Robin Cook - Seizure

Stephanie laughed hollowly. “What kind of burglar was he?”

“I don’t find this at all funny,” Daniel said. He began opening individual drawers of both the desk and the file cabinet to check the appearance of their contents.

“I’m not suggesting I find it funny either,” Stephanie said. “I’m trying to use humor to defuse my real feelings.”

Daniel looked up. “What are you talking about?”

Stephanie shook her head and breathed out forcibly. She successfully fought back tears. She was trembling. “I’m upset. This kind of unexpected event really disturbs me. I feel violated that someone was in here, invading our privacy. It emphasizes the reality that we’re always living on the edge, even when we don’t know it.”

“I’m disturbed too,” Daniel said. “But not philosophically. I’m disturbed because there is something here I don’t understand. It seems pretty clear to me that this intruder wasn’t a run-of-the-mill burglar. He was looking for something specific, and I have no idea what it could be. That’s troubling.”

“You don’t think we just came home before he had a chance to take anything?”

“He’d been here for a while, certainly long enough to take some valuables, if that was what he was after. He had time to go through the desk and maybe even the file cabinet.”

“How can you tell?”

“I just know because of my own brand of compulsiveness. This man was a professional, and he was looking for something in particular.”

“You mean like intellectual property perhaps associated with HTSR?”

“It’s possible, but I doubt it. That’s all covered with adequate patents. Besides, then the break-in would have been at the office, not here.”

“Then what else?”

Daniel shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Did you call the police?”

“I started to, but that was when he bolted out of here. Now I’m not sure we should.”

“Why not?” Stephanie was surprised.

“What would they do? The man’s obviously long gone. We don’t seem to be missing anything, so there’s no insurance issues, and besides, I’m not sure I want us to be asked a lot of questions about what we have been doing lately, if that were to come up. On top of that, we’re leaving tomorrow night, and I don’t want anything to mess that up.”

“Wait a sec!” Stephanie said suddenly. “What if this episode has something to do with Butler?”

Daniel stared across his desk at Stephanie.

“How and why would it involve Butler?” Daniel asked.

Stephanie returned Daniel’s gaze. The sound of the refrigerator compressor turning on in the kitchen broke the early evening silence. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I was just thinking about his connections with the FBI, and the fact that he had had you investigated in some form or fashion. Maybe they haven’t finished.”

Daniel nodded as he considered Stephanie’s idea, realizing it couldn’t be dismissed out of hand, despite its outlandishness. After all, the clandestine nighttime meeting with Butler two nights previously had been equally outlandish.

“Let’s try to forget this incident for the moment,” Daniel said. “We’ve got a lot to do to get ready. Let’s start!”

“Okay,” Stephanie said, marshaling her fortitude. “Maybe concentrating on packing will get me to relax. But first I think we should call Peter in the event this character is planning to break into the office as well.”

“Good idea,” Daniel said. “But we’re not going to tell him about Butler. I mean, you haven’t told him, have you?”

“No. I haven’t told him a thing.”

“Good!” Daniel said, as he picked up the phone.

11:45 A.M., Sunday, February 24, 2002

As accustomed as Stephanie was to mercurial New England weather, she was still surprised at the balmy, beautiful day Sunday turned out to be. Although the winter sunlight was pale, the air was warm and the birds were loud and omnipresent as if spring were just around the corner. It was a far cry from her frigid Friday night walk home from Harvard Square with a dusting of snow on the ground.

Stephanie had parked Daniel’s car in the city garage at Government Center and walked east into the North End, one of Boston’s quaintest neighborhoods. It was a warren of narrow streets lined with three- or four-story brick row houses. Southern Italian immigrants had adopted the area in the nineteenth century and transformed it into an ersatz Little Italy, complete with the usual sights and smells. There were always people engaged in animated conversation on the street, and the aroma of simmering Bolognese sauce permeated the air. When school was out, there were children everywhere.

Everything seemed familiar to Stephanie as she descended Hanover Street, the commercial avenue that bisected the neighborhood. In general, the community had been a nice, social, and warmly nurturing environment for her to grow up. The only problems were the family issues she had recently admitted to Daniel. That conversation had reawakened feelings and thoughts she’d long since suppressed, the same way Anthony’s indictment did.

Stephanie paused outside the open door of the Café Cosenza. It was one of her family’s holdings and offered Italian pastries and gelato as well as the usual espresso and cappuccino. A babble of conversation mixed with laughter and accompanied by the hiss and clank of the espresso machine drifted out, as did the smell of freshly roasted coffee. She had spent many pleasant hours enjoying cannoli, ice cream, and the camaraderie of her friends in that room, with its kitschy wall painting of Mt. Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples, yet from her current perspective, it seemed like a hundred years ago.

Standing outside and looking in, Stephanie realized how separated she felt from her childhood and her family except, perhaps, her mother, whom she frequently phoned. Excluding her younger brother Carlo, who had gone into the priesthood, a calling she could not fathom, she was the only person in her family to have gone to college, much less get a Ph.D. And most all of her elementary school and high school girlfriends, even those who had gone on to school, were presently either living in the North End or in the Boston suburbs along with houses, husbands, SUVs, and children. Instead, she was cohabiting with a man sixteen years her senior, with whom she was struggling to keep a biotech start-up company afloat by secretly treating a U.S. senator with an unapproved, experimental, but hopefully promising therapy.

Continuing down Hanover Street, Stephanie pondered her disconnect with her previous life. She found it interesting that it did not bother her. In retrospect, it had been a natural reaction to her discomfort about her father’s business deals and her family’s role in the community. What she found herself wondering was whether her life story would have taken a completely different track had her father been more emotionally available. As a young child, she had tried to break through the barrier of his self-centered male chauvinism and his preoccupation with whatever it was he was doing, but it had never worked. The vain effort had eventually nurtured a strong independent streak that had carried her to where she was today.

Stephanie stopped when a curious thought occurred to her. Her father and Daniel had some things in common, despite their enormous and obvious differences. Both were equally self-centered, both could be brash on occasion to the point of being considered asocial, and both were fiercely competitive within their own worlds. On top of that, Daniel was equivalently chauvinistic; it just involved intellect rather than gender. Stephanie laughed inwardly. She questioned why the thought had never crossed her mind, since Daniel in his preoccupations could also be emotionally unavailable, especially lately, with the advent of CURE’s financial difficulties. Although psychology was far from her forte, she vaguely wondered if the similarities between her father and Daniel could have had anything to do with the attraction she felt for Daniel in the first place.