An Eye For Murder: A Medical Thriller Read online

  Then he typed his resignation letter.

  The nerve-racking transition from one rival company to another had driven Ashraf back to smoking. He was a conservative man; even his previous transfer from academia to industry had been an audacious move for him, almost defection.

  “If you play your cards right, the sky is the limit,” his wife said.

  And indeed he had played his cards.

  But instead of skies, he found himself in a stinking basement, beginning to fear he would never see daylight again.

  ***

  Someone entered the dark room and turned on the light.

  Ashraf blinked. He tried to shade his eyes, and quickly realized that both his wrists were tied tightly behind the chair.

  The man stood behind the lamp, so all he could see was a silhouette. But his voice was familiar. He’d heard it before—where? There was a foreign accent—South London? Dublin? He held a bottle in his hand.

  “Good evening, Doctor,” the man said, leaning forward. Ashraf could not escape his bad breath—a mixture of alcohol and vomit. “I apologize for your accommodations, but this should not take long.”

  What shouldn’t take long?

  “Mr. Lister has a busy schedule.”

  Then he remembered where he knew the man from. He was the technician from the Medionetyx animal facility. The company owned a building in south Chicago—there were no signs, and it was surrounded by an electric fence to prevent interference by animal right activists. Once, when the company had still used the university’s animal care building, Nouri and his team had to be rescued from their rage. The company had subsequently bought the warehouse in a distant suburb.

  Nouri knew the place was run by a guy named Gibbons who had known Lister since their time in military service, but he hadn’t seen him there for a long time. Gossip had spread around about the tech’s peculiarities—the reason for his dismissal. Rumor had it that the ginger-haired Irishman liked to throw bunnies into the oven before they were dead. He’d inject pentobarbital and wait several minutes for respiratory arrest, then dig through the pile of albino cadavers until he found a pulse. After isolating those whose heart still fluttered, he’d throw them into the fire where they screeched in a last agonizing convulsion.

  But he had been fired. So how come—

  “Doctor, doctor, let’s spare the niceties,” Gibbons suggested. “My boss is hurt, badly hurt. He saw you as his protégé. He lifted you out of the trash, wiped your ass, and built you a dream lab.” The Irishman took a swig out of the bottle he held—Wild Turkey—and wiped his chin. “He opened doors for you—you traveled around the world with him in comfort, and you gained respect. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it?”

  Nouri tried to say something, but realized his mouth was blocked with tape. He shook his head from side to side, but all he managed to produce was a guttural grunt.

  “Doctor, you know the punishment for treason,” said Gibbons. “Someone told me that in your country, in Pakistan, you go by the laws of the Koran. First you chop off the fingers, then the tongue, and in the end you literally beg to have your head removed.”

  Another train rumbled behind the adjacent wall, rattling the basement and the ceiling lamp.

  “But here in America, Doctor, we are—how should I put it—more refined.”

  When the lights stabilized again Nouri saw Gibbons facing him, preparing a syringe. When he was done, he freed Nouri’s left hand, but instead of releasing him, he stretched out the hand and clamped it to a splint. He rolled up Nouri’s sleeve and wrapped a rubber band around his arm. Nouri tried to squirm, but the knots were stronger than before.

  Ashraf stared at the red liquid inside the syringe and felt cold sweat beading in the groove between his shoulder blades. It was an overdose.

  “In a moment you will become one of our volunteers,” Gibbons announced gleefully. “Let me quote you, and forgive me if I’m not accurate: ‘A single heartbeat will spread the stuff to every corner of your body. The material will solidify, and all your blood vessels will shrink like dry branches on a tree.’”

  Ashraf would have sufficient time to see his body wither, even as he exhaled the last breath from his richly vascularized, soon-to-be-ossifying lungs.

  Seconds passed. The next train went whizzing by at exactly the moment the needle punctured his cubital vein.

  Dr. Nouri twisted at once. His body arched in a spasm that tilted the chair, then hit the floor. His chin lay in a puddle of warm urine.

