Smart, But Dead (An Aggie Mundeen Mystery Book 3) Read online

  She was a big woman. Bent over, she reminded me of the song, “The bear went over the mountain…” I checked the back of her hair. Where was her bun? From the lump at her crown, I surmised she’d tucked it under the spiky black wig. The mound gave her head an egg shape. And a sturdy docking station where she could anchor the wig.

  She moved to the side to make sure I appreciated the importance of what I was viewing.

  “See there?” She wiggled her pointy digit. “They’re all yours—each a little clump of your very own genes, each group thriving in a different medium.” She gleefully tented her fingers together. “With goodies added. Changing your genes into God knows what.” She looked smug.

  “Take that plate, for instance.” She pointed. “The genes in those cells were drenched with telomerase. See how they proliferated? So many squiggly little darlings. The overabundance of telomerase made them multiply way too fast. They turned into busy little cancer cells.” She paused to let the horror of the diabolical experiment sink in. “With a good dose of those, you wouldn’t have to worry anymore about aging.” She threw her head back and chortled. Her wig bounced.

  “See the next plate over? There’s less telomerase on those cells...maybe just enough to lengthen telomeres at the end of your chromosomes. Help them proliferate properly. Maintain their immune properties. Wouldn’t that be nice?” She chuckled and batted lashes that looked like they’d been stuck on with Gorilla Glue. “You’d much rather have those genes back in your body, now wouldn’t you?”

  A chill slid down my back. I started wondering if I could outrun her fishnet legs and get out of there.

  “Now those,” she pointed to a plate whose contents looked almost dried up, “those were mixed with progerin. It’ll take a few more days for them to die.” She crossed her arms. I shuddered, remembering children with progeria aging rapidly and dying prematurely.

  “You might find those other specimens particularly interesting.” Her index finger pointed across a series of plates placed side by side in a row. “Eric extracted your APOE genes and cultured copies so he could mix each one with a different enzyme. Hmm. All those mixtures look pretty active. Which combination do you think will produce Alzheimer’s first? Maybe some protein will stop the APOE genes from mutating at all, so you’ll never get Alzheimer’s. Who knows? Sort of like Russian roulette, isn’t it?” She threw her head back and emitted an insane cackle.

  “I’d better go.”

  “Oh, no. We’re not nearly finished. You want to know about their latest discoveries, don’t you?” She grabbed my arm. Her hand, lengthened with false pointed nails, squeezed my arm with the strength of raptors’ talons. “This next set of experiments is the most interesting.”

  Still gripping my arm, she pointed to a set of agar plates occupying an entire shelf. “You remember the daf-2 gene? The one that affects the expression of other genes that speed up or slow ‘downstream’ genes believed to be earmarks for aging? I know you’re particularly interested in stopping the aging process.” She paused and waited for me to nod.

  “Kermit Carmody was especially interested in the daf-2 gene.” She looked smug. “But it was Eric who managed to get your DNA so they could experiment with your genes.”

  I was trying to remain rational and keep our conversation on a scientific plane. I thought she had killed both men and lured me to the lab. I had to figure out a way to make her confess and then escape.

  “Dr. Carmody and Eric worked well together?”

  “For a while.” She threw her head back, squawked a laugh, then shook herself back to seriousness. Her wig settled.

  Once they’d made their discovery, Eric invited me to the lab to scare me so I wouldn’t come back to pry. He must have hit me on the head for good measure.

  Bigsby rearranged the mounds on her chest and pointed back to the last set of plates.

  “Kermit figured out how to isolate the downstream genes,” she said, “but Eric wanted to test them using live, active specimens from a subject approaching middle age. Fortunately, you were amusingly available and big on V8 juice.”

  It was one thing to contribute to science, but my fear of Hortense Bigsby was growing by the second. She got behind me, nudged me up to the incubator so I couldn’t break away and pointed at the first plate in the set.

