An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Read online

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  An Eye for Murder

  Martin Sherwood

  Copyright © 2020 Martin Sherwood

  All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.

  Contact: [email protected]

  Contents

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  PART TWO

  61

  62

  63

  Author’s Note

  Scientific Background of the Book & Thank Yous

  Message from the Author

  ◆

  Seneca Park, Louisville, Kentucky

  The skies darkened suddenly, and forks of lightning flickered like a branching map of brain neurons.

  It was a frightening sight, but she had to be brave. She needed to find out what had happened to Belle, she reminded herself as she left her heated room with its comfortable bed behind her at the Blue Meadows nursing home and made her way deep into the park. She was utterly alone.

  ***

  Three times a day the medicine cart was drawn into the center of the corridor. There, opposite the old TV set, the nurse in charge would sort the stickers with the names of the medications, arranging them in three rows, in front of miniscule paper cups containing medications in multiple forms and colors—capsules, packets, minced tablets, and syrups.

  Administering the drugs wasn’t an easy job; it required a great deal of patience. It was essential to ensure that Mrs. Shapiro didn’t choke on her seven pills, that Reverend Williams swallowed the entire dose of his syrup, and that Mrs. Bertha Zucker, the old lady from Room 22, wouldn’t spit the pills behind her bed.

  Recently, new eyedrops had been added to the drug list. Dispensed from a special bottle covered in silver foil, the new medication had attracted considerable attention but was administered only to a chosen few. A few days after the drops had first appeared, Joseph-Arthur had whispered to Bertha on the balcony that it was an experimental new cataract treatment, which was why the nurses made meticulous notes in the medication log hanging on the side of the medicine cart each time the drops were administered.

  “You should try it, too,” Belle had suggested. “They really are miraculous.” After a slight hesitation Belle pinched her elbow. “Come to tango tonight.”

  But Bertha’s dancing days were over. Lately, she made more use of the wheelchair than ever. And, to her chagrin, she’d had to give up her favorite seat—in the last row behind the pillar in the rec hall—because of her failing eyesight.

  Then, over the last three weeks, they had begun to give Bertha the new eyedrops as well.

  The very first doses were administered by the doctor herself. “Bertha, darling,” said the woman in white, approaching the old lady’s lids with the small bottle and sponges, “with gorgeous eyes like yours, all the boys will be standing in line with bouquets and perfume.”

  Boys? What boys? There were only two men left inside this cuckoo’s nest—Reverend Williams, an old man of God with a tormented expression, and Joseph-Arthur, a poet who spent all his remaining days hallucinating.

  Every Wednesday, the staff played tango music from Bertha’s personal collection on the gramophone that stood in the recreation hall. But tonight Bertha had felt too weak to attend, and without Belle’s presence, she wasn’t in the mood to listen to the tunes she knew by heart.

  Yesterday Bertha had received a gift—a giant philodendron. She’d moved it around the room, first to the curtains, then further away, to the blinds. She had shoved the poor plant around till she was finally satisfied, and her efforts had left her completely exhausted. She’d slept well into the night, to be awoken only by loud voices from the corridor—again.

  Now, lost in the park, having escaped from Blue Meadows, the music still echoed inside her skull, exploding within her bones. It pressed excruciatingly behind her eyeballs, making them feel as if they might burst from their sockets.

  She found herself outside, among rows of trees. She knew she had no choice but to keep running, as far as her fragile limbs would carry her. When she was young, she had been an excellent athlete—short sprints had been her specialty. But now she had frequent sciatic attacks, like a pressure belt of electric currents radiating down toward those failing legs, pulling them to the ground.

  She stopped at the top of the hill, her breath crackling. A twitch stung under her ribcage and metallic saliva wandered down her throat. Her ankles bled from fresh scratches.

  She soon realized she had taken the wrong path. She stood at the junction—a shabby slipper on one foot, the other clutched firmly in her hand.

  Bertha didn’t remember how she’d arrived there, let alone where she was heading. Lost in the joggers’ labyrinth, she was lucky to find a bench. As she collapsed onto it in despair, her spectacles fell off her nose.

  She examined a laceration above her right knee. It was tender and swollen. Despite the pain when she bent the knee, she slowly knelt behind the bench in search of her glasses, but all she managed to find was ashes and dried leaves. She kept raking the ground, splintering a fingernail.

  The first drops of rain sprayed the air with a fresh mist. Without her glasses, the view was blurred. Although the new eyedrops had improved her eyesight—she was able to read the papers again, even without her glasses—she still needed proper illumination and felt lost in the darkness of the woods.

  She scanned her surroundings in a futile effort to locate the nursing home, her room window.

