She wished she could tell the attendees tonight that her quest for an alternative to Tetrabenazine, the drug that had been developed initially to treat schizophrenia but had proven useful in treating conditions with involuntary movements, like Huntington's disease, had proven fruitful. It would have been wonderful to share with the audience that she'd found one with potentially less-harmful side effects, that her research was on the right track, but in truth, the drug she'd been working on had ended up being more poison than medicine. She'd been convinced that she was on the way to creating a drug that would reduce hyperkinesia, the uncontrollable muscle spasms, without increasing the risk of psychiatric conditions such as depression, paranoia, and suicidal ideation. The same psychiatric conditions that caused her prone-to-depression father to succumb to his despair and hang himself in the garage of their estate in Torrey Pines. But instead, the drug she'd tested had gone too far, causing paralysis in rats while leaving them fully aware of what was happening to them. They'd been unable to eat or drink or help themselves.
Louisa studied each slide in detail. The audience wouldn't have the patience to hear long scientific proclamations, so she used layman's terms, like genes and chromosomes, and explained how everyone's fourth chromosome produced a protein called huntingtin, and faulty genes caused mutant huntingtin, which could ultimately kill. She'd learned over the years to avoid phrases like "basal ganglia" and "C-A-G repeats" because, in truth, no one really cared. People were attending the fundraiser for her work because her mother had asked them to. Because other rich people would be there. Because they needed to be seen doing good. Cancer they worried about because it could affect them at any point in time, but a hereditary disease that they knew their family didn't carry …
Her eyes caught the clock on the wall.
Crap.
It was already four in the afternoon. She normally didn't leave the lab until eight or nine in the evening. Fewer people in the lab, fewer people on the roads, fewer people, period. But Highway 5 to her home in Mission Hills was likely to be as congested as a nasal infection, and if she wanted to get home, get ready, psych herself up, and get back into the city for the fundraiser, she needed to get going now.
She grabbed the folders and made her way around the lab, turning off lights and locking up as she went. On her way to the exit, and the small room where they stored their files, Louisa stopped in front of the laboratory refrigerators and looked at the sample, trying to think dispassionately about what had happened on the last test.
But the trays drew her eye, and the same feeling crept over her skin as she'd had when she'd opened her files.
It was impossible to tell if anybody had tampered with it. Were the trays a little off-center? Maybe. Had the doors been opened? Impossible to say. But was it safe to assume this was all in her head? To do nothing?
If someone had been messing with the sample, they'd either found what they were looking for or hadn't finished searching. She pulled out an earlier sample drug that had been equally unsuccessful but had had nowhere near the same kind of side effects as the sample she had just finished testing. Carefully, with her back to the lab across the hall, she removed the labels from both of the samples, switched them, and replaced the samples on the shelf. It was her laboratory, so she could manage the samples any way she liked. Even in a way that might seem-or worse, be-paranoid. Paranoia had been one of her father's earliest symptoms at the onset of the disease.
Louisa closed the door and tried to ignore the way her heart raced. She reminded herself that fear was simply a signal for the body to engage, a command for adrenaline to flood the skeletal muscles in preparation for some kind of physical activity to avoid disaster, and that while it was one of the most adaptive emotions, she wasn't in any real danger right now.
She squared the microscope so its edges matched up with the corner of the desk and turned all the Erlenmeyer flasks so the measurements faced toward her. Then she hurried over to the autoclave and grabbed a clean beaker, just to make sure there were an equal number of beakers lined up with their spouts at forty-five degrees.
Relieved that the lab was in order, Louisa inhaled a deep breath in preparation for the battle to get out of the building. She left through the cleanroom air blower, allowing the hard jets to blow any chemical residue from her before she stepped into the small hallway where she kept her coat and purse in the locker.
Keeping close to the wall of the corridor, she hurried from the building. I'm fine, she reminded herself as she thought about the samples.
If only she could command her trembling hands to agree.
* * *
Six took another tour around the ballroom, eyeing the exits and balcony while trying to avoid the not-so-discreet glances of some of the female attendees and a couple of the men. He tugged the cuff of his crisp white shirt beneath the sleeve of his black tux. Maybe it was years of conditioning, but his head was running multiple scenarios. There was a truckload of money in the room. Not that he'd been to too many fundraisers hosted by the ultra-rich, but this one seemed to be swimming in a sea of diamonds. Sure, it was all for a good cause, but he couldn't help but imagine how much impact that money could have on the lives of injured veterans.