The Carbon Murder(89)
I listened to Berger’s opening remarks to the tape recorder, picturing it later as a transcript.
Detective George Berger, Dr. Gloria Lamerino, Mr. Paul Di Marco, Dr. Lorna Frederick, on Wednesday …
“According to your statement, Dr. Frederick, you added illegal compounds to microchips intended for use as identification codes for horses. Is that correct?”
“I manipulated the ketone using a Grignard reagent. It involves adding a carbon anion. It’s not illegal, just not approved for wide distribution.”
“Not approved, thank you. And to your knowledge is it legal to use chemicals not approved by the Food and Drug Administration?”
Lorna sighed and leaned into her lawyer. Mr. Di Marco said something inaudible, covering the side of his face with long, slender fingers, one of which sported a large school ring.
“No, it is not,” Lorna said.
“Not legal to use chemicals unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration?”
“No, it is not legal,” Lorna said, with an exasperated sigh.
As if it’s our fault that she’s here, detained and unkempt, I thought. In her circumstances, I knew I’d be tense, not haughty. The gray interview room alone would have depressed me if I were on the wrong side of the questioning. Peeling paint; exposed pipes; dripping, clanging radiator; rust marks on the ceiling—all seemed to scream out that murder suspects weren’t worth the price of decent space.
With a few more questions, Berger determined that Lorna had not enlisted pharmaceutical companies in her scheme, and had not involved her Charger Street research team.
“Alex masterminded this,” she said. “He created the system that kept our bench people in Revere in the dark. They thought they were just repackaging. The Houston guys converted the compound and shipped us the chip, which we then put our label on.”
An injectable form of bute was on the market, Lorna explained, but hers was a vastly improved version, and Charger Street had to take the opportunity to forge ahead, or they’d be left in the dust as far as research money. The derivative they’d used to coat the microchip—Alex Simpson’s “bute that’s not bute,” I realized—was meant to be a longer lasting anti-inflammatory without the side effects that would accompany a larger dose of pure bute.
She followed all the competitions, so she knew when one of “her” horses had had a chip implanted within twenty-four hours. The derivative also had a different boiling point, and therefore would be missed by most of the systems used by competition officials to test for the presence of pure bute.
“This approach didn’t give us an enormous number of samples, by the time you weeded out the non–show horses who had the chip implanted, plus the ones that didn’t compete within a reasonable number of days of the implant. But we didn’t need a lot, just enough to test whether we were going in the right direction.”
“What did you and Dr. Simpson hope to gain by this scheme, Dr. Frederick?” Berger emphasized Alex’s and Lorna’s titles, as if to remind her of the incongruity between their behavior and the respect ordinarily due the profession.
“What did we hope to gain? Please.” Lorna contorted her face, sneering, her lips becoming nearly absorbed into the junction of her downward-curving nose and her upward-curving chin. “You’re asking what did we hope to gain? How about progress? Cures for cancer. Relief from depression. Freedom from pain. How do you think all that comes about? The public doesn’t want to know. The public just wants the results. They’d rather not know how these things are accomplished.”
“We should thank you for murdering people and killing horses?” This was my first time witnessing Berger’s interrogation style. Not much different from Matt, who wasn’t above verbally taunting an arrestee.
“I’ve told you over and over, I did not murder anyone. See Dr. Simpson for that. And do you think I’m happy that two horses died from the error in dosage? I love horses. But I love people and my research even more. No one ever remembers the millions of successes.”
It bothered me to admit that Lorna had a point. How many of us were aware of the animals that died even in legitimate drug testing? Not that I was going to join a protest group. Too many of my firmly held opinions were being challenged by this case. I’d have to rethink them all. But another time.
Maybe we’d all be saved from tough decisions by computer modeling, I thought. Weapons research was the most obvious application where modeling was taking the place of real-life testing, and I knew pharmaceutical companies were involved in computer modeling also. If we could wait long enough, all the rats and rabbits and pigs might be saved from our laboratories.