  Bertha was sure she’d left the lights on.

  Since the first dreadful night, a month ago, she hadn’t been able to fall asleep in the dark. She thought about the scream, the sound of footsteps rushing through the corridor, the nurse calling the doctor, while watching with dread the monitor spikes moving further apart from each other.

  Beep… beep…… beep………… beep……………… beep

  A straight line.

  And the horrible silence that followed.

  The doctor and the nurses
noticed her, but Bertha had seen everything from behind her door. She’d peeped through the slit and seen the corpse wrapped in sheets, being hurried out almost clandestinely, and wheeled to the rear treatment room at the end of the corridor, facing the park.

  “Later, they will open that heavy door near room eleven, and straight into the ambulance,” an elegant lady had once whispered into her ear. She couldn’t recall the woman’s name.

  Near the end of the wing, between rooms eleven and fifteen, there was a heavy double door, its metal hinges rusted. It had been long forgotten and unused—but suddenly, over the last month, it had been opened four times. The last time, Bertha had heard someone say, it was to carry poor Belle through, into the ambulance and to the refrigerator in the city morgue.

  Bertha’s eyes wandered back, and after an excruciating effort she was able to find the nursing home. She saw the lights in the windows turn out one by one, until only the bluish glow from the computer at the nurses’ station remained.

  Then she saw something that would stay forever in her memory.

  From a distance, a white coat came floating toward her. An accordion played a tango in fierce crescendo, accompanied by a voice she had never heard before—a faint echo. As it faded, Belle’s familiar voice rose, calling her—not from her room, but from a long distance, apologizing for her sudden departure and abrupt farewell.

  But why had Belle died? She’d never been that sick. True, last Thanksgiving she had slipped in her tub and had to have her hip replaced. But other than that, she’d been in great shape.

  Bertha rose from the wet bench, straightened her damp gown, and started trekking her way through the scrub and back to the nursing home.

  Gary, Indiana

  The building appeared abandoned.

  It stood on a flat isthmus of land between Lake Michigan and the northern runway of the Gary-Chicago International Airport. If not for the tall electric fence and motion-sensitive pole lamps surrounding it, it could have passed for a school building. In shape, it was a single-story red brick rectangle, with a line of lattice windows and a chimney that projected from the wall furthest from the access road. The site was less than a mile from the Clark Junction rail crossing. A heaping junkyard blocked the view of the building from the boats that sailed lazily along the lake near the Gary mooring.

  There was no sign hanging on the gate or on any of the fences that surrounded the place; only a few people knew the real purpose of the building. It was the Medionetyx Pharmaceuticals animal care facility. Experiments on new candidate drugs were conducted here, away from the inquisitive eyes of animal rights activists.

  Since last June the place had been run by Jeffery Gibbons. He was in charge of ordering the animals from the vendors, rearing them up to the required weight of 3.5 kg, and monitoring their environmental conditions throughout all phases of the experiments. He handled immunizations, cleaning their cages, transferring them to the examination rooms, preparing them for anesthesia, and his favorite part—getting rid of the remains.

  Gibbons headed a team of four, but tonight he was alone—a specific request from the highest ranks. He knew that another project, critically important to the company, had ended in disaster. The Texas ophthalmologist’s eyedrops had failed miserably. The treated eye in each albino rabbit was bloodshot and the animals blinked frequently—a sign of toxicity. No one would move to advance the development of such a compound.

  At the beginning of summer the lab had been visited by Professor Lucy Efron, a renowned scientist from the University of Louisville. After spending several weeks tinkering with and tweaking the formula, she had solved the toxicity problem. The eyes treated by her formula had not become inflamed. Although Gibbons had seen her only once, and that from a distance, he remembered her dark curls and bulging eyes. The big boss had hinted that she and Medionetyx were going to be cooperating soon.

  Gibbons scanned the cages from his lab stool. In each cage, three albino rabbits scurried around restlessly. He reckoned he’d be able to stuff at least five of them into each biohazard bag.

  He reached forward and opened a cage, picked out a rabbit, and held it under the lamp. The blood vessels in the albino irises were congested. He examined the two white pupils—more evidence of total failure. But in the other rabbits, treated with the sample medicine brought by Efron, it was different. Each eye that had received her drops showed a crystal-clear pupil.

  Jeffrey Gibbons sighed. He slipped off his stool and walked to the distant metal table. Near the basin he found the small bottle containing sodium pentobarbital—the euthanasia solution.

  Twenty minutes later the cages were completely silent. Gibbons stuffed the lifeless creatures into the red bags and carried them to the incinerator.

  When he threw the last bag in, he noticed a movement. A leg twitched wildly through the plastic. Gibbons kept watching the leg until the fire consumed it and the contents of the bag became a smooth pile of ashes.

