Knockout Mouse (21 page)

“Do you think
her
death was a random mortality?”

His eyes grew wide. He slowly pressed his palms to his desk. “What are you saying?”

“Sheila’s allergist has been running some tests on her blood serum. People will want to know how her findings match up with MC124.”

“An allergist doesn’t have the training,” he scoffed.

“She’s doing research at UCSF.”

“I don’t care where she’s from. It’s perfectly obvious what caused Sheila’s death. You’ll find no connection to MC124.”

“Sheila herself did. It’s in her notes and some other materials. There are people following up on her research.”

“That’s just wrong!” He slammed a fist on the desk. The window rattled with the force of his voice.

If I’d exaggerated what Karen and I knew, his reaction told me we weren’t far off. “I understand you’re the principal designer
of the antibody,” I continued. “You probably know better than anyone what it can do and what it can’t. Don’t you want to find out if someone in this company misused it to hurt Sheila?”

Doug put his forehead in a bunch. His hands locked in front of his mouth again and he blew a little air between his thumbs. He was not one to hide his thought processes. “Like who?”

“Neil Dugan has been doing everything he can—legally and illegally—to get his hands on Sheila’s notebooks and diaries.”

I hoped for, and got, a ping of recognition. “Dugan, huh?”

Doug was showing what might be the start of a smile. I didn’t know why that thought would amuse him, but it did. Then I remembered Dugan’s battle with McKinnon. “Do you think he might be trying to use Sheila’s death somehow to derail MC124?”

Doug frowned. “Neil is an ignoramus, scientifically speaking. Company politics, the dirty kind, are his specialty. When the new regime came in, he read a couple of articles and decided monoclonals were dead. He had no idea about the work being done on the Fc region. Now that MAbs are making a comeback, Dugan looks bad. I never thought he’d go to such lengths, though.”

I leaned forward and waited for Doug to look me in the face. “Let’s stop him. Help me out. Tell me what happened to that knockout mouse. Tell me how MC124 could be misused.”

Doug bit his fingernail. The wheels were turning in his head. I looked at him more closely and saw the signs of wear and tear from the rush to complete this program: the newly etched lines around his eyes and mouth, the fuzz of gray above his ears. He was on the verge of speaking when a sharp rap came at the door. It opened before he could ask who it was.

Frederick McKinnon’s tall, angular frame loomed in the doorway. “Oh, sorry Doug.” He peered at me. “I know you. Where have we met?”

I stood and shook McKinnon’s hand. “Here and at Sheila’s funeral. I’m Bill Damen.”

“He had some information on the biocomputing deal,” Doug said. “It cinches our decision. I’ll fill you in.”

“That’s fine, Doug. Just pass it on to the department. You know we need to have the results locked down for the meeting on Monday.”

Doug’s mouth twisted in a brief grimace of resentment. McKinnon was busy scanning some papers on the desk. “What are you looking for, Frederick?” Doug asked with some irritation.

McKinnon glanced up. “Nothing, Doug. Just trying to help.”

“I’ll give you my usual update at lunch.”

McKinnon chuckled gently. “Of course. Sorry to intrude. You won’t have to put up with me much longer, eh?”

Doug started to act busy. He opened a folder on his desk and began poring over its contents. “Let’s get the work done. The sooner we can celebrate, the better.”

McKinnon smiled in commiseration. Doug wouldn’t look up. McKinnon shifted his glance to me. “Stressful time for all of us.”

I responded with my own smile. I wanted to hear what Doug was about to say before McKinnon came in, but I had a feeling he was not going to unglue his eyes from that folder anytime soon. Not while McKinnon was here. I took my next best opportunity. “Dr. McKinnon, do you have a minute? I’d like to talk to you about Sheila Harros.”

“Ah, now I remember. You visited us last week.” He shook his head. “I am so sorry about Sheila. What a loss. I’m—”

The old beg-off was coming, I could tell. I didn’t give him the chance. “Her death was not an accident. People here at LifeScience were involved.”

McKinnon straightened. His hands moved up, started to slide into his pockets, then stopped. “That’s a serious statement.”

“It is. I’d like to speak to you.”

He nodded toward the door. “We’ll go to my office.”

