A Perilous Conception Read online

  “Right. He walked over to me, opened a billfold to show a metal badge. “Bernard Baumgartner, EPD, Homicide. Thanks, Doctor.” He extended a hand.

  I gripped it. “I guess you want a word with me.”

  Baumgartner scanned the room. “Yes, I do, as soon as I’m finished with the lab personnel. I’ll have to give your patient the news, and I thought the two of us—”

  “I’ve already talked to Ms. Kennett,” I said. “She’s taking it as well as I could’ve hoped.”

  Baumgartner’s face went into lockdown mode. “Didn’t your office manager tell you to come right over here? Immediately?”

  “Barbara did tell me that,” I said. “But my responsibility to Ms. Kennett takes precedence in a situation like this. I’m ready and willing to cooperate with you in any way I can, but not at the cost of compromising my patient’s care.”

  Baumgartner’s face softened. He looked like a man trying to solve a complicated jigsaw puzzle. I thought he was about to say something, but instead, he scratched at the front edge of his retreating dark, curly hair. Then he said, “Where can I find you later?”

  “In my office. Puget Community Tower, Suite Twelve-o-one. Can you tell me about what time?”

  He checked his watch. “Five o’clock?”

  “Fine. I’ll be waiting for you.” No trouble there, I thought, since I’d canceled all my appointments for the day. And that would give me plenty of time to get my thoughts in order.

  “Thank you.” Baumgartner turned back and nodded to Miss Stephens, whose face suggested the lion was about to lead her into his den.

  The instant the door to the adjoining room closed, Camnitz wheeled around to face me. “He’s not the only one who wants to talk to you, Colin.” He launched an eye-dagger at Laurie Mansell. “Would you please excuse us, Mrs. Mansell?”

  She scuttled to the other end of the table, and slid into a chair near the techs.

  Camnitz turned his back on the group, then leaned toward me. He steepled his fingers, aimed them in my direction. “I’ve heard a rumor here and there about you and Giselle, that you might be collaborating on some work, but never anything, you might say, substantial enough that I thought I should pursue it. But the look on Mrs. Mansell’s face just now? You and Giselle were up to something, weren’t you? On top of a murder-suicide in my department, do I need to deal with a secret research project? Can you imagine how embarrassing that could be? Now, I demand to know just what was going on between you and Giselle.”

  I thought about whether I ought to deny everything, tell him Giselle and I had been friends, and Laurie had misinterpreted my visits. But there was nothing he could do to me, so why should I set myself up for him to call me a liar when I announce my success? “Sure, Gerry. I’ve been supplying Giselle with human oocytes to study for chromosome errors at fertilization.”

  “What? You know my opinion on human embryo research. How dare you—”

  “Giselle said you and she had reached an agreement.”

  “We did no such thing.” He looked like an overgrown, overweight baby with colic, flailing his arms, sputtering. “You know good and well I’d never permit that work in my department. Did you ever see approval papers from the Institutional Ethics Committee?”

  “That wasn’t my business. That was Giselle’s concern.”

  Camnitz pounded one fist into the other. “How many oocytes did you get for her?”

  “I didn’t keep count.”

  “Approximately, then.”

  “Gerry, where are you going with this? I don’t know, maybe fifty or sixty, over the past year.”

  “And you got them where?”

  “Christ, Gerry. From ovaries. Where do you think oocytes come from?”

  He swallowed hard. “Whose ovaries?”

  “Surgical patients. I retrieved ova incidentally at laparoscopy.”

  “After informed consent, I assume.”

  “You’re over the line. All the procedures were done at Puget Community Hospital. You have no authority there.”

  “But you involved yourself in a study of live human embryos in my department.”

  “The study was Giselle’s. If you want to know the details of what she did with the ova, go look in her lab log. I was just a humble practitioner helping a university professor with her research.”

  Camnitz laughed, not a pleasant sound. “’Just a humble practitioner,’ my foot. You’ve never in your life been humble about anything. How did this association come about?”

  “Giselle called me one day, asked me to come to lunch, and told me she wanted to extend her studies from mice to humans. She said she picked me because I’m the hands-down best laparoscopist in Emerald.”

  “And you were generous enough to agree to recover eggs for her. Nothing in it for you.”

  “She told me I’d be second author on any papers that came out. Look, Gerry, I’ve had enough. I have no way of knowing what went on between you and Giselle, but nothing I did was illegal, or a violation of any of my institution’s rules or guidelines. If you want to pursue this, let’s go public with it. I’ll say what I just told you, and then you can try to explain to news reporters, prospective faculty members, the dean, and a whole country-full of OBGYN chairmen why you’re such a misguided reactionary that a respected member of your department felt she had to do reasonable and important research on the sly.” I sprang from the chair so suddenly, Camnitz jumped. “So long, Gerry.”

  ***

  A few minutes before five, Barbara Renfro knocked lightly at my office door, then pushed it open. “Dr. Sanford?”

  I raised my eyebrows, a silent “What’s up.”

  “Detective Baumgartner is here to see you.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks, Barbara.” I got up, walked around the desk to the door, and extended a hand to Baumgartner. The detective looked tired, hair mussed, eyelids at half-staff. He gripped my hand. “Thanks for making yourself available.”

  “No trouble.” I pointed to the chair opposite the desk. “Take a load off. Care for a drink? Coke, Pepsi, juice?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll try not to take too much of your time.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “I talked to Ms. Kennett. Poor woman, what a thing to happen to someone after she’s had a baby. You were right, though, she’s bearing up well.” He paused, and I could’ve sworn I heard gears humming inside his head. “But it might surprise you to know how many well-meaning people throw monkey wrenches into police investigations. When a police officer tells you to come directly to the lab, that’s what you should do.”

