I dodged his question and said, “I appreciate your answering so fully.”
He waved it off. “I’m not giving away any company secrets. We’re about to publish our paper on it.”
“You sound very confident.”
He inhaled deeply, arching his brows. “Frankly, yes. I have been injecting myself with the drug to test for safety.” He smiled and exhaled. “So you see, I have reason for confidence.”
“And you’re going to have the rest of your team try it next? Doesn’t that violate some code of ethics?”
I finally broke the surface of his cool. He blinked a couple of times. “Only if they withhold assent. But they haven’t. Now,” he added with a trace of impatience, “you mentioned notes of Sheila’s. You’ll need to give them to me immediately. We can make revisions to the paper if necessary.”
“Neil Dugan must have given you the hard drive from her home computer already.”
Now he was flustered. “Neil—? I don’t know a thing about this.”
“He took the hard drive just after Sheila was found. He’s been trying his damnedest to get more documents from me. His private detectives have assaulted me twice.”
“Dugan, dammit. He’s out of control. He—” McKinnon stopped and glared at me. “I can’t vouch for anything Neil Dugan does. Sometimes I wonder if we even work for the same company. If you think Dugan is somehow involved with Sheila’s death, come out with it. I want to know. I’ll examine those documents, and we’ll take any evidence you have to the police.”
“Thank you for cooperating. I’ll be in touch with you.”
The blue eyes hardened again. “Now look, you can’t come in here and lay down these accusations and then just walk away. I need to see those materials. We need to take action.”
“I agree,” I said in my most polite voice. I wanted to remain on good terms with him, but I didn’t want him to take over. “I don’t have the materials here. Others have some of them. I’ll pull them all together.”
McKinnon relinquished as gracefully as he could. “Quickly, please, unless you’d like a visit from the police. Time is of the essence.”
“One other thing — why did you transfer Sheila out of the group?”
McKinnon collapsed back into his chair. “She requested it herself. Terribly disappointing to me. I never fully understood her reasons. Something personal, perhaps. She was a bit troubled, I think — not by our work, but in her emotions.”
“Did she test out MC124 on herself?”
McKinnon stared out the window for a long moment. “I suppose she could have.”
“Thanks for talking to me.” As I stood, the DAT recorder clicked off. I covered it with a cough. McKinnon gave me a long, hard look. I switched to a new subject. “Oh, I also meant to ask you about Carl Steiner.”
McKinnon stood with me. “Steiner? The gardener?”
“Yes. He was at the funeral. Had an attachment to Sheila.”
“Ah… he tends to do that. I didn’t realize Sheila was his latest object. Well, he works in the agri department, you know. That part of the company was acquired by the new management. I can’t tell you much about it.”
“All right. Thanks again. I can find my own way out.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll need to accompany you.” He touched my arm and moved me toward the door.
“Oh, you know what — I left my bag back in Doug’s office. He can show me out.”
McKinnon simply smiled and waited for me to walk with him down a floor to Doug’s office and the lab. Just outside the office, Doug and two white-coated researchers were engaged in a heated conversation over a series of printouts. McKinnon got drawn into the discussion. I sauntered over to Doug’s office, paused by the door, and waited for Doug to glance my way. When he did, I very deliberately closed the door.
It burst open a few moments later. “What the—?” Doug demanded.
“Close the door,” I said in a low voice. “Don’t you want to hear what Dr. McKinnon said to me?”
His shoulders relaxed. It was clear he did. My hypothesis was correct. Some kind of fissure had opened up between mentor and protégé, and I intended to exploit it. If Doug believed I was on his side, he might cough up some new information.
“Just a minute,” Doug said. He went back to the group, leaving the door ajar. I sat on the couch, out of sight of the scientists. I couldn’t follow their discussion, so I poked into a stack of papers next to me on the couch. On top was a book about golf, but underneath were reprints of technical papers. The words that appeared most often in the titles were phage display and Escherichia coli.
The sound of my name brought my attention back. It was McKinnon, asking Doug where I was and telling him I needed to be escorted from the building.
“I’ll do it, Frederick,” Doug said. “I want to speak to him again. The biocomputation matter.”
“That’s not our priority, Doug. The Curaris Pharmaceutical people arrive at ten on Monday morning. This is it for us. Once they sign the licensing deal, Dugan has no choice. But everything must—”
“I’m on it, Frederick.” Doug’s voice was curt. “Please, just leave me to do my work.”
Even from my position on the couch, I could feel the tension. All conversation had ceased. I pictured the two men glaring at each other, McKinnon towering erect and imperious, Doug bristling below.
Doug came into the office a moment later. He closed the door, then paced the small area in front of his desk.
“You need a bigger office,” I said.
He froze and stared me. “I’m getting one.”
“Once MC124 is a success?”
“Very soon.”
“I imagine that will put you on more equal footing with Dr. McKinnon. You two have been very close, haven’t you?”
He turned away and began to straighten papers. “I was his grad student. It’s long past time for me to have a program of my own.”
“Will you still be working with monoclonal antibodies?”
He spun on me. “What do you care? Just tell me what Frederick said to you!”
“He said he’s tested MC124 on himself to prove its safety. I thought that was noble of him.”
Doug stretched his neck and scratched. He had some kind of rash under his jowl. “I’ve tested it, too, but I don’t go around bragging about it.”
“Did Sheila?”
“Maybe Frederick tricked her into it,” he said after a pause. “Did Neil Dugan know about this?”
Doug shook his head slowly. “No one did. You shouldn’t either. What do you want, anyway?”
“I just want to know what killed Sheila.”
His forehead bunched again. “All right. I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll check up on Dugan. But not until after Monday.”
“Anything helps. I have some notes from Sheila—”
His eyes widened and the phone buzzed at the same instant. Doug picked it up. “Yeah, I talked to him. No, he’s not here. Yeah, I know what he looks like.”
He put down the phone. “Dugan. He’s looking for you.”
I stood up. Doug appraised me for a minute, then said, “Go back down the corridor to the center of the building. Past the elevators, into the wing opposite this one. Turn right. Look for a stairway. It’ll take you down to the atrium. Turn left and go out the door in the back. A guard will be watching for you at the front.”