the Devil's Workshop (1999) (3 page)

"Those cells are resistant to both macrophage M-tropic and T-cell line..."

Again, there was a pounding at the door.

"Goddammit," Courtney Smith said, coming up out of her chair, charging the door like an NFL lineman, and yanking it open. "I said we're in Quals!"

"This is an emergency," the Assistant Professor said, pointing to the tear-stained girl beside him. "She needs to talk to Ms. Richardson."

Joanne moved into the office. She had stopped crying, but when she looked at Stacy, she choked slightly. "Max is dead," she blurted.

"What?" Stacy said, her voice too loud.

"He's dead. I just got the call. They couldn't reach you, so they called me."

"How?" Stacy's mind was jumbled. Already a wave of nausea had hit the pit of her stomach.

"They ... the doctor said he shot himself."

"He what... ?" Stacy's mind was reeling. She looked over at Wendell Kinney, who had his bushy leonine head in his hands. Then she happened to glance at Art Hickman, who had a total lack of expression on his face, as if his conflicting emotions over this news allowed him no reaction. His hands, she noticed, were spread in front of him, pushing against the desk, almost as if he were trying to get away.

"Suicide?" Stacy said, and now she started to feel a mixture of emotions too complex to even describe. There was fear and disbelief, terror, anger... loss. Then came the tears.

Joanne moved to her and put her arms around her sister-in-law. They stood there in the room full of microbiology professors and held on to each other.

"Are you sure? You're sure it was ... real... not some horrible practical..." Stacy couldn't finish.

"I called back. I talked to a Colonel Laurence Chittick at Fort
Detrick. He said... Max went into the backyard late last night. He sat on a kitchen chair and stuck a shotgun in his mouth and ..." Now it was Joanne who couldn't finish.

Wendell Kinney got to his feet. He put an arm around Stacy. "Obviously," he said to the other doctors in the room, "we're postponing this exam."

They all nodded. Their faces were anguished. Except for Art, everybody had loved Max Richardson.

"Let's go to my office," Wendell said, and he led the two women out of Dr. Smith's office and down the hall.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and they were back in Max and Stacy's apartment on Alameda Boulevard, just off the University campus. It was a small, cluttered flat in a bad section of Los Angeles. USC was located in a high-crime area and living off campus was a calculated risk. The walls of the apartment were decorated with the modern art that Max liked to collect: Chagall and Picasso prints that only cost forty dollars apiece, but which Max had put in expensive frames to give the illusion of the real thing. He once told her if he ever won the Nobel he would blow a hundred grand and buy a small original. Their two offices were a testament to their different personalities. Max's was in the spare bedroom and was pin neat. Stacy had taken over the pantry and it looked like ground zero at a paper-shredding factory.

Everywhere she glanced she could see her dead husband... hear his voice or remember some funny, endearing moment. Augie, the Raccoon, sat in ceramic goofiness on a living-room shelf. Augie was a truly monstrous piece of pottery that Max had bought for her when she was pissed off about a paper she'd been assigned to write on new rabies strains in raccoons. "It's stupid science," she'd told him. Augie was up on his hindquarters, his little ceramic paws outstretched, as if he were soliciting a hug. Max bought hi
m a
t a student's garage sale and named him Augie, after the Rabies Augmentation Study in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which was the jumping-off point for her paper. He had placed Augie on her desk one evening and said, "You're saving this adorable little guy with your 'stupid science.' Don't give up on the masked rodent."

She had gotten an A on the paper, which had speculated on the viability of using targeted bait to deliver different antivirus liquids into different species of raccoons in the wild. Her paper was published in Animal Science Magazine. "Whoopee," she'd said sarcastically, when she got the magazine's acceptance letter and a check for five hundred dollars. But she'd been ashamed of herself and embarrassed that Max had been so right. No science was stupid science if it pushed back a new boundary or asked a new question. All of it had value if it added to the information pool.