We both turned at the sudden clatter of a chair. Doug was on his feet, coming around his desk. McKinnon gave me a small push out of the room, then positioned himself in the doorway. “Don’t stop your work, Doug. I can handle this.”

Frederick McKinnon’s office
was a different story than Doug Englehart’s. It was in a tower attached to the annex, at the fulcrum of the company’s three departments. Windows looked east over the bay, now green under the shadows of clouds, and west over the mottled landscape of Palo Alto. The bookcases were built into the walls, their contents stacked neatly. A pair of couches faced each other over a glass coffee table, which was arrayed with scientific journals. The rear of the office was dominated by McKinnon’s walnut desk, nearly empty of clutter. A single folder was open next to a slim black laptop in front of his Herman Miller desk chair.

I took a seat in one of the cushioned chairs facing the desk. McKinnon closed the folder and punched up a double-helix screensaver on the computer display. On our walk over, he’d asked for the background on my connection to Sheila. He asked intelligent questions and drew out various details about my film work. His voice was genial and refined, his gait loping, quite a contrast to Doug. Doug was a driven lab rat who didn’t have much of a life away from the bench. McKinnon, on the other hand, had the air of a man of the world. The wave in his hair, angled rakishly across his forehead, reminded me of a hero from
a British movie, an RAF pilot perhaps. While Doug was perpetually distracted, McKinnon listened with what seemed his full attention. He gave the impression of being utterly concerned about you and your words—a technique, I knew, that certain executives cultivated. It worked nonetheless.

Once we were seated, though, the casual chat was over. His sky-blue eyes lasered in on me. “Now tell me. What do you have to link LifeScience to Sheila’s death?”

“She found a problem with MC124. The dead knockout mouse. Someone here was very upset about that. They wanted to make sure it didn’t get out.”

McKinnon sat back and gazed out the window, wondering perhaps how I knew about the mouse. Whatever he decided, he didn’t let me in on it.

“Yes, the mouse,” he said smoothly. “It concerned Sheila. I took it quite seriously myself. She had an intuitive feel for the work. I had such hopes—” He caught himself, then turned back to me. “We did a careful investigation. MC124 has no significant problems.”

“I have some notes from her that say otherwise.” This was a stretch, but I wanted to gauge how close my theory was to being right. “These reactions are so complex—isn’t it possible something unexpected happened?”

McKinnon leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk. “The unexpected is more than possible, it’s inevitable. This is what makes the field so challenging. I feel a personal responsibility to detect potential danger. We have only the beginning of a grasp on these processes. When you alter one pathway, you can alter many others down the line. We don’t always know what produces a reaction. You have to study the effects minutely, in vitro, in silico, in vivo.”

He tapped his manicured fingers on the desk. “I’ve been working with monoclonal antibodies for fifteen years. The first time around, the subjects’ immune systems attacked the chimeric hybridomas as invaders. Monoclonals went out of favor, but I knew that with ingenuity they could succeed. Now, at last, we understand the role of the constant region more clearly, and we can be far more exact with the antigen-binding regions. MC124 is 90 percent humanized. It took some hard work to develop the framework and many versions of the antibody—124 to be exact—to get it right.”

“And you’re sure that it
is
right?”

McKinnon’s eyes blazed into me. “No one has more depth in this field than myself. Myself and Doug. We’ve reviewed every result. Who could have more incentive to insure its safety than me? I’ve staked my career on it.”

“You really can’t afford to have a mistake uncovered, then.”

“True.” He indulged a smile. “Does that turn me into the prime suspect?”

He was so smooth. He’d managed to disarm my thrust with a combination of honesty and style, even make it look a bit silly. My eyes strayed to the art on his walls. None of the usual suspects, meant to assure the executive of his taste, but mixed media tableaux that turned the letters and icons of genetics into children’s building blocks. His willingness to install such an ironic twist on biomedical symbols showed McKinnon had confidence in his choices. And in his style. Silicon Valley’s climate was Mediterranean, and his dress was calibrated to it—rather than to the power suit mode of the East Coast or the slick casualness of Hollywood. Accessible, jaunty, but still elegant and in charge.

I dodged his question and said, “I appreciate your answering so fully.”

He waved it off. “I’m not giving away any company secrets. We’re about to publish our paper on it.”

