRI lab entrance.

“Just look like you know where you're going,” I said.

We walked into the waiting room. Apparently business had bounced back because there were about a half-dozen people there. The receptionist was on the phone. Without hesitating, I strode through, reached for the door to the inner area, and pulled it open.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist said as we blew by. “Hey!”

“It's okay. Dr. Shands is expecting us,” I said. We were inside.

We walked through the central area. One of the young men working at the counter looked up. His face registered confusion as he looked back and forth from Annie to me, not recognizing either of us.

I nodded to him. “We were here visiting with Dr. Shands. I know the way.”

In a moment we'd pushed through the double doors and were out of sight. We passed the room with the helium tanks and the brain bank. Now we were outside the records room. I had my hand poised over the keypad. Emily said the combination was Shands's birthday.
Please tell me they haven't changed it.
I punched in the numbers. The keypad beeped, and Annie opened the door.

“Meet you at the car later, and remember to keep your head down,” Annie said, and slipped inside.

I
BACK TRACKED
to Shands's office. The door was standing open. He wasn't there, but his lab coat was thrown over the chair.

I doubled back, past the records room again where I hoped Annie was already gathering the evidence we needed, then past the yellow sawhorse barriers. I paused outside the scan room. The door was closed and at first I couldn't hear anything. I held my breath and listened. A woman's voice was audible. Then the low rumble of a man.

I went down the hall and let myself into the control room. Through the window I could see Dr. Pullaski and Shands in the scan room. They were locked in a struggle. Crouching, I approached the control console and switched on the speaker. “You have to…stop…can't keep…” said Shands, his voice coming in tinny bursts.

I hung back in the shadows of the darkened room and watched. Shands was trying to pull something away from Dr. Pullaski. Beside them was a patient in a wheelchair. The gray-haired woman in a hospital gown was whimpering and cringing.

“I never…meant for you—” Shands wrenched an oxygen mask free of Dr. Pullaski's grasp and was backing away.

“What on earth has come over you?” Dr. Pullaski said.

Shands bent over the woman in the wheelchair. Hesitantly, he put his hand on her shoulder. It was an awkward gesture, as if he were trying out a dance step he'd never done before. He got down on one knee, steadied himself against the wheelchair, and lowered the other knee. The effect was clearly calming as the woman became less rigid and the mewling subsided.

“Is she going to be all right?” Shands asked, looking up at Dr. Pullaski.

“She'll be fine, once you stop leaning on her.”

“How many have there been?”

Dr. Pullaski gazed at him steadily without answering.

“How many?” he demanded.

“You're telling me you don't know?”

Shands staggered to his feet. “God help me. It's true, isn't it? What could you have been thinking? I'm a doctor. I don't kill people.”

“Of course you don't.” Dr. Pullaski went up to him and put her hands on either side of his face. “Which is why you need me.” He pulled away. “Why you've always needed me. We're the perfect partnership. That's how we got all this. The most powerful magnet in any lab in the country. Patients clamoring to be included in your research.” Her voice turned hard. “Beautiful young research assistants. You can't suddenly get cold feet. We have a bargain.”

“Bargain? What the hell are you talking about?” Shands said.

The patient gave a yelp of distress.

Dr. Pullaski put her finger up to her lips. “Keep your voice down,” she told Shands, as if she were talking to a child. “Maybe you've forgotten that the girls come and go. I'm the constant, the one who keeps it all happening. Surely you know that after all these years. I do it for you. Because of the special relationship we have, that we've always—”

“You're out of your mind,” he said, cutting her off. The woman in the wheelchair started to mutter heatedly to herself. Shands dropped his voice. “I've tolerated you because you do your job better—”

“Tolerated?”

“You're not an easy woman. With your petty jealousies.”

“My
what?
”

“Your fantasies about us.”

Dr. Pullaski's mouth dropped open. “Fantasies? You…need…me,” she said, biting off each word.

“Like hell I do. You've endangered everything that means anything to me. I might have loved you once. But that was a long time ago. Now? How could I? You're cold. You're all dried up.”

“You bastard.”

“Bitch!”

The woman in the wheelchair let loose with a long, protracted scream that sliced through the air.

“Would you shut her the fuck up!” Shands yelled.

