A Perilous Conception Read online

  A Perilous Conception

  Larry Karp

  www.LarryKarp.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 2011 by Larry Karp

  First Edition 2011

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2011926981

  ISBN: 97815905897631 Hardcover

  ISBN: 9781590589755 Trade Paperback

  ISBN: 9781615953233 epub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

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  Contents

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Author’s Note

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Dedication

  This one’s for

  MARY FORSTER

  My medical colleague for twenty-five years,

  my friend for forty and counting.

  Both assignments were tough duty for her at times,

  and I’m grateful past words.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m indebted to Dr. Mary Forster, former Director of the Reproductive Technologies Facility at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, for extensive consultations regarding the scientific and clinical details of in vitro fertilization in its earliest days. Without her help, I could not have written this story. I wouldn’t even have tried.

  Mary also read and offered general comments on a late draft of the manuscript, as did my friend, children’s author Peg Kehret, and my wife, Myra. All readers came up with points that needed my attention, many of which I’d not have noticed on my own.

  The laboratory team that opened Swedish’s Reproductive Technologies Facility in 1983 consisted of Dr. Mary Forster, Dr. Ronald Gellert, Carol Zeigler, Jean Emrich, Dianne Smith, and Penny Cerdena. The clinical physicians who worked with these scientists were Drs. Robert E. McIntosh, Barry Stewart, Donald Smith, Jane Uhlir, and Wayne Weissman. All were exemplars of competence and professionalism; it was my good luck to have had the opportunity to work with them. Thanks to their efforts, countless Pacific Northwest couples over the past quarter-century have been able to raise children who otherwise never would have been conceived.

  Thanks to Dr. Roger Donahue, my fellowship supervisor, who, with good humor, taught the principles of chromosomal analysis and ovum/embryo culture to a trainee unable to bring himself to sacrifice experimental mice.

  A bow to the redoubtable Morrie Robkin for critical information on firearms and their use.

  Last, but not nearly least, thanks to the good people at Poisoned Pen Press. Barbara Peters, my editor, as patient as she is incisive and insightful, went far above and beyond to show me how to improve this book—as she has helped me improve all my books—by orders of magnitude. Publisher Rob Rosenwald and Associate Publisher Jessica Tribble have been unfailingly enthusiastic, encouraging, and helpful. When I’ve had questions, Nan Beams, Annette Rogers, Elizabeth Weld, and Marilyn Pizzo have been right there with answers. And I can’t imagine a friendlier, more supportive group of authors than the Poisoned Pen Posse.

  The author takes sole responsibility for any errors in A Perilous Conception.

  Epigraph

  “Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.”

  —Victor Hugo

  Chapter One

  Thursday, April 28, 1977

  Sanford

  One last look in the hall mirror. I straightened my tie, brushed my hand over that unruly clump of hair above my right ear. Should I be suave and assured, or would I come off better as wide-eyed and enthusiastic, maybe even a little eccentric? As I glanced at the gray fabric-covered log book in my hand, I caught the reflection of my smile in the mirror. Perfect. Cool, self-possessed, yes. Suave was the way to go.

  I didn’t need to check my watch, but did anyway. Couple of minutes past one, almost an hour till the press conference. By five o’clock, I’d be on the local news, right at the top, and tomorrow morning, my face would be on every screen from San Francisco to Timbuktu. Well, my face and Giselle Hearn’s, fair enough. I’d make sure to say I couldn’t have done it without her, but there’d be no doubt who’d been the project leader, and who, the co-worker. I smiled again.

  Good move, borrowing Giselle’s lab log last night, then canceling my appointments and staying home this morning. My office staff would’ve been driving me nuts, wanting to know what all the fuss was about. Instead, I’d put in five solid hours, studying the log and my pile of reprints from Nature, Lancet, and The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. For more than a year, I’d been keeping up with that literature, but I wanted to be sure I had the material down cold, every detail. I couldn’t afford a misstep.

  I walked out into the corridor, took the elevator down to the lobby, clapped Albert, the doorman, on the arm. “Hey, Doc,” Albert rumbled. “Them Seadogs gonna win today?”

  The Emerald Seadogs, Major League Baseball’s brand new representatives in the Pacific Northwest, were supposedly starting their existence under a lucky sign, double-sevens. But before the end of the first month of that auspicious 1977 season, the Seadogs were already hopelessly in the cellar, couldn’t win for losing. “Don’t know, Albert. I only bet on horses, but if I did bet baseball, I think I’d keep my money in my pocket on that one.” The old doorman cackled.

