Shock (25 page)

"You make it sound so easy," Joanna said.

"I honestly think it will be," Deborah said. "What do you think?"

"I suppose it sounds like a reasonable plan. But what if you start a conversation, and he breaks it off? You'd let me know?" Of course I'd call you instantly," Deborah said. "And remember! If he's in the dining room you'll have plenty of time to get out. It's not the same as when he's sitting in his cubicle."

Joanna nodded several times in a row.

"Do you feel better now about going back in there?"

"I guess," Joanna said.

"Good!" Deborah said. "Now, let's get the ball rolling. If perchance Mr. Porter is not in his cubicle when you get over there, you'd better call me. We might have to adjust the plan if we can't find him."

"All right!" Joanna said, trying to bolster her courage. She clasped hands with Deborah briefly and then turned to leave.

Deborah watched Joanna go. She knew her roommate had been seriously upset, but she also knew Joanna to be resilient. Deborah was confident that when the chips were down, Joanna could be counted on to pull through.

Deborah went back to her microscope and tried to go back to work. But it was impossible. She felt far too jazzed up for such a painstaking task as enucleating oocytes. She was also on edge in case Joanna called indicating that Randy Porter was not in his cubicle. After five minutes had passed without a call, Deborah pushed back from the lab bench and wandered over to Mare's station. The woman looked up from her microscope's eye pieces when she sensed Deborah's presence.

"I have a question," Deborah said. "Where do these eggs we're working on come from?"

Mare hooked a thumb over her shoulder. "They come from that incubator way down there near the end of the lab."

"And how do they get into the incubator?"

Mare gave Deborah a look that wouldn't have qualified as a dirty look, but it wasn't all that friendly either. "You ask a lot of questions."

"It's the sign of a budding researcher," Deborah said. "As a scientist, when you stop asking questions it's time to retire or find another calling."

"The eggs come up in a dumbwaiter inside the incubator,' Mare said. "But that's all I know. I've never been encouraged to ask, nor have I been inclined."

"Who would know?" Deborah asked.

"I imagine Miss Finnigan would know."

WITH HIS HANDS ON BOTH ARMS OF HIS CHAIR, RANDY slowly raised himself to provide a progressively more expansive view of the administration area. He wanted to see if Christine was in her cubicle without her knowing he was checking. If he stood up all the way she could see him, but by doing it slowly he could stop when he just caught sight of the top of her sizable, curly-haired head. Bingo! She was there, and Randy lowered himself back down.

With the knowledge the office manager was nearby Randy lowered the volume on his computer speakers. Although when he was home he let the sound effects roar at full volume, when he was in the office he was a realist, especially with Christine only a few cubicles away.

Next Randy pulled out his joystick. When he got that in the exact position he preferred, he adjusted his rear end in the seat pan of his chair. To game at the full level of his abilities he needed to be comfortable. When all was set to his liking, he gripped the mouse in preparation for logging onto the Internet. But then he paused. Strangely enough another thought occurred to him.

Randy had not only programmed the server room door so that he would be alerted when it was opened, he'd also programmed it so that the card swipe that opened the door would record the identity of the individual.

With a few rapid clicks of the mouse Randy brought up the appropriate window. What he expected to see was his name last on the list from when he'd gone to check the room after Helen Masterson had gone in. That would have confirmed his suspicion that the door had just opened on its own accord from his having not shut it properly. But to his surprise his name wasn't last. The last name was Dr. Spencer Wingate, the heralded founder of the clinic, and the time was 11:10 that very morning.

Randy stared at the entry with a mixture of confusion and disbelief. How could that be, he wondered. Since he was serious about his computer-gaming prowess, he kept an accurate log of his triumphs and even his rare failings. After minimizing the current window, Randy brought up his Unreal Tournament record. There it was: He'd been killed at 11:11.

Taking a deep breath, Randy rocked back in his chair, staring at the computer screen while his mind recreated his recent dash back to the server room. He estimated that it took him only a minute or two to get from his cubicle to the server room, meaning he'd arrived there about 11:12 or 11:13. If that were the case, where the hell was Dr. Wingate, who'd entered at 11:10? And if that weren't enough of a conundrum, why did the doctor leave the door ajar?

