“Did he say what it is?”
“No. But I noticed some articles in Doug’s office on topics I haven’t seen before. Phage display, I think, and a lot of stuff about E. coli”
Karen barked with laughter. “Aha! A completely different approach to monoclonals. See, MC124 had to be produced by a mouse population. It’s tough to do, and tough on the mice. With this other approach, you engineer the antibody into E. coli bacteria. The bacteria act as a carrier to reproduce the antibody-carrying phage inside the subject. If that’s what Doug plans to do, it’ll make McKinnon’s fur stand up.”
“I wonder how far Doug’s resentment goes. If McKinnon really is our man, maybe Doug will help us nail him.”
Karen shook her head. “Hard to imagine. It’s one thing to spread your wings and fly. It’s another to stab the man who helped get you there in the back.”
“It’s still hard for me to believe McKinnon is our man. He might be more capable of murder than Carl Steiner, but he’s not the one who sent private detectives after us. I have to think Carl is right: Dugan’s behind it all.”
Karen swirled the grounds in the bottom of her cup. “You don’t harass people like Dugan did unless you’ve got something big to hide.”
I finished the last of my coffee. “Karen, I’ve been meaning to say — I’m really sorry about getting you in trouble at BioVerge.”
She waved it off. “You did me a favor. My work was going nowhere. I spent most of my time trolling the Web for journal articles and important facts — like the one about coffee. This is much more exciting.” Her smile gradually fell. Her brown eyes turned muddy. “When I heard about Sheila, I couldn’t fathom it. Nothing made sense anymore. Science seemed useless. If we can uncover how Sheila was killed — I don’t know, at least I’ll have accomplished something.”
A pair of tears tracked down her cheeks, in no hurry to get to the bottom. It was the first time she’d shown her real feelings in front of me. My instinct was to put my arms around her, but I held back. I wasn’t sure how she’d take it.
“I’m afraid I’ve put you in some danger,” I said. I wanted to make sure she knew I was concerned about her. “Dugan knows you’re a biologist, a friend of Sheila’s who can put all the science together. If you want to get out of town for a little while, to be safe, I’d understand.” It was the same advice I’d given Jenny, though I was hoping for a different answer from Karen.
Her moist eyes slowly narrowed to sharp black points. “I’m not going anywhere. I want to know who did this to Sheila. I want to look them in the face and ask why.”
I nodded. A look of understanding flashed between us. Karen took the cups to the sink and washed them as if she was trying to punch through their bases. “What’s next?” she asked.
“Let’s talk to Marion. She’s in the agri department and knows more than she’s been telling me. I might be able to talk her into a data swap now. She definitely is not on Dugan’s side.”
Karen handed me the phone. I pulled out my billfold for the piece of paper on which I had all my numbers written. “You know what?” I said. “I need to call Jenny first.”
“No problem. Is it all right if I look at the diary?”
I nodded, then dialed Jenny’s mother in Sacramento. Jenny answered the phone herself. She started talking about how she’d been outside gardening and how good it was for her soul. I hated having to tell her the story of the killer tomato.
She reacted with a stunned silence. “That is so freaky,” Jenny finally said. “Someone deliberately gave her the tomatoes.”
“Yeah. But the good news is that you’re in the clear.”
“I don’t think you should stay there, Bill. It’s too dangerous. Take this to the police.”
“Don’t worry. We’re in a safe place. I’ll go to the police as soon as I figure out—”
“Who’s this we?”
“Karen, that scientist friend of Sheila’s. We’re about to visit Marion. I think she can fill in some more pieces for us.”
“You said you were coming up here.”
“Well, that was before I knew how Sheila was murdered. I’m not going to walk away from this.”
“Who said this is for you to solve, Bill? I don’t understand why you’re so fixated on it. Is it about some kind of ego battle with Dugan? Maybe you think you can get a film out of this.”
It was my turn to be stunned. I didn’t think she really meant what she said. She just felt left out — left out of a party she didn’t really want to attend. I knew there was hurt underneath her anger, but I’d have to try to take care of it later.
“I’m sorry, Jen. I’ll see you as soon as I can,” I said.
I put down the phone to find Karen at the kitchen door. “Sorry,” she said, “I thought—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ve never met Jenny. Sheila was kind of in awe of her. She thought Jenny had so much life, sparkle — a winning way, I guess.”
“She does like winning.”
A bit of mock pity played on Karen’s lips. It cheered me up. “I just had a conversation of my own,” she said. “Harry Salzmann, on my cell phone. I saw his name in the diary and should have thought of calling him sooner. He told me something really bizarre. Smidge was an offshoot of a line in Harry’s lab. Sheila herself developed the line. It was what got McKinnon interested in her in the first place. So, guess whose human DNA was knocked into Smidge’s chromosomes?”
“Sheila’s,” I said immediately. “Is that ethical?”
“It’s perfectly common. Researchers have to get human DNA from somewhere, right? I’ve known people who hang around maternity wards asking for spare placentas. All Sheila had to do was scrape a few of her own cells. Sheila must have realized the mouse’s origin when she wrote about Smidge’s fate being her own. If MC124 killed Smidge, she had good reason to worry about what it would do to her.”
I nodded. “It’s coming together, Karen. We’re getting close.”
She nodded back. I checked my watch. It was getting late. “Look, we better get going. Marion wanted to see us today. I’ll call to tell her we’re on the way.”
“Good. I’ll find a place to hide the research,” Karen said.
“Right. There’s no way we’re taking it to Marion’s.”
After I’d talked to Marion, my last call was to Abe Harros at the hotel. I came back into the living room when it was done, and Karen and I headed out to the Scout.
We crawled across the bay on the San Mateo Bridge. I got off 580 at State 13, a cute little grass-lined highway that snaked along the base of the Oakland hills, almost exactly on top of the Hayward fault. A winding hairpin lane took us from 13 into the steep, redwood-shaded hills. Marion’s place was about halfway up. I pulled into the carport, a wood platform built into the hillside, and parked next to a Volvo.
Marion lived in a classic wood-shingled Berkeley bungalow. The trees whispered in the breeze as we followed a stone walk down to the front door. Marion treated us like old friends. She kissed me on both cheeks. We went into a long, narrow living room. Marion had her own little indoor forest, consisting primarily of ferns. The walls were decorated with magical-looking tribal objects.
“You’re a world traveller,” I commented.
“What can I say, I’m Dutch. Sit down. I’ll bring you something — tea, wine?”
Karen and I both declined. We sat on a wool couch that faced a picture window. The bay, visible through the branches outside, was gunmetal gray and sullenly still under the clouds. Marion plunked down in a rocking chair. She was wearing tights and a long, loose shirt.
“Nice place,” I said. “Long drive to work, though.”