Fatal Reaction (32 page)

“Thank god,” I exclaimed.

“Turned up?” asked Michelle Goodwin nervously. “What do you mean turned up?”

“Turned up where?” demanded Remminger.

“Come with me,” replied Borland.

CHAPTER 25

Michael Childress lay on the floor of the cold room. His arms were folded peacefully across his chest. He was stark naked. He was also very definitely dead.

“Somebody go get Stephen,” I commanded in the sharp voice of emergency. I whirled around to face Borland. “Did you touch anything?” I demanded.

“I... oh... I don’t know.... I don’t think so....” stammered the protein chemist. His gruesome discovery had stripped him of all his usual bravura. “I must have, but only to make sure he was really dead.”

“What else would he be, for Christ’s sake?” drawled Remminger, who seemed if not amused, then downright unaffected.

“Why isn’t he wearing any clothes?” asked Michelle Goodwin in startled tones as she peered over my shoulder to get a better look at him.

“What do you think those marks are on the floor?” inquired Remminger, ever the scientist.

I hadn’t noticed them before. My eyes had been drawn to the bruising on his knees and his fingers. The digits were so bloody and raw, they looked like they’d been chewed by some kind of animal. But once she’d pointed them out I saw quite clearly what she was talking about. In the thin layer of frost that covered the metal floor of the cold room, on either side of the crystallographer’s body, were arcing marks—the kind we used to make as kids when we made angels in the snow.

“Maybe he killed himself,” Michelle ventured uncertainly.

It was as if we were all having separate conversations, everyone just saying the first thing that came to his mind, no one taking anything in or, for that matter, taking his eyes from Michael Childress’s naked corpse.

“Are those his clothes there next to him?” I asked, looking at the disorderly pile of dark clothing.

“What the hell is going on?” barked Stephen as he made his way down the hall toward us, with Carl Woodruff trailing close behind. “Everyone is supposed to be up in the lunchroom.”

“It’s Childress,” I said, breaking away from the group and walking toward him. “It looks like he got locked in the freezer over the weekend.”

“What? Is he okay?”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“He’s better than dead,” blurted Remminger. “He’s frozen like a Thanksgiving turkey.”

The rest of us were momentarily struck mute by her inappropriate outburst. For a minute Michelle looked as if she was about to say something, but instead, she heaved a great sob and broke into tears. Borland put his arm around her shoulder to comfort her, but she shrugged it off and made a dash for the ladies’ room.

When Stephen got there, we all stepped away from the cold room door so he could get a good look.

“What are we going to do?” demanded Carl, looking like a man who’s just dropped a winning lottery ticket through a subway grating. “We’ve got the Takisawa people due to arrive any minute.”

“Lou, go make sure Michelle is okay,” ordered Stephen, as if waking from a dream. “Tell her she’ll have to make the crystallography presentation. Let’s just hope he left the slides he was going to use somewhere where we can find them.”

“Michelle knows where the slides are,” I said, not believing the conversation was actually happening. “Somehow I don’t think that’s what Carl is worried about.” Stephen raised his hand to silence me. Then he turned to address the others.

“You all go back upstairs to the conference room and don’t say a word about this to anybody. Kate and I will figure out the best way to handle this. I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”

The scientists left reluctantly, still stunned by what had happened. I thought the chances of them keeping what they’d seen to themselves were somewhere between zero and none. I lost no time in sharing my assessment with Stephen.

“I don’t think you appreciate the delicacy of the situation, Kate,” he snapped. “The whole company is hanging by a thread, and now... this!”

“ ‘This,’ as you so aptly put it, is a matter for the police. There is no way around it.”

“There has to be some other way to handle it,” protested Stephen.

“There is no way to ‘handle’ it at all. This is one of those unambiguous situations. All we can do is call the police. I’ll try to explain the situation to them and see if I can get them to be discreet....”

“I don’t think that calling the police is necessarily in our best interests under the circumstances,” said Stephen calmly, pushing the cold-room door shut and adding his fingerprints to whatever else the crime lab was going to find there.