Something very strange going on, Randy thought, especially since Dr. Wingate was supposed to be semiretired even though rumor had it that he was around. Randy scratched his head, wondering what to do, if anything. He was supposed to report any security lapses to Dr. Saunders, but Randy wasn't sure there had been a lapse. As far as he was concerned, Dr. Wingate was the highest honcho in the whole organization, so how could anything that concerned him be a security lapse?

Then Randy had another idea. Maybe he'd say something to weird Kurt Hermann. The security chief had had Randy program his computer so it, too, recorded any and all openings of the card-swipe doors. That meant that Kurt already knew Dr. Wingate had been in the server room. What the security chief didn't know was that the doctor had only been in there for two minutes and had left the door open.

"Oh crap!" Randy said out loud. Worrying about all this was as bad as work. What he really wanted to do was get back on line with SCREAMER, so he tipped forward and grabbed his mouse.

"MISS FINNIGAN!" DEBORAH CALLED OUT. SHE WAS standing in the laboratory supervisor's doorway. She'd knocked on the jamb, but the depth of Megan Finnigan's concentration on her computer had precluded her from responding. But Deborah's voice had penetrated, and the woman looked up with a startled expression. She then hastily cleared her screen.

"I'd prefer it if you knocked," she said.

"I did knock," Deborah responded.

The woman tossed her head to rid her face of her bothersome strands. "I'm sorry. I'm just very busy. What can I do for you?"

"You encouraged me to come to you if I had any questions," Deborah said. "Well, I have a question."

"What is it?"

"I'm curious about where the eggs come from that I've been working on. I asked Maureen, but she said she didn't know. I mean, it's a lot of eggs. I just didn't realize they were available in such numbers."

"Availability of eggs has been one of the major limiting factors in our research from day one," Megan said. "We've devoted a lot of effort to solve the problem, and it has been one of Dr. Saunders and Dr. Donaldson's major contributions to the field. But the work is as of yet unpublished, and until it is, it is considered a trade secret." Megan smiled patronizingly and gave her head another one of her signature tosses that so annoyed Deborah. "After you've worked here for some reasonable period, and if you are still interested, I'm sure we can share with you our successes."

"I'll look forward to that," Deborah said. "One other question: What species are the eggs I've been working on?"

Megan did not answer immediately but rather returned Deborah's stare in a manner that made Deborah feel as if the lab supervisor was gauging Deborah's motives. The pause was long enough for Deborah to feel uncomfortable.

"Why are you asking this?" Megan questioned finally.

"As I said, I'm just curious," Deborah responded. Megan's responses to her simple questions were answers in themselves. Deborah felt she was not going to get a straight answer and at that point wanted to leave. She had the sense that her further questioning would only draw unwanted attention.

"I'm not immediately sure which protocol Maureen is working under," Megan said. "I'd have to look it up, but at the moment I'm too busy."

"I understand," Deborah said. "Thank you for your time."

"Don't mention it," Megan responded. She smiled insincerely.

Deborah was relieved to return to her microscope. Going to the supervisor's office had not been a good or particularly productive impulse. Deborah went back to work but had managed to enucleate only one oocyte when her curiosity, heightened by her short conversation with Megan, got the best of her again. Merely looking at the mass of oocytes in the microscopic field begged the question about their origin, especially if they were human eggs as Deborah suspected.

Leaning back, Deborah gazed over at Mare, who was ignoring her as she'd essentially been doing since the verbal skirmish with Paul Saunders over the eggs' identity. A quick glance around the huge lab convinced Deborah that none of the dozen or so people toiling away were paying her any heed either.

Grabbing her purse as if she intended to go to the ladies' room, Deborah slid off her stool and headed out into the main corridor. Believing she'd only be working at the Wingate for that one day, she decided the eggs' origin was too much of a mystery to ignore. She didn't know if she could sleuth it out, but she thought she'd learn what she could while she had the chance.