  With its long winters of short, gray, drizzly days, Emerald is the suicide capital of the country. This past season had been a prizewinner, barely a glimpse of sun between Christmas and Easter. But today, the sky was a glorious blue, not a cloud anywhere, and I threw back my head to take in the warmth of the midday sunlight. From this day on, that sun would shine on me, nonstop. Patients would clog my office. I’d see my photo in newspapers, magazines, on the tube. My name would be front and center in articles and popular histories; I’d get whole chapters in reproductive medicine textbooks. Rotary Club presidents and chairmen of university departments would book me for talks. It was not beyond reason to expect that one day I’d get a call to come give a speech in Stockholm. My parents would finall
y have to hand it to me. Their son was about to become a legend in medicine.

  Most of my colleagues lived in big houses in one or another of the fancy Emerald suburbs, which entitled them to drive nearly an hour to and from work, sometimes in the middle of the night. Not for me. An easy seven-minute walk, and I was at my office in the Emerald Medical Tower, linked by skybridges to Puget Community Hospital on one side, and the new glass-and-steel Washington Public University Medical Complex on the other.

  I strode into the Tower Lobby, past patients, some in wheelchairs, or making their way slowly on canes. White-coated doctors talked to white-capped nurses. Techs pushed blood-draw carts and EKG machines. For all the attention they weren’t giving me, I could’ve been walking along a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, but that was about to change. Tomorrow, people on all sides would stop, point, whisper to their companions, “Hey, isn’t that Dr. Colin Sanford? You know, the guy…”

  As I walked into my waiting room, a buzz of talk went silent. Lettie and Sally, the receptionists, Kinsey and Ruth Ellen, the nurses, Megan, the nurse-practitioner, stood in a circle in front of the reception counter. One look at me, and they froze in place, a body with five chalky faces, five open mouths and ten saucer-eyes. Barbara Renfro, the office manager, stood off from the others, stone-faced, leaning against the end of the counter. Her Adam’s apple bobbed up, down, up again.

  The room reeked of trouble. Had one of my patients keeled over with a pulmonary embolism? Did the pediatricians find a serious birth defect in a baby? Nah, either way, a nurse would have called my beeper. I looked past the mob to Barbara. “Got something to tell me?”

  She motioned me down the hall past reception, to my consulting office.

  I followed her along the corridor, into the office, closed the door. She rested a hand on my arm. “Oh, Dr. Sanford. Dr. Hearn is…dead.”

  “Dead? No.”

  “She was shot. Murdered. In her lab, a little while ago. And…”

  “What, Barbara?”

  “Mr. Kennett did it.”

  “Mr. Kennett? Why on earth would he ever—”

  “And after he killed Dr. Hearn, he shot himself. A Detective Baumgartner called here not five minutes ago, looking for you. He got your name off Mr. Kennett’s newborn-nursery ID bracelet. I told him we expected you any time now, and he said he wants you to go over to the lab immediately to talk to him.”

  I pride myself on keeping a cool head in emergencies. “I’ll get over there ASAP. Would you please cancel the press conference for me?”

  “Of course.” She took a step away. “Dr. Sanford…did the conference have something to do with the Kennetts?”

  I nodded.

  As she walked out of the office, I stared at the log book in my hand. Doubly fortunate now that it wasn’t sitting in a desk drawer in Giselle’s office, where the cops would find it. It was my ticket to the future, but it also contained seeds for disaster, which I’d stumbled onto the night before. No reporter at the press conference, rushing to get the story out, would have looked inside that log, but the scientists we’d beaten to the finish line would want to review it, and to say the least, some of the material could be embarrassing. I thought I knew what to do about it, and had figured to sit down with Giselle after the conference to get her on board. But that idea had been knocked into a cocked hat along with the conference. In any case, the log had to go someplace out of sight for the time being, absolutely-positively safe where no one would think of checking.

  I scanned the room. Stash it in my desk? That’d be the first place anyone would look. Two walls of bookshelves, filled with medical textbooks, monographs, and leather-bound journals. Good camouflage, but not good enough. The faux-woodgrain metal file cabinet next to my desk? Negative. A file cabinet would be Number Two on any search, right after my desk…but wait, here’s an idea. I stepped across the room, lowered a shoulder, tipped the cabinet. Below the bottom drawer was a nice little recess. Good. I tossed the log book into the cavity, gave a short silent thanks for all those after-work hours at the gym, then lowered the cabinet.

  I hung my suit jacket on a hook behind the door, grabbed a white coat from an adjacent hook, shrugged it on, and rushed out, through the waiting room, into the hallway, down the corridor to the skybridge. I could deal with a little delay in my plans. First things first, and the first thing had to be a talk with Joyce Kennett. Going to the lab and talking to the cops would need to settle for second.

