Rupture Read online

  Their affair started late that night, fast and furious, in her room at the Peabody Hotel. Korinsky didn’t tell her he was married until three months later, when he used that information to force her into the abortion.

  After the procedure, Korinsky left her there, cold and shaking in the sterile procedure room at RBI, with the additional duty of disposing of the evidence. She cried as she cleaned herself. After throwing away the bloodied sheets, she looked in the canister—at what was left of what would have become her baby.

  During the week after her home pregnancy test, Tsarina had decided that she was having a girl. She began to talk to her daughter, singing to her at bedtime. Alone in the procedure room and longing to have her daughter back, Tsarina was sickened by the thought of embryonic stem cells used as therapy. Tsarina realized the contradiction this created in her position as director of stem cell therapy. To her surprise, she laughed, amazed at the newfound power this directorship afforded her. She exhaled a defining laugh and removed the canister, cradling it as she limped back to her lab. The cells would live as they were for a few more minutes, and if she kept them warm in culture fluid, they could live indefinitely.

  In her laboratory, Tsarina felt sharp, stabbing pains deep in her pelvis. She limped into the incubator room and sat down on a metal stool. The endometrial tissue had settled to the bottom of the canister, leaving thin bloody fluid on top. Using a long pipette, she aspirated a sample from just above the tissue layer and placed a drop on a microscope slide.

  “There,” she whispered, looking through the scope at a group of embryonic cells floating across the glass surface, her focal vision obscured by a welling of tears. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” The pain hit again and Tsarina felt dizzy, the room spinning. “Mama will take care of you,” she said, closing her eyes. In the sterile room, with ravaged bits of what she was sure was her daughter floating across a microscopic field, she thought again of this sacrificed life. Her only hope in facing the tragedy was to realize the incredible position she was in. She controlled the fate of the embryonic stem cells stored in the incubator beside her, with their hyped-up promise of curing human disease and the unforeseen complications that could arise from their unmitigated power. Tsarina knew that the treatment protocols planned by RBI would require the sacrifice of many more human embryos—just like her daughter. Finally, her nausea and dizziness passed and out of despair came clarity.

  Under the sterile culture hood, Tsarina distributed the cells from the canister into individual flasks. Later, she would separate the embryonic cells from their somatic counterparts and place them on a layer of feeder cells, a surrogate for her womb. She realized then why she had been given her position in charge of stem cell development. At first skeptical about the move to the United States, and then to Memphis, Tsarina came to believe that divine providence had placed her in this powerful role. Though her relationship with Korinsky had turned into a nightmare, her purpose at RBI was evident.

  Tsarina knew that RBI had all the pieces in place to make human embryonic stem cell therapy a reality: near unlimited financial support from venture capitalists, a deep infrastructure of scientists, and the trust of the community and of the world, a result of RBI’s generous vaccine distribution. Only one additional ingredient was essential for the stem cell program’s success—a renegade doctor like Korinsky, whose greed would drive him into unauthorized human experimentation.

  In spite of her pain, Tsarina developed a plan. Each of RBI’s scientific divisions, from the public relations of vaccine production to the highly profitable biomedical device core, was poised to support the mission of stem cell therapy. Tsarina had seen the profit margin reports. The funding of RBI’s stem cell mission rested on the success of the AortaFix device.If it fails, RBI fails. If RBI fails, hundreds of unborn babies, like my daughter, will be saved. I will be the mother to all these precious embryonic lives, Tsarina vowed to herself. She looked at the embryonic cells floating in warm culture fluid and made them a promise. “You will live forever.”

  Now, as she watched Korinsky leave the lab with the flasks of cells, Tsarina removed a notebook from her desk and recorded an entry for the third batch of the metalloproteinase-producing cells she had given him. She laughed at the thought of Korinsky trying to prevent another rupture of an aortic device by coating the grafts with those destructive cells.

  The deaths will come quickly now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  RBI

  9:42 A.M.

  Eli held the note with both hands and tried to read beyond those three words.

  They’re hurting Henry.

  They? Who?

  And how are they hurting my brother? He thought of the fresh puncture marks on Henry’s leg.

  Doctor visits each month?

  His beeper went off.They changed the locks on my office, canceled my parking, but no one would ever deactivate this annoying beeper. Eli sighed with each successive irritating blast.

  You can run, but you can’t hide.

  As soon as he looked at the number on the display panel he answered Meg’s call.

  “Vera Tuck?” she asked.

  “Hi Meg.”

  Eli heard her searching through papers. He imagined her in the autopsy suite typing the findings into the computer, or leaning forward at the microscope in tight scrubs, just as he had seen her the first time. It seemed so long ago, yet it had only been four days.

  “You could’ve told me. We don’t always get the latest gossip down here in the dungeon.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Her body’s right in front of me, all twisted up like a pretzel.”

  Eli imagined the position of Vera’s body as it was removed from the incubator, rigor locking it in place.

  “These deaths, Eli, they’re not a coincidence. I’m sure of it.”

  He looked again at the note in his hand. “Yes, I know.”

