Near Death (7 page)

The lab was an old-world space on one of the floors that had so far escaped renovation, a turn-of-the-century room with period floorboards and dated soapstone countertops; but it was packed with twenty-first-century electronics and analytical instruments. Cyrus involuntarily sniffed at the acetone vapors hanging in the air. Every few seconds he was startled by a harsh vibratory whir when one of the women pressed a test tube against a mechanical agitator.

Sacco returned and pointed mutely toward the rear. Alex Weller stood at his corner office door, arms folded, forcing a smile. He was tall and lanky, late thirties, hair pulled into a hippie ponytail, casual in jeans, pullover and running shoes. To Cyrus’s ear he had an unvarnished British accent, like Ringo’s. He launched into a voluble barrage. “Davis Fox passed along your message. Welcome. Should I call you Mister O’Malley, Agent O’Malley, or Cyrus?”

Cyrus bristled at the way Weller was trying to take charge. “It’s Special Agent O’Malley.”

The tall man shrugged in a suit-yourself way. “Well, I’m more informal. I’m just Alex.”

Alex closed the door, offered a chair and squeezed back behind his desk. The airless office was impossibly small, so jammed with journals and papers as to be almost comical.

“Sorry for the mess,” he said, resting his feet on the one bare patch of desktop. The sneaker soles were worn from serious roadwork. “I don’t know how I can help. As I said, I already spoke with the police.”

Cyrus awkwardly stripped off his overcoat without standing up and let it drape back over the chair. “You were the last person to speak with Thomas Quinn on his mobile. I’m hoping you can be of further assistance to the investigation.”

“Has there been any progress?”

“I’d say yes,” he replied enigmatically, trying to ferret out some kind of response, verbal or nonverbal; but Alex was impassive. “I want you to walk me through your last phone calls with Thomas. That Thursday you spoke with him at three-fifteen for about a minute and again at five-twenty for three minutes.”

Cyrus detected a smirk of sorts. “Glad to; but first, I’m curious why the FBI would be involved. I grew up in Britain so perhaps I don’t understand these things as well as I should.”

He wasn’t about to humor him so he replied curtly, “The police asked for our help. The phone calls?”

Alex shrugged again and told him that both calls involved planning for their next Saturday meeting. Thomas helped organize biweekly salons at his house. They had discussed who was coming, the ever important matter of refreshments, and whether they would have a guest speaker. As memory served him, their first call was interrupted when Thomas had to take care of something in the recovery room, and the second call, a continuation of the first occurred during Thomas’s evening commute.

Had he seen Thomas in person at any time on Thursday or Friday? Alex said no, emphatically.

Cyrus looked at his notepad. He had written the word
salon
in capital letters and had underlined it twice. “Tell me about these salons. What are they?”

Alex gestured grandly as if he were about to impart a great teaching. “Well, a salon is a gathering of like-minded intellectuals who meet to—”

Cyrus cut him off irritably. “
Your
salons. What do
you
like-minded intellectuals discuss at
your
house?”

Alex innocently smiled back. “My friends and I are interested in all manner of topics relating to philosophy, religion, and biology. Specifically, we share a fascination in cultural concepts of the afterlife. It’s a subject I’ve been toying with ever since my university days. Several years ago I founded a small private society, the Uroboros Society—no more than an informal salon, really—to stimulate discussions.”

“What does that mean,
Uroboros
?”

“It’s an ancient mythological symbol, the serpent swallowing its own tail. It represents eternal return, life after death, self-renewal; immortality. It may sound pretentious, I know—and believe me, I’m not a pretentious bloke—but it encapsulates the scope of our interests.”

“Immortality and life after death. Is that what neuroscientists think about in their spare time?”

“This one does. The intersection between science, philosophy, and religion is blurred but fascinating. I’m immersed in that intersection.”

“What kind of research do you do?”

Alex wet his lips with his tongue. “I study the stressed brain … the brain in trauma, in oxygen deprivation, at the boundary between life and death.”

“Is this theoretical? Practical?”

