Knockout Mouse Page 5

  Before Doug could object, Alpha Man spoke. “We’ll release them to next of kin.”

  “We’re in touch with the family,” I said. The apartment manager had stimulated my misinformation faculties, though it was true we’d called Perkins at the hospital to give him the phone number for Abe, Sheila’s brother. “They won’t be here for a few days. They asked us to take care of her effects. We have the key to Sheila’s apartment.”

  I watched the man carefully. His thick brows rose slightly. “Next of kin only. Thank you for your concern.” He crossed his arms in a way that said he wasn’t thanking me at all.

  McKinnon looked at his watch again. We stood to shake his hand. “I’d like to talk to you some more,” I said.

  “Of course,” he agreed. “When time permits.”

  The dark-haired man frowned. “You’ll need to clear that first, doctor.”

  McKinnon whirled just before exiting the door. “I’ll speak to whomever I like, Neil.”

  Doug Englehart glared at the man named Neil, and followed McKinnon out. We started to leave as well, but Neil blocked the door. “You said you had something to give Sheila—which strikes me as strange, since you already knew she was dead. Nevertheless, I’ll be glad to handle it.”

  I wanted to see how he’d react if I mentioned the journal. He could well have been the one who’d been in Sheila’s apartment. If Jenny was right and their reasons for taking the hard drive were purely work-related, the diary wouldn’t concern him. But it was also possible that whoever was snooping had been interrupted by the manager and hadn’t seen the black book in the bedroom. In that case, he might want it.

  Curiosity got the better of me, as it usually did. First I asked, “I’m sorry, Neil, what was your last name?”

  “I’m an officer of the company.”

  I waited for him to go on. He didn’t. So I dropped my little bomb.

  “We have Sheila’s diary.”

  His eyes flicked up and down in a quick inspection of our persons. He settled on a straw bag Jenny was carrying. “We’ll keep it with the rest of her effects.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “We’ll give it to the family ourselves. I’m sure they’ll also want Sheila’s hard drive, when the police find out who stole it.”

  My comment about the hard drive was rewarded with a visible tightening of his facial muscles. He said nothing, but edged over to fill the door frame.

  I stepped toward him. “We’d like to see Sheila’s workspace.”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid.” He remained still, his features frozen.

  I said, “Let’s go, Jenny.”

  The man didn’t budge. His smile grew, which only made it more menacing. “Why did you bring her diary? You must have intended for us to have it.”

  “I’d hoped to cooperate with you in finding the cause of her death. I can see that’s not going to happen.”

  “Your definition of cooperation is rather self-centered. Leave the diary with people who know what they’re doing.”

  “We’re done here.” I advanced on the door. Jenny cinched the bag to her shoulder and followed.

  I didn’t stop when we got to the door. Neil and Mr. Security turned aside at the last second, allowing just enough space for us to squeeze through. The bag brushed against him. We strode across the lobby to the door.

  Jenny waited until I’d pulled the Scout out of the LifeScience lot to turn on me. Her face was red. “Bill, you are so dim sometimes. I can’t believe you told him about the diary. What if he tried to get it?”

  “The diary’s safe under my seat. It was the only way to break through his mask. Now we know he’s serious about getting it. I want to know why.”

  7

  I joined the stutter of Friday morning traffic the next day as I made my way toward 280, the freeway that would take me to San Francisco. Maple, oak, and sycamore flared gold and red in the morning sun. To drive through Silicon Valley was to jump abruptly from one era to another. One moment you were in a shaded postwar suburb of ranch houses, car washes, and drive-ins; the next you were passing by the expansive green campus of a big tech firm, complete with swimming pool, gym, and gourmet cafeteria. The recreational facilities were set right out front, too, for potential employees to see how good they’d have it.

  Interstate 280’s eight spacious lanes undulated through pastures in the shadow of the coastal range. It bracketed the west side of the valley, a mud flat that ran alongside the bay. Before its transformation, the flat had been a checkerboard of orchards and sunny towns, protected from the Pacific’s cold fog by the coastal chain. When silicon and software replaced apples and apricots, the string of sleepy, pleasant communities—Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino—melted together into something that, viewed from above, resembled an etched transistor. On the east side of the valley was Highway 101, the main artery along the bay, forty miles of noise barriers and auto body shops.

