Possessed (4 page)

As gifted as Stefan was, Annika soon came to realize what others had about him, that he lacked a street-smartness, or perhaps common sense. The stories about him were legendary, like the time he complained his television was broken. Annika looked it over for him and realized that it was simply unplugged.

Another favorite story was the day Stefan knocked on Mark Bouril's apartment door with a quandary. One of the things Stefan loved so much about Texas was the cachet of the Wild West, and he began collecting antique guns, including old Winchesters and a stunning Smith & Wesson. That day, he'd been cleaning one on the kitchen counter, when he dropped a bullet that clattered into the sink and landed in the garbage disposal. His hand too large to reach inside to pull it out, Stefan knocked on Bouril's door for help. “So many Americans have guns, this must be a common problem,” he said. “You must have a tool for this?”

Laughing, Bouril said he knew of no such tool, and the two men ended up rigging a tweezer-type apparatus out of chopsticks.

A
s they became closer friends, Annika saw things in Stefan that made sense after he confided in her about his upbringing, describing his father as abusive to him and to his mother. At times, Stefan seemed overeager to please, and he assiduously avoided conflict. “He'd sided with his mother.
They were very close, and he took on the pain of her abuse,” she said. As a result, he was easily hurt.

One afternoon, he came to her with a thought he wanted to share, but Annika had no time to listen with a deadline looming. When he continued to talk, she snapped at him, “Not now!”

She looked up, saw the devastated look on his face, and quickly regretted her words.

As sympathetic as she was, however, Stefan's inability to stand up for himself frustrated Annika. Routinely, she counseled him to be more forceful, to fight for what he wanted, telling him that he needed to have confidence. Always, he agreed, but when a difficult situation presented itself, he crumbled rather than engage in any conflict. As the years passed, she grew to understand that it was too much to expect of him. “Any confrontation terrified him,” she said. “It wasn't something he could control.”

Outside the lab, too, Annika watched Stefan habitually back away from unpleasant situations. In a bar one night, an intoxicated woman for some unknown reason took offense to something Stefan said and moved toward him, poised to scratch his face. Not raising a hand, Stefan simply turned away. The woman's boyfriend moved in, grabbed her, and dragged her off.

“I could never hit a woman,” he said to a friend. “My deepest fear is becoming my father.”

Those who knew him would realize that the memory of his father's rage never left Stefan. In 2005, when his father died, at work Stefan seemed uncharacteristically remote and depressed, talking about how his father had never told him that he loved him or that he was proud of him, never acknowledged all Stefan had done with his life. “It saddened him that his father never approved of all he'd accomplished,” Annika said. “He loved his father. He didn't dislike him. And he was disappointed that he'd never been able to please him.”

A
s the years passed in Dallas, Stefan relied on his makeshift family of friends, looking out for each of them when he could. In his way, Stefan was something of a fixer, networking people. When his CPA friend, Ran Holcomb, was diagnosed with cancer, Stefan researched the type and connected him to physicians at MD Anderson in Houston to treat him. When Annika had a problem with her car, Stefan went through his list of contacts and found a repairman, handed it to her, and said, “Call this fellow. He's an expert on that part of the car.”

At times, Annika mentioned something to him in passing, and later he'd approach her with the solution to her problem, an answer for her question, something he'd taken the time to investigate to help her. One of the most remarkable events was the time she mentioned to him that Hawaii was on her bucket list. Stefan said nothing, and she hadn't even realized that he listened. But a year and a half later, he gave her an American Airlines ticket to Hawaii as a Christmas gift.

Annika and Stefan

(Courtesy of Annika Lindqvist)

The friendship and respect grew between them, and Stefan trusted Annika. Over the years, she learned the disdain he had for those scientists he judged weren't dedicated to the truth, some he suspected misrepresented data to bolster their results and increase their prestige and grant money. At one point, he refused to work with a scientist after he questioned a study's results. For some scientists, their work was tied to their egos, but Stefan was simply intrigued by the quest to discover, to expand boundaries, so for him manipulating scientific data was unthinkable and inexcusable, because, said Annika, “it was truly all about the science.”

I
n April of 2002, Annika and Stefan authored an article that ran in the
Journal of Biological Chemistry
entitled: “Enzyme catalysis and regulation; biochemical properties of purified recombinant human carotene 15.”

By then, Annika and Stefan spent so much time together, meshed so well, that friends and colleagues assumed they were a couple. Instead, they were the closest of friends. Then, in the spring of 2004, their platonic relationship transformed into a romance. For months, their connection took what seemed a natural step, and they dated. In many ways, nothing had changed. They still went out with their group, frequenting the local restaurants and bars, laughing and having fun. While not overtly passionate, not prone to buying candy, sending poems or flowers, Stefan was loving, highly attentive, and gentle. “I'd sit down on a couch, and suddenly there would be a pillow next to me,” she said. “It was a little like hovering over me.”