“Well, this is a medical school. I’m a pediatric neurologist. I split my time between patient care and research. My grant funding points toward the discovery of new drugs for brain injury; but it is fundamental thanatobiology—the biology of death—that really gets my motor running. Death isn’t instantaneous, you know. We’re complex machines, and when we shut down, a lot happens in specific sequences at a cellular and molecular level. By understanding death, maybe we’ll get a better understanding of life.”

Cyrus raised his eyebrows. “If you say so. What kind of people go to your salon?”

“All types: biologists, psychologists, philosophy students, dilettantes, a theologian or two.”

“Thomas was a nurse. What did he bring?”

“Thomas was an interesting man, very astute. He wasn’t all that book smart, yet his line of work made him a keen observer of life and death. He held his own in debates with PhDs.”

“What is it you debate about?”

“This is relevant to Thomas’s murder, how?” Cyrus was staring back at him icily, prompting Alex to add, “I’m just asking.”

“I’m not sure it is, I’m not sure it isn’t,” Cyrus said evenly. “A guy’s got a fascination with death, his last cell phone call is to another guy who’s got the same interest and he winds up dead. I don’t know … call me crazy for being curious.”

“Just as long as you don’t think I had anything to do with it,” Alex said with forced cheeriness. “We debate many things: What should we read into the differences in cross-cultural beliefs in life after death? Does God exist—that’s a biggie. Why are so-called near death experiences so similar by description across multiple cultures? Is there a biological basis for them or should we be looking toward spirituality? We ask large questions and after lively discussion, we come up with small answers, which guarantees we’ll be talking for a very long time.”

Cyrus slipped into a higher gear and asked a series of rapid-fire questions. Did Thomas have any serious conflicts with members of the group? Could he get a list of members? Did Thomas have any enemies? Did Alex know whether he engaged in illicit activities? What did he know about Thomas’s relationship with Davis Fox?

Alex’s short, bland answers added nothing. Then Cyrus caught him off guard with, “Do you know any prostitutes?”

Alex finally pulled his feet off the desk. “What?”

“Prostitutes. Know any? Use any?”

For the first time, Alex got surly. “Absolutely not! I’ve got a girlfriend. Why are you asking me that?”

Cyrus’s mobile rang. He was going to ignore it but the caller ID said MARIAN so he picked up, listened to her then said, “I’m just down the street from Children’s. I can meet you there in ten minutes.”

He put the phone away. “I’ve got to take off. Thank you for your time, Doctor Weller. I may need to talk with you again.”

Alex rose, momentarily towering over him until Cyrus stood himself. Alex’s anger over the last question seemed to have dissipated and he said in a quiet, almost pastoral voice, “You’re going to Children’s Hospital?”

Cyrus put his coat back on and didn’t answer.

“Do you have a sick child?”

Cyrus found himself nodding. There was an odd expression on Weller’s face. He reached into the breast pocket of a white lab coat hanging on a nearby hook. There was a stack of three-by-five cards stamped with names and scribbled with notes. He rifled through them like he was
looking for jokers in a deck before plucking out one card. Cyrus couldn’t imagine what he was up to.

“Your daughter’s name isn’t Tara O’Malley, is it?”

It was like getting hit in the gut by a thick piece of wood. Cyrus felt sick. His ears rang. He nodded again.

“Her surgeon, Bill Thorpe, asked me to see her. I’ve been adjusting her seizure medications. I’ve met your wife.”

“
Ex
-wife,” Cyrus said automatically, fishing for something else to say.

“Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it?” Alex said. “Would you like me to walk over with you?”

Cyrus reached for the doorknob. He wanted to get out of the building into the cold air. “She just had another seizure.”

“Let me call over and make sure one of the other attendings sees her right away. Perhaps, under the circumstances, I should transfer her care to a colleague.”

Cyrus swallowed and nodded. “That would be good.”

“Let me say this,” Alex added. “She’s a lovely girl. A perfectly lovely little girl.”

Eight

It was late and the neurology ward was quiet. When Alex was a young boy in England staying with his grandparents in the village of Gressingham, he and his brother used to sneak into the parish church around midnight. The heavy oak door in the old Norman tower was always unlocked so they really weren’t being delinquent but it felt naughty and dangerous and that’s why they were drawn to it. The dark, narrow nave was full of musty dead air. He’d touch the smooth pulpit and nervously whisper to his brother about an imagined noise coming from the large tomb in the chapel. These were the things he remembered, walking through the ward that night.

