An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Read online

  I’d always had problems with my left eye and had recently developed night-blindness.

  Thus it had long been obvious to everyone around me—I was the last to agree—that one day I would become an eye doctor.

  And that, in a nutshell, was how I found myself facing the notoriously egocentric genius, Professor Lucy Efron.

  2

  I stood on the seventh floor, looking down on the central courtyard of the medical school complex—donated by a local psychiatrist who’d thought his money would fund a schizophrenia study, but had ended up as a dry fountain—and tried to overcome the gloomy day.

  I knew the professor was nuts. After clenching my fists and an internal command—Milbert, let’s do it!—I turned around and pushed open the door of the wing that led to Efron’s office and lab.

  I knocked on her door, but no one answered.

  As I was turned to search for a pen and paper to leave a note, my elbow hit the door and it opened. I peeped in and saw her arched back and the hair on her nape. When I opened the door further, I saw she was crouched on all fours, crawling on the floor, assembling a series of electron microscopy slides on one of the parquet floor tiles.

  I cleared my throat. Without turning around, she said, “Is that you, Gilbert?”

  “Milbert.”

  “Whatever. Come on in.”

  I moved past the threshold in two wide steps and surveyed the room, but remained standing, because there was no free space to park myself on. The slides were strewn across the floor, filling all the gaps between the table, three chairs, the computer, and the windowsill.

  I said, “I thought we were going to meet downstairs, in the cafeteria.”

  She waved her hand dismissively, as if brushing off a mosquito or a butterfly. “Sorry, but I can’t stand the noise.”

  I continued to negotiate with her buttocks. “So here I am.”

  Efron lifted a hand and reached for a radio that was tuned to classical music. But instead of lowering the volume, she turned it the other way. A soft violin melody filled the room, and she hummed along in an obscure, disharmonic key.

  “Bruch’s ‘Violin Concerto Number One.’ Heavenly, isn’t it? How much feeling there is in that little instrument, the violin… How romantic.”

  I was beginning to lose my patience. “Professor Efron, I’m here on my break. My physiology lab starts in twenty minutes.”

  The violin gasped momentarily, and I was granted the opportunity of seeing her face-to-face for the first time.

  She was ageless, with a slim figure and an abundance of curly-wooly hair, leaving exposed only the tips of her earlobes, which were adorned with pearl earrings. Her nose was narrow, but perfectly suited her challenging chin. Her cheekbones looked as if they had been carved by a chisel. Her baggy lower eyelids supported a pair of green eyes that were too big for their sockets.

  Before I’d left to meet her, my classmate Ben had prepared me for the encounter. “Dark like a gypsy,” he said. “She’s approaching fifty, if she isn’t already.”

  “Then she colors her hair,” added Sharon, Ben’s partner in anatomy class. “Women that age can’t have lampblack hair like hers, without a single silver strand.”

  Lucy Efron wore a tight pastel dress that complimented her nicely. She had a magnificent physique—thin waist, flat belly, and a proud, upright chest. A delicate golden necklace was trapped in her cleavage, trying to fall free each time she leaned over the notebooks that were scattered across the floor.

  My gaze wandered upward and got lost in the tangled dark curls. When the Adagio part of the concert began, she straightened up, her lips parted in a tiny mischievous smile that exposed a delicate gap between her front teeth. She closed her eyes, and it seemed I could have set her lab on fire in that moment and she wouldn’t have noticed.

  The phone rang. Efron lifted the receiver and listened, then moaned. “Not ready yet. No!” There was an annoyed silence, followed by a glimpse at her wall clock. “The tech just left, and Bergman’s samples haven’t gone through the scanner yet. After that, I have eleven more tubes. Yes, eleven. My lenses.” She exhaled air in a loud whistle. “Kevin was supposed to do it weeks ago.”

  With that, and with no goodbyes, Efron banged the receiver back in its cradle, but missed. She didn’t bother to replace it properly until it started to beep.

