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

  I decided not to mention she’d lured me to the lab to kill me.

  “I found a bunch of weird concoctions she said were mixed with my genes. They’re over there in that incubator. She tried to inject me with them.”

  He paled. “But she didn’t do it.”

  “No.”

  He turned to one of the officers. “Grady, get the lab guys over here. And a chemist. And a geneticist. And whatever other kind of scientist they think they might need. I want everybody wearing protective gear.”

  “There might be ethidium bromide over there on that counter. The purplish-red powder. It’s a carcinogen. If you inhale enough, it can kill you.”

  “Did you inhale it? Is that what’s on your face?”

  “She shook it under my nose. We both inhaled it.”

  “Okay. I’m calling Hazmat. Everybody out in the hall. You too, Aggie. You guys stay in the hall, pull up that door shade and watch through the glass. Don’t let EMS in until Hazmat clears it. I’ll handcuff Bigsby in case she wakes up.”

  He pulled on disposable gloves and yanked a mask from his pocket. “Put this on, Aggie. I carry it from past experience with spitters. Go sit in the hall. Do. Not. Move. You guys have masks?” he asked the officers. “If not, tie handkerchiefs over your nose and mouth.”

  I backed into the hall, watching Sam hold his breath while he tied a handkerchief over his nose and mouth and handcuffed Dr. Bigsby. I was glad he was experienced enough to carry a mask, but I wished he’d brought more than one. He joined us in the hall.

  “Where’s Meredith?” I asked.

  “She called us in a panic and said she was afraid you might come here. I told her to go to HEB in case you showed up at your car.” He punched numbers into his phone, called the officer nearest the store and told him to find Meredith and tell her he’d found me.

  “She’ll be pretty angry.”

  “I’m not too happy with you myself.”

  “Hortense Bigsby killed Carmody and Eric Lager,” I said through the mask.

  “How do you know?”

  I pulled the pen from my pocket and handed it to him. “It’s a recorder pen. Voice-activated. It was expensive, but everything is on there. Even why she did it. Can you drive me to my car at HEB? And have the officer tell Meredith again that we’re fine? And that I’ll call her later?”

  He squinted his eyes closed. He might have been counting to ten.

  Fifty-Nine

  I heard sirens and tiptoed so I could see out the front of the science building. Two red fire trucks and two white EMS units with red and blue decals screeched to a stop, sirens blaring. Students approached the perimeter of the vehicles. A fire department officer had to shoo them off the grass.

  Sam and I walked out onto the steps.

  Two firemen jumped from the first truck, dressed in space suits and hoods, and came blasting toward us. “Hazmat Entry Team, San Antonio Fire Department.”

  A voice called through a megaphone near a fire truck. “District Chief Lansing here. You the officer who called?”

  Sam nodded and shouted back, “Detective Sam Vanderhoven, SAPD.”

  Lansing said, “I’m directing the Hazmat Unit. Where’s the hot zone?”

  Sam pointed. “Inside the building. Lab to the right. We have one victim here and one inside.”

  Two Hazmat team members charged into the building and two more loped toward us. “Sit down, miss. We have to see if you’re contaminated. You too, officers.” They put equipment on the steps and started testing the four of us.

  “You were in there, miss?” he asked me, breathing from inside his bubble.

  “Yes, sir,” I burbled through my mask. “Aggie Mundeen.”

  “She inhaled ethidium bromide powder in that science lab,” Sam said. “We’re from SAPD and just got here.” He pointed to his fellow officers. “Officers Martinez and Grady.”

  The fireman pulled my mask down and swabbed my face. “Is this the bromide?”

  I nodded. He removed all he could and put it in a container to test it. Sam and I held our breath.

  The fireman sat back on his haunches. “It’s talcum powder. Colored with chalk. Did you touch, breathe or ingest anything else in that lab? Were you inoculated with anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He asked me more questions until he was satisfied I hadn’t ingested or inhaled anything but colored chalk. Then he twirled me around, looked at every inch of my body and tested me for contamination.

  I remembered the colored powdery sands on Brandy’s window sill. It appeared Dr. Bigsby had learned a lot from Brandy.

  Sam gave me a stern look. “You are absolutely sure you did not touch or ingest anything in that lab?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think the hospital should check you out,” he said.

  “I’m perfectly fine. I just want to go home.”

  “That’s up to our EMS lieutenant,” the fireman said. “We need to check the rest of you.”

  When they finished testing us, the Hazmat fireman waved to a man standing by the vehicles. “All clear. No contamination.”

  The EMS lieutenant, who was apparently the medic in charge, answered, “Okay. We’re ready for transport.”

  “I need to go talk to him,” Sam said. “If we’re clear, we should be able to leave in my car.”

  He strode toward the medic. After what seemed like an endless conversation, he came back. “Okay. The lieutenant called his medical director. We sign releases and we’re free to leave.”

  We walked to the vehicles and scribbled our names. I looked at Sam. “Can I go home now?”

  “I’ll take her,” Sam said. “You can release her to my custody.”

  The EMS lieutenant gave Sam another paper to sign.