The woman in the wheelchair flinched, shrinking down, bringing her chest to her knees. She began to screech, and the screech turned into a prolonged moaning that seemed to set the air vibrating. Dr. Pullaski tried shushing her, but to no avail. Now the woman was thrashing around. Any minute she'd have thrown herself out of the wheelchair.

As Dr. Pullaski reached for the woman's neck, I bolted for the door to the scan room and pulled it open. When she saw me Dr. Pullaski took a step back.

The room fell silent, the only sound the patient in the wheelchair keening, her gray hair hanging over her face.

Shands and Dr. Pullaski exchanged a look.

“He knows,” Shands said.

Dr. Pullaski absorbed the news without changing her expression. She smoothed her lab coat. Shands picked up the phone in the room, punched in a few numbers, and asked whoever answered to send someone down to get the patient. A few moments later one of the men I'd seen working in the lab came and took her away.

Dr. Pullaski began wheeling the oxygen tank to the door.

“You aren't very fond of Dr. Ryan, are you, Dr. Pullaski?” I said.

She paused, an amused expression passing over her face. “Should've thrown that one back.”

“And why was that?”

Dr. Pullaski set the pushcart upright and gave me a direct look. “She—”

“Estelle,” Shands said, a warning in his voice.

“You're not only an able administrator who keeps this place humming and the money flowing in, are you?” I said. “You keep the young women flowing in as well. You hire them knowing full well what's going to happen. One after another, they get seduced by the good doctor. They get chewed up and spit out. They come and they go, but you're still here, the irreplaceable helpmate. Only you made a little mistake with Dr. Ryan.”

“Me? Oh no, I never would have hired that one. She applied”—she paused—“directly to you, James, didn't she?” Dr. Pullaski's thin smile turned into a sneer. “Oh, she knew how to appeal. How to make you stand up and take notice. Little Miss Innocent. Then she wouldn't have you, would she?”

“She would have, if it weren't for your…your interfering,” Shands sputtered. “Besides, she's different.”

“You think so?” She shot Shands a pitying look. “Ambition. That's what that girl's about. That's what they're all about, really. She'd have made love to
me
if it had gotten her what she wanted. All she's done is distract you from the important work. It was pathetic, really. The way you followed her—”

“I think you've said quite enough,” Shands said.

“You just couldn't take no for an answer, could you?”

So I'd been right in my first impression of Philbrick—odd, intense, socially awkward, but not a stalker. Now I recalled the undercurrent of anxiety I'd felt from Shands when he'd asked if I'd seen anything the night I'd found Emily terrified in the parking lot at the Pearce. His obvious relief had been because I hadn't seen
him.
Shands was obsessed with Emily, all right, the woman who'd pose for
Playboy
but wouldn't fall into bed with him.

Had something changed? When had Shands turned from pursuer to executioner? The fabric heart and the pages from
Playboy
had been planted in the desk to make Philbrick look like the stalker—and to give Emily a motive for murder. Emily's earring and her “Freudian Slips” had been planted by the same person who ran Kyle down with her car. It would have been easy to take Emily's car keys, her apartment keys from her bag while she was working at the lab, have copies made, and then return them before she knew they were missing.

But Philbrick's and Kyle's deaths weren't about stalking. That was just a convenient ruse to divert attention from the real reason they were killed.

“I ran into one of the doctors who served on the board with you at the Cambridge Brain Bank,” I said. Now I had both of their attention. “You both left at the same time, didn't you? Why was that? One too many complaints from young women? Too much research funding vanishing from other budget lines and showing up on yours?”

Dr. Pullaski and Shands exchanged a look. In that instant they'd morphed from adversaries to allies.

“We didn't belong there,” Shands said. “It was too conservative, stodgy. Our research was…is…light-years ahead of theirs.”

“So why haven't you published it? Why not let the world know about the radical, groundbreaking work that's going on here?”

Together they presented me with an impassive wall.

Now I spoke directly to Shands. “It's not just women that you collect, is it? You need brains to feed your research, and you need a lot of them because whatever you're doing, it causes the tissue structure to break down. And time is of the essence, isn't it? Who knows how long before you start to feel the effects of the disease yourself?”

“Shut up!” Shands roared. “You know nothing.”

The room fell into silence, the only sound the humming of the overhead fluorescent lighting and an occasional clicking from the scanner. It had been twenty minutes since I left Annie.