Standing outside Room 919 he looked around to see if anyone was in the corridor. It was still deserted. He went inside and quietly put on a sterile gown, gloves, and mask.

Tara O’Malley was asleep. Though another neurologist had taken over her case, he was drawn to her in a new context: no longer his patient, she was the daughter of a man who was pursuing him.

He picked up her chart and flipped through it. She’d been seizure-free for several days. Her blood counts were coming back, her infection clearing. She’d be going home soon; but her last MRI was disturbing. The tumor was on the prowl.

He stood over her. Her plump lips parted with each breath.
Pretty as a china doll
, he thought. Cyrus O’Malley was going to miss her.

Nine

The last leaves of the season were whipping past the big windows and settling onto the quadrangle. That Saturday, Alex was alone in his lab, his skin prickling with anticipation. He liked being the only one there, uninhibited, flitting from bench to bench, reagent to reagent, machine to machine, humming, singing snippets of pop tunes stuck in his head, waiting for the LC-mass spec to spit out his data. No prying eyes. No small talk. No seemingly innocent questions to answer.

He was on the brink.

He could feel it
.

It was neither guesswork nor intuition: he was a very good scientist, plain and simple. He likened his quest to one of those big, concentric circle mazes where you start on the outside and draw your way in until your pencil stops dead center. There was heaviness in the air and lightness in his head. Would today be the day he was going to reach the center?

Every set of samples inched him closer. Every experiment had chipped away at the mantle of rock, exposing more of the crystal gemstone at its kernel.

Poor Thomas Quinn had not died in vain. He took comfort in that, he really did. The two-minute sample of Thomas’s cerebrospinal fluid had revealed a small telltale spike at 854.73
m/z
. At three minutes, the value was off the charts.

854.73.

To Alex, there was no more important number in the world, the mass-to-charge ratio: the precise peak on his mass spectrometry instrument where his beautiful unknown showed itself over and over. He had first laid eyes on that peak two years earlier when a brilliantly simple experiment in mice yielded the same result time after time. The idea had come to him in a
eureka
-type of flash, so obvious in retrospect that he was pained it had taken him so long to think of it. Emboldened, he started to climb the evolutionary ladder. Rats had the same peak. Cats. Dogs. Monkeys.

And man?

A subject was needed
.

Who else but himself? At least that was the plan. He’d need Thomas’s help to be sure; Thomas was the ideal partner
for an ethically challenged experiment. He was adept, discreet, part of Alex’s inner circle.

Following that terrible night in the dog lab, he had spent two weeks in a state of alternating despair and ecstasy. He had murdered a man. From his limited knowledge of the law it could have been manslaughter, but Thomas nevertheless was dead and he had caused it. His anxiety skyrocketed when the body was found. Every day the articles in the papers would send him into a panic—then the agonizing phone call from the police and the interview with a simpleton detective that had meandered and mercifully sputtered.

Yet, the data was so perfect, so validating, that it almost liberated him from guilt and sent him soaring. Thomas had the peak too: just as predicted; but this was only the beginning. What molecule was lurking at 854.73
m/z
? What was its chemistry, its biology? Was it his Holy Grail? There was no point trying to isolate it from lower species. He eventually had to go to man anyway …

To really know
.

At night, lying awake next to Jessie’s slumbering warmth, so much heat from so small a body, he would turn his mind into a rollicking debating society, arguing the pros and cons of his next steps. He wasn’t a murderer, he
was a biologist. He wasn’t Mengele—he was a scientist. Should a few be sacrificed for the greater good? Could the end justify the means? Even if it did, could he stomach the act?

Could he live with himself?

Still, he couldn’t make the decision. In a madly detached way he felt he had to delegate it to someone else. Then, one night, staring at the dark ceiling, he found the decision transcendently taken out of his hands. He felt like a marionette, his movements controlled by invisible wires. He shifted to an altered consciousness whereby he became external observer, passively watching himself get dressed, drive to the lab, sign in at the security desk, pick up his sample tubes and instruments, sneak out a rear exit, hop into his car and cruise the streets.