Cited to Death (3 page)
"You didn't." I took a long drink from my beer. "He never came home with me. We didn’t really date. It was mostly physical, and it only lasted for four months."
Pete studied me. "That doesn't sound like your kind of thing."
"It wasn't. But he was the first gay guy I met after I moved back here. And I hadn't been with anyone for almost a year since Ethan left, and no strings attached sounded really good to me at the time."
"You had met me."
"Yeah, but at first I didn't know you were gay. And there was the matter of Luke."
I couldn't interpret the look on his face. "Hmm. Back to Dan. Tell me more about him."
"What, you want to do a psychological profile?"
"Why not?"
"Yeah, okay, why not?" I took another drink. "Okay. Dan Christensen. Tall, skinny, Teutonic looking. I guess he was Scandinavian. He joined the army right out of high school, was a medic and got assigned to Germany. He was in five years then was in a really bad car accident over there, had a head injury, developed a seizure disorder and had to take a medical discharge. He came back here, went to nursing school on the GI bill, worked at County in the ER for four years, then decided to do library school. He still worked in the ER to put himself through school, so it took him longer and he graduated a year after me. He got the librarian job at Cedars as soon as he graduated. I'd see him around campus until then, but haven't seen him at all for three years."
"So it's really odd that he sent you this letter."
"Yep."
"Okay. What was he like?"
I sighed. "He was…hard to read. He could be funny and joke around, then something would set him off and he’d fly off the handle. He had a lot of tattoos and piercings and was adding to them all the time. We didn't see each other on the weekends because if he wasn't working he was at the leather bars in West Hollywood. I always thought that might be a phase, like he was still figuring out what it meant to him to be gay. He was smart, very intelligent, but he just did enough in school to get by. He said library school was just a hoop to jump through to get the piece of paper that said you were a librarian, and there wasn't any point in straining himself to do well, he'd get the same piece of paper that the rest of us had."
“So he could be a jerk.”
“Yeah. He didn’t have a lot of friends at school.”
"And you broke it off after your first semester."
"He broke it off. He wanted to try out the BDSM clubs, and I wouldn’t go with him, so he chose that over me. But in March I met Nick, and I got over it."
“Which one was Nick?”
“Film student. Wore his hair in a braid.”
“Oh, yeah. So how bad was Dan’s seizure disorder?"
"I don't really know. He took meds for it. I don't think he was supposed to drive, but he did. I never knew of him having any seizures when we were in school, at least."
"Hmm. His personality fits that of someone who’s had a head injury. The outbursts, the socially inappropriate behavior, the risk taking. And maybe, based on that note, paranoia."
"Could be.” I reminisced for a moment. “I remember him saying that he didn't miss the army because he had gotten tired of taking orders from asshole officers, and he wouldn't miss the ER because he was tired of taking orders from asshole doctors. So he wasn't good at subordination, even though he was a sub at the BDSM clubs. It didn't match."
"Which was probably one of the sources of his anger. Confusion. Cognitive dissonance. Self-hatred. Possibly consistent with the piercings."
"I'm sure. Also, his family had completely disowned him when he came back from Germany and told them he was gay. His parents were strict Baptists or something and didn't want to have anything else to do with him. And he always said that was no big deal, but he still lived in Glendale where he had grown up."
"Lots of contradictions there."
"Yeah. He was a complicated guy."
"So - why do you think he sent you this letter? Why would it matter that you're a UC librarian?"
"Because I have access to resources that other librarians don't? That's the only thing I can think of."
Our food came then, and we dug in and talked about other things. Pete had parked on the street at our apartments, and we said goodbye at his car.
Neither Kevin nor Abby were home yet. No surprise there. I got undressed and got a beer out of the fridge, sat on the sofa, booted up my laptop, and opened Google Translate. I spread Dan’s letter in front of me and typed the first citation, minus the names and date, into the “From: Detect Language” box. Immediately the box changed to “From: Welsh-detected,” and the translation read:
Does not stimulate human embryonic stem cells cultured with follicle stimulating hormone leads to the formation of ovum-like cells. Medical Journal
I compared it to the second citation from the letter. The words were similar, but the sentence was so scrambled it was impossible to make any sense from it. I copied and pasted the two article titles and compared them side by side.