  “Are you okay? You sound different.”

  “I’m okay, I think.”

  There was silence on both ends before Meg asked, “Anything I should know before I slice her?”

  Eli wished the whole Vera thing would just go away. But he knew that clues from her autopsy could potentially prove who killed her.

  “I want to be there for it.” He thought about how long it would take to drive—and find a parking place. “Give me half an hour.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AUTOPSY SUITE

  10:32 A.M.

  Meg had the body prepared on the autopsy table. An assortment of tools and instruments were set out in the order they would be used. Scalpel to make the V cut, rib cutters, Metzenbaum scissors, Stryker saw for the skull, and basins for each individual organ.

  Vera’s body was completely uncovered. Eli thought this unnecessary before the procedure had even begun.I don’t care if she did hate everybody; a sheet should cover her at least, in deference to basic human dignity.

  Although her face was gaunt and wrinkled, her body was surprisingly fit: full muscular legs and a scaphoid abdomen sloping to a tiny waist.

  “This her?” Meg asked as she left her office and entered the room.

  Eli stepped closer. “’Fraid so.” He focused on her left groin. Three puncture wounds just lateral to dark tufts of pubic hair. They were in the anatomic site used for femoral catheterization. Identical to the wounds that Eli found on Henry.

  “I noticed those too. Fairly recent, don’t you think?”

  Eli didn’t answer.

  Meg handed him a pair of gloves. “Here, put these on. I’ve got more to show you.”

  She lifted Vera’s hand and pressed the skin away from a long, chipped fingernail. “Vera neglected her nails or the police overlooked this one.”

  Eli leaned over for a closer look. “Ouch.”

  “Yeah,” Meg said. “Whoever killed her left the scene missing plugs of their skin.”

  “That should be incriminating evidence.”

  “I’m sure the crime-scene inve
stigators collected a sample,” Meg said. “There is epidermis under every fingernail.” She removed a handheld fluorescent lamp from the table and flipped off the overhead lights. The room was completely dark until the lamp flickered on. Eli watched the light move toward Vera’s face. Meg’s gloved finger pried the jaw open. A green fluorescent glow emanated from the dead woman’s mouth.

  “What in the world?” Eli asked.

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Eli moved closer and saw that the glow separated into tiny green specks. They were everywhere: on her teeth, her tongue, and down the back of her throat.

  With the room still dark, Meg pulled him over to the microscope. “Take a look.”

  Eli recognized the source of the green color immediately. “It’s green fluorescent protein.” He could feel Meg beside him, the sweet smell of her hair stronger in the darkness. “I always transfect GFP into my cells, to track their movement.”

  Meg flipped on the overhead lights. “Do you usually feed them to your lab tech?”

  Eli looked again at Vera. Her mouth was still partially open to reveal a swollen tongue. “I knew she was crazy, but —”

  “But not crazy enough to eat cells from a culture dish?”

  Eli tried to imagine the minutes before her death. If someone was trying to steal the cells, Vera would have definitely tried to stop them.

  Even if she had to eat them.

  Meg interrupted the crime scene re-creation. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you put GFP in the cells? That they would light up like fireflies?”

  Eli knew where she was going with this. They could have searched for the green protein in the aortic grafts.

  “The specimens from Gaston and Lankford?”

  Meg wore her one-step-ahead-of-you smile. “Like a St. Patrick’s Day parade.”

  One of Vera’s ridiculous outbursts rang in his head.

  Rich Bitch Ink.

  This was her only phrase that carried no religious or racial connotation. And she had said it only in the presence of Stone.

  Rich Bitch Inc.

  RBI

  “And I’ll tell you what else,” Meg said.

  “What?”

  “We’re starting to receive calls from medical examiners in the region. Jackson, Tennessee and Tupelo. Each reported a death from aortic rupture.”

  Meg waited for Eli to respond.

  He said nothing

  “And a local hospital out in Cordova had two similar deaths, just last night.”

  The voice of Ms. Conch gurgled over the intercom. “Dr. Daily? A Detective Lipsky from the police department called.”

  Meg looked at Eli and pressed the button on the intercom. “What did he want?”

  “He wanted to know if a Dr. Eli Branch had been here.”

  Eli pointed at Vera’s body. “Lipsky’s the one conducting the investigation.”

  Ms. Conch crackled back in. “When I didn’t answer him, he said he was coming over and hung up.”

  “Look, Meg, I need to talk to you some more.” Eli quickly headed to the door. “I think we’re onto something big, whether we want to be or not.”

  “I’ve got an hour before my next autopsy. Want me to come to your office?”

  My office? If she only knew.

  “No, I need to lie low away from the medical center for a while. Let’s meet later tonight,” Eli said, trying to think of a place off campus, somewhere no one would expect.

  “Do you know Automatic Slim’s?”

  “Automatic whose?” Meg asked.

  “It’s called Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club. Downtown on Second. Got an Asian-Caribbean thing going on.”

  “Sounds like a sexy place for a mother and her young child. We don’t get out much.”