  Gibbons continued to watch him for a long moment, measuring the rhythm of the seizures with his watch, until the doctor was completely still. Ashraf Nouri’s head flopped back as the Irishman returned the chair to a sitting position.

  Gibbons pulled out a pocketknife and walked behind the chair. He gripped the black hair, slippery from sweat, and moved straight toward the eye sockets.

  On his next vacation to the Seychelles, he would be taking back a souvenir.

  5

  Johanna was dressed in a peach-colored raincoat buttoned up to her neck, her legs in black buckled boots, a designer purse slung casually on her shoulder, and a bunch of keys jingling in her hand.

  Her hair was hidden beneath a dome-shaped black felt cap that emphasized the blond waves peeping out from under the brim. One frivolous damp curl fell sideways over her eye, almost reaching the corner of her mouth. She pulled off one glove and opened the top two buttons of her coat with snow-white fingers, her long, manicured fingernails painted a fiery scarlet that matched her lipstick.

  I had left the lab an hour earlier, not sure if the rain had managed to wash away the odors of the cold room. Professor Efron had asked me to be nice to the guest. I was sure the guest wouldn’t have given me a second glance had Efron not given her a similar order—or could there be some other reason I was still unaware of? With her looks, she could get any man she fancied. If she decided to have coffee with me, it was a small sacrifice compared to the benefit for Oculoris Biopharma. Milbert Greene was marked as ‘useful.’ I got it. I wasn’t dumb.

  So we took a table at Floyd’s Café, across from the medical school complex.

  Johanna continued to unbutton her coat as she walked toward me, sashaying the way women do when they feel great about their figure.

  I looked around, embarrassed. It was an unfamiliar situation for me—the woman who had just entered a café and turned all heads was actually on her way to meet me. She took off her second glove and we shook hands as I stood up, sheepishly, to greet her.

  “Mil-bert? What kind of a name is that?” Here we go. “I’ve never heard—”

  “I was named after a tortoiseshell butterfly.”

  “You probably get asked that all the time.” She smiled apologetically.

  “Not really,” I said, then worsened the situation by correcting myself: “Well, actually, yes.” I hoped for a hole to open in the floor, preferably large enough to be sucked into.

  We were both quiet, but it seemed I was the only one who felt embarrassed. Finally, with my eyes still downcast and my pulse pounding, in a voice that barely rose above the background din, I tried to make a joke. “I had prepared myself to practice my German, and here you speak perfect English.”

  As she did a half-turn, I had a chance to examine her more carefully, from the bottom up. A pair of long shapely legs seemed to grow straight out of her boot buckles, in tight black leggings. A leather belt with copper foil hung diagonally over her hip. A knitted turtleneck in a shade of taupe emphasized her slim, almost boyish curves.

  As she removed her black hat, sumptuous blond waves spilled out and brushed her shoulders. She shook her head from side to side, like a wet umbrella. Although my left contact lens had become stuck once again under my upper eyelid, it wasn’t hard to drown in the deep blue of her eyes, which lit up when she smiled.

  I had wisely chosen the corner table
, where a hedge of creeping vines hid us fairly well from any potential intruding classmates. At least two of them had the rare talent of appearing out of nowhere at the least suitable moment, and the danger of this happening was real since the café was within walking distance of the campus.

  Because I had awakened late, I’d skipped breakfast—again—and was ravenous enough to devour a heaping chicken club sandwich with all the fixings, plus sauerkraut. But I didn’t feel comfortable eating solo in her presence, especially because of my tendency to drip the sauce and make a mess of the tabletop, napkin, my pants, and everything else in the vicinity.

  But it turned out that even the simple task of carrying two cups of coffee was too complicated for my two left hands. I overfilled the cups, and by the time I’d reached our table, I had managed to splash some of the hot liquid on her. She smiled indulgently, took one cup from me, placed it comfortably by her side, and dabbed at her soiled leggings with a napkin.

