Mutant (16 page)

Chapter 11

“Good morning, Dr. Sullivan. I take it your assistant explained who I am and why I’m calling.” He had only the slightest trace of a French accent.

“Yes, but I never knew anyone of that name—Pierre Gaston, you said?”

“That’s right. We found his body in an aboveground crypt at the Rodez cathedral. Workmen were doing renovations in the place, and about a week ago they accidentally shifted the stone cover while lifting the tomb with a winch. The stench immediately alerted them that something much riper than a mummified, centuries-old priest lay inside. We identified Gaston using dental records, and autopsy confirmed that whoever killed him had snapped his neck like a stick.”

A ghostly face wrenched to one side in the darkness flashed through her mind. “Oh, my God!” she uttered in a whisper, her throat constricting.

“Pardon, Madame?”

“Nothing,” she answered, quickly recovering her voice. “But I don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

“We’re not sure, either, Madame, except that he left a letter with his notary to be forwarded to you
‘in the event
of his arrest.’
It got turned over to us along with all his papers, including his will, after the discovery of his body.”

“In the event of his arrest?”

“Yes, those were the exact written instructions. But we have no idea what he meant, nor can we find any indication he’d done anything that he’d be in danger of being arrested for. I had hoped perhaps you could tell us what it’s all about.”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but as I said, I never knew the man, at least not that I can recall. I meet a lot of people at conferences whose names I never remember.”

“This man we think has been dead since New Year’s Eve, so any personal contact would have been before that. And he may only have known you through your publications,
Docteur
.” His accent drew the title out and seemed to give greater homage to her profession than she’d been in the habit of hearing on her side of the Atlantic. “When we opened his computer files, both at his place of work and in his apartment, we found that he had flagged many of your articles on the Internet. According to his log, the site he visited most recently involved a feature on you by a group called
Environment
Watch
just before Christmas. In it you called on biotechnical companies to cooperate with testing for genetic vectors in plant life around their laboratories. This interests us, because it also relates to the contents of his letter. Shall I read aloud what he wrote to you?”

Her pulse quickened. “Please.”

“The note itself is dated December twenty-third,” said the inspector.

Dear Dr. Sullivan,

You’re on the right track. Now I suggest you test around our plant. There’s a secret there related to well-known events in Taiwan and Oahu that will shock you. Then get me out of jail, and I’ll show you something even deadlier.

Merci!

Pierre Gaston

By now she could barely contain her excitement. “Where did this man work?” she demanded.

“At an agricultural research facility called Agriterre Incorporated. But as I told you, when we first interviewed his superior there, a Dr. François Dancereau, he assured us that nothing about Pierre Gaston’s professional activities seemed amiss.”

The name François Dancereau sounded vaguely familiar to her, but she didn’t pause to dwell on it now. “And is this company involved in engineering crops using genetic vectors?”

“They claim only to be an ‘agricultural research laboratory developing products which facilitate crop yields.’ ” He sounded as if he were quoting the company’s official line, but with a sarcasm that would have done a bistro waiter on the Champs-Élysées proud. “They refused to provide details, citing confidentiality agreements between themselves and the clients they work for. We didn’t force the issue.”

“But the letter—”

“We only just got court clearance to read it, well after our interviews with Dancereau and others at Agriterre, so at the time we had no grounds to consider that any of them had anything to hide or were connected to Pierre Gaston’s death. Now it’s entirely a different story, and we’ll be going over the place with a microscope, but before we showed our hand, I wanted to hear if you could make anything of what he wrote. For instance, do you have any idea what he means when he says Taiwan and Oahu have something in common?”

Her imagination had already leaped into overdrive, making connections she hardly dared voice aloud even to herself. “I don’t know,” she said guardedly. “Let me mull it over awhile.”

His answering silence suggested deep discontent with her reply.

“But I could do tests on samplings of plants from the grounds around that laboratory,” she added, “looking for evidence of genetic vectors as he suggests. I’d explain to you how to take the cuttings, but you’d have to courier them to me immediately. I’d prefer to do the analysis in my own lab using my own team rather than come to you.”