  Eli had forgotten about Margaret. His silence indicated this to Meg.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get a sitter,” she said. “There’s a nursing student who lives on my street who can stay with Margaret. What time?”

  “I need to visit an old friend first. Is nine o’clock too late?”

  “That’s okay. See you then.”

  Eli turned to leave, but Meg stopped him.

  “I don’t know why, but I feel compelled to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “Be careful.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  UNIVERSITY OF THE MID-SOUTH

  MEDICAL CAMPUS

  8:00 P.M.

  The back entrance of Anatomy Hall was hardly ever used anymore. Until the late seventies, bodies for dissection had been transported in and out through the back of the building, a discreet method that could not be observed by those walking between other academic buildings. Now there was a side entrance through which bodies were transported, concealed in wooden boxes indistinguishable from other supplies.

  Ragged blades of Johnson grass hung over a cobblestone walkway and ivy climbed the brick wall. A strange combination, Eli thought, the horticultural symbol of academia and a weed that could snuff out the most fertile crops in the delta. He was dressed in scrubs and carried only a penlight and a set of keys in his pocket. Long seed stems brushed his leg as he approached.

  Anatomy Hall was virtually unoccupied during the months of June and July, after the first-year medical students went home for the summer. The place would remain this way, visited only by cleaning and maintenance personnel, until mid-August, when the hall would become alive again with nervous medical students, anxious to meet the dead body with whom they would spend the next six months.

  Eli had not entered the building since returning to Memphis. It had been almost ten years since he walked among the portraits of anatomy professors, the oldest—Dr. Latimer Stemfield, first chair of the department—dating back to 1904. There was something daunting about the building now, this place where young Eli had spent most of his summer days, enthralled with the mysteries of life and death. To be twelve and watch the hands of young men and women explore the depths of the human body was a unique experience, a privilege off-limits to anyone but surgeons, morticians, and the criminally insane. But along with the fascination of it all, he was not shielded from the harshness, the gradual loss of compassion that Eli, though young, had recognized happening to almost every student after they’d spent hours picking away at fascial layers, uncovering strands of muscle, memorizing each point of insertion and origin on tiny nubbins of bone.

  It was tradition at the University of the Mid-South that each cadaver be given a name by the group of four students assigned to that table. Eli’s favorite time in the hall was to walk among the tables and listen as a student from each group read a brief description of the person who died and how. The most common scenario was that of a patient in his or her seventies or eighties who died of cancer or heart disease. Eli was comforted when the cause of death was that broad, ill-defined category, old age.

  Then there were patients whose deaths disturbed Eli, kept him awake at night; a fifty-two-year-old vagrant found in a diabetic coma, a thirty-year-old homeless woman with extreme hypothermia discovered on New Year’s Eve. How had they given consent to donate their bodies to medical science? None of these individuals, he was sure, had a driver’s license or a signed donor card. They didn’t even own a wallet. Were their bodies used by the school because no one claimed them? No grieving family members to make funeral plans? So they were carted to the hall with a tag on their toe.

  Other troubling images kept the young boy awake in his bed: a middle-aged woman with Down syndrome, a prisoner on death row, the teenage girl in a car accident. Eli had heard the sexual innuendoes from the male medical students as they dissected the girl’s pelvis. Memories good and bad were ingrained in the history of this place.

  Once, Eli had asked Gaston about these people. Unaware of ethics as a discipline, he nevertheless asked how it could be ethical to use their bodies if they had not given permission. The boy’s suspicion grew when Gaston told him to mind his own
business. To ask this of his father would never have occurred to Eli.

  The youngest son of Elizer and Naomi Branch, Eli was considered a prodigy by everyone in Anatomy Hall. At ten years of age, he could draw the branches of the brachial plexus with three-dimensional accuracy, including spatial relationships to the subclavian artery. At twelve, one group of students let him open a skull with the circular saw. When he finished the task, he peeled back the bowl-shaped skull and handed it to a squeamish female student, to the cheers and accolades of a male-dominated class. But none of the students knew that Eli was troubled by these things.

  How did I come out of those years without being psychologically crippled? Or maybe I am.

  Eli approached the rear door, wood-framed with a stone arch of Gothic design. He twisted the knob, anticipating that it would be locked. From his pocket he removed a chain of keys and opened the door as if he were the janitor or night watchman. Eli had always kept a key to the hall, but didn’t know why.

  Until now.

  He stepped into the back storage room, musty and stale, careful to watch his footing on a wet layer of slime that covered the concrete floor. He swung the beam of his penlight across wooden crates of formalin fixative stacked in the corner. The rest of the room was empty.

  From this part of the building, Eli could not remember how to get to Gaston’s room. He thought of the layout from the front entrance and tried to work backward. Students entered through the foyer, ignoring its marble floor and dark-paneled walls hung with anatomist’s portraits. Instead, they peered at the antique display cases lining the walls that held dissection instruments from the early eighteen hundreds. As a boy, Eli’s favorite relic was a human skull with a line of bone missing, a hatchet having been driven through.