I knew what he was thinking and I couldn’t believe it. How could anyone so intelligent even contemplate something so stupid? Suddenly my stomach felt exactly the same way it did when as a kid I’d crest the top of the first big hill on the roller coaster.

“We have to call the police and we have to call them now,” I said reasonably.

Stephen stepped into the modeling room, picked up the telephone that hung on the wall, and punched in a number.

“Hello, security? This is Dr. Azorini. I want you to station someone at the elevator and the stairs to the basement. We have to make sure no one comes down here. We’ve had an equipment problem over the weekend and I don’t want anyone coming down until we’re sure there hasn’t been a radiation leak.” He hung up the receiver and turned to me. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Stephen Anthony Azorini,” I said sternly. “This is not some situation you can finesse your way around. There is a dead man lying on the floor of this freezer and if we don’t call the police, we will be committing a felony.”

“Do you really want the Takisawa people to pull into the parking lot and have the first thing they see be a half-dozen squad cars parked out front with their lights flashing? Do you have any idea what is riding on this visit? Do you?”

“What you’re proposing to do could land you in jail,” I countered. “If you’re so afraid of what the Japanese will think, then call them in their limos right now and tell them you’re still having trouble with the electricity out here and have the scientists make their presentations downtown.” '

“That’s not acceptable.”

“Neither is failure to report a death to the proper authorities.”

“I didn’t say we weren’t going to report it. I’m just asking what it would hurt if we waited?”

“It would be wrong,” I said, frustrated that he would let his desperation to make a deal with Takisawa cloud his judgment, “and it will hurt you. Cover this up now and I guarantee it’ll come back and bite you. You don’t think the cops will be able to tell that the door to the cold room has already been opened? Or that Borland touched the body, for Christ’s sake? Do you think it’s all right for you to ask all of us to lie to the police? Even if we were all willing, how do you think you, Dave, Carl, Michelle, Lou, and I will keep our stories straight? The only way is to do the right thing and tell the truth.”

“What difference will it make if we call the police now or if we call them at five o’clock?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” I snapped, suddenly losing patience. “I am an officer of the court and I won’t be a party to any deception. I’m willing to do everything in my power to see if we can’t get this handled as quietly as possible. If we can get the local cops to play ball, there’s a chance we can keep it from Takisawa. But the only way you’re going to keep me from calling the police is to lock me up with Childress right now.”

Stephen fixed me with such a murderous look that for a moment I honestly thought I was going to be spending the day with a dead man.

“Just handle it,” he said finally. Then he turned and walked away, leaving me alone in the basement with the body.

I called 911 from the phone in the crystallography lab and told the dispatcher to direct the police to the back of the building by the loading dock. Then I called Elliott Abelman and told him what had happened. He said he was on his way. That done, I went outside and waited for the police.

As I shivered on the loading dock I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether it was Elliott’s inquiries into Childress’s past that had frightened him into suicide. Coming on the morning of the Takisawa visit, it might have been just the kind of dramatic “fuck you” to Stephen I imagined Childress to be capable of.

Unburdened by serial killers and afflicted with no crime more serious than shoplifting, the Oak Brook police responded quickly to my report of a dead man in the freezer. Two incredibly clean-cut officers who looked like they’d just graduated from bible college arrived within five minutes of my call.

As succinctly as I could I told them what had happened. I also explained that the building had been closed over the weekend with the power shut down for the new transformers. I described how the temperature had been turned down in the cold room and about its being taped shut in order to help keep cold air from escaping.

“Did anybody check to make sure there was nobody inside before it was taped shut?” the older officer asked.

“I don’t know if they checked,” I replied, “but I was there while it was being taped. Believe me, if there was somebody inside who wanted to get out, we would have heard them.”

“And nobody missed this guy Childress over the weekend? Not even his wife?”

“He wasn’t married. Besides, we all thought he was in Boston attending a conference.”

“What kind of work did he do here?” the younger of the two officers asked while the older one pulled on some sort of plastic gloves that looked like baggies with fingers.