  Chapter Two

  Sanford

  I’m a doctor, an OBGYN. I opened my office in Emerald in 1965, and by 1970, my practice was the biggest in town. Patients knew when they came to me, they’d get the best care possible, and they’d get it directly from me. No partners, no interns, no med students. I always did have an eye for the main chance—no point denying the obvious—and during the late sixties, I saw laparoscopy was the coming thing in my field. And why not? Would you want your surgery performed through the customary five-inch slash in the breadbasket if it could be neatly accomplished via a thin optical instrument slipped through a tiny puncture into the abdomen? So I took myself off to Philadelphia to learn the procedure from the guru, Guiseppe Allegri, and I’ve got to tell you, Allegri was impressed. He said he’d never seen anyone with such a knack for the procedure. When I got back home, I wangled an interview with the medical editor of The Emerald Times, to tell the city all about Band-Aid surgery, now available right in its own back yard. My office phones didn’t stop ringing for days.

  Then, in the midseventies, federal research grants began to dry up. The University faculty panicked. None of them had ever dreamed of dirtying their hands by laying them on patients, but necessity really is a mother, and the professors started promoting themselves as super-specialists, the ultimate experts. What they didn’t say was that hands-on care at the U would in fact be provided by residents and med students, and the professors’ role would consist of initialing trainees’ chart notes. But you can sell people anything, and I started to notice a patient here, a patient there, leaving my care to go to “The Northwest’s Preeminent Medical Center.” Which pissed me off, royally.

  You’ve got to keep an eye on your opposition, so I was a regular at the Wednesday morning University OBGYN Grand Rounds, where professors, fellows, and residents honed their one-upsmanship skills, pontificating on esoteric topics. At the first session after Christmas break, in January, 1976, the speaker was Dr. Giselle Hearn, a PhD embryologist. The room was packed. Dr. Hearn talked about her experiments on the behavior of chromosomes at fertilization in mice, which she hoped would shed light on factors that cause errors during that process, and produce conditions like Down Syndrome. Near the end of the hour, she said she was convinced there would be no real breakthroughs until studies being carried out in other research centers on human gametes started to yield up critical information.

  I didn’t realize she’d flung a gauntlet until Gerry Camnitz flew to his feet, no small accomplishment given the size and weight distribution of L. Gerald Camnitz, MD. The Professor and Chairman of OBGYN had the look of an angry, red-faced walrus in a sharply-tailored gray suit, pink shirt, and narrow blue tie. “Dr. Hearn, this is not a public forum for departmental policy. It is an educational session. Kindly stick to your subject.”

  Hearn’s face and body language told everyone in that room they were about to get a preview of the Bicentennial fireworks display. She blinked at Camnitz like a cow, offended at having gotten a gratuitous poke in the udder from a stick in the hand of a nasty little boy. “I’ve not gone off my topic, Dr. Camnitz. I’ve merely stated a matter of fact. If it happens to conflict with your prejudices, you might do well to reconsider.”

  I’d had no idea what was obviously running deep below the calm surface waters of the University OBGYN Department. A couple of medical students snickered. Camnitz silenced them with a glare, then turned back to Hearn. “All right, Dr
. Hearn. Since you insist on pursuing this, I will restate my policy. We are not going to start down the slippery slope of experimentation on human embryos, not in my department. The ethical, moral, and legal implications are too uncertain. Would you propose to flush human beings down a sink when they’re no longer of use to you? Would you be concerned even the slightest bit that attempts at in vitro fertilization might produce monstrously abnormal children?”

  “I never said anything about in vitro—” Hearn began, but Camnitz shouted her down with, “This conference is over. Thank you all for coming.” I thought he might follow that with an order for Hearn to go to the Dean’s office and serve detention, but instead, he stormed out of the auditorium. There was a brief silence, followed by a sound like the swarming of a million angry bees. Don Gardiner, a young assistant professor, poked an elbow into my ribs. “Welcome to the halls of ivy.”

  I muttered, “Yeah,” but I was thinking about in vitro fertilization and embryo replacement.

  ***

  Not a week later, I was talking to Joyce and James Kennett, one of my infertility couples. They had what’s called idiopathic infertility, which is doctor-talk for “I don’t have a goddamn clue.” Joyce’s temperature records showed she ovulated right on schedule, every twenty-nine days plus or minus one. X-ray contrast studies indicated no blockage of her fallopian tubes. Her uterus was perfectly normal, inside and out. James’ sperm were lively and quick. The couple hit the mattress at a frequency that should already have borne them a football team. Artificial insemination with James’ sperm had been no more efficacious than the natural process.

  They were both up tight, squirming in the chairs opposite my desk. Not unusual for infertility patients. They’d been trying for a year before they first came to see me, and I’d been working with them for an equal length of time. Two years of having every menstrual period be a bitter cup of dashed hopes does things to people, and in any case, this couple was predisposed to emotional problems.