Fatal Care (18 page)

“Have you cleaned up any blood from this ship?”

“No, señor.”

“Did you ever see blood in the bedroom or bathroom or up top?”

The man shook his head three times.

Joanna and Jake went topside into bright sunlight. Lucy Rabb had put on a wraparound skirt over her bikini bathing suit. Tuch had his coat off and slung over his shoulder. He was drinking Coca-Cola from a small, thick bottle.

Jake asked, “Do you always serve Coke in those bottles aboard ship?”

“Yes,” Lucy answered. “It was Edmond’s favorite drink.”

And a perfect weapon to crack somebody over the head with, Jake was thinking. “We’re going to take a look at the stern. That’s where your husband was standing before he went overboard. Right, Mrs. Rabb?”

“I believe so,” Lucy Rabb said without emotion.

Cold, Jake thought. So damn pretty and beneath it nothing but ice. He took Joanna’s arm and guided her to the back of the vessel. When they were well out of earshot, he asked, “Did you see that Coke bottle? You could really bash in a skull with that.”

“And toss it overboard in the wink of an eye.”

“That, too,” Jake said as a seagull flew over them. “Is there any way to check Edmond Rabb’s skull to see if he might have gotten conked with a Coke bottle?”

Joanna thought for a moment. “I guess it’s possible that a little piece of green glass chipped off and embedded itself into bone.”

“Check it out.” Jake put on dark sunglasses and walked to the brass railing at the very rear of the vessel. “Let me show you where Edmond Rabb was seen just before he died. According to an eyewitness, he was leaning forward with one hand on the railing and the other holding a drink.” Jake assumed the position for Joanna and then straightened up. “No one was near him. The sea was calm. There was no wind. They were traveling at five knots per hour.”

“Is it possible that he was sitting on the railing?”

Jake shook his head. “Rabb wasn’t that stupid. As a young man he was in the merchant marine. He knew ships and he knew the sea.”

Joanna carefully inspected the brass railing and the hard wood below it. There was no protruding ledge or anything else jutting out. She peered down over the railing to examine the stern of the ship. It was smooth and flat with nothing protruding. She couldn’t see the propeller beneath the blue water. She gazed back at the deck. She searched the area around her, looking for hiding places. There weren’t any.

Joanna stepped away from the railing, trying to envision the murder of Edmond Rabb. He was leaning on the rail, yet his body was a safe distance from it. He was probably staring out at the sea. Everything was calm and quiet, so he would have heard someone coming up behind him. Rabb turned, but he was unconcerned because he knew his murderer. He again assumed his position, leaning over the railing. Then he got his head bashed in. He fell forward onto the railing and the murderer shoved him overboard.

“Well?” Jake broke into her thoughts.

“It’s got to be murder,” Joanna told him. “There’s no other way to explain the skull fracture near the crown of his head.”

“No way it could have been accidental, huh?”

“Not that I can see,” Joanna said, and pointed at the brass railing. “If he’d slipped and hit the railing, the skull fracture would have been at the front or back of his head.”

“Could he have taken a header and hit the propeller?”

Joanna shook her head. “They were moving at five knots an hour. The propeller blades would have chewed him up.”

“And you’re telling me that a coroner’s inquest would never buy murder here?”

“It would be a long shot,” Joanna replied. “Somebody would raise the possibility that he took a header and hit a piece of log floating in the water. That would cause a skull fracture near the crown.”

“Is that really a possibility?”

“Sure. But it’s not what happened.”

Joanna and Jake walked back across the deck. The day was becoming hotter, with virtually no breeze at all. Atop the wheelhouse, a string of flags drooped down motionless.

Jake nodded to Lucy Rabb and her lawyer. “Thanks for your time.”

“Mrs. Rabb hopes that no further searches of her ship will be necessary,” Tuch said formally.

“I can’t promise you that,” Jake said.

“If you do return, she will insist on your having a search warrant.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Jake and Joanna went down the gangplank and onto the wharf. The bald man in the white suit was still standing guard.

“Were you working here the night of the party?” Jake asked the guard.

“Yeah.”

“Did you go aboard that night?”

“No,” the guard said, his eyes avoiding Jake’s stare. “I stay on dock.”

“You sure of that?”

