The Proteus Cure (8 page)

Sheila loved going to the fertility clinic. Seeing those women, so anxious and depressed when they walked in and so happy when they left. Walls of pictures of their infants lined the halls. Each photo tangible proof of the ability of medicine, and specifically Tethys, to perform miracles.

When she hung up, the phone rattled a little more. She shook it.

What was that? A loose wire?

The sound seemed to be coming from the mouthpiece. She unscrewed it and a little black disk fell out. Her first thought was that something had broken off. Then it occurred to her that it looked like an electronic bug. She smiled at the thought.

Who’d want to bug me?

Then she noticed the adhesive coating on the surface. She’d never seen one in real life but had watched enough detective shows to know that bugs were usually stuck in out-of-the-way places.

Like inside a phone …

Oh my God. The break in. And now a bug. Her chest tightened and she felt pressure behind her eyes. Her heart pounded. Who would want to bug me?

She bolted from her chair and ran downstairs.

Bill pulled into the Tethys lot, smiling. Last night had gone down perfectly. Had to hand it to Shen, the man knew his stuff. Made enough noise to awaken Sheila but not terrify her. Alarm her just enough to call security. And he snagged her camera.

Now they could drop the Kelly incident and move on. And who knew? The way things were going, maybe the other woman who received the errant VG723 would never surface.

Yes, it was shaping up to be a great day.

He walked into his office and was surprised to see Sheila. She was holding out her hand and looking angry.

“Look at this!”

He repressed a gasp when she dropped a bug into his hand. He had to fake looking puzzled, but no problem looking shocked. When he’d hired Sheila, he’d had her office wired for audio and visual surveillance. He’d needed to monitor her, make sure her husband hadn’t told her about his investigation of Tethys before Shen had silenced him. How the hell had she found it?

“What is it?”

“A bug—an electronic bug! In my phone! What’s going on, Bill?”

He held it closer pretending to examine it.

“Are you sure? I’ve never seen one.”

“Me either until now. It was in the mouthpiece of my office phone.”

“This is crazy!”

He put the bug on his desk and hung up his coat.

“Bill, it’s got me spooked. Who’d be listening in on me? And last night someone broke into my house.”

“I heard about that. Shen called me first thing this morning. He said they took your purse and laptop.”

“Along with my camera. So much for Kelly’s pictures.”

“Are you all right? You weren’t hurt?”

“It was while I was sleeping. They took my things and left. It was scary, Bill. I feel violated.”

Such a typical female term.

“Sheila, there’s no need to get dramatic. Robberies happen all the time. I’m sure it was random.”

“A robbery where they take my laptop and camera, and the next day this?” She pointed to the bug. “It’s not random—that’s a pattern. But why me?”

What to say? How to explain it? Next time Shen had better use a stronger adhesive.

Then he had an idea.

“I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts it was VecGen’s competition, GenEon. They’ve been snooping into VecGen’s secrets for years.”

GenEon didn’t go near oncology but he had read an article about their being accused of corporate espionage. And they were in the stem cell field.

“You think? And they’re watching me?”

“I’ll bet they’ve bugged a lot of phones. Looking for corporate secrets. Did you have any patient files on your laptop?”

“Yeah, some, but Dave Ellis in IT encrypted my hard drive so if anyone stole it they couldn’t access my files. It’s technology from the Navy. At least that’s what he told me.”

Bill picked up the bug. “Look, I’ll call Shen and have him do a sweep of all the offices.”

“Do you think they’ll come back?”

“Doubt it—not with Shen keeping an eye out. We’ll get rid of all the bugs and whoever it was will go away.” Bill was thrilled she seemed to be buying this. “Do you need the day off? After last night you must be exhausted.”

“No, I’m okay. I’ll turn in early tonight.”

Good girl, he thought.

“I’m meeting Abra for lunch. That’ll bolster my spirits.”

Oh, hell. How was he going to explain the bug to Abra? Well, he’d give her the GenEon story too. She’d have no way to disprove it. Shen would do a sweep, pretend to find and remove half a dozen others, and that would be the end of it. And during the sweep he’d replace Sheila’s in a new location with a lot more glue.