“This has been an interesting discussion, but I'm afraid we have work to do,” Dr. Pullaski said, busying herself straightening the room. “We have a full schedule today, and there are patients waiting to be tested.”

She removed the paper covering the scanner table, threw it away, and tore off a fresh sheet from a roll under the counter. She placed it on the table and smoothed it in place. She began to wheel the pushcart holding the oxygen canister from the room. I started to follow, but Shands put his hand on my arm, holding me back. The door swung shut behind her.

“You have to believe me, I had no idea,” Shands said. “She must be insane. She set Emily up.”

“The police will have to be told,” I said.

“Isn't there some other way?” Shands said, sinking down onto a stool. “Think of all my work. The benefits to mankind. There are four million people in this country alone with dementia. Think of the quality of life lost.” His tunnel vision took my breath away. Not a moment spent pondering the patients who'd been killed, never mind Leonard Philbrick and Kyle Ronan. “You understand how important it is, don't you? There has to be a way to save it.”

I thought about the brains, stuck with electrodes like cloves in so many Christmas hams, dissolving in whatever he had them suspended in. Was that research worth saving, or the quest of a madman intent on only one thing—saving himself?

“She can be very jealous, you know,” Shands continued. “A brilliant administrator. Seemed like early on, when we were just getting started, she could just about pull money out of the air.” He seemed to settle into a kind of reverie. “I remember the first time I saw her. That dark hair, flashing eyes. She wasn't pretty, but she had a kind of electricity about her. Raw power.

“Now she's turned into something else. Something ugly. I've kept her on because she's made herself”—he paused, looking for the word—“indispensable.”

Over Shands's shoulder I could see Dr. Pullaski had entered the control room. She was staring at Shands's back, listening.

“I don't think you should—” I began, putting up my hand to silence him.

“I've already laid the groundwork. A deal that will make the lab financially independent and free me of her—”

Shands looked up sharply as a thud sounded overhead. The sound had come from the ceiling over the scanner. Shands spun around and looked through the window into the control room. Dr. Pullaski had disappeared.

There was another thud. Shands froze, like an animal listening for a predator.

“What was that?” I asked.

“The vents.” He cleared his throat and looked up at the ceiling. “Closing, I think.”

Now Dr. Pullaski was standing there, her eyes fixed on Shands. She raised her index finger, then reached for the desk. I remembered what was there—the control panel with emergency buttons. Philbrick had nearly jumped out of his skin when Annie had gone for them.

“No!” Shands screamed, spreading his arms protectively over the MRI system.

Dr. Pullaski ignored him. She pressed her hand down.

There was a pause and, for a moment, I thought nothing was going to happen. Then there was an explosion, like a jet engine coming to life. It seemed to come from the MRI system itself. Clouds of vapor began belching from the smokestack vent atop the scanner, cascading over Shands. He gave an agonized scream and he fell back, his hands outstretched. His splayed fingers had turned pale yellow and waxy. A two-tone blaring sound began, like a foghorn.

“Quench!” Shands screamed. Dr. Pullaski stood there, staring at him impassively. “For God's sake, Estelle, open the vents!”

Philbrick's words came back to me:
The system holds over a thousand liters of liquid helium.
And all thousand of them were now boiling over and vaporizing. I could see my college chemistry professor, Hiram Bucholtz, lecturing to us on the dangers of working with cryogenic gases. “It cannot be overstated,” he'd intone for the umpteenth time, “compressed gases are hazardous by virtue of their temperature and their compression.” Somewhere from the recesses of my brain I recalled that helium expanded at a ratio of about nine hundred to one when it vaporized. We had to get out of there, and fast.

My head felt as if it were about to explode. I lunged for the door, took hold of the handle, and pulled. It wouldn't budge. I wondered if Dr. Pullaski had locked it from the outside, or if the pressure buildup in the room was already holding it shut. I tried to yell to Shands to help me, but ended up bending double with my hands over my ears. It felt like nails were being driven in.

Then, it was as if someone suddenly turned off the sound. The foghorn turned muffled and my ears were ringing. The room seemed to be revolving around me, and I found myself sitting on the floor, breathing rapidly. A red sensor on the wall started blinking, telling me what I already knew. Oxygen levels in the room had dropped.