Extreme Measures (27 page)

S
oon after Eric had left for the hospital, Laura floated back to sleep. She awoke after nine, bewildered and confused to find herself not in her cabana on Little Cayman. Across the room, Verdi was scuffing about beneath his cage cover. Laura set the cover aside and spent a fruitless five minutes endeavoring to coax the bird into a “good morning.” Finally, she sat on the edge of the bed, trying to map out some sort of plan for the day ahead. For the first time since leaving the island she felt listless and ill at ease.

Gradually she began to see that meeting Eric—growing to care for him and to have him care for her—seemed somehow to have blunted her sense of urgency in finding Scott.

Was her commitment that fragile?

It frightened and angered her to think that it might not be fear for her brother that had been driving her so, but fear of losing the only real connection she had kept to life beyond the island.

Had her life grown that thin?

She got dressed and walked downtown to the Carlisle. The day, which had dawned cloudless, had grown overcast and unpleasantly damp. The city seemed to be begging for the relief that rain would bring. Several times during her walk she tried without success to spot anyone following her. Just the notion that somone might constantly be watching was sickening.

The Iranian desk clerk had no new messages. Laura went up to her room, turned on some talk show, and lay down. Almost immediately she could feel herself begin to drift off again. The search for Scott was so much easier with Eric along to help, she reasoned. She could catch up on some sleep, do some shopping, and wait until tomorrow to see the police. The thought of another encounter with another bored, condescending officer was not at all appealing. Besides, there was little chance of their helping anyway. Her eyes closed.

“… and it is our belief as antivivisectionists,” one of the program’s guests was saying, “that the medical researchers and animal providers have a lobby going in Washington that is as strong and well-funded as any special interest group.…”

Laura forced her eyes open, pushed herself up, and stared at the screen. The speaker droned on, castigating the loss of perspective in the medical world.

“… first mice and hamsters, then dogs, then primates, then so-called volunteer prisoners,” she was saying. “And where do you suppose all this is heading?”

Laura snatched up the phone, dialed Information, and got the number of the anatomy department at the medical school. She was connected with a man named Bishoff, the administrator of the department.

“Mr. Bishoff, thanks for speaking with me,” Laura said. “My name is Laura Scott. I’m doing some
research for a novel, and I need some information on how med-school anatomy departments acquire the bodies they use for students to dissect.”

“You a mystery writer?” The man sounded intrigued.

“That’s right.”

“Published?”

“Well, not yet.”

“Oh.”

Laura could sense the man’s interest begin to wane.

“But I’m under contract,” she said eagerly.

“Well, then, in that case congratulations are in order. Your first sold novel. You know, I’ve been planning a book myself. A medical mystery. I haven’t quite gotten to the actual writing yet, but I do have a title:
Take Two Aspirins and Call Me in the Morgue
. Catchy, don’t you think?”

Laura wished she had decided on some other ploy.

“It … has potential,” she said.

“Glad you think so. Now then, author to author, what do you want to know?”

“Well, Mr. Bishoff, where do you get your bodies?”

“Why, they’re donated.”

“By whom?”

“By the only person authorized to do so—the deceased.”

“People sign their bodies over in their wills?”

“That’s right. They are required to notify us of their desire when they are sound of mind, and to sign a notarized form in triplicate. A copy goes to their records, a copy goes to us, and a copy goes on their will.”

“Do the police ever supply you with bodies?”

“Never.”

“And you get enough that way?”

“More than enough, actually. We keep them on
ice. Say, wouldn’t it be great to have a big chase scene that ends up in a body freezer?”

“It would be, Mr. Bishoff, but I think it may have been done already.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me,” she said, “do you pay for them?”

“The bodies? Hell no. Only burial fees if the family wants to use the county’s boot hill up on the North Shore.”

“You never pay for a body?”

“Absolutely not. We can’t make budget as it is. Does that wreck your plot?”

“It may.”

“In that case, I’m sorry.”

“One last time, just so I can be sure: There is no way someone can profit from selling bodies to medical schools?”

“Absolutely none.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bishoff. You’ve been very helpful.”

“My pleasure. Now I have one question for you.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I should get an agent before or after I write my book?”

Laura smiled. “I think after might be better, Mr. Bishoff,” she said.

She hung up and then dialed the number of the medical examiner Thaddeus Bushnell. A recording told her that the line was out of order. Ten minutes later she was in a cab headed toward his lower Beacon Hill town house, hoping that in midday she might find him a bit more sober and easier to talk to.

At the turn onto Bushnell’s street, she spotted the wooden barriers on the sidewalk in front of his place. The building itself was gutted—a burned-out shell. The stench of smoke and charred wood hung heavy in the air.

She asked the cabbie to wait and walked to the
barriers. A uniformed fire inspector was standing beside what remained of the front doorway.

“What happened?” she asked.

The man stared at her.

“The house burned down,” he said, his tone asking:
What do you think happened?

“What about Dr. Bushnell?”

Laura sensed ominously that she needn’t have bothered asking the question.

“You a friend?”

“I … I knew him.”

The man softened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The old guy never made it out.”

“I knew he would do this to himself,” Laura said.

“Pardon?”

“Dr. Bushnell, I saw him the other night, and he was drinking too much and smoking. I was frightened that something like this might happen to him.”

The inspector looked back at the house, and then at Laura.

“You a reporter?” he asked.

“No, why?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m … I’m visiting from the South. Why?”

“Because I’m not supposed to talk to anyone until we’ve checked on a few more things.”

“Please,” Laura said, suddenly apprehensive. “Please tell me what happened. It … it’s very important.”

