Death Match

FORTY-ONE

Lash walked into the Rio a few minutes after four. The walls were covered in gilt wallpaper, and the incandescent lights and resin-colored banquettes gave the diner a hazy, golden glow. He felt like an insect surrounded by amber.

For a moment, he thought he’d arrived first. But then he caught sight of Tara, sitting at a booth in the rear of the restaurant. He stepped forward and slid into the seat across from her.

A waitress approached; Lash ordered a coffee, waited until she walked away. Then he turned back. “Tara. Thanks for coming.”

Tara nodded.

“Did you talk to that doctor? Moffett?”

Tara nodded again.

“What did he say?”

“He was following instructions from an internal scrip.”

“What does that mean?”

“Medication regimen, based on the findings of an earlier examination.”

“In other words, he was following some other in-house doctor’s orders.”

“Yes.”

“Did he say whose orders?”

“I didn’t ask him that.”

“How easy would it be to fake such orders?”

Tara hesitated. “I’m sorry?”

“Everything at Eden is automated. You get a piece of paper, telling you to do something. Couldn’t somebody type false medical orders into the computer system?”

When Tara did not reply, Lash leaned a little closer. “I don’t have all the answers yet. But I have enough to know it’s not only the remaining supercouples who are in danger. We’re in danger, too.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody — somebody inside Eden — has set these women up to kill themselves and murder their husbands.”

Tara began to speak, but Lash quickly held up a suppressing hand. “No. Let me talk first, please. You’re not going to believe it unless I give you a little background.”

Tara relaxed, but only slightly. She was looking at him with shock, even apprehension. Lash glanced toward a nearby mirror and caught a glimpse of himself: haggard, hair askew, tired eyes animated with nervous energy. If he was her, he’d be apprehensive, too.

The waitress returned with his coffee, and Lash took a sip. “That prescription of Lindsay Thorpe’s, for one milligram of scolipane? It was the clue I needed. I spent the afternoon tracking down more information. Did Dr. Moffett tell you what scolipane is normally prescribed for?”

Tara shook her head.

“It’s a muscle relaxant. It works on the area of the brain that controls muscle spasms. Sports medicine doctors use it to treat strains. You say Dr. Moffett was following through on treatment prescribed in an earlier examination. But Tara, what earlier examination could have predicted Lindsay Thorpe would strain a muscle?”

“Then scolipane must be used to treat something else.”

“You’re more right than you know. Scolipane was originally intended to treat something else. But that something else was kept a close secret, locked up in drug development databases.”

He paused. “Ever see a TV ad for what sounds like a miracle drug? No more allergies, maybe. Or your high cholesterol, suddenly gone. And then all the side effects go scrolling across the screen… and it’s almost enough to make you swear off medicine forever. Those are just the drugs that make it past clinical trials. Many others never make it.”

He glanced across the table, but Tara’s expression remained unreadable.

“Okay. Let’s back up. Most aspects of personality are the result of genes controlling neurotransmitters in the brain. That includes undesirable traits like anxiety and depression. So we create drugs to deal with them. Things like SSNRIs, which suppress the reuptake of serotonin. But there are lots of serotonin receptors in the brain. How can you aim a drug at all the receptors at once?”

He took another sip of coffee. “So drug companies have been looking for other solutions. Ways they could alter brain chemistry to achieve better results. Sometimes they venture deep into unknown territory. Such as the neuropeptide known as ‘Substance P.’ ”

“Substance P,” Tara repeated.

“I hadn’t heard of it either, until this afternoon. It’s very mysterious: nobody knows exactly why it’s in the brain, or what its purpose is. But we do know the kind of things that cause it to be released. Acute physical pain. High levels of stress. It’s been closely implicated with severe depression, sudden suicide.”

He leaned closer. “At least one drug company became interested in Substance P. They decided if they could develop a pharmaceutical agent to ‘hit’ Substance P, to block its receptor, maybe they could make a whole lot of depressed people happy again. That drug company was PharmGen. Eden’s parent.”

“Not anymore. Eden is independent now.”

“PharmGen developed a new anti-psychotic drug that acted against Substance P. It had some rough going early on — red flags appeared during toxicology testing — and the drug was remodified. Four years ago, it was finally ready for group testing. The testing was done in Poland, which was common practice. Maybe ten thousand people were involved, all told. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the drug worked beautifully. And it wasn’t limited to single indicators: schizoids, borderlines, chronic depressives, all seemed to benefit.”

He sipped his coffee. “But there was a problem: that other one percent. If a person without mental illness took the drug — specifically, a person with high levels of serum copper in their blood — terrible side effects resulted. Depression, paranoia, homicidal rage. There were mass instances of suicide, enough to skew the suicide statistics for the entire country that year.”

He glanced across the table to gauge the effect. But Tara’s expression remained guarded.

“The drug was withdrawn from testing. But it emerged late the following year, in a drastically lowered dosage, reformulated for another purpose: a muscle relaxant.”

