Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (24 page)

“Oh, well then.
That makes it okay,” he said, smiling.

Phoebe gave him a quick overview of the information she had on the missing student and why she wanted to understand more about
Myxomycetes
. “So what can you tell me?” she asked.

“Hmmm,” he said, thinking, as he punched in the code to a lock. He held the door open and gestured for her to go in ahead of him. She didn’t recognize the room. The last time she’d watched him work, he’d been reading images printed on actual film. Clearly, that was now passé. She scanned the room for images to get an indication about which particular reading room they were in, such as ER, ICU, or Neonatal, but there were no wall-mounted light boxes with X-rays anymore.

There were several desk areas partitioned off just enough to block the light, but not enough to make them into separate cubicles.
Each one had a rolling office chair and two computer monitors rotated 90
°
from normal so the long axis was vertical.
He pulled a chair over for her, then sat down and logged in to the computer.

She loved to sit beside him as he read. The images of the human body were, to her, the most beautiful art gallery in the world. Charlie started talking and it took her a moment to realize he was answering her question and not dictating his findings pertaining to the image on the computer screen. The radiology department computers were set up for voice recognition and the switch to turn it on was handheld, so in the dark conversation could get confusing if she didn’t pay close attention to whether he was speaking to her or the machine.

“… the most important thing is that for their own protection some of them can produce and emit chemicals that will kill bacteria in their immediate environment. We humans noticed this defensive trick of theirs and learned to harvest and then synthesize the chemicals they create so we can use them to kill bacteria in people.”

Charlie was accustomed to talking to himself in the dark, so he continued to run on without needing any prompting.

“Because of this, there’s a renewed interest in checking out what’s growing in the woods. You can get a Ph.D. these days in the finding or testing of novel biological chemical compounds. It’s called
bio-prospecting
.

“And of course we’ve got a
doozy
of a hunting preserve right here in the
Smokies
because the place is a temperate rainforest, or
cloudforest
, or
fogforest
, depending on which area of the park you’re in. Although a tropical rainforest is the best for many kinds of biological growth, a temperate jungle happens to better for
myxomycetes
.”

Phoebe nodded. She’d known Charlie would be a font of information, but it was still amazing what the guy knew.

“And we’ve got extreme diversity of life forms here because our mountains run northeast and southwest. Species weren’t eradicated by the Ice Age in this area like they were in the
Alps
and
Himalayas
where the mountains run east and west.

“In the
Smokies
plants and animals could advance and retreat as they needed to, so they were able
survive.
They didn’t get trapped by a glacier and obliterated against the side of a mountain range like they did in many parts of the world.

“Give me a second,” he said, leaning forward and typing with two fingers. An image of a torso appeared on the screen and he concentrated on it, manipulating it so he could view it from different angles. Phoebe was awestruck by the exotic rotations, slices, and animations the new digital imaging software was capable of.

Charlie dictated his findings in a rapid monotone. He spoke with a strong local accent, like Phoebe did, and she was amused to see that sometimes there were errors in the text as it appeared on the screen if he pronounced a word in standard English. The software didn’t recognize it and he’d have to go back and say it again with an accent.

Phoebe laughed and said, “
Jethro
.” That was the nickname his classmates had given him in medical school.

He turned and smiled at her. “The system is programmed to identify the speaker from the login information,” he explained, “and to transcribe what we’re saying. It pulls the examples we’ve loaded to train it to understand our particular way of talking. It can interpret the distinctive speech patterns of each of the radiologists who work here. I have to remember to maintain a consistent accent for it to work properly. I can’t straddle two worlds in here, even though I have to as soon as I leave the room.”

“Well,
Jethro
,” Phoebe said, “I’m awful glad you chose the hillbilly world for your speech recognition. You’re
strikin
a blow for hicks everywhere.”

“Thank you,” he said, bowing his head to accept her praise.

She sighed and said, “Now here’s the hard question.
Whaddya
think’s
goin
on if you
gotta
a girl in the Ph.D. program who loves to climb tall trees and study slime, and all of a sudden she goes
missin
?”

“Is there evidence of foul play?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ruled out the significant other?”

“Let’s say so for the sake of this discussion.”

“Then I’d say the kid’s found something valuable in the tree canopy and one of the experts she’s in communication with knows what she found and wants it for themselves.”

Phoebe was amazed at his immediate and specific suspicion, but knew better than to dispute him.

“This is not a field very many people can navigate,” he said
,
“even to steal each other’s work. It requires a great deal of academic know-how to test the specimens. And then it takes a biochemist who can synthesize commercial amounts of the chemical compound discovered in nature before you can sell it.”