"He didn't commit suicide," Stacy said three or four times in the last hour, hanging on to it, as if that one possible inaccuracy would make the whole thing a lie.

"But they said he shot--"

"I don't give a shit what they said, Joanne," she interrupted, "he didn't commit suicide. I talked to him last night till almost one A
. M
. He was not fucking depressed!" Anger was now taking center stage inside her. Her lover and mentor had been snatched from her at some godforsaken military lab in Maryland, and that fact was now untenable and totally unacceptable.

Wendell sat in the living room, looking at the two distraught women. Joanne was still tearing up, but Stacy, after crying for an hour, had given in to her natural instinct, which was to come out swinging. She had replaced the tears with anger and a stubborn, iron-willed determination. Wendell wasn't an expert on grieving, but he knew that the first stage was denial. This insistence on Stacy's part that Max had not committed suicide sounded like a form of denial to him, but he wasn't quite sure how to deal with it.

"Look, Stace," he said softly, "I think we need to consider--"

"You were his friend, Wendell," she interrupted, her eyes glinting anger. "Do you honestly believe he blew his head off with a shotgun? Do you? It's bullshit!" She shook her head. "Maybe it wasn't even him." She looked at Joanne. "I mean, if his head was blown off, maybe they just think it was him, but it was somebody else."

"Stacy, I think the doctors at Fort Detrick wouldn't make that kind of mistake," Wendell said.

"Max told me last night that he didn't belong there. He said, 'I don't think they want me either.' " She looked up at Wendell.

"That could mean anything. Maybe they didn't accept some of his science. Or maybe he was just having a bad day."

"Bad day? Yeah, sure, that's gotta be it," she said, biting the words off one at a time.

She stood and moved into her bedroom, past the wall-mounted punching bag. Max had painted a frown face on the bag, and on each stitched section he had written a word: INFERENCE
-
CONCLUSION--ILLATION--JUDGMENT, the four pillars of deductive reason. When Max was stumped on some science problem, he'd stand in front of the bag and fire away. He had been on the boxing team at Stanford and could really get the bag going in a steady rhythm, his athletic body shining with sweat, while working on some brain-stumping hypothesis.

Stacy started throwing things in an overnight case, not even choosing outfits. It was just the act of packing, the feeling of doing something, that she needed.

Joanne and Wendell stood at the door, watching her flurry of activity.

"You're going to Fort Detrick?" Wendell asked.

"Yes," she said through clenched teeth, her emotions still coming in waves. Her anger could, in a matter of seconds, recede and be overtaken by grief so overpowering that it almost buckled her. She was trying desperately not to give in to it. Max was gone. A
fact that was impossible for her to fully grasp. He had been her soul mate, her perfect fit. She would never replace him.

"You're going to go back there and accuse those people of misidentifying the body?" Wendell asked. His voice was gentle, sympathetic. "You think that's a good idea?"

"Wendell, someone has to claim Max's body. Someone has to bring him back for burial. That's my job. I'm his wife," she challenged. "And while I'm at it, I'm gonna ask a few bloody goddamn questions about why a guy who had no history of depression, no overriding negative perceptions on either his life or career, after just two months at fucking Fort Detrick, suddenly goes out into his backyard, sits on a kitchen chair, and... Oh God...." She shuddered like a spaniel coming out of the water. She shook herself, throwing her hair back, then bit her lip and held on until the moment passed. Then she straightened her shoulders. "Well, I don't buy it!" She slammed her suitcase shut without remembering to put in her toiletries.

"I'm going with you," Joanne said.

"I can do it, honey ... really."

"He was my big brother. I wanna go with you. I need to go with you."

"I'll book us a flight."

"This is not smart," Wendell said. "The doctors at the Fort can make arrangements to ship Max back here."

"I'm sure they can," Stacy said, spitting the words out like fruit seeds, "but I'm not going to give 'em the chance."