“
Magnifique,
Madame! I prayed you would offer us your services. I know you’re a world-respected leader in this field—I took the liberty of looking you up on the Internet.” He spoke so loudly she had to hold the phone away from her ear. “As you can understand, we’re most anxious to find out this secret he’s referring to, and obviously it has something to do with the genetic vectors you’ve been so vocal about. I’ll have the specimens you require in New York by tomorrow afternoon.”

His Gallic enthusiasm sparked her own scientific caution. “I have to warn you, without knowing the specific vectors involved, I’m liable to come up with negative results. Which makes me wonder, if your Pierre Gaston had really wanted me to find out what they were using, why all the cat-and-mouse stuff? Why didn’t he just tell me outright, the way all the other scientists who responded to that article did?”

The line remained so quiet that for a moment she feared their connection had been severed. After a few seconds, she said, “Inspector Racine?”

“I am here, Madame, thinking over your very good question, and perhaps have even struck on an answer.” She heard him suck in a breath, then exhale long and hard. He must be smoking a cigarette, she thought, instantly conjuring up her image of a French gendarme— based, she had to admit, on Claude Rains’s performance in the movie
Casablanca
. “Despite the denials from the CEO at Agriterre that a crime has been committed against the company,” he went on, “it’s obvious that Gaston had done something which he knew could land him in prison. Maybe, when he wrote this letter, he only wanted to use the threat of you looking for whatever vectors are there as leverage against whomever he feared could send him to jail. The promise to show you ‘something even deadlier’ he probably added as an additional hook, intending to snag your actual help in setting him free, in case his first plan failed to keep charges from being brought against him.”

Maybe you’re right, thought Sullivan, except he’d got his neck wrung instead.

The inner gloom of the downstairs bar at the Plaza seemed unusually crowded that afternoon, the noise level suited more to a waterfront tavern than a decorous watering hole for pampered guests of a luxury hotel. At four-thirty Steele shoved back from the darkened oak table that had become as familiar as his desk at the hospital, gathered up his pile of newspapers, and folded the wad of journalistic wisdom under his arm for the stroll home.

“Hey, Doc, you barely touched your drink again today,” said the waiter, a burly stump of a man who also seemed out of place. He appeared more the type to sort out brawls and dispense draft by the tableful than serve up a champagne cocktail. “Why not just order a club soda? You still get the peanuts,” he suggested. His lips and eyebrows, both thick as ropes, curved to bracket his puffy cheeks from above and below.

Steele took it as a smile. “I’ll do that,” he replied, and made his way through a maze of revelers getting a jump on happy hour.

Outside, a light drizzle felt cool on his forehead as he strode briskly along Fifth Avenue. Pulling his raincoat around him, he started passing the others in the crowd, weaving between their umbrellas by using a syncopated zigzag step that took all his concentration. The aroma of franks and pretzels carried far through the humid air, filling his nostrils and perking his appetite long before he reached the dozens of vendors’ carts that populated the street corners ahead. He liked how their gay, candy-striped canopies punctuated the gloom in white and red contrast to the more sober, darker marquees of Saks, Gucci, or Wempe. He found himself using them as markers to measure his progress.

But within a few blocks the exhaust of the stop-and-surge traffic had burned the pleasant smells and tastes from the back of his throat, and it was the cumulative noise of horsepower, marching feet, and a thousand conversations, constant as an urban rapids, that filled his head. Tuning out the din, he turned his thoughts to the person who’d been most on his mind since his return.

Chet.

He’d managed to persuade him to return to school before the boy even got out of bed that very first morning. “Hey, there wasn’t so much as a peep about me on the radio news in the taxi coming from the airport,” he reassured his mortified son. “Nobody remembers that kind of smut for longer than it takes to move on to the next scandal anyway.”

“I do!” came his surly reply.

“Any friend who’s worth having won’t ride you over it.”

