headset, pointed down the corridor.
Victor looked at the nameplates as he walked.
“Excuse me. Dr. Shryack?” Victor called as he stepped through the open door. The extraordinarily young- looking man raised his head from a microscope.
“I’m Dr. Frank,” Victor said. “Remember when I stopped in while you were autopsying the Hobbs baby?”
“Of course,” said Dr. Shryack. He stood up and extended his hand. “Nice to meet you under more pleasant circumstances. The name is Stephen.”
Victor shook his hand.
“I’m afraid we haven’t any definitive diagnosis yet,”
Stephen said, “if that is what you’ve come for. The slides are still being processed.”
“I’m interested, of course,” Victor said. “But the reason I stopped by was to ask another favor. I was curious if you routinely take fluid samples.”
“Absolutely,” Stephen answered. “We always do toxicology, at least a screen.”
“I was hoping to get some of the fluid myself,” Victor said.
“I’m impressed with your interest,” Stephen said. “Most internists give us a rather wide berth. Come on, let’s see what we have.”
Stephen led Victor out of his office, down the hall, and into the extensive laboratory where he stopped to speak to a severely dressed middle-aged woman. The conversation lasted for a minute before she pointed toward the opposite end of the room. Stephen then led Victor down the length of the lab and into a side room.
“I think we’re in luck.” Stephen opened the doors to a large cooler on the far wall and began searching through the hundreds of stoppered Erlenmeyer flasks. He found one and handed it back to Victor. Soon he found three others.
Victor noticed he had two flasks of blood and two of urine.
“How much do you need?” Stephen asked.
“Just a tiny bit,” Victor said.
Stephen carefully poured a little from each flask into test tubes that he got from a nearby counter top. He capped them, labeled each with a red grease pencil, and handed them to Victor.
“Anything else?” Stephen asked.
“Well, I hate to take advantage of your generosity,”
Victor said.
“It’s quite all right,” Stephen said.
“About five years ago, my son died of a very rare liver cancer,” Victor began.
“I’m so sorry.”
“He was treated here. At the time the doctors said there had only been a couple of similar cases in the literature.
The thought was that the cancer had arisen from the Kupffer cells so that it really was a cancer of the reticuloendothelial system.”
Stephen nodded. “I think I read about that case. In fact, I’m sure I did.”
“Since the tumor was so rare,” Victor said, “do you think that any gross material was saved?”
“There’s a chance,” Stephen said. “Let’s go back to my office.”
When Stephen was settled in front of his computer terminal, he asked Victor for David’s full name and birth date. Entering that, he obtained David’s hospital number and located the pathology record. With his finger on the screen, he scanned the information. His finger stopped. “This looks encouraging. Here’s a specimen number. Let’s check it out.”
This time he took Victor down to the subbasement. “We have a crypt where we put things for long-term storage,” he explained.
They stepped off the elevator into a dimly lit hall that snaked off in myriad directions. There were pipes and ducts along the ceiling, the floor a bare, stained concrete.
“We don’t get to come down here that often,” Stephen said as he led the way through the maze. He finally stopped at a heavy metal door. When Victor helped pull it open, Stephen reached in and flipped on a light.
It was a large, poorly lit room with widely spaced bulbs in simple ceiling fixtures. The air was cold and humid.
Numerous rows of metal shelves reached almost to the ceiling.
Checking a number that he had written on a scrap of paper, Stephen set off down one of the rows. Victor followed, glancing into the shelves. At one point he stopped, transfixed by the image of an entire head of a child contained in a large glass canister and soaking in some kind of preservative brine. The eyes stared out and the mouth was open as if in some perpetual scream. Victor looked at the other glass containers. Each contained some horrifying preserved testament to past suffering. He shuddered, then realized that Stephen had passed from sight.
Looking nervously around, he heard the resident call.
“Over here.”
Victor strode forward, no longer looking at the specimens.
When he reached the corner, he saw the pathologist reaching into one of the shelves, noisily pushing around the glass containers. “Eureka!” he said, straightening up. He had a modest-sized glass jar in his hands that contained a bulbous liver suspended in clear fluid. “You’re in luck,” he said.
Later, on the way up in the elevator, he asked Victor why he wanted the tissue.
“Curiosity,” Victor said. “When David died my grief was so overwhelming I didn’t ask any questions. Now after all these years, I want to know more about why he died.”
Marsha drove VJ and Philip through the Chimera gates.
During the drive VJ had chatted about a new Pac-Man video just like any other ten-year-old.
“Thanks for the lift, Mom,” he said, jumping out.
“Let Colleen know where you’re playing,” she said. “And I want you to stay away from the river. You saw what it looked like from the bridge.”
Philip got out from the back seat. “Nothing’s going to happen to VJ,” he said.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go over to your friend Richie’s?” Marsha questioned.
“I’m happy here,” VJ said. “Don’t worry about me, okay?”
Marsha watched VJ stride off with Philip rushing to catch up. “What a pair,” she thought, trying to keep last night’s revelation from panicking her.
She parked the car and headed for the day-care center. As she entered the building she could hear the thwack of a racquetball. The courts were on the floor above, in the fitness center.
Marsha found Pauline Spaulding kneeling on the floor, supervising a group of children who were finger- painting. She leaped up when she saw Marsha, her figure giving proof to all those years as an aerobics instructor.
When Marsha asked for a few minutes of her time, Pauline left the kids and went off to find another teacher. After she returned with a younger woman in tow, she led Marsha to another room filled with cribs and folding cots.
“We’ll have some privacy here,” Pauline said. Her large oval eyes looked nervously at Marsha, who she assumed had come on official business for her husband.
“I’m not here as the wife of one of the partners,” Marsha said, trying to put Pauline at ease.
“I see.” Pauline took a deep breath and smiled. “I thought you had some major complaint.”
“Quite the contrary,” Marsha said. “I wanted to talk to you about my son.”
“Wonderful boy,” Pauline said. “I suppose you know that he comes in here from time to time and helps out. In fact, he visited us just last weekend.”
“I didn’t know the center was open on weekends,” Marsha said.
“Seven days a week,” Pauline said with pride. “A lot of people here at Chimera work every day. I suppose that’s called dedication.”