  Part One

  October—November

  1

  Laboratory Log

  Louisville, Kentucky

  My first encounter with Professor Lucy Efron was on the parquet floor of her office. She must have been an important researcher in her field; otherwise the University of Louisville wouldn’t have given her a room of her own, not to mention a room with a window.

  I wouldn’t have troubled myself to knock on the last door in the seventh-floor hallway of the medical school were it not for the latest decree by the vice dean—some faculty members would claim that it was the result of a minor stroke—according to which all first-year medical students were to get a chance to be exposed to the wonders of basic science before they descended into the clinical world of hospitals, operating theaters, and night shifts.

  Everyone is familiar with the animosity that exists between physicians (MDs) and research scientists (PhDs). The MDs soar high into the dolce vita of private practice, while the PhDs—equally brilliant minds—compete for crumbs in the shallow barrel of budgets and grants. Competition is fierce.

  Vice Dean Jules Copeland assembled us in the Doyle Auditorium for his latest dictum: four months’ rotation behind centrifuges, swan-neck bottles, tubes with rubber stoppers, magnetic mixers, and flasks exuding the stench of ammonia.

  As a result, we, the first-year medical students, came together for an emergency meeting in the ground-floor cafeteria. The goal was to survive the lab with minimal casualties on both sides. Most of my classmates chose genetics, in the hope that when the time came for practical experience, professors would not permit extensive participation due to the expense of the materials. Fifteen students went to biochemistry (“only tubes, not that bad”), an equal number elected physiology (“frog EKG at the most”), and twenty went to histology (“microscopes and slides—clean work”).

  And I, one of the dozen who chose pharmacology—the science of medication—found myself with Professor Lucy Efron, a renowned research scientist, specializing in eye diseases.

  I have a fixation with eyes.

  If I’d had psoriasis, I might have chosen to smear my body with juniper and coal tar in Professor Popovic’s dermatology lab. Had I suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, I would likely have ended up spending my four months with Professor Hoskins, who, for decades, had immersed mice in diarrhea baths as part of his search for a cure for colitis.

  But it wasn’t to be. I ended up at the ophthalmology lab.

  Milbert Greene, that’s my name; no nicknames—definitely not Bert or Mel. Always Milbert. It’s the kind of name you get when your mother is a zoologist and lepidopterist—a butterfly researcher. I was named after the tortoiseshell fly nymphalis milberti, her dissertation topic. My little sister was named Leanira, after the gorgeous Thessalia leanira.

  I graduated in the top tenth percentile of my high school class, with an embarrassingly high SAT score and even higher nearsightedness with ast
igmatism. I spent a year trekking in Nepal, and on my return to Louisville, I began lifting weights three times a week at the Students’ Athletic Club and jogging every night in Seneca Park. Now, at twenty-three, with my contact lenses and crew cut, I had morphed from a wimp to a street fighter.

  I shared a lovely apartment with Leanira in a quiet complex off Crescent Hill. Our loving parents had been abroad since the summer, on my mother’s sabbatical at the African Butterfly Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya. Leanira had taken time out from her modern art studies and visited them there.

  All things considered, I was a lucky guy—I had a reasonable past, comfortable present, and a promising future. So what, in spite of all that, was wrong with me?

  My eyes.

  I suffered from congenital myopia. When I was one month old, my mother suspected I had strabismus. Dad read every word published on “lazy eyes.” I was examined by every ophthalmologist in town, underwent exercises, and was given drops that only fogged my eyes more. In kindergarten, when all my buddies were busy smearing their faces and soiling their shoes, I sat under a tree, specs in my pocket, easy on movements, afraid of stumbling.

  So no soccer for me, no Friday night parties, no annual trip—”If you approach a cliff, God forbid what can happen if your glasses fall!” For me, only books remained. And I read everything I could lay my hands on.

  I never felt comfortable with the opposite sex. My one and only date was with a thick-spectacled person like myself.

  I waited impatiently to reach twenty, at which age I’d been told I could qualify for laser surgery. Twice I lay on the table, under the bouncing red dot, wearing the little blue paper cap.

  And twice I got cold feet.

  I never gave it a third attempt.

  Leanira was not in favor. She claimed that spectacles make me sexy—”mature, respectable,” to use her terms. Mom’s pronouncements went even further—”scholarly; the dignified look of a college professor.”

  But to me, glasses and contacts were a pain. And my vision kept getting worse, my prescription grew stronger every few months. My last prescription was quite scary, -7.5 diopters OD [Right Eye], -9.0 diopters with -2.0 cylinder OS [Left Eye].