Gerrie Nelson - Lab Notes

For a week, he had followed her around the lab with his hound dog eyes. Then one day, on her way out, she grabbed him from his cage, placed him in her giant shoulder bag and ran to the elevator. A clean getaway, she thought. But just as the doors were closing, Dr. Vincent Rose—her boss—jumped onto the elevator.

For four long stories down, while her shoulder bag wiggled and whined, Dr. Rose nibbled on his bottom lip and stared at the floor.

The next day Vincent invited Diane out to lunch, their first date. A couple months later he confessed he had fallen in love while riding down in the elevator with her and her whimpering shoulder bag.

When Buster was eight years old, he was mated with a friend’s dog, also of questionable lineage. Miraculously, the coupling resulted in Huck, a short-haired hound—a clone of his father, but much larger.

He was her only remaining immediate family member.

Diane stood very still and listened for panting, scratching or paws ticking on wood or tile—anything that would direct her to Huck’s whereabouts. But all she heard was the house’s implacable silence.

When she had returned to the treehouse from Vincent’s memorial Mass in Pittsburgh, the new silence that greeted her at the door was not quietude, but a void that could not be filled up with the air conditioner and the refrigerator running or the surround sound and TV playing or Huck’s bark or her own sobs or even the telephone ringing, because she knew it could never again be him calling.

Now, in a high state of anxiety, Diane ran back down the stairs and into the kitchen. Huck could have gone out through the dog door. She flipped on the spotlights.

She stepped onto the back deck and called to him. Then she headed for the screen door that opened onto the side deck. Huck had access though a hinged opening at its base. Maybe he went around to the front deck and couldn’t hear her, unlikely though. With his hearing he could detect a rabbit’s nose wiggling a mile away.

Diane walked slowly along the side of the house, listening, afraid of what she might find. At first, all she heard was the slow ting, ting-ting of wind chimes and the lazy rubbing of pine branches.

Then the thunder of big feet announced Huck’s approach as he rounded the corner from the front deck, tail wagging, and one knotted end of a large rawhide bone in his mouth.

“There you are, you scamp. I should have known you were eating something—the only distraction that would keep you from greeting me.”

She bent down to hug him and got a whiff of the rawhide clenched in his teeth. It was beef-basted. She never bought those; they stained the rugs.

She admonished him again. “Where did you dredge that up?” Vincent must have bought it months before. And Huck had hidden it, knowing she’d take it from him. But right then she didn’t have the heart to do so.

After Diane took Huck for a walk, it was almost midnight. But she knew she wouldn’t sleep until she checked her emails.

She went upstairs to her computer and found it booted up with the password prompt flashing. Either she’d left it on or it had rebooted itself in the midst of turning off. First, she had left the door unlocked and now this. She really needed to get her mind straight.

She sat down and keyed in her password. Clicking open her incoming mail, she froze. Tung Chen had already sent a response.

With anxious fingers, she clicked on his attachment. And there it was: Murder Suspected in American Scientist’s Fall. Diane’s heart throbbed in her ears as she read the article. Dr. Harry Lee—an American—had been pushed or had jumped from a viewing area on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong.

In an interview, Harry Lee’s uncle Hu Lee, a Hong Kong investment banker, stated that his nephew was ecstatic about a new business venture, and he never would have committed suicide.

Harry had left his uncle’s house, briefcase in hand, to sign up the deal. Harry had told Hu Lee that confidentiality was key. So Hu Lee had no idea who Harry was meeting that fateful night.

Harry Lee’s wallet, credit cards, cash and his Rolex watch were all found on his body. The search continued for his briefcase.

The newspaper article stated that an unnamed source close to the police department disclosed that forensics found marks on Harry Lee’s neck and sweater fibers and dog hairs on his jacket. When presented with the information, Harry’s uncle was baffled by the report of dog hairs. “Harry was terrified of dogs,”

The Hong Kong police were working close with American authorities in the case.

Diane jumped up from her chair and paced around her home office. In the short space of the past five hours, two items had been confirmed under the classification: Things Vincent Mentioned Regarding Harry Lee. 1) Harry Lee had been hard of hearing. 2) Harry Lee was murdered. What were you on to, Vincent?

If she had listened to him, if she hadn’t had such a strong psychological bias against his “paranoid” assertions, he would have told her exactly what it was.

But wait. He could still tell her. She closed her eyes, dropped her head back and groaned. How could she be so obtuse? Vincent’s song wasn’t the product of a demented mind. He was pleading with her to find his notes in the piano and study them. That being the case, he knew he might not be returning. He knew he was being followed.

The collision was a hit and run alright, but it wasn’t an accident.

She stopped in her tracks, stunned by the epiphany. Was it the pirates? Drug runners? Or someone else.

The camera had stopped shortly after the collision. It had been connected to the boat’s electrical system, which could have become submerged. Or had someone come aboard out of camera view, disconnected it and thrown Vincent overboard?

Diane buried her face in her hands. She had to stop torturing herself with those images. She’d probably never know exactly what had happened or why. But there were things she could investigate.

She turned and ran down the stairs, opened the top of the piano and peered inside. The notebooks and flash drives were still there where she had carefully replaced them before her trip to Pittsburgh.

Diane went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. Then she settled onto a bar stool and opened a notebook—as well as her mind.

By daybreak, Vincent had made her a believer.

Fog had formed in low-lying areas on the roadsides and was starting to roll across the pavement—just the beginning according to the weather report. Diane slowed down and switched on her fog lights. She wasn’t about to let a little visibility problem thwart her plan.

Wilbur remained her only concern. What reason would she give for showing up at BRI’s gates at ten p.m.—and without her office keys? It was absurd to worry of course. She was on administrative call. She had every right to be there.

As for the prospect of Wilbur following her around like a bodyguard, she felt confident that wouldn’t happen now. Ever since the chimp roundup, he had been less protective, and maybe even a little intimidated by her. Too bad, really, Wilbur was the only one in the organization Vincent trusted, according to his notes.

A second evening spent poring over her husband’s notebooks had driven her out into the weather. Vincent’s jumbled thoughts were, at times, nearly illegible. But his frenzied attempts to connect all the snippets of information came through clearly.

Calling it “the handwriting on the wall” (Vincent’s prophesy of doom for Bellfort and BRI, she supposed), he had made lists upon lists: technology transfer companies he called “the fences”—TekTranz, Cell Trans, Intel Trans etc. etc; pharmaceutical companies (mostly in Asia); GPS coordinates (oddly enough); and people’s names.