 “What’s the most valuable thing she could’ve found?” Phoebe asked. “I mean
somethin
valuable enough to make somebody want to kill her over it?”

Charlie thought about it,
then
said, “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s discovered a naturally-occurring antibiotic, possibly one capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier.”

“What’s the blood-brain barrier?”

“It’s a great mystery,” he said, turning toward her in the dark. “The human body is extraordinarily complex. It’s not just a container where things slosh around together. It’s full of discrete zones that are separated from one another. Substances aren’t free to move from one place to another because that would be dangerous. For example, stomach acid needs to stay in the stomach. And there are sequestered organ systems, like the brain and spinal cord.

“An antibiotic pill that works well on lots of things won’t necessarily treat a brain infection. There are filters in the body that carefully strain whatever gets into the brain or the cerebrospinal fluid. Many antibiotics can’t make it through this filtering system, so they’re useless to treat brain infections.

“These chemically-sequestered areas of the body are fascinating. You discover how unusual they are when you get a physical injury, a traumatic intrusion that breaches the barrier between these separated areas, so the rest of the body encounters it for the first time.

“Our immune systems keep a molecular memory of every type of body molecule to prevent them from attacking anything they recognize as a part of you, but when a new type of molecule comes on the scene that they haven’t run into before, like when you have a cold or flu, they attack it.

“If lymphocytes encounter body parts that they don’t have in their inventory list of acceptable molecules, they will engineer an attack on it. Unfortunately, this means when you get a traumatic exposure of a sequestered body part, like falling and getting a stick jammed into your eye, the immune response can go wrong and produce unexpected collateral damage to the normal eye.

“
Immunologically
the body will not be able to reliably recognize as its own some of the chemical components of the interior of the eye or of the testicles and this can result in peculiar outcomes after injuries to these areas. The body’s immune cells mistake eye or testicle components as foreign invaders and attack not only the injured part, but also the normal part.

“So a surgeon might have to remove an injured eye or testicle before the unwanted autoimmune response can begin, in order to save the uninjured side.”

“Good grief,” Phoebe said, “that’s amazing and horrible. I never knew that.”

“It’s interesting, but it’s not really what you asked me. I got off the subject. You asked about high value botanical discoveries.

“Right now, about the highest value discovery would be an antibiotic that could treat
tuberculous
meningitis. That’s
a tuberculosis
that can infect the membranes that envelop the central nervous system.

“There’s a fierce, antibiotic-resistant strain erupting in
India
that nothing can treat. We have no truly effective medicine for it. It’s scary. Any new antibiotics that might help with that would be priceless.

“So, my money’s on a fellow student, or professor, or a biochemist who wants to take credit for identifying a hot new antibiotic that works in a sequestered organ system. I’d bet on the kid’s professor.”

“Why are you so suspicious of him?”

“It takes one to know one,” Charlie said.

“Criminals?” she asked.

“Professors.”

It was late in the afternoon by the time
Waneeta
was able to get in touch with Phoebe. She wanted to have an undisturbed conversation, so she sent Bruce far, far away, this time by fabricating a story about a disgruntled local family, upset about the denial of coverage for an expensive experimental treatment to save their momma.

Bruce was deeply afraid of the local people. He worked in a rural area and was employed to care for the people there, but he lived in
West Knoxville
in a gated urban enclave with other non-natives. He dashed to and from work as quickly as possible without stopping until well within the perceived safe zones of the city.

He intended to leave before any unpleasantness occurred, but was being slow about it, so
Waneeta
faked a call to
herself
and then breathlessly warned Bruce that the
LeQuire
brothers were on their way over. As soon as he heard that, he made a mumbled excuse and left for the day. His car hadn’t cleared the parking lot before
Waneeta
was dialing Phoebe.

But before
Waneeta
could say anything, Phoebe blurted out, “
Waneeta
, honey, I’ve found your 4
^th
husband. He’s fun and smart and talented. He can make every frog noise you ever heard in your life. You’re
gonna
love
him.”

Waneeta
didn’t need to think about it more than a few seconds before bursting into song:

Froggie
went a
courtin
’ and he did ride.

He took Miss Mousey on his knee.

Said Miss Mousey will you marry me?

***

Henry headed to Jameson Knob to see if any of Ivy’s most recent specimens and notes might be there. He hoped to find something that would indicate what she was working on and maybe even where. He’d been to the Knob a couple of times and tried to enjoy the drive through the beautiful
North Carolina
countryside.