She moved into the pantry, booted up her computer, used her search engine to get to "Airlines," then to "Travel Schedules." She found a nine-p
. M
. Delta flight that arrived at five A
. M
. at Dulles Airport in Virginia, which was forty miles from Fort Detrick. She accessed reservations, booked two seats for that evening, typed in her credit card number, and downloaded her confirmation. Then she went into the bathroom, closed the door, sat on the toilet, and stared at herself in the mirror.

She looked drawn and frightened. She studied her eyes and mouth. The reflection didn't look like her. It was a new mask, as if her face had melted, then stretched and dried differently in the heat from this disaster. When the anger left her, she felt the hopeless grief. "Max... Max," she said, wailing at her reflection, "why did you leave me?"

Wendell knocked on the door and called to her.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," she choked out bravely.

Why do people do that? she wondered. A stupid question followed by a lie.

Ten minutes later, she steeled herself again, then got up off the toilet and moved back into the bedroom, looking at her watch, then at Joanne.

"We'd better hurry if we're going to get all the way to your house, get you packed and back to the airport by eight."

Joanne got up off the bed and they all left the bedroom. Stacy was the last to exit, and she paused for a minute in front of the punching bag. She could picture Max in his pajama bottoms in front of the bag, smiling. "If I hit this thing hard enough everything seems to make sense
,"
he had once told her. So Stacy put down her suitcase and faced the bag. "I'm gonna go kick us some ass, baby," she whispered to his memory. Then she hit the bag as hard as she could.

Chapter
2

The cab turned off Military Road, past a huge monument sign that read:

FORT DETRICK A COMMUNITY OF EXCELLENCE

The letters were electrified, and the monument sat on a manicured front lawn by the stone-pillared main gate like a misplaced theater marquee. Three flags whipped in a cold April breeze. The American flag stood tallest in the middle; next to it the flag of Fort Detrick and the state flag of Maryland. The main post sat on four hundred acres at the corner of a twelve-hundred-acre government site. The taxi stopped at the gate while a uniformed Marine M
. P
. with a white helmet and webbed pistol belt told them that Colonel Chittick was officed in Building 810, one block east of Doughton Drive. He handed the driver a map and let them pass.

The buildings that made up the old section of the Fort were four-story dark brick structures that had been originally built in th
e l
ate forties. They were blocky and rectangular with no design significance. Over the years as the Fort expanded, a startling variety of architectural styles had surfaced: boxy stucco buildings from the fifties, concrete tilt-ups popular in the sixties, followed lately by the steel and glass of the eighties and nineties. Fort Detrick was a huge, grassy, campus-like facility with thousands of personnel, both military and civilian. Max had told her that most of the Fort had been demilitarized in the seventies, when President Nixon had shut down the U
. S
. bio-weapons program. The Army still maintained a defense bio-research facility that was under strict military controls. There were officers, both men and women, in every uniform of the U
. S
. Armed Services moving briskly along the cement walkways. There were an equal number of people in white lab coats.

The taxi pulled up in front of Building 810, which was one of the old brick-faced structures. Joanne and Stacy got their bags out of the trunk.

"Thanks," Stacy said, paying the driver, who promptly drove off. She was surprisingly calm, in what she had come to realize was one of her "disconnect" stages. During a disconnect, her mind could deal with Max's death as an abstract fact, as something that had simply happened: Max is gone. I loved Max. He was my reason for being. I'll deal with it. I'm functioning. In this state, these were just thoughts, not devastating downdrafts that threatened to blow her against untenable realities. During her disconnects, she was strangely detached from all of it. Then, just as suddenly, her mind would swell with anguish and those same concepts would threaten to drive her to her knees.

She suspected her disconnects were part of the protective mechanism built deep in her psyche that allowed her to deal with only so much grief at one interval. Then she would click into abstract mode, where, for a few minutes or an hour, she was able to break out of the black and get a few breaths of air before she would be pulled down again.