  I whizzed along without much problem. The commute had reversed its direction during the tech revolution, which to me was something like water flowing uphill. The heavy morning traffic now headed south from San Francisco to what were once suburbs.

  Whizzed was a relative term for the Scout. I kept to the rightmost lane. The car was in a good mood and had started right up this morning. Some day I’d get to the bottom of what made it sulk in the moisture. Jenny said I was just stubborn. She didn’t understand how much the Scout had gotten me through.

  The jeep had loomed mighty in my mind as a child. I insisted on being the one to turn the hub locks on the front wheels, and savored the sound when my father ground the secondary gearshift into four-wheel drive. When I was in high school, after my parents split up, the Scout came into my hands. I couldn’t imagine turning it over to some stranger, even as the paint faded and I had to replace one original part after another. It was an anchor for me through the high-tech whirlwind. Some people understood its charm, but most saw it the way Jenny did: a prehistoric box whose bucket seats were about as comfortable as a school bus and whose truck suspension allowed you to feel every pebble on the road. While new cars were designed to look slippery as a suppository, the Scout was all straight lines. The windshield was a flat piece of glass. The original black license plate with yellow letters, now beaten and bent, was still fixed to the bumper.

  I was on my way to a meeting with Rita. Jenny had wanted me to stay another day with her in Palo Alto, but Rita and I had to prep for the Kumar shoot, which began on Monday.

  Last night, after LifeScience, Jenny and I had ended up at a pizza joint for dinner. She could barely stand the thought of food, much less cooking, and just picked at her slice. She couldn’t stop imagining Sheila’s last minutes. I didn’t want to tell her the details of what I’d learned about anaphylaxis.

  Sheila probably first felt it as a tingle in her teeth, an itch on the roof of her mouth. Not suspecting food caused it, she might have blamed it on the cat. As the antigen was absorbed into her stomach, Sheila’s immune system would have misidentified it as a threat. Mast cells were dispatched from various locations in her body, in search of the antigen. Histamine exploded like grenades out of the mast cells as they degranulated. Her stomach cramped. Capillaries enlarged and filled with fluid, which leaked into other tissues. Her gut, throat, hands, and feet swelled. Her skin started to feel hot and prickly. Welts spread over it. Her blood pressure dropped and she became dizzy from the onset of hypotensive shock. By now she must have known what was happening. A sense of doom overcame her. She tried the adrenaline injection in the bathroom, or maybe in her car. It should have relieved the other dangerous effect of the histamine, which was to cause her muscles to constrict, especially muscles in her bronchial tubes. But the solution was spoiled. Slowly her breathing apparatus closed up. She fought for oxygen. It could get neither in nor out. She suffocated with two hyperinflated lungs, like balloons full of air.

  I got off 280 at San Jose Avenue and went straight to Rita’s. She lived in a backyard bungal
ow, built around 1910, in the Mission. She’d bought it in the early nineties, when prices were low. Low for San Francisco, that is: at the time, her down payment seemed a small fortune. Rita had been smart in all the ways I hadn’t. She’d stuck with filmmaking. A steady income from industrials had allowed her to make one independent documentary and begin research for a second.

  Rita arched her brows as soon as I entered the house. The living room was an obstacle course of film gear. I left my camera there and we went into the kitchen, a large room with windows on two walls. A breakfast table sat in the middle. A couch was in the corner. I dropped into it and Rita stuck a cup of coffee in my hand.

  “Two nights in a row with Jenny,” Rita said. “I smell a matrimonial mishap.” Her bright, throaty voice undercut itself with a low current of irony.

  I frowned. “I haven’t told you the reason yet.”

  I related the whole Sheila story. Rita’s expression sobered. “I can see why Jenny’s upset,” she said. “But I don’t see why she feels responsible. She took all the right precautions.”