Deborah walked down the corridor in the direction of the central tower until she reached the last of the three doors leading from the corridor into the lab. Leaning into the lab, she could see Mare a good distance away, hunched over her scope. To Deborah's immediate right was the walk-in incubator where Mare had been going for the petri dishes full of eggs. Deborah went to its glass door, slid it open, and stepped inside.

The air was warm and moist. A large wall-mounted thermometer and humidistat indicated it was exactly 98.6°F with one hundred percent humidity. Shelves for the petri dishes lined both sides of the narrow room. At the rear was the dumbwaiter, but it was a far cry from its initial incarnation when it had served to bring food up to the wards from the institution's basement kitchen. It was made of stainless steel instead of the usual wood, with a glass door and glass shelves. For a dumbwaiter it was large, about the size of a highboy chest of drawers. It also had its own auxiliary heat and humidifying source to make sure it, too, stayed at the proper temperature and humidity.

Deborah pushed on the dumbwaiter to see if it would move enough to give her a view down the shaft, but it was rock solid. It was obviously a highly engineered piece of equipment. Deborah stepped back and eyed the unit. She guessed the back of the shaft was common with the wall of the main corridor.

Leaving the incubator, she went back out into the main hall and gauged where the dumbwaiter shaft was located. Then she paced off the distance to the stairwell near the fire door to the central tower. Using the old metal stairway, she climbed up to the third floor. When she opened the door she was surprised.

Although she vaguely remembered Dr. Donaldson saying the vast old institution, save for the small portion occupied by the Wingate, was like a museum, she was unprepared for what she was looking at. It was as if sometime in the nineteen-twenties everybody, professional staff and patients alike, had just walked out leaving everything behind. There were old desks, wooden gurneys, and antique-appearing wheel chairs lining the dark hall. Huge cobweb-like strands hung like garlands from Victorian light fixtures. There were even old, framed Currier and Ives prints hanging askew on the walls. The floor was covered with a thick layer of dust and pieces of plaster that had fallen from the shallowly vaulted ceiling.

Superstitiously Deborah covered her mouth and tried to breath shallowly as she paced off the distance from the stairwell. She knew intellectually that any of the tubercular organisms and any of the other miasma that had at one time roamed the halls were long gone, but she still felt vulnerable and uneasy.

Once she had an approximate fix on where the dumbwaiter shaft was, she entered the nearest door. Not unexpectedly, she found herself in a windowless room which had served as a butler's pantry complete with cupboards full of institutional dishes and flatware. There were even some old warming ovens with their doors ajar. In the semidarkness they looked like huge dead animals with their mouths open.

The dumbwaiter shaft's doors were where she expected them to be. They were designed to open vertically like a freight elevator, but when Deborah pulled on the frayed canvas strap, it was obvious there was a fail-safe mechanism to keep them locked until the dumbwaiter itself had arrived.

Brushing her hands free of the dust, Deborah retraced her steps back to the stairwell and climbed to the fourth and top floor. She found the situation the same as on the third floor. Returning to the stairwell, she descended to the first floor.

When Deborah emerged from the stairwell, she knew instantly that the eggs did not come from there. The first floor had been renovated even more dramatically than the second floor to house the Wingate Clinic's clinical operations, and at that time of the morning it was in full swing with a constant flux of doctors, nurses, and patients. Deborah had to step to the side to allow an occupied gurney to go by.

Dodging the crowd, Deborah paced off the distance from the stairwell to where she guessed the dumbwaiter shaft was, behind the corridor wall. Leaving the corridor, she found herself in a patient-treatment area. Where the dumbwaiter shaft's doors should have been located, she was confronted by a shallow linen closet. It was immediately obvious to her that there was no opening for the dumbwaiter on the first floor.

A simple process of elimination left only the basement as the eggs' origin. Deborah headed back to the stairwell. To get down there she had to descend three flights instead of the two that had separated each of the upper floors. This suggested to her that the basement would have a higher ceiling, but it turned out not to be the case. There was a mezzanine floor of sorts between the basement and the first floor, composed of a myriad of piping and ductwork.