  “That’s why my career as a waiter had to be curtailed,” I said with a shrug.

  “It’s only a matter of coordination,” she comforted me. “It’ll all work out when you start to do surgery. Micro-surgery.”

  It was time for my carefully rehearsed intro. “So, you’re from Vienna—what brings you to Louisville, of all places? Vienna has it all—waltz, schnitzel, strudel, Mozartkugeln… have I forgotten anything?”

  “No horses in Vienna, apart from the Lipizzaners.”

  “Do you like horses?”

  “Ja. And mint julep and cannabis and country music.”

  We looked at each other in silence and she burst out laughing. My usual earnestness cracked a little and I released a chuckle. She leaned forward and covered my hand with hers, gently caressing it. But my eyes were fixed lower down, on her boyish chest with its gumdrop nipples, unfettered and proudly erect beneath the fine fabric of her sweater. I inhaled a whiff of her perfume, delicate and sweet.

  “So?” I managed to say.

  “So, what?”

  “Professor Efron said something about you working for a pharmaceutical company.”

  She raised the cup to her lips, nodded and took an eager sip. “Ja. Oculoris Biopharmazeutika. We want to develop Efron’s formula. My boss believes her drug really works. But first we need to complete the experiments.”

  “I do the experiments on rabbits—concentrations, graphs, enzymes. She won’t let me get close to human eyes, so I don’t know what the final results will be.”

  Johanna’s shoulders rose by an inch. “It’s too early to tell. It all depends on her new stuff. Oculoris made a big gamble here. They invested a lot of money, and they want—”

  “They want to be sure that Efron delivers.”

  “Ja.”

  “That’s why they sent you to help the professor? How long have you been here?”

  Johanna looked at me attentively, not understanding the intent of my query. Obviously, she had not been here for long; otherwise she would have already known how unbearable it was to work with the professor. Quite a few people had worked for Lucy Efron—technicians, PhD candidates—all in the past tense.

  “I’ve been here since September,” she replied, and shrugged when she realized my surprise. Clearly her line of work created many occasions for close cooperation with egocentric geniuses; thus she wasn’t particularly intimidated by their whims. “But I’m flying back and forth all the time.”

  “That must be hard. Life around labs and rabbits and protocols and research centers—what else? Many flights, I bet—it can be very demanding. Hardly leaves time for—”

  “Hardly. It is so nice of you to care. After all, you know me for such a short time. Really nice of you. Men only talk to me about—” She winked. “you know…”

  Johanna was waiting for my next question, but I had no idea how to continue. This always happened when the professional prelude was over: I’d suddenly realize I’d been talking to a pretty girl and get stuck, like a computer hit by a virus, needing to be turned off and restarted.

  She took a sip, looked around, and finally focused on me.

  Then Johanna sighed. “Al-sssso?... Well?”

  “I don’t know,” I stammered. Without lifting my head I continued the conversation according to what I’d learned on internet dating sites. “I… I think we have reached the point where we start talking about ourselves.”

  “Really?” Her fingers embraced her cup. “So soon?” She assessed my reaction at length, until her rolling laughter returned. “So what would you like to know? It’s not that exciting. I’m just another girl from Austria.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “Do you have a family?”

  “I’m an only child.”

  “No, I mean—”

  Her smile widened. No, she wasn’t married and wasn’t currently in a relationship. Just then my cellphone beeped, summoning me back to the lab to remove tissue cultures from the incubator and prepare fluid for the next tube.

  That morning I had reached tube number twelve.

  Each of the previous eleven tubes had represented at least a year of frustration and disappointment. Number one had been synthesized by Professor Efron when she was still working on her post-doc with a research fellow named Nouri. It was the prototype—a novel molecule created to answer a single question: “Does it work? Yes or no.” The tubes that followed were variations on a theme—stronger compounds, more stable and less toxic.