“Dr. Childress was a chemist,” I replied, balking at the prospect of trying to explain X-ray crystallography under these circumstances.

“You want to show us where the body is, ma’am?” the one with the gloves asked with a nod.

I led them to the cold room. They opened the door and stepped inside. Through the open door I watched as they squatted down beside the body. The younger officer pulled a set of plastic gloves from his pocket as the other uniform briskly touched Childress’s neck, no doubt making sure he was dead.

“You’d better get on the radio and call it in as an accidental death slash possible homicide,” he said to his partner. “Then you better page Jerry and tell ID to get the hell out here. Tell them we’re going to be needing the morgue wagon.”

As he talked I took another look at the dead crystallographer. I’m not sure that even in life Childress had been much to look at naked, but the cold certainly hadn’t helped. He was a skinny little man with pale skin and pubic hair that had begun to turn gray. The skin on his face was a dusky shade of red, and even though his arms were folded over his chest, I could tell that, like his knees, they were badly bruised.

“What’s all this in here with him?” asked the younger officer, pointing to the bulky Styrofoam containers that lined the shelves and were stacked up on the floor. “They’re research supplies,” I replied.

“No food? Nothing to eat or drink?”

“I don’t think so.”

He got up and examined the inside of the door carefully without touching it.

“That’s funny. It looks like the emergency release handle is broken. Do you have any idea how long it’s been that way?”

“I have no idea,” I replied, seeing my suicide theory evaporating before my eyes.

“You mind telling me who actually found the body?” asked the second officer, pulling a notebook from his pocket and starting to write.

“Dr. Dave Borland.”

“Is he a medical doctor, ma’am?”

“No. He’s a chemist.”

“Just like the dead guy?”

“Yes. This is a pharmaceutical company. They’re all chemists here.”

“Where is this Dr. Borland, ma’am?”

“He’s upstairs.”

“We’re going to need to speak to him and get his statement.”

“I’ll be happy to go get him for you if you like.”

On my way up to the first floor I took the stairs two at a time. If things were proceeding on schedule Stephen should have just finished his presentation. I opened the door of the first-floor lunchroom. Partitions had been erected to block the refrigerator and sink from view. A podium had been brought in and a large screen for slides set up in the front of the room. Chairs, which Stephen had personally selected so that he could be sure they were comfortable, had been rented and arranged in rows.

Lou Remminger was at the podium speaking with great authority about her theory that ZK-501 consisted of two distinct regions—binding and affector. The Japanese scientists were taking notes so furiously that the tables in front of them shook. I slipped into an empty chair beside Borland.

“The police are here,” I whispered. “They want to talk to you.” From across the room Stephen shot me an inquiring glance, which I chose to ignore. Borland rose to his feet with a little grunt and together we slipped out of the room.

“Do you know if anybody checked to make sure the room was empty before they taped it shut?” I asked once we were out in the hall.

“What kind of idiot do you take me for?” he answered. “Michelle and I both looked. Believe me, there was nobody in there when we closed it up. Besides, if he somehow got shut in there by accident all he’d have had to do was use the emergency release to open the door. It wouldn’t be hard to push through the duct tape, even for a wimp like Childress.”

“The cops say the emergency release was broken.”

“Broken? Since when?”

“I don’t know,” I replied as we arrived in the basement.

During the short time I was upstairs more police had arrived. The team from the county crime lab was there in their Day-Glo jumpsuits with their tackle boxes full of equipment. While Borland gave his statement to the two uniformed officers I lingered in the hallway and watched the forensics team go about their business. No one objected to my presence. Indeed, they all seemed happy to accept my being head of the company’s legal department as a valid reason for staying.

The plainclothes detectives arrived just as two jump-suited attendants wheeled a stretcher into the cold room. I couldn’t help but notice that on top of the sheets was a neatly folded body bag. The two detectives were as clean-cut as the uniformed officers, though older and not as good-looking. They ambled down the corridor, each carrying a steaming Styrofoam cup of 7-Eleven coffee. From where I was standing it sounded like they were talking about last night’s Bulls game.