Mark of the Beast (2 page)

She got up to leave, heading back to finish rounds with the residents.

“Well, I'm still married.” Millons was hoping to sneak in the last word.

“You call that marriage?” Dickerson replied, in obvious reference to the rumor circulating around the hospital that Mrs. Millons enjoyed one-night stands with young residents.

Dickerson couldn't help but ask how Millons could be so naïve—or did he just surreptitiously choose to ignore it?

*   *   *

Driving home from church, Dickerson thought about her life.

Here she was, a forty-something, still-attractive medical doctor, and one of the top research scientists at the University of California, La Jolla Medical School; she had no children, no obligations, yet her life appeared to be in shambles. However, she got along very well with her patients. She had long figured out that her patients were the key to her success.

Treating patients the way you would like to be treated, regardless of each patient's status in life, she thought, was the key. She could communicate with patients in ways no other doctor could.

Those difficult, know-it-all, Internet-educated, question-every-test patients were her most treasured. She delighted in explaining to them in her most simple verbiage the hard-to-comprehend medical terminologies and tests, and those patients loved her for that. They knew they could talk to her and be able to get an understandable answer.

Her marriage to Manuel was wonderful for a while, but then a major crisis had erupted.

Manuel was the senior sales representative for Atira Pharmaceutical, in the San Diego region. Mike Smith, the drug representative who normally called on Dickerson, had brought his senior manager along on one of his details.

Dickerson always liked to challenge the drug reps on the merits of whatever article they quoted in support of the use of a particular drug. Dickerson, a published researcher herself, loved these exchanges. That day, however, Manuel volunteered to answer all Dickerson's questions.

The exchange was a little testy at first, but finally, Manuel asked, “Can I invite you to an evening at a medical conference in the Hilton La Jolla hotel, sponsored by University of California, Los Angeles Medical School? The conference may shed light on some of your concerns.”

Dickerson accepted.

At the conference, Manuel was surprised to see Dr. Dickerson drink as much as she did without getting drunk. Eventually the conversation turned personal.

“Are you from San Diego?” Manuel asked.

“No, I'm from Vermont,” Dickerson said, “a little town called Bellows Falls.”

“I've heard of it,” Manuel said, excited.

“How?” Dickerson asked, looking at Manuel askance.

“When we were at the company headquarters in New Jersey for training, one of the guys came from that town, and they used to tease him by calling the town…”

Dickerson did not let Manuel finish, for she had heard that joke several times. “Fellows Balls,” Dickerson matter-of-factly finished. “Yeah, we know.”

“I'm sorry, go ahead,” Manuel urged.

“After my medical school training at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and residency at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Boston, I did a fellowship in Immunology and Genetics at San Francisco General Hospital. From there, I was hired in San Diego.”

“You like it here?” Manuel asked.

“Yeah, I love it.”

“What do you do for fun?”

“Oh, nothing. I had my marriage annulled after sixteen months because my ex-husband, who wasn't Catholic, refused to convert, and like a typical man, no offense intended, also refused to zip up his pants.” Dickerson paused. “Since then, I've buried myself in my work, and I'm near a breakthrough in a new HLA-antigen and its linkage.”

“That sounds interesting,” said Manuel.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Do you like Mexican food?”

“Living in San Diego, I've learned to love it.”

“What's your favorite Mexican restaurant?” Manuel asked, leaning on the table.

“Let me think.” Dickerson closed her eyes for a second. “Cantina Marina Don Bravo restaurant.”

“That big restaurant located on University Drive?” Manuel's face lit up.

“So you know it?”

“Yeah I do,” Manuel answered, “but let me tell you, the best Mexican restaurants around here are in Tijuana.”

“You know, that's one place I've never visited.”

“You haven't been to Tijuana and you live in San Diego?” Manuel sounded surprised. “You should go.”

“I will, one of these days.”

“I'll take you whenever you are ready,” Manuel freely offered.

That was the beginning of a short, but romantic courtship that cumulated in marriage six months later.

*   *   *

Dickerson's recent marital problems started about two years ago when she stumbled upon an HLA antibody found on a young, drug-addicted prisoner under police custody at the Veterans Administration Hospital.

Mr. Pedrosa had been arrested for public intoxication and also the alleged brutal strangulation of two homeless men. The prisoner died less than twenty-four hours after admission, and Dickerson was given a blood sample for analysis and evaluation of a possible genetic explanation of the sudden death.

On the gel test studies of the HLA, a nice band rested on the B locus at position sixty-six. This is new! she thought.

No previous tests had clearly defined this band, although Dr. Abramhoff, writing in the July issue of
The Journal of Immunology,
talked about predestined behaviors that he claimed could be traced to the HLA B locus.

What is this drunk predestined for? Dickerson asked.

Is he destined to kill somebody? Or is he just predestined to be an alcoholic?

Does this HLA type make people kill?

When Dickerson called her friend Marie Pinkett—Pinky, for short—the lead detective with the San Diego Police Department, the conversation was initially about marriage, with Dickerson trying to convince Marie to get married, and how wonderful that would be for her career.

“You've been telling me that for a long time,” Pinkett answered.

“And I'll keep telling you until you do it.”

“When I do, you'll be the first to know.”

“Listen,” Dickerson said, “I need to talk to you about the Pedrosa case.”

“What about it?” Detective Pinkett asked.

“I was running a test on his blood sample the other day, you know, the HLA test.”

“Yes, yes.”

“There's this peculiar band on HLA B locus that is puzzling.”

“What is the B locus?”

“It's just the nomenclature we use to differentiate the HLAs.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Well, this is the first differentiation using our new specialized solution that improves detection.”

“What does that have to do with Pedrosa?”

“Plenty,” Dickerson said, “because I was thinking that if I perform more testing on more individuals I can make a more reasonable deduction.”