  “That daf-2 gene? The one right there? It has a daf-16 gene in its pathway. We insert something into daf-2 and then see what daf-16 does. Neat, huh?”

  She was breathing in my ear. Her proximity creeped me out. How could I get away from this madwoman?

  “We see what various enzymes added to daf-2 will do to daf-16. Then we pick the enzymes that seem to affect daf-16 the most, and we add another downstream gene to the plate. It’s so exciting! A chain reaction of mutating genes. It’s like watching a new civilization breed.” With that, she clamped me in a bear hug from the rear. The bottle of nasal spray popped out of my pants pocket and hit the floor.

  “Where’d you get that?” she screamed, crushing me tighter.

  I bit her arm, jerked my elbows up to break her hold and stomped her mammoth foot hard as I could. When she stumbled backward, her wig came loose. It was still moored, but now it was flapping around the back of her head. Wild-eyed, she rushed me.

  Fifty-Seven

  I charged for the door. She leaped behind me and grabbed me around the neck in a headlock. I bit her arm. She shrieked but was still able to tug me toward the electrophoresis machine and power box. With her arm mashing my windpipe, I couldn’t scream. I tried to maneuver my leg behind one of her legs to throw her off balance. But with her dragging me, I couldn’t do it.

  She tightened her hold around my neck, reached for the cable and plugged the power box into the DNA-separating machine. She looked down with scorn, her mouth contorting into a reptilian sneer.

  “Why don’t we stick your hands in some gel and into the chamber to see what three hundred volts does? Burn off your skin? Shock the bejeebers out of you?”

  “It’ll shock you too,” I croaked. “We’re connected.”

  When she relaxed her hold, I bit her arm again.

  “Aagh!”

  She was too tall for me to poke her eyes or smack her eardrums. I started to run. I was halfway to the door when she tackled me and knocked me to the floor. Stunned and breathless, I felt her plop down and pin me by sitting on my backside.

  “That’s enough, bitch. You’re all alike. You. Penelope. Brandy. The lot of you. All flirty and cute and curious. And ignorant!”

  I heard her open a drawer and grab something. Perched on my rear end, she leaned forward and dangled rubber tubing in front of my face.

  “Let’s tie you up and see what kind of experiments we can do.”

  I squirmed, but she was too strong. She yanked my wrists together behind my back and tied them with tubing. Since I might be about to die, I decided to try and get on Hortense’s wavelength.

  “Brandy really flirted with Dr. Carmody, didn’t she?”

  She pulled the tubing tighter. “We were lovers, Kermit and I, until Sleazy Pants showed up and started twitting around the Boston lab.” Hortense was so upset, she had trouble tying the knot around my hands.

  The image of Kermit and Olive Oyl making love triggered my cough reflex, but with my breathing capacity compromised, I only sputtered.

  “I took it as long as I could, watching her sashay in and out, flipping her boobs around. She could never help Kermit in his work like I could.”

  I squeezed out a comment that I knew would get a rise. “Perhaps Brandy had other attributes.”

  To my amazement, Hortense started sniffling. When I heard her snatch a Kleenex from a box on a nearby desk, I twisted my wrists to loosen the tubing. When she raised a hand to wipe her face and honked into the Kleenex, I pulled against the binding.

  “I couldn�
�t stand it anymore,” she sniffed, “so I accepted this position at UHT. Darned if the university didn’t pay him big bucks so he’d come here.” She honked again. “And Sleazy Pants came with him.”

  I spewed words out in puffs. “And they were…getting close...to determining...the sequence…of anti-aging genes.”

  “Yes. And how to affect their activity. Kermit and I could have discovered the secrets of anti-aging. Working together, we could have been famous! He could never have left me then.”

  “But they were getting so close,” I said, “he and Eric and Brandy. You decided you had to do something.”

  She sniffed back a glob of tears. “I couldn’t let them find the secrets to aging. That would cement Kermit’s relationship with her. He would live longer, and she would have him forever.”