“It’s a stroke of luck you found this. Who knows how long it’s been going on? I’ll get Shen on it right away.”

Sheila got up and walked out.

So much for a calm, smooth, easy morning.

Tanesha Green looked around.

Well, here she was again, back in an examining room. Second one in two days. Why did they all look alike? Did doctors all order their rooms from some catalog?

They all
had
to order these dumb-ass paper capes from the same place.

Tanesha dried her sweaty palms on the cape. Lordy she was nervous. That quack at the Penner clinic had her running scared. The way he’d washed his hands of her like … like Pontius Pilate. Did he think she was a lost cause?

Worry wouldn’t go away and had kept her up all night. If she didn’t find an answer soon—

The door opened and Tanesha almost puddled up and bawled as Dr. Takamura stepped in. At last, a friendly face.

She remembered how gentle and caring she’d been back in the VG723 days, treating her like a real person, not some number. Everything here was numbers—numbered people getting numbered treatments. But Doc Takamura had been different.

“Tanesha?” she said, frowning and knitting her brows as she looked down at the chart and up again. “You look …”

“Different?” Tanesha bit back a sob. “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

Dr. Takamura didn’t look any different though. Didn’t look a minute older than back when Tanesha was taking the cancer cure. Same reddish blond hair, same bright blue eyes and freckled nose, same slim body—Tanesha would kill for that body. Or would have before her skin and hair had started changing. Now she’d keep the blubber—she’d
love
the blubber if she could just get back to her old self.

“I … I …”

The look on Dr. Takamura’s face made Tanesha’s heart stumble. Her expression reminded her of that Dr. Kaplan.

“What’s wrong? Why you lookin’ me like that?”

“Because …” She stepped closer and touched Tanesha’s hair, then her skin. “Your skin’s half a dozen tones lighter.”

“Tell me about it.”

“And your hair …”

“Is coming in straight and light brown. I knows all that. What I don’t know is why.
That’s
what I needs to know.” She felt a tear roll down her cheek. “I’m scared, doc. Really scared. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

Now the locked-up sob broke free. Tanesha squeezed her eyes shut to hold off a complete meltdown. She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Dr. Takamura staring into her eyes.

“We’ll lick this, Tanesha,” she said, her voice soft but firm. “But first we have to find out what’s causing it. When we know that, we can start working on returning you to normal.”

Tanesha grabbed her hand and squeezed. “I knew you’d help. What’s happening to me?”

Dr. Takamura shook her head. “I don’t know.”

That didn’t sound so good. Tanesha felt her faint hope fading.

“Girl, you saying you ain’t never seen nothin’ like me before?”

“As a matter of fact I have. Just recently.”

Tanesha could’ve started bawling again. She wasn’t the only one.

“What was wrong?”

Dr. Takamura looked away. “I didn’t get a chance to work her up.”

“But you gonna work
me
up, right?”

She smiled. “Six ways from Sunday. We’ll start with blood tests, then I’m sending you to Doctor Haskins.”

“Who’s he?”

“A dermatologist.”

“Hope he better than the one I been to.”

“He’s tops. He’s going to look you over, then take a skin biopsy and do a hair analysis. First we find out what’s going wrong—the changes in the tissues that are making this happen. Then we find out why. Once we know the what and the why, we can start figuring out
how
to fix it.”

Tanesha sobbed again. Couldn’t help it.

“Oh, Lordy, I sure hope you right. ’Cause if you ain’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m so sick of them strange looks people give me, I don’t want to go out. And even little Jamal’s starting to look at me like I ain’t his mother no more. He don’t understand—shit,
I
don’t understand—and I think he’s as scared as me. Maybe more.”

Dr. Takamura touched her arm again. “I’m not promising a solution, Tanesha. I want to be clear on that. But I’ll use everything modern medicine has to offer to find an answer for you.”

“Can’t ask for more than that, I guess.” She paused. “You think this was caused by my cancer medicine?”

Dr. Takamura blinked. “What makes you think that?”

“The doctor I saw yesterday—”

“Who?”