There were things Stefan admired, and near the top of his list was a beautiful woman in high heels. For his fiftieth birthday that May, Annika made Stefan a framed collage of photos of him with his friends, along with handwritten notes, little greetings most of which read “Happy Birthday!” with short sentiments including “Official Old Fart,” and “Looks like it's time to get that red convertible!” Tucked in
between were suggestive photos of women in stiletto heels. In the center, Annika posted a note that read: “Shoe Fetish” in blue, with an arrow pointing at a picture of Stefan. At the time, all Stefan's friends laughed. Years later, it would seem both tragic and ironic.

While their friendship continued, Annika and Stefan's romance lasted only a matter of months. Later, she would decide that while similar in many ways, they were simply too different. Annika loved nature and the wilderness, while Stefan craved city life. She wanted to explore the world, and Stefan had grown set in his ways, wary of change, only wanting to visit places he'd already been, Sweden, New York, and to see a friend in Rio. Rarely happier than in a field bird-watching, Annika knew Stefan had no such desires. When she asked him to go hiking or camping, he'd suggest, “Why don't you just stay here, and we'll go out to lunch?”

Afterward, Annika realized that part of the problem was that Stefan didn't know what to do with her since she was independent and not looking for him to support her. Many of the other women he'd dated over the years had wanted something from him, including the married woman he dated when he first returned to Dallas, who still occasionally asked him for money or presents. Habitually, although they hadn't had a relationship in years, he bought the woman what she wanted, which grated on Annika. “I wondered why he couldn't just say no,” she said. “But that wasn't Stefan. He had a hard time saying no to anyone. And if he once cared about a person, he always cared.”

No bitter breakup, as quietly as their romance began, Annika and Stefan simply went back to being friends, perhaps closer after their brief affair. Although he was two years older than she, Annika thought of him as a younger brother, someone so accepting that he was easy to take advantage of and needed protection. “I loved Stefan dearly as a friend,” she said. “But as a relationship, it didn't work. We just weren't a good match.”

I
n 2007, Stefan traveled to Washington, D.C., for a conference, and called his ex-wife, Jackie, asking her to meet him for lunch. By then, she worked in the Indian repatriation branch of the Smithsonian Institute, assisting American Indian tribes reclaiming religious artifacts and human remains. Jackie had gone on with her life, completed her college education, married, and had children. In contrast, Stefan's life had changed little from when she first met him although he talked regularly about looking for the right woman to start a family. Perhaps he was still attempting to put that first marriage behind him. At lunch that day, Jackie and Stefan ate crab sandwiches and talked, but she would remember it as being uneventful. When he returned to Dallas, Stefan seemed no more settled for having seen her again.

That same year, Annika bought a one-story, four-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood about ten minutes from The Village. Amplifying the differences between them, Stefan seemed unable to understand why she'd want to be tied down with a house. Yet before long, he dropped in off and on, happily sunning in her backyard, sipping wine, and talking. At times, he showed up on the weekend for a morning coffee, and stayed to have a beer or wine in the afternoon.

For the most part, Stefan seemed content at The Village, surrounded by his friends. He continued his research, and that year he published a paper on how estrogen and progesterone metabolize in the cervix during pregnancy. His personal desires progressed as well. For years, Stefan had talked about replacing his white Camry and exhaustively studied cars on the Internet. After so much thought, he chose a Mercedes and bought a four-year-old, silver CLK-320 coupe. Once he had it, he rarely drove it except to and from work, still staying close to his apartment or Annika's house, walking or taking a cab out in the evenings. “If he left the city limits, it must have been a mistake,” Annika said with a laugh.

Stefan showing off his new car

(Courtesy of Annika Lindqvist)

At Henk's, the Bavarian deli and bakery, he met a German artist, Arie Van Selm. Later, Stefan purchased one of Van Selm's paintings, a large black crow called
Not an Everyday Bird
. Stefan and the artist became friends, occasionally talking on the phone, meeting for lunch, getting together for dinners. Explaining why he liked the painting, Stefan said he appreciated crows because they weren't the most loved of birds and were rather outsiders in the bird world. “I think Stefan saw himself in the painting,” said Van Selm. In the following months, Stefan purchased two more of the artist's crow paintings, and Van Selm would say that he found Stefan to have a good sense of form and color. “We drank good wine together and talked art.”

In the bars and restaurants, Stefan and his friends continued to gather in the evenings and on weekends. Stefan bought rounds of drinks, picked up more than his share of the tabs, and tipped heavily. His friends cautioned him that
there was no need to, but he insisted. Some thought that he was overcompensating, that it was so important to him to be liked. Others thought that he did it to hide what they saw as his inner shyness.

D
espite his many successes, in 2009 everyone in Stefan's life knew he was on edge. The economic downturn that began a year earlier was impacting NIH grants, and federal research money dried up across the country. As an associate professor, Stefan's position at UTSW wasn't tenured, and without the grant money to fund his investigation into molecular changes inside the cervix during pregnancy, he faced losing his position and his lab.

Furiously, he wrote grant proposals, worked on finding funding, but with the banks in turmoil and money tight, nothing emerged. Off and on over the years, Stefan had battled with depression, and he'd taken prescription meds to treat it, but the impending loss of his position loomed large, troubling him. Not as outgoing as usual, Stefan appeared anxious about his situation and his future.