Does not stimulate human embryonic stem cells cultured with follicle stimulating hormone leads to the formation of ovum-like cells.
Stimulation of cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone leads to formation of ovum-like cells.
I leaned back and regarded the citations for a minute. The first one was like a jigsaw puzzle, or one of those jumble word games they put in the newspaper. I just needed to unscramble it. I started lining up phrases that matched, and finally had an order that made a little sense:
Stimulate cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone does not leads to the formation of ovum-like cells.
A couple of grammatical fixes later, I had:
Stimulation of cultured human embryonic stem cells with follicle stimulating hormone does not lead to formation of ovum-like cells.
I looked at the title from the second article again. The titles were identical, except for one word.
Not.
The first researchers found that their procedure didn’t work, and the second group found that it did. That didn’t sound unusual. Medical research was changing all the time. One week coffee was bad for you, the next week good for you. Why would this be any different?
I failed to see the mystery in this. What was Dan thinking?
At any rate, there wasn't anything else I could do about it tonight. And I was really tired. I saved the citations to Dropbox, shut down my laptop, and got ready for bed.
Once I was in bed, though, I couldn't go to sleep. My brain wouldn't shut down. Thoughts of Pete, Dan, and the letter kept swirling through.
For the first time since we’d dated, Pete and I were both single at the same time. Did he want to get back together? Did I? I didn’t think so. My latest boyfriend, Scott, had broken up with me while I was in the hospital two weeks ago. I was beginning to consider becoming a monk.
They have libraries in monasteries, don’t they?
I purposely hadn’t gotten very attached to any guy since Ethan so that when they left me, as I knew they would, it wouldn’t hurt. But the routine was getting old. I didn’t think I could maintain the detachment with Pete, and when he left me it would hurt a lot. So I just couldn’t go there.
I rolled from my side to my back, stared at the ceiling and thought about Dan. Was he just paranoid, and his death a weird coincidence? Or did he have reason to be paranoid? And why would he send the letter to
me?
Why make a dying request of someone you hadn’t contacted for years? Why not ask another medical librarian? I knew every history librarian in California; Dan had to know at least a few other medical librarians. Surely one of them would be better equipped to solve this puzzle than I would.
Maybe he
had
sent the letter to other people as well. But how would I know?
History has two functions: serving as a record of what happened and analyzing why it happened. I didn’t know
why
Dan sent me the letter, but I did have
what
he sent me. Two titles, separated by one word. On the surface, there was nothing suspicious about that. So if the answer to
why
wasn’t in the titles, maybe it was in the text of the articles.
That gave me a plan of action. Tomorrow, I’d look for the full text of the articles. If I was right in speculating that Dan had sent the letter to me because I was a UC librarian, then I’d put the power of the UC library system to work.
With that settled, I drifted off to sleep.
Wednesday May 30
I was feeling pretty good the next morning, and went for a swim before work. I had three goals in mind for the day. First, I had to finish going through the mail and get the interlibrary loan materials delivered. It wasn’t necessary to do that in person, but it was a good way for me to keep in touch with the history faculty, to remind them that they had their own subject librarian at their disposal. That took most of the morning, and it wasn’t until almost 11:00 that I was able to focus on my second goal: finding the full text of the citations Dan had given me.
I opened up our citation linker and typed in the second title first. It popped up, but only the abstract was available to me. I read it; I was unsure of some of the jargon, but it looked like a typical medical research article. For the full text, I needed a separate log in for the biomedical library, which I didn’t have.
I went back to the citation linker and typed in the first title, first in English and then in Welsh. No hits on either. So I was going to have to visit the biomed library.
I let Dr. Loomis know where I was going, and headed south. UCLA’s hospital and medical school complex is spread across the south end of campus, and the Research Library is at the north end, so it’s a nice walk. I went in the biomedical library and found the reference desk. I was glad to see Karen Lewis there. At least I knew her a bit. We’d served on a couple of committees together, and she’d always been cooperative. She spotted me and waved.
“Jamie Brodie! We are graced with the presence of the humanities!”
I laughed. “Social sciences, to be exact. Got a minute?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
I laid my printout of the two citations, including the translation of the Welsh title, in front of her. “I’ve got a little mystery to clear up, and I need the full text of these. Google Translate gave me the English version of this title, or at least a reasonable facsimile. The language is Welsh.”