  “The doctor was sure it was something Sheila ate. The reaction comes on pretty fast. Where else would the toxin have come from but dinner?”

  “Something in her car?”

  I shook my head. “Sheila was careful.”

  Rita gave a sympathetic shrug. “Just one of those terrible, inexplicable things, I guess. You may never know the real cause.”

  I looked at her without answering. She was nearly my height, with light sandstone hair that fell to her shoulders in waves. Her round face and fine features reminded me of a Botticelli painting. We had been a couple for two years, but that seemed ages ago, before the Internet bubble swelled big enough to separate us. While I got sucked into it, she stuck with film. We’d been a good team. I could shoot and she could direct, or vice-versa. On the kind of films I shot now—documentaries, industrials, independent narrative, most with small crews—half the directors didn’t know how to compose a frame. Rita knew cinematography. We agreed about the process, and I didn’t have to put up a fight to make the picture look good.

  We sipped coffee for a minute and stared out the window. Her little house was set back from the street. A neighbor was hanging laundry on the line that stretched from her porch to Rita’s roof.

  Rita got up and tossed a script into my lap. She’d written it with someone from Kumar’s marketing department. The first shoot would last five days, all next week. We began to plot out each day’s work, each setup, each piece of gear. This afternoon I’d go and rent the specialized equipment we’d need.

  It was a bioinformatics industrial, meant to show off the company’s tech to the stockholders. There’d be lots of shots of computer screens. Not much challenge, except to use Clearscan to make sure no bars went rolling up the screen. We also came up with ideas for showing some of the micro world that underlay all that computation. That would be more interesting to shoot.

  “We can get inside with the snorkel lens we used on our last microchip job,” I said. “Put a one-and-a-half-inch probe lens on it, use a ninety-degree rotating periscope to get different angles on the circuitry. They don’t want to use film, do they?”

  “No, HD. Everyone’s on a budget these days.”

  “I did some establishing shots of the building on Wednesday.” That reminded me of the parking lot. “Hey, Gregory hasn’t bothered you again, has he?”

  Rita rolled her eyes. “Only six times yesterday. He doesn’t leave messages, but I see his number on caller ID.”

  “I told him to lay off. You want to see what he looks like? I’ve got the tape in my camera bag. You’re not going to believe this guy.”

  “Not necessary. I won’t be working with him.”

  “I got footage of Sheila, too. She was in the same parking lot. The camera spooked her. I wonder what she was up to.”

  “You said she worked in biotech. People in the industry know each other, right? Maybe her company was doing business with Kumar.”

  “Why would she hide, though? There are so many weird things going on. The missing hard drive. Mr. Alpha Male at LifeScience. Why did he want Sheila’s journal? And Fay, stealing it in the first place.”

  Rita tsked. “Those are the kind of friends Jenny has.”

  “Come on now, you can blame Jenny for a lot of things, but not what happened to Sheila.”

  “Well, what’s in Sheila’s diary?”

  “I don’t know yet. I opened it last night, but…” It had been bad enough to see Sheila laid out in the morgue; I hadn’t been ready to see her heart laid bare. The journal had gone into my glove compartment this morning. “I’ll read it tonight. See what’s in there about her allergies. LifeScience. Fay.”

  Rita’s green eyes held me for several long seconds. They were aloof, like an oracle. “Why are you getting so caught up in this?”

  “You know me, Rita. I like to get to the bottom of things.”

  She gave me a scolding smile. “The curious cat. Always chasing after things he can’t quite catch. Pretty soon one of those things will jump up and bite you.”

  “I bite back, don’t forget.”

  “Yes. One of the few men whose bite is worse than his bark.” She smiled.

  “Thanks for the upgrade to dog status. But look, I was dragged into this. I’m the one who identified the body. Jenny may get blamed for her death. And Sheila was—I don’t know, something just clicked. You don’t often meet people like her. You would have liked her, Rita.”

  “I’m sorry, Bill. I’m sorry she died.”

  “The guy at LifeScience was such a prick about it. He’s covering something, I’m sure. It pisses me off, you know? The things people get away with.”

