[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. Anyway, Ihave a tin ear.Can you ask him to come down for a minute? Sure.I ll get him.Ryan set the coffee dripping into the thermos while John climbed the stairs.He opened the fridge for milk, balancing awkwardly.Carstairs glanced at him. How s the leg? Mostly annoying, Ryan said. It ll heal. Good. She tilted her head. Your roommate and his kid doing okay too?Ryan smiled. My boyfriend and his kid are fine, Detective.John, coming back in with Mark, caught the remark.The brightness of hiseyes was reward enough for that admission.Carstairs turned to Mark. Can you sit down for us? she asked. We wantto show you a set of photos, and see if you can pick out the man you saw in thelab.He sat obediently but looked doubtful. I can try.The other detective set six photos out on the table in two rows of three.Allshowed pictures of middle-aged men with dark hair and glasses.Mark poredover them intently.After a minute he pulled out three. Those are wrong.Thetwo guys are too fat, and the other one has that big bald forehead.But I don tknow about the other three.He might be one of those, or even someone elsethat s not in the pictures.I m sorry.www.samhainpublishing.com 269Kaje HarperCarstairs nodded, and at a flick of her fingers, her associate picked up thecards. Pity, she said. If we ever get him, we ll try a lineup.Maybe when yousee him move, it ll ring a bell. If you get him? John asked. Yeah. She shrugged. Listen, give me a big mug of that great coffee and I lltell you what we know. Done. Ryan s curiosity was killing him.He and John had hashed the thingto death without making sense of it.He had refused to spend the night in thehospital, and John had finally consented to bring him home.For the first timesince Mark s arrival, they had spent the night in the big bed, just holding eachother.They hadn t talked much, maybe a few short sentences about mundanethings.Like, we need to run by the grocery store tomorrow.The important stuff wasall said with touch, in the darkness.Mark had woken twice with screamingnightmares, and John went in to reassure him each time.Ryan hadn t sleptenough to dream.Carstairs took a long pull on the hot drink, and breathed a sigh ofsatisfaction. My candidate for sainthood is the guy who invented coffee, shesaid. So.Crosby.We ve been going through his computer, and talking to peopleand I think we have most of the story. About seven years ago, Dr.Crosby was a little-known researcher in anobscure medical school.Then he found an antibiotic that showed a little promiseagainst staph, and some other disease-causing bacteria.He did some animalstudies, and the results were just good enough to get a big pharmaceutical firminterested.He probably had dollar signs flashing in his eyes.The potential pay-off is huge.All the early testing went well.Crosby applied for and receivedpermission for the first human studies, the safety testing in healthy volunteers.If270 www.samhainpublishing.comThe Rebuilding Yearthings panned out, he was set to move to the private sector and really cash in.That s when he hit a snag. The drug in humans gradually caused side effects.People got dizzy, ordisoriented, or started to hallucinate.Not at first, but after four or five days onthe med, some reported it.Before ten days, most at least said the drug madethem feel funny and some were hallucinating.Crosby tried altering the dose andthe use schedule, but he couldn t get effective levels in the body without the sideeffects.The drug company bowed out.All that money and fame, down the drain. But Crosby didn t give up.He noticed that on the positive side, several ofthe safety-test subjects reported that their acne cleared up really well on thedrug.So he decided to reformulate it into a skin gel.He figured it might work,without the side effects.Just putting it on the skin surface didn t help in animalswith skin infections, so he tried it mixed with somethingcalled& dimethyl& sulfo& ox. DMSO, Ryan suggested. To make the medication penetrate better? Yeah.That stuff.The problem was, he couldn t get permission for a humantrial.I guess two of the original testers almost died, one from a suicide attemptand one from wandering out into traffic.So the university was spooked.Crosbydecided to go ahead on his own.He recruited four lab assistants with bad acne.One quit early.One, a Robert McClosky, turned out to be too unreliable.Crosby s notes show the kid couldn t follow a dosing schedule to save his life.The other two were Alice Tormel and Patrick Remington. Who both began acting strange, Ryan realized. Exactly.The stuff in the gel acted more slowly.The kids skin looked good,and Crosby was really optimistic.But the effects didn t last if he stopped themedication, or spread out the doses.He tried long-term, low-dose use, and thewww.samhainpublishing.com 271Kaje Harperacne was cured, but the kids began to act odd.Crosby tried adding a couple ofthings to the mix, like Naloxone and Diazepam, whatever they are. Naloxone blocks receptors for narcotics like morphine, Ryan said.Hey,pharmacology class was paying off early. Diazepam is Valium, which preventsseizures.I guess he was trying to block the neurological side effects.I m not sureeither one would do much just put on the skin though. Sure, Carstairs said, making a note. Anyway, it didn t work, whatever hisreasoning.The kids got acne when they were off the med, and got high whenthey were on it.Then Alice did her swan dive out of the tree and died. She wasn t knowingly taking drugs.It was the gel, John said. Exactly.And Crosby got nervous [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]