“Anybody who say I was on the boat is a liar,” the guard growled.

“We’ll see.”

Jake and Joanna walked away, each lost in their own thoughts for a moment. Behind them they could hear Lucy Rabb shouting down orders to the guard. She wasn’t happy about something.

“What do you think?” Joanna asked.

“I think they’re going to walk.”

The breeze suddenly picked up, blowing in from the harbor. The flags on the pole above the wheelhouse of the
Argonaut
began to unfurl. There were three flags: the American flag, the State of California flag, and a third one that showed a corporate logo. It was a blue globe of the world on a white background. The word BIO-MED surrounded the globe.

Joanna and Jake left the wharf without looking back. They didn’t see the Bio-Med flag blowing in the wind.

“Oliver Rhodes could have lived forever,” Lori McKay said, moving her chair aside. “Take a peek at this.”

Joanna leaned in and studied the slide under the microscope. The cardiac muscle cells appeared young and healthy with no evidence of scarring or atrophy. Small arterioles were wide open without a hint of atherosclerosis. “It looks like the heart of a twenty-year-old.”

“And it performed that way, too.” Lori pointed over at a stack of medical records on a nearby table. “Check out his cardiac function studies, and it’ll blow your mind. His EKG and thallium stress test were absolutely normal, and his cardiac ejection fraction was a hundred and ten percent of the expected value. Hell, this heart could have beat for another fifty years.”

“If it hadn’t developed rhabdomyosarcoma.”

“It’s the same story here,” said Dennis Green, the specialist in oncologic pathology. He pushed himself away from a microscope near the wall in the forensic laboratory. “You examine the brain tissue from this patient and you’ll swear it came from a teenager. There’s no scarring or infarcts or atrophy—yet she’d had multiple strokes in the past.”

“Did her brain function return as well?” Joanna asked.

“It was unbelievable,” Green answered. “All of her motor and sensory functions were completely restored. And perhaps most remarkable of all, she had been suffering from a progressive form of dementia, like Alzheimer’s. That, too, was reversed.”

“Like magic,” Lori commented.

“Like black magic,” Green went on. “Because right in the middle of this woman’s brain was an astrocytoma, which is just about the nastiest tumor you can find.”

Joanna sighed deeply. “And we still don’t know why.”

“It could be happenstance,” Lori suggested. “That’s a possibility here. Remember, we’re dealing with only two patients.”

“No way.” Green shook his head at Lori. “We’ve got two very rare tumors occurring in a group of thirty patients. That’s not a coincidence. I’d bet it’s somehow related to that lipolytic enzyme they received.”

He turned in his swivel chair to Joanna. “Did you find out anything at Bio-Med?”

“Everything looked fine,” Joanna told him. “They have very good quality control. In one lab they even had a—” She interrupted herself, thinking back to the lab with the technician wearing a space suit. And plain latex gloves. That’s what had bothered Joanna. The plain latex gloves wouldn’t protect the wearer in a supposed hot zone laboratory. “Excuse me for a moment.”

Joanna went to a wall phone, spoke briefly, and returned.

“What was that all about?” Green asked.

“A virus was contaminating one of the labs at Bio-Med,” Joanna replied.

“So?”

“So the technician in that lab was wearing a space suit.”

Green looked at Joanna strangely. “A space suit?”

“We’ll talk about it in a little while,” Joanna said. “I just spoke with Mack Brown down in virology research. He’s on his way up. Maybe he can explain it to us.”

“A space suit?” Green asked again.

“Let’s wait for Mack.”

Joanna reached in her white laboratory coat for a chocolate bar. She unwrapped it slowly, her thoughts now going back to the rare cancers. “Let’s focus in on the enzyme made by Bio-Med. They had plenty of quality control in place. Their enzyme preparations should have been pure. But we’ll check them out ourselves to make sure.”

Green asked, “You think there may be a contaminant in the preparation?”

“It’s possible,” Joanna said. “I think we all remember the L-tryptophan story.”

Green and Lori nodded at the memory of the medical disaster.