“At the Penner clinic. Real piece of work. All the personality of a collard green. Maybe less. Anyway, he’s looking me over, and as soon as he hears I had cancer therapy, he gets all shook up and says I gots to get back to Tethys.”

“He probably wasn’t familiar with the therapy and thought your immune system might be compromised.”

“You wanna say that in English?”

She smiled. “What’s important is that he sent you to the right place.”

Tanesha sensed something bothering Dr. Takamura.

“But you didn’t answer my question, doc: Could this be from the treatment?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. But that’s one of the things I’ll be looking into.”

“This other patient—she get the same cancer treatment as me?”

Another head shake. “I can’t discuss other patients—privacy, you know.”

Dr. Takamura seemed to be plenty worried, about more than privacy, but Tanesha let it go. She trusted this lady. Had to. She had no one else.

Sheila wished she’d seen Tanesha before lunch so she could have told Abra. She’d told her all about the bug and Paul, but this was big. Exciting. Abra would have to wait, but not Bill. As soon as she finished her round of appointments, Sheila headed for Bill’s office, walking at top speed. It took all her reserve to keep from running.

Two patients with pigment changes—radical, pervasive changes. Hair too—not only color but texture as well. And both treated with VG723. There
had
to be a connection.

She pulled open the door to the clinic building and found herself facing a wall of rain. What had begun as a light mid-morning drizzle had graduated to a full-scale deluge. And her umbrella was in her car.

Damn.

Well, she’d just have to get wet. This couldn’t wait. She had to tell Bill. And a phone call wasn’t going to do it. This was face-to-face stuff.

Wait—the tunnels.

She passed the elevator and pushed through the stairwell door to its right. Two flights down, through another door, and she was in the tunnel system.

The underground network that crisscrossed the campus had been dug back in the nineteenth century when this had been Bradfield College. The granite blocks forming the walls, floors, and arched ceilings gave the tunnels a chill, dungeony feel.

Sheila wondered what it had been like down here before electricity. What had folks used to see? Torches? Kerosene lamps? Must have been dark and foreboding. Now, with fluorescent light boxes strung along the ceilings, they were anything but.

Light alone couldn’t dissipate the damp chill, however. Nor keep out the trickles that seeped through from above.

Sheila rarely came down here, so she had to pause to orient herself. The Admin building was to her right, and then left. They needed signs down here. Take a wrong turn and you could wind up in one of the unrefurbished dead-ends.

She maintained a hurried walk, nodding and smiling to other Tethys staff members taking advantage of the shelter.

She was glad to see them. After last night, the last place she wanted to be alone was in these eerie tunnels.

Reaching the Admin stairs, she ran up to the first floor, down the hall, and pushed through a door emblazoned with
William P. Gilchrist, Jr. MD
.

“Is he in?”

Marge, his secretary, looked startled by Sheila’s precipitous entrance.

“Yes, but he’s on a call.”

“Thanks.”

Sheila stepped through the inner door into Bill’s sanctum without waiting to be announced. He had the phone to his ear but smiled and gestured to the settee. Sheila felt too wired to sit, so she wandered the room.

She loved this office and hoped to have one just like it someday. The big windows with their diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass, the richly paneled walls, the hardwood floor, the stone fireplace that had been converted to gas. It used to belong to the dean of Bradfield.

She’d been here numerous times but never tired of inspecting the photo-bedizened walls. Bill had been everywhere and seemed to know everybody. He had framed photos of himself with politicos—President Bush, Senator Kerry, Kofi Annan, among others—and celebrities—everyone from Bono to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Salted among the photos were award plaques from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Society of Pediatric Hematology / Oncology, the Massachusetts Society of Clinical Oncology, plus a host of cancer advocacy groups.

She studied his smiling face under a ten-gallon Stetson as he shook hands with Imus at his ranch for kids with cancer. The same smile that had pulled her back into the light from the darkest moment of her life.

She remembered that time … she’d never forget.

Her mother had recently died, only a year after Da. Sheila’s pregnancy had helped her deal with her grief and she’d begun applying for positions at cancer centers. Then the call came that Dek was DOA after his accident. She’d miscarried the very next day. She’d had the D&C and then gone to pick out Dek’s casket.