“No, but people who
aren’t
my friends will. My name will be a joke.”

“Chet, who cares about them? A good woman died, took her own life because she lost her son to a filthy disease and couldn’t find any reason to go on living. Anybody gives you a hard time, remind them of that. What happened won’t be a joke anymore.”

“Gimme a break, Dad!” he snapped, glowering at him with a sullen hard stare. “I can’t say that to a bunch of kids.” But by seven-thirty he’d packed up his books and, his young jaw set with determination, left for his first class.

In subsequent conversations Steele found the answers increasingly hard to provide.

“Why did you go with that woman?” Chet had demanded over dinner that night.

“I liked her—especially talking with her. And she seemed to like me.”

“Don’t you think Mommy would be angry with you?”

“I think she’d be more angry if I kept moping around the way I have been and didn’t get on with my life.”

Chet gave a start and swallowed a few times, then said, “She still wouldn’t approve of what you did in Hawaii.”

“Chet, the only thing I think she’d disapprove of is my not being alert enough to stop that poor woman from taking her life. That’s what I blame myself for. As for my being interested in the lady sexually, your mother would probably think, ‘It’s about time!’ ”

The boy’s eyes nearly fell out onto his plate. Steele had never given him so frank a glimpse of his father before. The revelation that a parent, especially his own, could harbor such doubts and desires obviously came as a shock to the youth. For the rest of his meal he talked mainly with Martha and only about school, but occasionally, his normally smooth forehead corrugated like the brow of a perplexed puppy, he would sneak a glance at Dad. After that Steele trod lightly whenever they talked.

Just before Fiftieth Street he slowed his pace in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral while a funeral procession under a double row of umbrellas descended the massive gray steps. Like some black centipede, it deposited its cargo in a hearse waiting at the curb, and he picked his way through the stragglers, reaching the corner where, pivoting left, he began the three-block trek to Lexington. There were fewer pedestrians here, and as he picked up speed the exertion felt good.

Covering the distance in no time, he glanced at his watch and saw that he still had over an hour before Martha would have supper ready. Instead of turning south toward Thirty-sixth and home as usual, he continued in the direction of the East River, deciding to swing around to the hospital and pick up some insurance papers that his secretary had left in his office for him. Increasing his stride, he went on thinking about Chet.

After their encounter on his first night back, the boy had begun to hang around the table following meal-times, at least long enough to keep Martha filled in about the happenings in his life. A school concert he’d be playing guitar at, how his preparations were going for final exams, that he didn’t yet have a date for his end-of-year class party—Steele listened in on it all, grateful for at least having been granted the privilege of observer status. In the last few days, however, Chet had begun to direct some of the conversation toward him. They’d even had a brief discussion about renting a cottage somewhere on the ocean for a few weeks that summer, but left the plan comfortably vague for the moment.

“It’s a start,” Martha had said approvingly one evening after Chet had gone back upstairs.

Steele turned his thoughts to how he might best enter the hospital to avoid meeting anyone he knew. Since returning from Hawaii he’d stayed away from the place completely, having no stomach to endure the inevitable snickers and stares. By going to his office now, at the end of the day, he hoped to escape seeing anybody in the administrative wing of his department. He figured with a little luck he could evade everyone else if he went in through a back door and stuck to the staircases.

He especially didn’t want to run into Greg Stanton. As good a friend as he’d been, Steele knew him to be a consummate politician whenever it came to his role as dean of medicine. “A particularly mean son of a bitch,” he’d heard others put it when it came to anyone interfering with the flow of endowments to the faculty. And Steele could believe it. He’d heard the man rage on about “tenured parasites” often enough. Better let the dust settle awhile, he figured, having no doubts that his blast of bad publicity had already made Greg’s life difficult with the money counters in the rest of the university. The decision about whether he’d resume his work as Chief of ER wasn’t due for a month, and he hoped by then they’d all have moved on to new problems and that the embarrassment he’d caused would be less of an issue.