“Reasonable deduction?” the detective asked. “What kind of individuals are we making this reasonable deduction about?”

“Well, Mr. Pedrosa is a hardened … more like a hard-core criminal, an alcoholic with multiple run-ins with the law, a murderer, and God knows what else.”

“And you're saying…”

“If I can start a program with your department to do blood work on all inmates as part of the booking process, maybe I can run more tests to determine the significance of this finding on the B locus,” Dickerson finally said.

“Oh, I don't know.” There was hesitation in the detective's voice. “I think we might be infringing on inmates' rights here, because, whatever you do with it, some smart lawyer will likely challenge you in court.”

“I'm not planning on publishing any article on this, at least not yet,” Dickerson replied. “Whatever I find, it will remain within the scientific community, and will be labeled as the so-so B-locus antigen associated with certain groups of people.”

“You have to be careful now,” the detective said, “because you don't want to be accused of discriminatory labeling.”

“I am acutely aware of that. What I'm doing is simply making an association,” Dickerson said. “Once an association is made, then we can ask the government, or whoever, for a wider study.”

“I don't know, I just don't know. I have to think about that and see if I can actually handle it,” the detective replied.

*   *   *

Detective Pinkett, an Oklahoma University graduate in criminal justice, had been with the San Diego Police Department for seven years. She had seen it all, ever since being promoted to lead detective five years ago.

“You do have a natural instinct to analyze clues, especially in a crime situation, don't you?” a colleague, a lieutenant, had once asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” Pinkett had replied.

“I will say one thing—at least you're better than our former boss.”

“Thanks for the compliment, Lieutenant.”

A short but well-proportioned woman with dark hair, she had often been accused of acting like a man. She was always neatly dressed and her hair always well groomed.

“That gun of yours,” the lieutenant had once asked her, “isn't it a Smith & Wesson 4911PD, the lightweight thing?”

“No, Lieutenant, that's a 1911PD, and yes, that's the lightweight thing.”

“Are you sure? I just looked at one a month ago.”

“I'm absolutely sure, because I bought it.”

“What is it with you and the Sherlock Holmes novels? You've read every one of them, I heard.”

“Are you coming on to me, Lieutenant?”

“No, no, not at all,” the lieutenant said. “I'm just…”

“That's okay,” Pinkett said. “Yeah, I love Sherlock Holmes. Most of the cases I've seen have some resemblance to a Sherlock Holmes novel. That man was a genius.”

The men in the department, even though they gave her a hard time at the beginning, had come to accept her as one of their own.

She owed few people few favors, and that's why when she asked the police chief for permission to do the HLA blood sampling, she encountered no obstacles. The only stipulation was that Dr. Dickerson and the university would be the responsible party for everything that had to do with handling the blood. Dickerson, of course, saw no problem with that, and as a matter of fact, her staff at the immunology department volunteered to handle all that.

 

2

A
COLD
J
ANUARY WIND
WAS
blowing all over Lake Michigan, freezing everything and anything in sight. The traffic on Lake Shore Drive remained at a standstill. Taking a sharp left onto Jackson Street to avoid the endless delay, Dr. David Aaron Abramhoff drove down to the less crowded Michigan Avenue, and turned north toward the Magnificent Mile and on to Chicago Avenue.

He flashed his identification card to the car lot attendant before driving into the parking garage.

“Good morning, Dr. Abramhoff,” said the broadly smiling garage attendant.

“Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” replied Dr. Abramhoff, stern as the winter weather.

“It's freezing, Doc.”

“Yes, it is.”

He parked his car at his designated parking space on the second floor of the five-story building. The garage, connected to the Richard C. Needleman Medical Building, felt warm.

The RCN Medical Building, a sprawling twenty-two-story towering medical complex, housed Chicago's Loop University Medical School (the LUMS), the university hospital, and several other medical departments, including the Department of Immunology and Genetics.

Dr. Abramhoff, chairman of the Department of Immunology and Genetics, nonchalantly strolled into the Needleman Building.

The highly expensive marble floors were the pride and joy of Dr. Abramhoff; he had been instrumental in the final construction phase of the complex. The main hallways were lined with the most expensive paintings Chicago had ever seen.

Dr. Abramhoff wielded a lot of power and influence. A tall, gray-haired, solidly built Chicagoan in his mid-sixties, he always wore fashionably cut dark blue suits. He was trained at the University of Chicago Medical School. After finally choosing to settle for Immunology and Genetics, the immunological aspect of brain function had fascinated him. A microbiologist and theorist at college, he strongly believed that people who perform purposeful acts had been genetically programmed at birth to do so.

According to Dr. Abramhoff's theory, most people realize what they were programmed for early in life, then pursue this path and become good at it, while others miss it completely. The latter folks, according to Dr. Abramhoff, spend the rest of their lives lamenting what they could have been if they had acted at the appropriate time.

He concentrated his research on the histo-compatible antigens, especially the human leukocyte antigens, otherwise known as the HLA. Several diseases in the body were preprogrammed through HLA, and it was only fitting that purposeful behaviors were also preprogrammed, theorized Dr. Abramhoff.

“Good morning, Dr. Abramhoff,” greeted Sabrina, his beautiful secretary, as Abramhoff walked into the office.

Abramhoff, always pleased to see Sabrina Marley in the morning, nodded first and then proceeded to take off his winter coat.

*   *   *

A slim and beautiful woman, Sabrina carried herself well. She had become the most efficient secretary in the entire medical complex, and she virtually ran Dr. Abramhoff's office single-handedly.

“Have you heard of a certain Dr. Hood?” Dr. Abramhoff said one day.

“Yes sir. He is the orthopedic surgeon recently recruited by the Department of Surgery,” Sabrina answered without hesitation.