Fatal Reaction

broken one with a splint.
    Before I would let him drive me to the emergency room, I insisted we go back upstairs to my office so that I could put the draft of the agreement on Stephen’s desk where I could be sure he’d see it in the morning. I tried not to get too much blood on it. Then I paged Claudia to have her meet us in the emergency room. I insisted we drive to Hyde Park instead of going to some doc-in-the-box suburban hospital. On the way I explained to him about Michelle.
    “You see, Michelle has only ever wanted one thing and that is to be famous in her field, which is X-ray crystallography. And I’ve got to hand it to whoever steered her into crystallography in the first place—they knew what they were doing. It was just perfect for someone like her. Obsessed, driven, single-minded, a highly intelligent loner. The problem is that success in crystallography is as much about luck as it is about science. A good crystallographer can go his or her entire career without solving the structure of a really important molecule. So far, Michelle had had her chance at solving three of them, and every time, circumstances kept her from her prize. Straight out of graduate school she’d worked in a lab that was destroyed by a fire set by a disgruntled employee, and two years’ work was lost. After that she went to work on one of a pair of enzymes related to the function of aspirin, and while she did get some attention for successfully solving the structure, it turns out the other enzyme is the one that mattered.
    “Based on her success with that, Stephen hired her to work on the company’s integrase project—that was an experimental AIDS drug they were working on—but they spent so much time trying to sell a deal to fund the project to a Japanese company called Okuda that another pharmaceutical company beat them to the structure.”
    “Is that why she killed Danny? Because she didn’t want this deal you’re working on with the Japanese to go through?”
    “Yes. You see, she didn’t care if Azor ever turned ZK-501 into a drug. She didn’t care if the company went bankrupt. Her interest has always been in purely academic research. All she wanted was to solve the structure of ZKBP so that she could return to academia wrapped in glory. She was afraid the company would get involved in another lengthy negotiation. She was desperate to prevent what had happened with Okuda from happening to her again.”
    “Desperate enough to kill someone?”
    “They all told me, every one of them, Borland, Remminger, even Stephen. I just wouldn’t listen.”
    “What did they tell you?”
    “In science no one cares how you get there, only that you get there first. Besides, killing Danny was so easy. He had come to her to ask about new AIDS drugs—she was the logical person to confide in. Not only did she have the expertise, but they were natural allies against Childress. All she had to do when he came home euphoric about the Japanese was to convince him to try some new treatment and inject him with PAF. I’m sure that when he started vomiting up blood it gave her a nasty surprise. It was obviously a struggle, but she had the strength and the presence of mind to keep him from getting help.
    “I should have realized it was a woman from the way she managed to clean up the kitchen. I’m sure it never occurred to her that they’d look inside the drain for traces of blood. Other than that, she handled herself perfectly, even going so far as to steal the key to the guards’ room from the security desk at Azor and dispose of the videotape showing her coming into the building with the athletic bag containing the hypodermic, the syringe, and her bloody clothes.”
    “Do you think they’re her fingerprints on the glass that was on the sink in Danny’s apartment?”
    “Yes, I do. I think that was her one mistake, at least with Danny’s murder. She made a couple more with Childress.”
    “Such as?”
    “Such as mixing her ID card up with his. She had to have it in order to make it look like he’d left the building, but obviously, in her hurry to get rid of the evidence, she switched the two. The names are so similar, and both of them are all covered up with radiation tags, you can see how it would be easy to do.”
    “I thought Borland said he checked the inside of the cold room before he taped it shut.”
    “He did. But he had Michelle check it after him. All she had to do was ask Childress to come into the cold room