  I stood there waiting for a few moments. An early autumn sunset had darkened the room, but she hadn’t turned on the lights. “How much time do you have?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Before your physiology lab.”

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe less.”

  Efron carefully skirted the table and turned to the bookcase. “Sit down.” Her fingers strolled through flacons and folders. “Make room, for God’s sake; let’s get started,” she scolded.

  I pushed aside a stack of papers and sat down, as if in a job interview. She looked at me sardonically until I divested myself of the pile of physiology notebooks I was schlepping around by burying them safely under the seat.

  It took her a few seconds to clear away the notebooks on the floor. When I sat up, the table lamp was on and Efron was at the table, holding up a latex glove and amputating each of its fingers one by one. From each clipped finger, a small patch of tissue was released, landing soundlessly on a napkin.

  “Lenses,” the professor declared.

  I picked one up and palpated it. It was not more than five millimeters in size, oval and smooth to the touch.

  “From human eyes,” she continued. “They are grey and turbid. What we call cataracts. These are not suitable for research; I keep them to show the students. The ones I work on are in the containers.”

  I held one against the light and scrutinized it. Its core was a yellowish-red, like a candle flame.

  Efron indicated the container. “And here we have clear, healthy lenses, which were removed from bodies of relatively young donors.”

  She waited until she had my full attention.

  “This room, as well as three others across the corridor, the electron microscope, the magnetic resonance imaging—everything in here is for a single purpose.” She pointed to the container on her right and continued, “To understand what causes clear lenses to become murky and cataractous, and”—she pointed to the amputated glove on her left—”to halt the process.”

  “How?”

  “Eyedrops, for example.” She flashed a micro-smile.

  Her phone buzzed inside her pocket. She pulled it out and glanced at the number. “New consignment of eyes. I need to go. So for now, Filbert—”

  “Milbert.”

  She approached me with what looked like a Manhattan phone directory. Not one. Four. The stack landed with a dusty crash on the edge of the table beside me. “Homework,” she snickered. “Background material, for an easy intro.”

  I leafed through the top folder, tried to read only the titles first, and shuddered. Even attempting to spell the pompous terms without a mistake would have been a major feat.

  “Tomorrow you have an early start,” she said, clearly enjoying herself. “So you’d better get a good night’s sleep.”

  3

  “And so as not to waste time on prattle, let’s get you acquainted with the lab.”

  The night before I had dragged two of the professor’s notebooks with me all over my apartment—the sofa, the shower, as well as the bedroom.

  In the kitchen I had started reading and lost my appetite. In the toilet I didn’t get much further than the second paragraph. In the shower I tucked the stuff under a towel so it wouldn’t get wet—in retrospect, I should have drowned the lot. In the bedroom, the situation was continuous anguish. Even arranging the pillows comfortably behind my head hadn’t prevented me from having to massage my nape frequently before I surrendered to a blissful slumber.

  Lately, that had been h
appening a lot. I knew it shouldn’t. Normal guys in their mid-twenties should be enjoying life—shooting darts, dating women, sitting on bar stools swigging tequila, eating sushi, and listening to jazz.

  Or rolling between the sheets.

  But that didn’t work for me, with my eight-to-eight schedule and extra hours in the library or labs, not to mention a parade of wacky and demanding professors. Twice in a row that week, I’d slept in and had to skip my morning gym session. Lately I had been forgetting about breakfast and getting dressed on my way to the car.

  So that morning I stood in Efron’s seventh floor lab, still groggy, gazing at the one person who could effortlessly be crowned ‘weirdest lecturer of them all.’ She talked and talked, while I was able to pick up every fifth, maybe tenth, word.

  It wasn’t even seven a.m. and she was brimming with energy. Was the lady on speed?

  I plodded along to the last room in the wing, facing a sterilizing alcove with a detox shower and an eyewash station. The door was wide open.