Disbelief returned to Tara’s face. “Scolipane?”

“One-milligram tablets. The original fifty-milligram formulation is also available, but prescribed only in very rare circumstances, under close observation.” He pushed his cup aside. “Remember that call I made just before leaving your office? That was to a friend of mine in the Phoenix field office. I asked him to send somebody to the Thorpes’ house, check on their meds. Lindsay’s prescription for scolipane was on the night table beside her bed. But the dosage had been increased from one to fifty milligrams. In capsule form, she didn’t notice the difference.”

Tara frowned.

“Somebody changed her dosage. Somebody who knew about the side effects of scolipane in its original formulation. Somebody who knew scolipane wouldn’t set off any alarms in the autopsy blood work. Somebody who also knew — probably from her application form — that Lindsay Thorpe was taking an antihistamine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I first began investigating the deaths, I had a talk with Lindsay’s father. He mentioned she had dermatographia. It’s a benign but irritating skin condition that causes itchiness. The recommended treatment is a histamine antagonist. Over time, chronic users of such drugs can develop high-copper histapenia — low levels of histamine in the blood, causing an accumulation of copper.”

Lash was increasingly alarmed by her continued disbelief. “Don’t you understand? When Lindsay Thorpe took that huge dose of scolipane, coupled with her high blood copper, she unwittingly re-created—exactly—the conditions that caused such high suicide in the initial drug trials. Think of the terrible mental ordeal she must have gone through, made all the worse for being sudden, inexplicable. Hostile voices in her head. Acts of psychotic deviance: she found herself playing music she detested on the stereo. Lindsay Thorpe hated opera, you see, but she was listening to opera when she died. All this would be followed by black despair, overwhelming homicidal and suicidal urgings…” He paused. “She loved her husband dearly. But the impulses were irresistible. Still, I think she carried them through with as much dignity, as little pain, as possible.”

When she said nothing, he went on. “I know what you’re thinking. Why did she kill her husband? She didn’t want to. But she had to. Yet even as the flood of brain chemicals drove her half mad, her love for Lewis Thorpe remained. And how do you kill somebody you love? As painlessly as possible. And you would go together. That’s why the deaths happened at night: Lindsay could slip a dry cleaning bag over the head of her sleeping husband before slipping one over her own. She probably waited for him to fall asleep in front of the TV. Same with Karen Wilner. She was a librarian, she would have access to scalpels in the book repair lab. A fresh scalpel is so sharp you wouldn’t even feel it opening your vein — not if you were asleep, anyway. But I’ll bet she sliced her own wrist more hesitantly, that’s why it took her longer to die.”

“What about the baby?” Tara murmured. “The Thorpes’ child?”

“You mean, why did she survive? I don’t know the morphology of Substance P well enough to speculate. Perhaps the mother-child bond is too elemental, too primitive, to be broken in such a way.”

Now he reached across the table, took Tara’s hand. “Lindsay may have killed herself and her husband. But this isn’t about that. It’s about first-degree murder. Somebody inside Eden knew exactly how to make Lindsay Thorpe self-destruct. Somebody knew her medical background, knew about the early tests on scolipane, knew how to create that precise chemical cocktail within her blood. And that somebody had the power to fake a paper trail, doctor her medical orders, even modify her prescription. You said it yourself: it has to be somebody with world-class access to your systems.”

His grip tightened on her hand. “I think you know where this is leading. It’s the answer, the only possible answer. And you have to be strong. Because this person must be stopped. He got to Karen Wilner the same way. He’s singling out the women, making them self-destruct. In just two days, the third couple will—”

He stopped abruptly. Tara was no longer listening. Her expression had shifted from his face to somewhere else: somewhere over his shoulder.

He turned. Edwin Mauchly was approaching from the front of the diner, surrounded by half a dozen other men. Lash did not recognize them, but he knew they must be Eden security.

Quickly, Tara pulled her hand from his.

Lash, stunned, was slow to react. Within a moment the table was surrounded, the exits blocked.

“Dr. Lash,” Mauchly said. “If you’ll come with us, please?”

As comprehension broke over him he rose instinctively, ready for flight. One of the guards placed a hand on his shoulder and, gently but irresistibly, guided him back into the seat.

“You’ll find things a lot less painful if you cooperate, sir,” the security officer said.

Vaguely, Lash was aware Tara had slipped out of the booth and was now standing behind Mauchly.

A few seconds ticked by. They seemed very long. Lash glanced around the diner. A few faces were turned in his direction, watching with mild curiosity. Then he looked up at the surrounding guards. And then he nodded and — much more slowly — stood. The security staff closed around him, and he felt himself propelled forward.

Mauchly was far ahead now, already leaving the restaurant. One arm was draped protectively around Tara’s shoulders. “I’m sorry you had to be put through this,” Lash heard him say. “But it’s all over. You’re safe.” Then the door closed behind them, the sound cut off, and the two melted into the gathering darkness of Fifty-fourth Street.

Tara vanished without looking back.