Robin Cook - Acceptable Risk

The first thing she did was show him the mass spectrometry results. She was now certain that they were dealing with three new alkaloids. After talking with him that morning she’d spent time researching the results; there was no way they could have been made by any known compounds.

“Are there any more sclerotia?” Edward asked.

“A few,” Eleanor said. “Kevin Scranton said more will be on their way, but he didn’t know when. I didn’t want to sacrifice the ones we have until I’d spoken with you. How do you want to separate the alkaloids? With organic solvents?”

“Let’s use capillary electrophoresis,” Edward said. “If necessary we can go to micellular electrokinetic capillary chromatography.”

“Should I run a crude sample like I did with the mass spec?” Eleanor asked.

“No,” Edward said. “Let’s extract the alkaloids with distilled water and precipitate them with a weak acid. That’s what I did over at the biological labs and it worked fine. We’ll get purer samples, which will make structural work easier.”

Eleanor started toward her bench space, but Edward grabbed her arm. “Before you start on the extraction I want you to do something else,” he said. With no preamble he opened the plumbing supply box and lifted out the mummified head. Eleanor recoiled at the ghoulish sight.

“You could have warned me,” she said.

“I suppose I could have,” Edward said with a laugh. For the first time he looked at the head with a critical eye. It was rather lurid. The skin was dark brown, almost mahogany in color. It had dried to a leathery texture and retracted over the bony prominences, exposing the teeth in a gruesome smile. The hair was dried and matted like steel wool.

“What is it?” Eleanor asked. “An Egyptian mummy?”

Edward told Eleanor the story. He also explained that the reason he’d brought the head to the lab was to see if there was anything in the cranial vault to sample.

“Let me guess,” Eleanor said. “You want to run it through the mass spec.”

“Exactly,” Edward said. “It would be scientifically elegant if we could show peaks corresponding to the new alkaloids. It would be definitive proof that this woman ingested the new mold.”

While Eleanor ran over to the Department of Cell Biology to borrow anatomical dissection instruments, Edward faced the graduate students and assistants who had come in for the day and were nervously biding their time waiting for his attention. He answered all their questions in turn and sent them back to their experiments. By the time he was through, Eleanor was back.

“An anatomy instructor told me we should take the whole calvarium off,” Eleanor said. She held up an electric vibratory saw.

Edward set to work. He reflected the scalp and exposed the skull. Then he took the saw and cut off a skullcap. He and Eleanor looked inside. There wasn’t much. The brain had contracted to a congealed mass in the back of the skull.

“What do you think?” Edward asked. He poked the mass with the tip of a scalpel. It was hard.

“Cut out a piece and I’ll get it to dissolve in something,” Eleanor said.

Edward did as she suggested.

Once they had the sample, they began to try various solvents. Unsure of what they had, they began to introduce them into the mass spectrometer. By the second sample they had a match. Several of the peaks corresponded exactly with those of the new alkaloids in the crude extract that Eleanor had run the night before.

“Isn’t science great?” Edward commented gleefully.

“It’s a turn-on,” Eleanor agreed.

Edward went over to his desk and called Kim’s apartment. As he anticipated, he got the answering machine. After the beep sounded he left a message that for Elizabeth Stewart the devil in Salem had been explained scientifically.

Hanging up the phone, Edward glided back to Eleanor. He was in a rare mood.

“All right, enough of this fooling around,” he said. “Let’s get down to some real science. Let’s see if we can separate these new alkaloids so we can figure out what we have.”

“This is impossible,” Kim said. She pushed the drawer of a file cabinet closed with her hip. She was hot, dusty, and frustrated. After taking Edward to the train station, she’d returned to the attic in the castle and had made a four-hour general inspection from the servants’ wing all the way around to the guest wing. Not only hadn’t she found anything significant, she hadn’t even found any seventeenth-century material at all.

“This is not going to be an easy task,” Kim said. Her eyes scanned the profusion of file cabinets, trunks, boxes, and bureaus that stretched as far as she could see until the attic made a right-hand turn. She was daunted by the sheer volume of material. There was even more in the attic than there was in the wine cellar. And like the wine cellar there was no order in terms of subject matter or chronology. Sequential pages varied as much as a century, and the subject matter bounced back and forth among mercantile data, business records, domestic receipts, official governmental documents, and personal correspondence. The only way to go through it all was page by page.

Confronted by such reality, Kim began to appreciate the good luck she’d had in finding James Flanagan’s 1679 letter to Ronald Stewart that Monday. It had given her the false impression that researching Elizabeth in the castle would be an enjoyable if not easy undertaking.

Finally hunger, exhaustion, and discouragement temporarily overwhelmed Kim’s commitment to discover the nature of the conclusive evidence used against Elizabeth. Badly in need of a shower, Kim descended from the attic and emerged into the late afternoon summer heat. Climbing into the car, she began the trek back to Boston.

Monday, July 25, 1994

Edward’s eyes blinked open after only four hours’ sleep. It was just five a.m. Whenever he got excited about a project, his need for sleep diminished. Just now, he was more excited than he could ever remember being. His scientific intuition was telling him that he’d stumbled onto something really big, and his scientific intuition had never failed him.

Leaping out of bed, Edward set Buffer into a paroxysm of barking. The poor dog thought there was a life-threatening emergency. Edward had to give him a light swat to bring him to his senses.

After speeding through his morning ritual, which included taking Buffer for a short walk, Edward drove to his lab. It was before seven when he entered, and Eleanor was already there.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” she admitted. Her usually carefully combed long blond hair was in mild disarray.

“Me too,” Edward said.

They had worked Saturday night until one a.m. and all day Sunday. With success in sight, Edward had even begged off plans to see Kim Sunday evening. When he’d explained to her how close he and Eleanor were to their goal, Kim had been understanding.

Finally, just after midnight Sunday, Edward and Eleanor had perfected a separation technique. The difficulties had been mostly due to the fact that two of the alkaloids shared many physical properties. Now all they needed was more material, and as if an answer to a prayer, Kevin Scranton had called saying that he’d be sending over another batch of sclerotia that morning.

“I want everything to be ready when the material arrives,” Edward said.

“Aye, aye,” Eleanor said as she clicked her heels and made a playful salute. Edward tried to swat her on the top of her head but she was much more agile than he.

After they had been feverishly working for more than an hour, Eleanor tapped Edward on the arm.

“Are you intentionally ignoring your flock?” she asked quietly while motioning over her shoulder.