  Behind a collection of packed refrigerators stood a stool, facing a chest. She opened a drawer, pushed aside a pocket calculator and a coffee mug, and fished out a red notebook. She pointed at a square surface near the sink.

  “This is your table,” she solemnly announced, “and this is your lab notebook. Put your name on it and all contact information, including your cell number. You must be available twenty-four/seven. This notebook must never leave the lab. At the end of the day you must lock it in here.” Here she paused, then handed me a small key. “Only you and I have the key. From now on every research plan, every formulation, every result—good or bad—will be recorded in this notebook. Understood?”

  I nodded wearily. She ended with: “Under no circumstances are you to show the results to anybody but me, nor even discuss the subject of your research without my explicit permission.” It was a mantra that she would repeat from that day forward. She also frequently called my attention to a large magnetic sign in the shape of a rainbow that read, ‘Count Only on Yourself.’

  The first two weeks in the lab were dreadful, due to the fact that my neurotic professor wanted me to observe her particular protocols, and her materials were new to me.

  Efron was reasonably tolerant. After all, I was her first experience in the vice dean’s project. Until I arrived, she had been used to highly qualified technicians who were thoroughly familiar with her sophisticated equipment.

  Her lab contained a variety of ‘smart’ instruments. The jewel in the crown was the chromatograph—a large metal box with a port of entry through which flasks moved on a treadmill, like a toy train. A flask would disappear inside the analysis tunnel, a whimper would be heard, and then it would reappear at the exit port, beaten and sad, with a tiny cap resembling a capuchon on top.

  During those first weeks, I caused quite a few mishaps, Just before she’d tear me a new asshole, the esteemed professor would console herself that my tour of duty would last no more than six months; then she would be freed from my damaging presence, and I would be set loose to wreak havoc elsewhere.

  She first assigned me to work with ‘cell wells’—a highfalutin’ name for a pitted plastic plate that looked like a miniature egg carton. I had to instill drops from a micropipette into the bottom of each tiny grave, fifty of them per plate. The pipette had an automatic scale that delivered a constant amount. But somehow, I managed to screw that up too.

  My next stop was the cold room. There I made better progress, but four degrees Celsius did me no good, and my constant sneezing caused anything that could fly from the stand to do so, including the “very expensive flasks.”

  Nonetheless, my red notebook began to bloom with tables, graphs, and numbers. It made Efron very happy, but I couldn’t have cared less. What mattered was that the clock was ticking, and soon enough the tedium created by our dear vice dean would end.

  But then, just when I was about to start another day in the company of the centrifuge and tubes, I saw her.

  I entered Efron’s office to get some more buffer solution for my experiment. She was standing with her back to the door, conversing in a low voice with Efron, who was leaning back in her chair, stretching her legs and sucking a pencil.

  They stopped talking the moment I entered, and the blond girl turned around. Efron offered an introduction. “Milbert, please meet Dr. Johanna Berger. Johanna is a physician with the Vienna branch of Oculoris Biopharma, in their eye research division.”

  “Hello.”

  The doctor was stunningly beautiful, as if she had just stepped out of Vanity Fair. When she held out her hand, the smile that settled on her beautiful face caused my earlobes to blush. The smile broadened and a minute slit nestled in a dark pigmented birthmark under her left nostril, like Cindy Crawford and Marilyn Monroe.

  “So this is the new doctor,” Johanna said, her tongue sliding across her perfect lips and covering them with a new gloss.

  For a long moment her eyes seemed to pierce through me, causing me to feel naked. I tried to form a proper response, but my vocal cords did not obey.

  She moved forward and put her hand on mine, but it was only to flip my wrist and glance at my watch. “Ich bin zu spat… I didn’t realize it was so late! I have a plane to catch.” As she turned, her wavy blond hair formed a magnificent halo.

  And just before she grabbed her bag and coat, she added with a wink, “I’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Looking forward to working long hours with you, Milbert.”