  I guessed that each numbered tube was responsible for one of the grey streaks Efron concealed by dyeing her coal-colored mane.

  From the beginning, Efron had been deeply excited about this tube, the twelfth. The electricity in the lab made me walk on the tips of my toes. I could see the sparkle in the professor’s wild eyes: This is it!

  I faced Johanna and said, “I have to go. Please stay and finish your coffee.”

  She nodded while all kinds of thoughts raced inside my head. Soon I would start the world premiere. For the first time I would be squirting the new stuff from Tube 12 into the eyes of lab rabbits. I’d then have to shine a penlight on their pupils and record any sign of local toxicity: tearing, redness, and/or frequent blinking.

  It was only one thirty. The centrifuge round, filtration, and transfer to the in vitro analysis would take two or three hours, max. If I then sprinted home, had a quick shower and changed my clothes…

  “Are you free tonight?”

  6

  Gary, Indiana

  Dr. Ashraf Nouri was only five foot six, and not particularly heavy. His body was lean, without so much as an extra gram of fat; the patchy stubble on his cheeks made him look like an overgrown kid.

  Gibbons arrived at the animal facility after dark, stopped the car, and stepped out to open the iron gate. Once inside, he drove the car over the gravel path to the rear entrance door. The building was dark. Bluish nightlights illuminated the corridors. The examination rooms were locked and empty. Only one room contained serial-numbered cages, housing the morning’s consignment of rabbits.

  Gibbons carried the scientist’s limp corpse to the oven and remained beside it until it was reduced to ashes. Using a poker, he deftly removed Nouri’s skull and teeth from the blazing tray. On his way back to town he would bury them separately in the woods. Then he’d board the midnight flight to the Seychelles.

  He had barely made it back to his Acura Legend when his cellphone started to shake and buzz. He thought about ignoring the ringing but was quick to answer when he recognized the number on the screen.

  The boss was calling him from his private plane.

  On New Year’s Eve twenty years earlier, Gibbons had sworn absolute loyalty to Peter Lister.

  They had both been young Marines, thrown together in the detention cell on Camp Pendleton. It was minutes before the beginning of the New Year. Gibbons was being held for his involvement in a violent brawl; Lister was
the medic on duty. When loud screams for help reached the infirmary down the hall from the cell block, Lister had rushed out with the first-aid gear, but he was too late.

  The two guards on duty were already in the cell, weapons drawn. The inmate, redheaded Jeffrey Gibbons, sat on the top bunk swinging his legs, his face and hands stained with blood. A body lay on the floor with its head tilted at a bizarre angle, its face a mash of broken nose and swollen orbits. The palms were open, reaching halfway to the neck, as if in a last prayer. A pool of blood had begun to form under the twisted mouth, which had no teeth.

  Looking up, Lister saw that the CCTV cam above the door was cracked. “What happened here?” he asked, squatting to check for a jugular pulse. There was none.

  “Salinger went crazy. He wanted to kill me,” Gibbons said. His eyes were fixed on Lister’s, unblinking, ignoring the guards in the room.

  “Why would he want to kill you?”

  “People say he had mental problems.” The inmate’s eyes bounced between the two guards. “It was self-defense.”

  “Why tonight?” asked the senior guard, his weapon still trained on Gibbons.

  “I don’t know. He was upset about losing money in a poker game, though.”

  “That was a hell of a game,” chuckled the other guard.

  Earlier that evening a group of celebrating soldiers had been brought in from a New Year’s party that had gotten out of control. The ruckus involved at least a dozen, all inebriated—some needed stitches and bandaging; others just passed out. They’d had to put the men two to a cell for lack of space.

  “And you?”

  “I don’t play, sir. There are more important things than money.”

  “Like what?”

  “Semper Fidelis. The spirit of the Marines.”

  “I need to move you to another cell, private,” said the senior guard. “Nobody touches anything until we take samples, get a statement and everything. Evans, get Dr. Rogers here on the double.”