  “All right then,” District Chief Lansing said. “She’s yours, Detective.” I liked the sound of that.

  Chief Lansing radioed to the team inside the lab. “Once the victim inside is decontaminated, bring her to the cold zone and seal the lab and the building.”

  When they hauled Dr. Bigsby out on a stretcher, I heard her moan. They carried her to the EMS van.

  “What happens next?” I asked Sam.

  “It looks like she’s been cleared for cold zone transport by EMS. They’ll wire ahead to the hospital and have them prepare an isolation unit, just to be safe. Then hospital doctors will treat her injuries.” He held open the door for me, and I got into his car. He swung into the driver’s seat and pulled away from the curb.

  “It’s really sad,” I said. “With her intellect and drive, she could have been a successful and elegant woman. She was so obsessed with being what she thought Dr. Carmody wanted her to be, his scientific comrade, that she lost perspective about her full potential.”

  Sam looked over at me. Had I made the same mistake with him? I’d made a ton of mistakes, and it was too late to correct them.

  “When that Brandy chick sunk her claws into Carmody, that’s when Dr. Bigsby must have snapped.”

  Sam didn’t seem interested in Dr. Bigsby’s psychology. I think he was more concerned with mine.

  I waited as long as I could for him to talk. When he didn’t, I decided to tell him what else I’d learned, like details of our lunch conversation with Brandy and her boyfriends. “I think those three, plus Bigsby—if she hasn’t totally schizzed out—will know exactly what Carmody and Eric Lager were doing in the lab.”

  “Our guys followed those scientists from the cafeteria and interviewed them this morning. We thought Carmody and Eric Lager might be secretly collaborating, since they both turned up dead. But the postdocs told us they were very familiar with every experiment in the lab. They said so many researchers worked o
n similar projects in conjunction with the Human Genome Project, and there was so much collaboration between labs, it was doubtful Carmody and Lager could have been going in a direction nobody else knew about. They said professors like Carmody direct the research but almost never touch the lab. The standard joke is that a professor who walks into the lab is liable to break something. The research group of graduate students, postdocs, and a few undergrads actually do the lab work. Any hands-on work by professors is only to teach undergrads. We’ll check out the postdocs’ story, of course.”

  “The locked drawer in the lab behind where I stood could have Carmody’s research notes in it and maybe the list of his scientific colleagues.”

  “We’ll check it.”

  “So,” I said, “all Hortense Bigsby’s talk about Carmody and Lager making a breakthrough was just to prop up Carmody’s legacy and her own fantasies?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “What was all that stuff in the incubator she used to threaten me?”

  “Probably a bunch of worthless concoctions. Hazmat will test it. Scientists have told us NIH has strict protocols, which must be approved long ahead of time, for taking samples from human subjects. If your cells and genes are in that incubator, Bigsby’s actions would be highly illegal.”

  “Probably not as illegal as murder though.”

  “Right. I think I’ll take you home, Aggie. We can get your car later.”

  “Did the medical examiner find out what killed Eric Lager?”

  “Yes. Cyanide in his nasal spray. Bigsby was on a roll with spray bottles. She apparently dissolved sodium cyanide salt into saline spray and substituted it for Lager’s nasal spray.”

  “Since so many people suffer from allergies, I guess she found the method pretty useful. And she could get whatever she wanted from the lab’s chemical stockroom.”

  “Yes. There will be prints on gloves she used to mix the chemicals and on Eric Lager’s spray bottle. They found something else in the stockroom: a flashlight with Lager’s fingerprints on one end and blood traces on the other end, like he’d hit somebody with it. Did he hit you on the head the night you told me you fell?”

  I nodded. “I wasn’t sure who did it. Now I know it was him.” I sighed. “What a semester. I learned a lot about genetics, and a ton about professional jealousy, but not nearly enough to stay young.”

  He didn’t say another word all the way to my house.

  Sixty

  Sam stood silently and watched me unlock my front door. The minute we stepped inside, he took my arm and led me to the sofa. I plopped down and waited for whatever was coming.

  He clicked on my pen recorder to make sure it worked, listened a few minutes and went to the phone. He called my attorney and told him Bigsby had killed both men, and that he had evidence to prove my innocence.

  He hung up. “Matheson says if our evidence holds, he’ll contact the court to drop charges against you. He said Meredith might have paid him enough to help your jail friends.”

  I let out a sigh. “I’ll repay Meredith.”

  “There’s something else I want to discuss with you, Aggie.” He sat by me on the couch.

  I dreaded hearing what he was going to say. I knew I’d made everything difficult for myself and for Sam with my lies and omissions. But I’d had all the trauma I could take for one day.

  He took my hands. “I think you’re beautiful, Aggie, exactly as you are. Well, maybe after a bath.” He grinned at me. “And you’re young. You always will be, because you’re eager and interested and empathetic and too damn curious for your own good.”

  I frowned. I wasn’t sure where this was going.

  “Did you notice that Phillip Delay looks a little like Dr. Carmody?” I asked. “I wondered if he might be related, might even be his son.”