  “Looking forward to it,” I managed to murmur to the empty corridor.

  Vienna, Austria.

  It was late, but the lights on the thirty-fifth floor of the tower in the Donaustadt quarter were still on. Just one year before, the giant American pharmaceutical company Oculoris Biopharma had transferred its European headquarters to this modern brown-glass building.

  At the request of Helmut Frisch, head of the Austrian office, an emergency meeting had been called on both sides of the ocean. A pinstripe Armani suit shrouded the body of the dour-faced, bald-headed Mr. Frisch; his hawkish eyes examined the plasma screen from behind a pair of pince-nez. At his side sat Rolf Schneider, head of purchasing in East Europe and the deputy CEO for global marketing. As handsome as a movie star, Schneider plucked nervously at his necktie. Frisch’s urgent call had caught him in his Lexus in the underground parking deck. He’d had different plans for tonight.

  Two senior executives, a man and a woman, gazed at them from the screen. They were seated behind the oval conference table in the company’s head office in Chicago. Schneider knew the bearded man—Bryan Smith from human resources. The woman, a pretty brunette, was the senior legal counsel of the company. She radiated aloofness, which Schneider attributed to a winning combination of beauty, professionalism, and success. And she kept him alert.

  What he heard next caused him to sit up in his chair.

  Frisch skipped the small talk and got straight to the point. Due to the delicate circumstances, he announced, their confidential discussion would be limited to this small forum.

  The regular Monday meeting of the five vice presidents—global finance, marketing, R&D, technology, and manufacturing—had just convened at the president’s room in Chicago. Bernie Cooperstein, the president and CEO, wasn’t back from Singapore yet.

  Usually the quintet and the CEO met with the legal counsel to go over last week’s activities and review next week’s strategic plans. But today Helmut Frisch had insisted on the presence of legal counsel at his urgent videoconference. This was Vera Sinsky, whose job was to provide the veil of attorney-client privilege and confidentiality.

  “Oculoris cannot risk another scandal,” Frisch began. During the last month, the company had been accused of ‘industrial espionage tactics’ in the market sections of the Tribune and the Sun, two of Chicago’s most important newspapers. It had started when a reporter found that a senior scientis
t in Medionetyx, a rival company, had been head-hunted by Oculoris for an undisclosed price. The information spread to Wall Street and the European stock exchanges. “During the latest debacle, our stock plunged by eight percent.”

  “Helmut, we’d better state this for the record,” Smith sighed. “Doctor Nouri is working for us of his own free will.”

  “But the public doesn’t like it.” Frisch rifled through a stack of papers in front of the camera. “Have you read the documents I sent?”

  The two Americans nodded, and Vera Sinsky’s forehead wrinkled. “What’s the nature of the source?”

  “I have received information from the head of the Innsbruck Police Department’s Division of Serious Crimes. We’ve known each other since high school. They’ve been conducting an investigation into deaths that occurred during the night shifts of Dr. Johanna Berger, who started working for us six months ago. For obvious reasons they won’t be able to keep it quiet much longer.”

  “I talked to Bernie before the meeting,” said Smith from human resources.

  Frisch felt uneasy. Why involve the president in this?

  Smith seemed to pick up on his unspoken question. “She is the daughter of a close friend of Bernie’s, which is why I informed him. But I also studied her personnel file—the doctor has been an excellent employee. If I were you, I would think very carefully before I throw her to the dogs. Who spilled the beans to the police?”

  “Wilhelm Bart. He is a highly respected journalist here. His reports are considered absolutely reliable, like your 60 Minutes.”

  “What’s all the fuss about?” Vera Sinsky balanced foldable reading glasses on her delicate nose and browsed through the papers. “The people who died on her shifts have been elderly patients, terminally ill—doesn’t that happen to every doctor on call?”

  “We have sensitivity about such issues,” Frisch said, her nonchalance making his voice rise an octave, “here in post-war Austria.”