“Huh.” Karen looked at the two articles. “This is stem cell research. Looks like your Welsh guys were unsuccessful with this procedure, and the next guys were successful. There are four years between these two; I’d bet that the second one finally figured out how to do the procedure.”
“That’s kind of what I thought, but I wanted to make sure…a librarian friend of mine asked me to look these up, then he was found dead on Monday.”
“
What
? Oh my God! Do you think there’s some connection?”
“No. He had a seizure disorder, and apparently was alone at work on Friday evening and had a seizure and died. The library was closed on the weekend, so no one came in to find him until Monday.”
Karen frowned. “He was a librarian? Where?”
“Cedars. Dan Christensen. Did you know him?”
“The name is familiar. Was he active in any of the associations?”
“I really don’t know. We went through library school together, but I hadn’t seen him since then.”
“Why’d he ask you to do this?”
“I have no idea. I thought it might have been because I was the only UC librarian he knew.”
Karen read the titles again. “Actually, this is pretty big stuff. I think what both groups were trying to do is create human egg cells out of stem cells. This would be hugely significant if it was possible.”
“So this second group has figured out how to do it. Good for them.”
“Yeah. Okay...” Karen turned to her computer and started clicking on things. “I’ll do the easy one first…okay, here it is, right in Biological Record.”
“Yeah, I could see the abstract, but I couldn’t log in for the full text.”
“No problem.” Karen printed the article and handed it to me. “Now…boy, Welsh is an odd language. Can you find someone to translate the article for you?”
“I think so. If Google Translate can’t handle it, I’ve got friends at Oxford that can either do it or know someone who can.”
“Ooooh, friends at Oxford.” Karen smirked. “Okay, we don’t seem to have it. I’ll have to put in an ILL request.”
I shrugged. “That’s fine. There’s obviously no rush.”
Karen looked at her screen. “It’s only held by three libraries in the world. Lucky for you, one of them is Oxford.”
“Excellent. If you have trouble getting them to send it, let me know and I’ll rattle some cages.”
“Ha ha.” Karen did some more typing and clicking, then sat back. “Ta-da! Your ILL request is on its way. You know this will take a while.”
“Yes, I know. Will they send it electronically?”
“Probably. Either way, it will come right to you.”
“Okey dokey.” I stood up. “Ms. Lewis, you rock. A thousand thank yous.”
“Heh.” Karen stood up as well. “You owe me one. And don’t be a stranger! We need a little more humanity around this place.”
After I left the biomedical library, I had a meeting to attend. I was on a curriculum development committee for the library school, which was quartered in the building next to the research library. I sat through the meeting, but my mind wasn't fully on it. I was anxious to take a look at the article burning a hole in my bag.
When I got back to my office, my monitor screen was blank. That was weird; it wasn't set up to go into power saver mode like that. I jiggled the mouse, expecting my desktop layout to reappear. It didn't. I looked at the power indicator; the light on the start button was off. I turned the computer back on and waited. Instead of the usual booting up sequence, I saw the thing feared by computer users everywhere: The dreaded blue screen of death. My hard drive had crashed.
Shit
.
I called IT and left my information on their automated system. The recorded voice assured me that someone would be in touch to address my problem in a timely manner. I hung up and considered my options. I only had about 15 minutes until I was due on the reference desk, so it didn't make much sense to commandeer someone else's computer, or get my laptop fired up in that amount of time. I stashed my laptop in my filing cabinet, locked it up behind me, hit the coffee shop for a little pick me up, then headed for reference.
At 1:30, Clinton walked up to the desk.
“Hi, Clinton.”
“The word for the day is
spruik
.” He bowed and walked away.
Liz looked it up. “To make or give a speech, especially extensively.”
I laughed. “Well, we don’t have to worry about that from Clinton.”
I checked my email one more time before I left the reference computer at 3:00 and saw an email from Karen Lewis.
Hi Jamie,
Just wanted to let you know I got an acknowledgement of your request. The article should arrive next week. Much more quickly than I expected.