“You sound very confident.”

He inhaled deeply, arching his brows. “Frankly, yes. I have been injecting myself with the drug to test for safety.” He smiled and exhaled. “So you see, I have reason for confidence.”

“And you’re going to have the rest of your team try it next? Doesn’t that violate some code of ethics?”

I finally broke the surface of his cool. He blinked a couple of times. “Only if they withhold assent. But they haven’t. Now,” he added with a trace of impatience, “you mentioned notes of Sheila’s. You’ll need to give them to me immediately. We can make revisions to the paper if necessary.”

“Neil Dugan must have given you the hard drive from her home computer already.”

Now he was flustered.
“Neil—?
I don’t know a thing about this.”

“He took the hard drive just after Sheila was found. He’s been trying his damnedest to get more documents from me. His private detectives have assaulted me twice.”

“Dugan,
dammit. He’s out of control. He—” McKinnon stopped and glared at me. “I can’t vouch for anything Neil Dugan does. Sometimes I wonder if we even work for the same company. If you think Dugan is somehow involved with Sheila’s death, come out with it. I want to know. I’ll examine those documents, and we’ll take any evidence you have to the police.”

“Thank you for cooperating. I’ll be in touch with you.”

The blue eyes hardened again. “Now look, you can’t come in here and lay down these accusations and then just walk away. I need to see those materials. We need to take action.”

“I agree,” I said in my most polite voice. I wanted to remain on good terms with him, but I didn’t want him to take over.
“I don’t have the materials here. Others have some of them. I’ll pull them all together.”

McKinnon relinquished as gracefully as he could.
“Quickly,
please, unless you’d like a visit from the police. Time is of the essence.”

“One other thing—why did you transfer Sheila out of the group?”

McKinnon collapsed back into his chair. “She requested it herself. Terribly disappointing to me. I never fully understood her reasons. Something personal, perhaps. She was a bit troubled, I think—not by our work, but in her emotions.”

“Did she test out MC124 on herself?”

McKinnon stared out the window for a long moment. “I suppose she could have.”

“Thanks for talking to me.” As I stood, the DAT recorder clicked off. I covered it with a cough. McKinnon gave me a long, hard look. I switched to a new subject. “Oh, I also meant to ask you about Carl Steiner.”

McKinnon stood with me. “Steiner? The gardener?”

“Yes. He was at the funeral. Had an attachment to Sheila.”

“Ah… he tends to do that. I didn’t realize Sheila was his latest object. Well, he works in the agri department, you know. That part of the company was acquired by the new management. I can’t tell you much about it.”

“All right. Thanks again. I can find my own way out.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll need to accompany you.” He touched my arm and moved me toward the door.

“Oh, you know what—I left my bag back in Doug’s office. He can show me out.”

McKinnon simply smiled and waited for me to walk with him down a floor to Doug’s office and the lab. Just outside the office,
Doug and two white-coated researchers were engaged in a heated conversation over a series of printouts. McKinnon got drawn into the discussion. I sauntered over to Doug’s office, paused by the door, and waited for Doug to glance my way. When he did, I very deliberately closed the door.

It burst open a few moments later. “What the—?” Doug demanded.

“Close the door,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t you want to hear what Dr. McKinnon said to me?”

His shoulders relaxed. It was clear he did. My hypothesis was correct. Some kind of fissure had opened up between mentor and protégé, and I intended to exploit it. If Doug believed I was on his side, he might cough up some new information.

“Just a minute,” Doug said. He went back to the group, leaving the door ajar. I sat on the couch, out of sight of the scientists. I couldn’t follow their discussion, so I poked into a stack of papers next to me on the couch. On top was a book about golf, but underneath were reprints of technical papers. The words that appeared most often in the titles were
phage display
and
Escherichia coli.

The sound of my name brought my attention back. It was McKinnon, asking Doug where I was and telling him I needed to be escorted from the building.

“I’ll do it, Frederick,” Doug said. “I want to speak to him again. The biocomputation matter.”

“That’s not our priority, Doug. The Curaris Pharmaceutical people arrive at ten on Monday morning. This is it for us. Once they sign the licensing deal, Dugan has no choice. But everything must—”