  “We noticed and checked him out. He’s not related to Carmody. But you are amazingly perceptive about people, Aggie—about their motives and why they might commit crimes. You’ve proven to me you can be a great investigator and help on a case.”

  My heart skipped. “Did I tell you about the colored powders Brandy has on her windowsill? One of them looks just like that powder Dr. Bigsby made me sniff.”

  “We’ll analyze all the powders. Aggie, you don’t need to investigate crimes to impress me. I can’t always be afraid for you. I can’t do my job and wonder if I’m going to lose you because of it. You even lied to me about being hit on the head. I have enough pressure without that.”

  I hung my head. He was right.

  “I don’t want any more secrets between us.”

  Now he was really making me nervous.

  He reached in his pocket and held up a plastic bracelet. A baby’s bracelet…my baby’s bracelet!

  I shrunk back from him. “Where did you get that?”

  “Detective Sheffield found it on the lawn outside the lab the night you were arrested. He gave it to me later at the station. It didn’t mean a whole lot to me at first. I thought it was some trinket. I didn’t even look at it. I almost threw it away. For some reason, I stuck it in a drawer.

  “I always wondered, when we lived in Chicago, and you decided to work at the branch bank for six months, why you transferred there. I wondered whether it had to do with Lester. Not long after you stopped telling Katy and me about him, you left. I assumed you stopped dating him and wondered if you left because of him.”

  I covered my face with my hands and hung my head. He was never supposed to know. Katy had promised she’d never tell him.

  “I pulled out the bracelet again. I realized you might have lost it. When I saw it was a baby’s hospital bracelet, I read the names on it. Yours and Lee’s.”

  I started sobbing. I thought I was going to be ill. My whole relationship with him and Lee had been a lie. He and Katy had raised her as their own with me, Lee’s biological mother, right under their nose. I wanted him to leave me alone and go away so I’d never have to see him again. But he wouldn’t stop talking.

  “When Katy and I talked about naming our baby girl, she brought up the name Lee. It wasn’t a family name, but she seemed to like it a lot, and it did go with other names. So we named our daughter Susan Lee Vanderhoven. But we called her Lee. She was your daughter too, wasn’t she, Aggie?”

  By this time, I was bawling. My stomach hurt, and I couldn’t look at him. I put my face in my hands. He sat and let me cry until I couldn’t cry anymore. When I heard him walk away, my heart dropped in my chest like a stone.

  But he came back with a box of Kleenex and touched my shoulder. I took it, blew my nose and wiped my eyes. When I was able to look at his face, his eyes were sad but not hateful.

  He sat down. “Now,” he said. “You need to know something else. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I was angry at first that you didn’t tell me, but the more I thought about it, I understood why you didn’t. Why you couldn’t. I realized you gave Lee to us because you loved us. You thought we’d be the best parents for her. And you couldn’t keep her yourself.”

  I started crying again, nodding and nodding.

  “I understand. I’ve always felt a bond between us, even when I loved Katy. The bond is Lee. And, Aggie…”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you. I think I’ve loved you for a long time.” He pulled me into his arms.

  I clung to him. “I’ve loved you since we were in Chicago,” I said. “But you loved Katy, and I couldn’t interfere with that. I dated Lester because I wanted what you and Katy had. I was so naive and foolish. Lester was nothing like you. Can you ever forgive me?”

  “About Lee? I already have.” He pulled back from me and smiled. “I’m still thinking about your other infractions.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. With red eyes and purplish-red powder streaking down my face, I must have looked like a
goofy clown. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek.

  I’d been transported to another place. Another life. And I didn’t feel one bit older. Maybe I never would. Maybe that’s what love did. I pulled back and looked at him.

  “Now what do we do?”

  He leaned back against the couch, took a deep breath and closed his eyes momentarily before he looked back at me. “I think we need to meet each other again for the first time. Without pressure. Without crime. And without secrets.”

  I nodded. “Where could that possibly be?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a trip. A cruise. A vacation at some resort.”

  I recalled our dude ranch vacation. It had been pretty traumatic. But I wasn’t about to interrupt when he was making plans for us. I silently swore I would not be so meddlesome. And I was determined to be truthful.

  “There could be other people there,” he said. “Maybe Meredith would want to come. We’d have time to get to know each other in a different light. Without emotions from the past always weighing us down.”

  “And without any secrets between us.”

  “Exactly.”

  I started smiling. I couldn’t stop. I was grinning like an idiot.

  “Why don’t you start thinking about where we might go? I’ll call you later,” he said.

  I smiled him to the door, smiled when he got into the car and smiled him down the street until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  I didn’t even wash my face. I plopped on my bedspread, face up, and flapped my arms and legs like a fresh snow angel.

  I was Aggie Mundeen. And I was never going to grow old.

  Afterword

  Cynthia Kenyon: Future – Aging – Facing the Challenge

  Thanks to the pioneering studies by Kenyon there is now a strong reason to think that genetic or drug-induced extension of lifespan could delay the onset of diseases of old age. This concept has revolutionary implications.