FYI, I just had a visit from one of the authors of the article I printed for you. The first author, as I remember – a Dr. Oliver. He was interested in whoever it was that wanted his article. Apparently he has an alert set up to ping him every time the article is downloaded. Can you imagine? I think he believed that one of our docs was going to use his procedure, the way he acted at first, but when he found out it was someone else he relaxed and became quite charming. I gave him your name, but he truly didn’t seem interested once I told him it wasn’t a medical person.
Cheers,
Karen
Shit
. I wish she hadn’t mentioned my name. But it didn’t occur to me to tell her not to because it didn’t occur to me that anyone connected to the articles would find out. So the guy had set it up to receive an alert every time someone accessed his article. I didn’t even know that was possible. Either he was really paranoid about having his work copied, or he had a huge ego and the alert was just a way to stroke it.
When I got back to my office, IT hadn’t arrived yet, and my desktop PC was still dead. The top of my desk was clear after yesterday’s cleaning binge, so I pushed the PC to the far side and got my laptop set up. My third goal for the day was to finish work on a budget presentation that I was scheduled to give on Friday. I’d worked on it at home while I was recovering, so it was nearly complete. It just needed a few finishing touches. I kept all my works-in-progress in Dropbox so that I could access them from anywhere. The death of my PC was annoying but not a disaster because there was very little saved on its hard drive. All of my important files were in various clouds.
I finished up the PowerPoint slides I wanted to use and was in the process of transferring them to Prezi when there was a knock on the door. I looked up and saw a stranger. Silver hair, patrician features, expensive tailored suit,
very
expensive shoes. He smiled and held out his hand. "Dr. Brodie? I'm Tristan Oliver, of Fertility Research. Your medical librarian gave me your name."
Holy shit
. I glanced at the clock over Oliver's shoulder on the opposite wall. I'd only been in Karen's office five hours earlier. This guy worked fast. I tried to keep my facial expression neutral.
Oliver’s handshake was firm, dry, and brisk. “I understand from Ms. Lewis that you have an interest in an article that I coauthored.”
Right to the point
. “Yes, sir. Is there a problem?”
Oliver smiled. He had a politician’s smile – not quite natural. “Not at all. Initially I was concerned that another medical group was hoping to co-opt our research. We have patents in place to prevent that, of course. Ms. Lewis assured me that you had no such intent. But I remained curious. What interest could a – I believe she said your subject was history, correct? What interest could a history librarian have in our research?”
Don’t mention Dan
. I tried to think fast. “Another librarian mentioned it to me in passing at a conference several months ago.”
The state library association met back in November; that would work as a ruse
. “I thought it sounded interesting and wrote down the information, but it got lost in the shuffle and I just found my note yesterday. Karen was kind enough to print out the article for me.”
Oliver seemed satisfied. He smiled again, a bit more warmly this time. “Do you have a particular interest in fertility medicine? For personal reasons, perhaps?”
Heh. Good one
. “No, sir. I just wanted to expand my horizons. It keeps my brain sharp to learn about something outside my field.”
Oliver chuckled. He was charming when he wasn’t in interrogation mode. “Very good, young man. Expand away. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. My email address is listed on the paper.”
“Yes, sir. I appreciate that.”
“It’s been a long time since anyone addressed me as sir. You must have been raised in a military household.”
“Yes, sir. Marines.”
“Excellent.” Oliver looked nostalgic. “I was a Navy man myself. Better food and no crawling through the mud. Was your father a Korean War vet, by any chance?”
“No, sir. Vietnam.”
“Ah.” Oliver looked less nostalgic. “I was out of the service by then. Well, Dr. Brodie, I won’t take any more of your time. Thank you for your interest in my work, and please don’t hesitate to contact me.”
“I won’t. Thank you, sir.”
Oliver strode away and out of the building.
I watched him go and let out a long breath; I’d been half holding it without realizing. Why would Oliver come in person for a five-minute conversation? Did he just want to make doubly sure that no one was going to steal his research? Or was there more to it?
It was 5:00. I taught a class on Wednesdays that started at 5:30, so I needed to get going. I had retrieved my computer bag and was re-locking my file cabinet when IT Andy showed up. Andy Mitchell was the guy who usually came to work on our computers. We called him IT Andy to distinguish him from another Andy that worked at the circulation desk. He looked surprised to see me. “Hey, Dr. B. I didn’t think you’d still be here.”