  Rita slowly exhaled. “Nothing surprises me anymore. I’ve been doing a lot of work in biotech lately. I see what’s going on. The money osmosed to it after VCs came to their senses about the Net rush. Sequencing the human genome was supposed to open a new gold mine. But it’s an industry like any other. A young one. Only a handful of these companies show any profit right now. Most of them are hot air, or years from a return on investment. Think of all the money that went into the dot-bombs: the startup costs of a biotech company are even greater.”

  “At least biotech makes an actual product.”

  “The lead time to results still can be long. And the shenanigans of the Web run-up are going on in biotech, too, with higher stakes in some cases. So, yes, there could be shenanigans at LifeScience, but they’re probably nothing more than the usual.”

  “Except Sheila’s dead.”

  “She had a medical condition. What, you think someone tried to kill her? Bad business strategy.”

  “Only if you get caught. And not if she was screwing up someone’s plans while she was alive.”

  Rita leaned over and gave me a little punch on my bicep. “It’s Jenny, isn’t it? You’re sweet to be so concerned. You’re taking good care of her. Just don’t let her run your whole life.”

  “Jenny is completely upset. She doesn’t scheme nearly as much as you think she does. But this is as much for me as for Jenny.”

  Rita sat back. “I’ve seen it a thousand times,” she said, nodding in the wise, wry way she had. “Death does it to people. It brings them together—or it splits them apart. One of the two. Rarely in between.”

  She tilted her chin up and added, “You’ve been on the fence about Jenny. Mark my words, you’re going to fall one way or another before this is all over.”

  8

  After I’d rented the film gear, I had just enough time to drop in at Dr. Jill Nikano’s office. It was in the Sunset district, near Golden Gate Park and the University of California Medical Center. The nurse at the front desk was just putting on her coat to leave. I asked if Dr. Nikano was in her office. Yes, but she was done seeing patients for the day. I said it was a personal matter. The nurse buzzed her and then pointed me down a hallway.

  The doctor waited outside her door with her arms folded. She was
a sturdy woman with veins of gray in her short hair. A pair of trapezoidal glasses sat on her nose like a piece of furniture. Telling her I was a friend of Sheila’s got me invited into the doctor’s office.

  “I got a call from Dr. Curran at the hospital this morning,” Dr. Nikano said, sitting at a cluttered desk. Behind her was an image of lungs blossoming with bronchioles. “I feel terrible about Sheila. Made me wonder if I’d missed something at her last visit.”

  “That’s just it. It’s so rare for this to happen, isn’t it?”

  “Yes and no…” She hesitated. “A study was done a few years ago that found elevated levels of mast cell tryptase in a significant number of unexplained deaths. It may happen more frequently than we think.”

  “Well, I want to find out what caused such a severe reaction.”

  “The spoiled epinephrine didn’t help. That surprised the jelly out of me. Sheila was as prepared as any patient I’ve known.”

  “Could she really have been taken down by a little speck of shellfish?”

  “The long answer is that a number of scenarios could have brought on the anaphylactic reaction. People have severe allergies to nuts, milk, eggs, latex, even sperm. There’s a disease called mastocytosis in which your body can induce the reaction on its own. But Sheila didn’t have it, nor any of these allergies. So the short answer is, yes. A little bit of crustacean could be responsible.”

  I shook my head. “How can that happen?”

  “Don’t underestimate the speck. It triggers the whole arsenal of the immune system, a powerful thing. With allergic rhinitis, the allergen is pollen or dust and the reaction localized to the nasal cavity. In food allergy, it’s usually a protein. The reaction is far more extreme when sensitivity has developed in the intestinal tract. There are several crustacean proteins people are allergic to, some of which allow the animal to survive in cold water. Sheila’s immune system mistook them for a barbarian horde. We don’t know why, exactly. Some doctors theorize our society has become too clean. Our immune system doesn’t have as many germs to fight, so it turns its weapons on innocent allergens—or our own cells, in the case of autoimmune disease. People in developing countries have a lower rate of allergy and asthma, presumably because their histamines and eosinophils are kept busy with other things.”