The man sized her up for a few moments and then said simply, “The fire was set. Professional job from the looks of it, but not the best. The old guy was on the second floor. The thing was put together in such a way that he probably couldn’t have gotten out even if he wanted to.… Miss? You look a little pale.”

Laura pictured the frail little man, wrapped in his blanket, speaking of events long past as if they had happened yesterday.

“I’m
feeling
a little pale,” she said. “There are some terrible things going on around here.”

The man gazed again at the shell that was once Thaddeus Bushnell’s home.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose there are.” He put his hand out and peered overhead. “Rain’s startin’,” he said.

Except for the elegant Countway Medical Library on Huntington Avenue, the Hoffman Medical Library at White Memorial was the largest in the city. Eric planned to start his research there with a screening of basic textbooks in the areas of toxicology, metabolism, and cardiology. He would pay special attention to the bibliographies at the end of each pertinent chapter, and set up a card file of the journal articles that would form phase two of his project. His operating thesis was that somehow the two patients had encountered the same poison or environmental pollutant—a toxin powerful enough to cause cardiovascular collapse and profound metabolic slowing.

It was just after four in the afternoon. Earlier in the day a light rain had moved in on the city, floating a slick of embedded oil up onto the highways. The result—a series of multivictim accidents—had kept him at work in the E.R. longer than he had wished. Finally he had signed out to the senior resident Joe Silver had appointed to take Reed’s place, and agreed to split shifts with the man each day until a more permanent arrangement could be made.

Earlier in the day, Laura had phoned with a report of her call to the anatomy department and news of the probable murder of Thaddeus Bushnell. Hoping to come up with an explanation for the similarities between the deaths of John Doe and Loretta Leone, Eric had battled back the urge to tell her right then of the horrible error he might have made. Very soon, though, they would have to have that talk.

With a growing sense of urgency, he piled the
texts on the corner of a table and began. Within an hour his list of toxins was at forty.

Aconite, curare, botulin, belladonna, sapotoxin, physostigmine, tetrodotoxin, cyanide, arsenic, acet-anilide, antimony, barbiturates, bee venom, mandrake root, muscarine, amanita, Picrotoxin, reptile neurotoxin, strychnine …

One by one on index cards he listed the substances, their toxic doses, routes of administration, sources, and principal symptoms. Each of them was capable of causing death by neurologic or cardiac paralysis, and by inference, specific doses of each might induce a marked metabolic slowdown. The task of sorting them out seemed overwhelming. But so, too, Eric reminded himself, were the hundreds of organic chemistry formulas he was once faced with memorizing.

An hour passed, then another, as he worked his way through his cards. Bit by bit the list grew smaller. For a time, one toxin or another would catch his fancy, only to be discarded by the question
How would both victims have been exposed?
or
Could the effect of the substance possibly stop after metabolic paralysis and before death?
Amanita, a mushroom poison, was one of the leading candidates. So for a time were strychnine and the toad poison bufotoxin. But again and again, as if daring him to refute it, one substance kept cropping up: tetrodotoxin, a product found in certain species of puffer fish, and believed by one researcher at least to be the long-sought-after zombi poison.

In Japan certain chefs were certified by the government in the preparation of fugu, a puffer-fish sashimi dish that straddled the line between food and drug. The chefs, some of whom occasionally died from sampling their wares, sought to preserve just enough tetrodotoxin to cause flushing of the skin, tingling of the lips and extremities, and a mild euphoria. But numerous cases of puffer-fish poisoning had been documented, the effects being, in part, pulmonary
edema due to cardiac slowing, respiratory failure, and marked metabolic depression.

Could Loretta Leone and John Doe somehow have inadvertently eaten fugu?

The idea made no sense.

Outside the library the gray evening gave way to ebony night. Inside, the pile of journals on Eric’s table grew. Amanita mushrooms, fugu, aconite plant alkaloid. One by one, Eric pared his list until finally only those three remained. Each, in the proper dosage, seemed capable of inducing a state of metabolic slowdown that might be indistinguishable from death.

Behind him the library door opened, then closed. Eric did not look up. Moments later he felt a massive hand on his shoulder.

“Dr. Subarsky, I presume,” he said as he eliminated strychnine once and for all from his prospects.

“You are certainly a diligent little beaver,” the biochemist said. “Surely you must have something more exotic to do with your free time.”

He dropped a load of books on a nearby table, settled in across from Eric, and scanned the books he was using.

“Journal of Toxicology … Poisons of the World … Journal of Ethnopharmacology …”

“See, I am doing something exotic,” Eric said, realizing only then how much time had elapsed.

“And what, exactly, is that?”

Subarsky leaned back and propped his gunboat sneakers on the table.

“I’m looking into the case of the lady that Reed Marshall pronounced dead yesterday,” Eric said.

“Ah, yes, the talk of the town. Nasty mistake the man made. Nasty.”

“I’m not so sure it was a mistake.”

“
Res ipsa loquitur”
Subarsky said.

“What does that mean?”

“Roughly, ‘the deed speaks for itself.’ ”

“David, how would you define death?”

Subarsky scratched at his beard. “The usual, I guess. Cessation of cardiac and neurologic activity—that sort ofthing.”

“What about all these reports I’ve been reading of people who had those findings for a time and then woke up?”

“I can find you reports of dinosaur sightings in the Grand Canyon,” Subarsky said.

“Well, I’ve been here for hours trying to put together a definition that fits all these reports, and you know what I keep coming up with? Putrefaction. That’s what.”