He was quiet for a moment. “You’re ignoring the fact that I’ve built my career on anonymity.”
“Which conveniently removes many of the women that might interest you.”
“So when you go to the store are you one of those people that picks through all the fruit, testing each one?”
“It’s just dating.”
“That’s me, I’m just dating too.”
“But you will…”
“Take you to the party.”
The Seattle cabbie had a walrus mustache and spoke Russian. After talking to a Russian-speaking dispatcher, the man seemed to understand where they were going.
Sam listened intently on his cell phone to Paul rattle off the tail end of the report on Dr. Galbraith. Anna was trying to put her head close to Sam’s so she could hear the story as Paul told it. Sam blew in her ear, causing her to pull away, and grinned.
“So you checked the title records and found a few million in commercial real estate?” Anna asked when Sam had hung up.
“That’s right. House is expensive, no mortgage, no car loans, no credit card debt. We had somebody go through his garbage and find his stockbroker. He had three. We called all of them, claiming to be a friend and wanting to adopt the same strategy as the good doctor. We emphasized how much the doctor thought of them. One of them was candid enough to say that Galbraith made most of his money on stock options in Grace Technologies and the brokerage house had nothing to do with the choice. In fact they wouldn’t have picked the stock.”
“No kidding.”
“I think we’ve established that he’s well off through some association with Grace Technologies.”
“So he’s in their pocket.”
“Seems so.”
“And you’re absolutely sure that your fellow, what’s his name…”
“Yanavitch, George Yanavitch.”
“… has no connection with Grace.”
“I am. Plus he’s a leading authority on schizophrenia and its physiological correlates.”
“And you think that helps because?…”
“If somebody were going to do something to screw up your mind, they probably disrupt the electrical chemical activity in your brain. That is a physiological process.”
“Okay,” she said. “When do we leave for Jason’s?”
“Paul will have my friends outfitted and ready to go in a couple of hours. We have the intelligence we need.”
The cab sped past Virginia Mason Clinic and up to a large brick residential-looking structure that was actually a suite of medical offices.
They paid the cabbie and got out. There were four psychiatrists listed on the bronze plaque by the door. In the offices they were confronted with an empty receptionist’s chair, antiques, and a carpet that Anna carefully inspected. Checking the nap from the underside, she pronounced it genuine handwoven Persian.
“This isn’t the place they do the scans and physiology stuff.”
“It looks nearly like the office of an art broker.”
“Yeah, well, no law against taste.”
At that moment the receptionist returned and showed them into the office of Dr. Yanavitch, a pleasant bearded man, round in the face and with hair gone silver-gray.
“My goodness,” he said when Anna took off the hat and the glasses.
“Pleased to meet you,” Anna said.
“As between the two of us, I’m sure I’m the one who’s pleased. Sit down.”
They sat in stylish wooden chairs next to a large overstuffed chair that Sam surmised was the proverbial couch.
“I’m afraid we’ve had a little hitch.”
“Hitch?” Sam said, immediately alert.
“I know you said that no one was to know about your inquiries. But we goofed. Routinely we get referrals. Our physiological work leads many therapists to want to eliminate functional disorders before they begin treatment. They want to work with as healthy a brain as they can get. Sometimes our studies lead us to recommend drugs that alter the brain chemistry and make therapy more effective. At any rate, my staff knew that Jason had been seeing Dr. Galbraith and unfortunately assumed it must be a referral despite my admonition. So they contacted Galbraith’s office and requested records. That’s the bad news. The good news is his office sent the records and I opened them before they called, in a panic, and asked for them back. I also, as you requested, have had several discussions with Dr. Carl Fielding about the contents of the disk. And in addition, as you requested, we have talked with others at Harvard and MIT.”
Sam tried not to look sick about the disclosure to Galbraith. “What did you learn?”
“Galbraith’s office said they’d need the consent of the patient’s guardian for me to release their information to Anna Wade or anyone else. And they asked for it back.”
“But you didn’t mention the disk.”
“That never came up.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said. “We have a lot of resistance from those responsible for Jason. Anna is his sister. Maybe without going into specifics you could tell us what might account for Jason’s behavioral problems.”
“Well, let’s just assume he’s paranoid as you describe, nervous, afraid, makes up imaginary enemies, and so on. But otherwise he’s brilliant. To tell you the truth, I’ve never seen asymmetric right prefrontal brain activity combined this way with diffuse amygdala activity and some limbic system activity in patterns that I see with Jason. Let’s just say hypothetically that if he had pathology in his prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and limbic system, you would expect abnormalities related to fear, perhaps the memory of fearful events, or even the inability to be afraid, or at least the inability to respond appropriately. Prefrontal activity similar to this, although not quite the same, is associated with anxious temperament. The amygdala is critical in processing unconditioned fear responses such as what you might expect if you show a zoo-raised monkey a deadly cobra.” Yanavitch slowed, seeing that his guests were not following him. “Let me tell you a little about the brain if I might, because it will be relevant in talking over Jason’s work.”
Sam nodded, and the concentration lines on Anna’s forehead made it apparent that she was girding herself for a mental battle.
“The brain consists of a hundred billion neurons. They transmit and receive electrical impulses using chemically operated circuits. For our little discussion about how the brain makes a mind, a neuron looks something like this.” Yanavitch stood and placed a large drawing on a white drawing board. On the drawing there was something that looked roughly like a rubber squeeze bulb sprouting brushy fine hairs around its surface and, at what would be the small end of the squeeze bulb, a branched stalk. The fine bushlike things protruding at several points were labeled dendrites. Then the single branching stalk with its several forks was labeled axon. At the end of each axon was a tip called a terminal button. At the base of the axon was the axon hillock.
“We have incoming mail on all these bushy-looking dendrites and outgoing mail on this axon through the terminal buttons. On the dendrites there are proteins that act as receptors for the chemical signal that crosses from the terminal buttons of the neuron before. These transmissions cause the generation of electrical waves that traverse the neuron body. The straight line here with branching toward the end is the axon, and is outgoing, carrying an electrical pulse toward the next neurons. So the transmitting neuron communicates by sending electrical output through its axon and generating a chemical signal across the synapse to the receptors on the dendrites of the receiving neuron, thus perpetuating the electrical signal.
“Just to avoid confusion, we will be talking only about those neurons associated with conscious thought and emotion, the cerebral cortex and the limbic system.”
“I am reaching back to undergraduate biology and it’s a little fuzzy,” Sam said. “And you are moving into deep waters.”