L-tryptophan, a naturally occurring amino acid, was found to be helpful in inducing sleep and relaxing muscles. It was eventually produced by a Japanese pharmaceutical company using a gene-splicing technique and sold in large quantities at health food stores all over America. Soon some of the patients taking L-tryptophan showed signs of a progressive, devastating neurologic disorder. A number of them died as a result. The disease was caused by a contaminant that was present in the L-tryptophan preparations. The pharmaceutical company was sued for hundreds of millions of dollars. L-tryptophan was pulled from the shelves.

“So,” Joanna said as she nibbled on the candy bar, “a contaminant in the Bio-Med preparation remains high on the list of possibilities. But the enzyme itself could still be the causative agent.”

Green waved off the idea. “There’s never been an enzyme shown to induce cancer. Not one.”

“Right,” Joanna agreed. “Except this enzyme was produced by a genetically altered bacteria. This may not be your run-of-the-mill enzyme.”

“You’ve got a point,” Green conceded.

Joanna licked the chocolate from her fingers. “But this doesn’t bring us any closer to the answer, does it?”

“Well, whatever it is,” Green said, “I think we can all agree that the causative agent is in that enzyme preparation.”

Joanna nodded firmly. “You can bet your house on that.”

“Two patients already dead from cancer,” Green said, more to himself than to the others. “And more sure to come.”

Lori asked thoughtfully, “Can you imagine how those other twenty-eight patients will feel once they find out what’s going on? They’ll just be sitting there, waiting for a cancer to pop up and kill them. And there’s not a damn thing anybody can do about it. Our study is not going to help them.”

“I know,” Joanna said softly, thinking how frightened and angry the patients would be. One day they’re feeling great and sitting on top of the world, and the next day they’re without hope and waiting for a deadly cancer to appear.

Joanna pushed the sad thoughts from her mind and focused again on the study to find the causative agent. She pointed to boxes and boxes of slides stacked high on a nearby table. “Those are the slides on the experimental animals who received the enzyme preparation at Bio-Med. We’ve got to review every one of them.”

“Jesus,” Lori groaned. “There must be a hundred boxes on that table. It’s going to take us weeks to go through all of them.”

“More,” Green said miserably.

“Whatever,” Joanna said, ignoring their objections. “Each of us will review a box of slides per day. Don’t just scan them. Look at them carefully and concentrate on the heart and brain.”

“Should we get some pathology fellows to help out?” Lori suggested.

“No,” Joanna said at once. “We can’t afford inexperience here. And remember, subtle changes may be important, particularly if they indicate early malignant transformation.”

The door to the forensic laboratory opened, and J. Mack Brown entered. He was a tall, lanky Texan with a square jaw and tousled brown hair that never stayed in place no matter how often he brushed it. Everybody thought he looked like the Marlboro man. And they weren’t far off. Named after the famous movie cowboy Johnnie Mack Brown, he was born and raised on a ranch near Del Rio, Texas. He was also a renowned virologist and the world’s expert on Lassa fever, an illness caused by one of nature’s deadliest viruses. Mack Brown had spent a lot of time doing research in a space suit.

“How you doing, Joanna?” Mack asked in a soft Texas drawl.

“Just fine.”

“You look real good,” Mack said, scratching his ear. “How do you manage to stay so young?”

“Clean living.” Joanna grinned.

Mack grinned back. “Ha!” He sat in a swivel chair and propped his feet up on a table. His boots were old and worn, but well polished.

“I think you know Dennis and Lori,” Joanna said, sitting on the counter that held the microscopes.

“Sure do.” Mack nodded to them and then looked at Joanna. “What’s all this business about a space suit?”

“What I’m about to tell you has got to be held in strict confidence.”

“Fire away.”

Joanna told him about the lipolytic enzyme and how it appeared to have induced malignant tumors in two patients. She described her visit to the Bio-Med plant, giving Mack all the details of the laboratory where the technician wore a space suit.

Mack squinted an eye at Joanna. “A space suit, with a visor and everything?”

Joanna nodded. “And a tube connected to the helmet to supply oxygen.”

“What the hell were they doing back there?”

“They said that their cell lines were being contaminated with an adenovirus,” Joanna told him. “They thought the virus was being transmitted into the lab by the personnel who worked in there. The space suit was meant to prevent the individual from contaminating the cell lines.”

Mack slowly digested the information and then ran a hand through his hair. “Something is wrong here.”