  That didn’t sound like such a great deal to me.

  “That could not happen!” she shouted.

  “So you killed him.”

  “I only meant to weaken his immune system so he’d stay out of the lab long enough for me to get rid of Brandy,” she wailed. “But the fungus overwhelmed him.”

  She sat back on her haunches, sobbing and grabbed the Kleenex box. I could breathe better, but my legs were still pinned. I had to make her confess that she killed Eric.

  I heard her sigh. I thought she was so busy nursing her grief she’d lost interest in me. She might have, if I hadn’t piped up. I couldn’t resist needling her.

  “Then Brandy started helping Eric, scientifically and in other ways. And he began to realize what you’d done to Carmody.”

  I heard a growl in her throat. “Brandy helped him, all right. That’s when I decided she’d done all the damage she was going to do. Anybody can dress like this and seduce men. Don’t you see? It’s so meaningless. Yet men keep falling for it. Dr. Carmody admired the complete opposite type of woman, a serious, brilliant scientist like me. Until Brandy took him down.”

  Hortense Bigsby had tried to perfect herself into what she thought Carmody wanted. When that didn’t work, she flipped and became Brandy.

  “You knew you could be like Brandy. Better than Brandy, if you wanted to.”

  “Exactly.”

  I sensed that Hortense was leaning back—probably admiring her boobs.

  “And you understood what they were accomplishing in the lab. You could continue the experiments without any of them. With Carmody and Eric both gone, Brandy had no reason to hang around. She couldn’t pull off a scientific breakthrough without them. She might book the next flight back to Boston.”

  “Precisely. But Eric had to be eliminated.”

  “Now that you’ve killed him, you’re free to carry on. I could help you,” I said. “I’ve studied enough to know what you’re trying to do. I could help carry out experiments under your direction. My name wouldn’t be associated with the research, of course. I don’t have the qualifications. But you would be famous. I could use my column to help make you famous.”

  Her voice grated like gravel. “But you would know I killed Kermit and Eric. That bit of information would make it difficult for us to work together.”

  She got off my legs and yanked me to my feet. My knees wobbled.

  “Let’s see what kind of lab accident we can have,” she said.

  With my hands still bound at my back, she headlocked me again and dragged me toward the incubator. I hadn’t noticed the small box on the adjoining countertop labeled “ethidium bromide.” She opened it, grabbed a spoon from a drawer, scooped out a purplish-red mound of powder and held it under my nose.

  I turned my head away so I wouldn’t inhale it, but she had a boa-constrictor hold around my neck. I finally had to breathe, and I inhaled the deadly stuff. I twisted my head to make sure I sneezed as much of it as I could back in her face. We would die together.

  With both of us sneezing violently, I slipped out of her headlock, wrangled one of my hands out of the binding and yanked at her camisole. A falsie popped out followed by a wire-supported rubber crescent. There was nothing left but flat fabric with a small wrinkle.

  “That did it!” The hatred in her eyes could have shattered a test tube. She grabbed my arm and almost jerked it out of the socket, yanking my wrist back to retie me. She saw the bulge in my pants pocket and yanked out my heavy-duty twine. “How convenient,” she sneered.

  I’d planned to use it to tie up the killer, but she wrapped it around me and tied me to the heavy metal pull on a locked cabinet. It was probably the cabinet where Dr. Carmody kept his research notes and list of trusted scientists. Sam could retrieve them after they removed my body.

  She rummaged through other drawers and came back with a syringe. Holding it in front of my nose, she slowly pushed in the plunger. “Let’s see which of your mutated genes your body likes the best.”

  Cackling insanely, she strutted to the incubator, swinging the syringe back and forth, and opened the door.

  “This APOE gene looks good. But not everybody’s APOE gene morphs into Alzheimer’s disease. It doesn’t happen all that often. Not a sure thing. Too bad. We’ll skip that one for now.”

  Why hadn’t we died from inhaling ethidium bromide? It should have been quicker.

