Susan Smith - The Timer Game

The elevator opened and she faced smoked-glass doors with Warren’s name engraved in brass: DR. WARREN PENDRELL, DIRECTOR.

Another name was inscribed in smaller script underneath: LABS OF DR. LEE ANN BENTLEY.

Grace felt the beginning of a headache, seeing the name. Lee had been a coldly amoral researcher hungry for grants and recognition when Grace had known her five years before. Now she’d moved up to the major leagues, sharing lab space with Warren himself. Grace had managed to avoid seeing Lee in earlier visits. But today she didn’t feel lucky.

Grace opened the heavy door leading to the reception area. This smaller lobby glowed in a soft shade of gold, the center of the room dominated by a carved marble statue of an angel and child. A drug salesman looked up incuriously from a trade magazine and went back to reading, his briefcase of samples bulging at his feet.

Grace went to the counter and waited as the receptionist finished a call. The receptionist was middle-aged, efficient, with a helmet of dyed black hair and a chest that jutted forward like the prow of an immense ship. She put down the telephone and turned to Grace.

‘Yes?’ Her face was neutral. She’d missed a spot with her eyebrow pencil, and one of her brows had a small, disconcerting patch of white in the middle of what otherwise was a perfect walnut brown arched wing.

‘Cynthia. Could you please alert Warren I’m here.’

‘And you are?’

Cynthia knew exactly who she was. This was a petty humiliation she put Grace through every time. ‘Grace. Descanso.’

‘Identification?’

Grace pulled out her crime lab ID instead of her driver’s license and was heartened to see a quiver of surprise in Cynthia’s eyes before she recovered. Good. Let her think I’m here on official business. Serves her right .

‘Do you have an appointment?’ She touched her pearls. The necklace was so long she could hang herself.

‘No.’ Grace stared her down and felt a sharp surge of victory when Cynthia turned away first. She really needed to play more board games.

‘He’s very busy.’

‘He wants to see me.’

‘I’ll let him be the judge of that. Sit and wait.’ It was an order.

Grace smiled thinly and went to the window, looking out. Far away, hang gliders floated over a blue expanse of sea, and clouds threaded the soft sky. Behind her, she heard Cynthia whispering into a phone. The steel door behind the counter slid open.

‘Grace!’

Warren had a forceful way of dominating a room, his energy thrusting itself into the place moments before he spoke, which gave her the unsettled feeling of being constantly in the presence of a sonic boom. He was in his late sixties but tall and fit-looking. His silver-white hair was precision cut, and he wore dark linen trousers and a blue cashmere sweater that matched his eyes.

He bared his teeth in a smile. The door wickered shut behind him. He stepped into the lobby. ‘Cynthia taking good care of you?’

Grace shot a smug smile at Cynthia but it was wasted. Cynthia shuffled papers, pretending to be busy.

Warren didn’t wait for an answer. He gripped Grace’s elbow gently and moved her out of harm’s way as he stood for a moment under the retina scanner. The red light beamed into his eyes. He blinked and the door reopened.

‘Quickly, quickly.’

He led her back into a hallway as the steel door closed behind them. They were in a corridor with laboratories. Grace could hear a synthesizer whirring softly in a lab down the hall, and the muted sound of voices coming from a conference room.

Warren turned and studied her, and the heartiness in his face fell away and was replaced with anger. ‘He could have killed you, damn it. I’ve left three messages since yesterday. You couldn’t pick up the phone and let me know you were all right?’

‘I wanted to come in person.’ She wondered if he could tell she was lying. ‘I have questions about Eddie Loud.’

Warren glanced quickly at the conference room and Grace realized Warren didn’t want whoever was in there overhearing them.

‘Follow me. I’ve got a meeting going on so I don’t have much time.’

In all the years she’d known him, he’d always had a meeting going on. Something big.

Warren had started the Center as a shoestring biotech company thirty years earlier, and hit the jackpot with a drug that became widely used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, inhibiting the immune system from attacking the body’s own cartilage. He’d taken that money and bought land, eventually building the Center for BioChimera. Now the company had grown to over three thousand employees worldwide, with manufacturing plants scattered across the globe.

But it was the hospital side that had attracted her. The chance to work with pediatric heart transplant patients and pursue new methods of controlling transplant rejection. When she’d been offered a residency, she’d jumped at it.

Warren had immediately singled her out, something that stunned her and made her uneasy at the same time. She had no interest in following Warren Pendrell into hospital administration, but she soon learned his interest was more complicated.

He’d lost a daughter about her age, he confided finally. Warren’s pain at losing his daughter Sara, and Grace’s need to have a dad, melded during her work at the Center. That and a mutual passion for research and healing. He’d personally recommended her for a position at Cedars-Sinai after her residency, and had helped set up the two months she’d spent in Guatemala working in a remote mountain clinic.

And then she’d come back from Guatemala and dropped out of medicine and taken a job at the crime lab.

She’d never told him why and Warren never let it drop, how her place was back at the Center leading the assault on transplant rejection and doing heart surgery on kids, instead of wasting her talent in some two-bit job with the police, barely scraping by.

She’d delivered Katie at the Center when the time came, and later Katie had ear surgery as a baby there, but the relationship between Warren and Grace had grown increasingly strained until it had erupted in a frightening outburst of pyrotechnics, Warren insisting she tell him why she’d given up medicine, Grace holding to silence. He’d apologized but she sensed lurking beneath the surface a fierce need to control, a need he was barely able to keep in check. Now their contact was relegated to stray lunches and occasional phone calls.

‘Do you know how many people I’ve mentored here in all these years? Exactly two.’

‘Warren.’ It was the opening volley of a familiar war and she didn’t have the taste for it.

‘Fine, fine, I’ll stop.’

She followed him into his private library and waited as he scooped up an open reference book from a leather sofa. The room was large, airy, painted Italian custard.

A plaster fireplace vaulted in sweeping simplicity, surrounded by chairs in a rich palette of gold and red, accenting his favorite painting, a Degas that hung near his Italian rosewood writing desk. Two walls held floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It was here he kept his collection of science journals, books on philosophy and religion and first-edition nineteenth-century European novels.

‘Sit anyplace.’ He turned his back on her and went to the window. ‘I’m relieved you’re all right, by the way,’ he said gruffly. ‘More relieved than you’ll know.’

She sank into the leather sofa. Soft sunlight floated through raw silk panels, spilling wide bands of light across the tiled floor.

He turned and she saw how tired he looked under the tan. ‘I don’t mean to be short. I’m under more pressure than usual this week, that’s all, and then when I heard how close you’d come to dying – well, it seems to have unhinged me. What do you need?’