  She pointed the syringe at the plates lined up on a shelf. “There’s those little daf-2 darlings with their downstream genes.” She shook her head. “It’s not a slam dunk how one will change the next one, though—especially if some disgustingly healthy lifestyle habit of yours changes how they act once they’re back in your body.” I felt nauseous.

  She put a hand on her bony hip. “Okay, so what else? The progerin looks good. Everybody is born with some in their body.” She wrinkled her face. “We’re not sure how much more it takes to set you on the path to destruction…” I hoped for a quick death.

  “I’ve got it.” Her wig flopped around. “We’ll use your genes that are drenched with telomerase. Those little boogers are proliferating like crazy. They’re not going to stop when I inject them into you. I wonder what organs they’ll go for first. Your liver? Maybe a bone? Your heart? Your brain? You’ll always wonder, won’t you, where they’ll attack first. While you worry about it, you can look forward to a slow, agonizing death.”

  I was about to black out. Either the bromide was working, or she was scaring me to death. I watched her remove a plate and suck its revolting mixture into the syringe. I had to think of something fast before I started hyperventilating. She slithered toward me with an eel-like stride. Like slow motion in a dream, she unveiled her teeth in a wicked smile. The room was fading.

  Her talons sank into my arm and brought me back.

  “I’ll have to loosen the rope to get one of your arms—bring it around so I can inject this directly into a vein. Works faster.”

  She had to get really close to reach around me. When I felt the rope loosen, she was right up against me. With the top of my head, I headbutted her under the chin as hard as I could. She staggered. I had to use my defense training before she fell back too far. I step-kicked. With the bottom of my foot, I caught her full force right in the kneecap. She screamed with pain, fell back, clipped her head on a counter and fell to the floor, unconscious.

  She looked pretty disheveled. One boob pointed skyward. On the other side, her chest was flat. Her black wig flew to the back of her head, barely attached to her bun. When she came to, she’d be in a lot of pain. But she wouldn’t be able to get up. Igor had made that clear. I’d torn up everything around her knee that held her leg bones together.

  I brought my hand around, ripped off the rubber tubing and started wiggling my body out of the twine. The police were so slow, I’d probably be free before they got there.

  I felt for the lump under my waistband, pushed the “on” button and stuck my fingers in my ears. It was amazing how loud a personal alarm could sound powered with nothing but
batteries.

  Fifty-Eight

  Sam burst through the lab door followed by two other cops in civvies, guns drawn.

  He was wild-eyed. “I can’t believe you’re in here!” he shouted. “Are you all right? What’s that screeching noise? Who’s that on the floor?” He leaned toward her. “What happened to her?”

  I pushed the “off” button on my personal alarm. “She has torn ligaments and cartilage that held her upper and lower leg bones together. And a torn meniscus—the padding between the bones. You better call an ambulance. She can’t get up.”

  He pointed to one of the cops. “Call EMS.” He walked closer to her and squinted down. “Who is she?”

  “Dr. Hortense Bigsby. Head of the biology department. Former lover of Dr. Kermit Carmody. Revolting thought, isn’t it?”

  “I’d never have recognized her.” He furrowed his brow. “What did you do to her?”

  “She came in here dressed like Brandy Crystal, Eric Lager’s lab assistant and Dr. Bigsby’s competition for Dr. Carmody. She attacked me. I rearranged her attire.”

  “You certainly did. I doubt they can put her back together.”

  I grinned.

  “What was that screeching siren?”

  “My personal alarm.” I held up the battery-operated alarm on the keychain I’d stuffed under my waistband. “Best Buy. Twelve dollars.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. And I learned self-defense. That’s how I fought her off.”

  “You knew she’d be here? And you came here, despite what I told you?” His eyes were bulging. He looked like an owl.

  “She announced in class that Carmody and Lager had made a breakthrough against aging before they died.”

  “And you just had to come see what that was.” He shook his head. “Did you find anything?”