  “I’m sorry if I caused a problem by going to see my patient,” I said. “But I still think I had an obligation to do it. For a doctor, the needs of a patient have top priority.”

  The gear noise got louder. “Well, I guess we all have our own ideas about priorities. Let’s leave it at that.”

  No reason not to give him the last word. “All right. Joyce definitely is a tough cookie, Mr. Baumgartner. Infertility’s a hard row to hoe, going month after month, hoping whatever treatment you’re getting will be the one that works, and then comes the next menstrual period. Not every doctor takes that into account, but I’ve always given full attention to the emotional sides of the situation. I think that’s one reason my success rate with infertility patients is as good as it is. Some patients get terribly depressed, but I watch for any signs of trouble. Catch it before it gets out of hand.”

  Baumgartner regarded me from the corners of his eyes. “Do you watch the husbands, too?”

  I kept my smile secret. “Yes, of course. Too many gynecologists get a sperm sample from the husband, and if it’s normal, they ignore him from then on, and basically just treat the wife. But my approach is always to treat the couple, and given that James carried a diagnosis of p
aranoid schizophrenia, I made certain to talk to Dr. Hammacher, his psychiatrist.”

  “Your idea or the Kennetts’?”

  “Mine. Expert consultation. I’d have insisted if I’d needed to, but Joyce and James had no problem with it. Dr. Hammacher said he didn’t think there was a contraindication to James becoming a father. His condition was borderline, and ever since he’d had a breakdown, oh, twenty years ago, he’d taken his meds religiously and stayed away from alcohol, and he’d done very well. He was a little peculiar here and there, but so are a lot of people, and as best I could tell, he was handling the infertility workup better than a lot of so-called normal men. I can’t begin to imagine what happened.”

  Baumgartner sighed. “That’s what both Dr. Hammacher and Ms. Kennett told me. Ms. Kennett said her husband went over to thank Dr. Hearn for doing a procedure on his sperm that was supposed to help her conceive, something about separating the sperm. Can you enlighten me about that?”

  “Sure. The Kennetts had been through both my clinic and the University’s, almost two years of the usual tests and treatments, but nothing worked. I knew one of the projects in Dr. Hearn’s lab was a procedure called Density Gradient Separation. You set up a tube with layered solutions of silica particles, the densest layer on the bottom, the thinnest on top. Then you place the sperm above the top silica layer, and centrifuge the tube, which brings the fastest-moving sperm into the bottom layer. Inseminating with that sub-sample theoretically uses the sperm with the best chance of getting to an egg and fertilizing it. Dr. Hearn told me that as far as she knew, no one had done a trial in humans, but results in mice seemed encouraging, and we couldn’t see any risk to giving it a try.”

  Baumgartner nodded. “Seems like it was very encouraging for the Kennetts.” A little grin curled the side of his mouth. “Makes me wonder, though. Isn’t that kind of like asking a man to get a woman pregnant right after he runs a marathon?”

  I laughed. “Think of it like this. A guy in condition to run a fast marathon is going to do better in any race if a bunch of slow, out-of-shape runners aren’t all around, blocking his way. We figured we’d try it, what could we lose? And I guess we won, except for what happened out past the finish line.”

  “That’s one way to put it. The lab supervisor told me that right before the shooting, she heard Dr. Hearn and Mr. Kennett arguing, something about a second sample that had worked when the first one hadn’t. Ring any bells with you?”

  I shook my head, shrugged. “No, but I’m a clinician. I don’t begin to know the ins and outs of lab protocols. Sorry.”

  “Okay. Do you have Ms. Kennett’s chart handy? I’d like to take a look at it, just for the record.”

  I checked my watch. “Office staff’s gone by now. Hang on, I’ll go out to the file storage.”

  A few minutes later, I was back, shaking my head. “I’m sorry, I can’t seem to lay my hands on it.”

  Baumgartner’s smile was wry. “Not quite in your job description?”

  “I thought I could find a chart in my own office, but it’s not in the alphabetical storage. I also looked through the piles of charts at the check-in desk, and it wasn’t there either. I don’t know where else it could be. Do you want me to call my office manager? I’m not sure she’ll be home yet, but—”

  Baumgartner waved off the question. “Nah. If anything comes up, I might ask you to find it for me, but right now, I don’t think it’s worth bothering your staff. Dr. Hammacher thought the excitement of the birth might have unglued Kennett, that maybe he went out and celebrated a little last night, and then, on top of that, maybe he didn’t take his pills this morning. According to the doctor, putting a gun into the hand of a paranoid schizophrenic is like putting a dynamite detonator into the hand of an epileptic. He said if he’d had any idea Kennett owned a gun, he’d have been sure to get him to turn it in. If, if if.” Well, thanks for your time, Doctor.”

  “Glad to help. You know where to find me if you need to talk to me again.”

  ***

  I walked Baumgartner through the empty waiting room, into the outer corridor, where he shook my hand, and headed off toward the elevator. I went back to my office, locked the door behind me, then took a key from my pocket, opened my center desk drawer, and pulled out a thick Manila folder labeled Kennett, Joyce/James. Good thing I’d thought to grab it from alphabetical storage earlier, when I came back to the office from the lab.

  I laid the folder on my desk, flipped pages until I came to the one I was looking for. Smart move to have all office visits on separate pages. Not only did that make it easy to find the record of a particular visit, it also made it a snap to get rid of a visit you didn’t want anyone else to be aware of. Anyone else like lawyers, I’d thought, when I started that practice. I’d never imagined police.

  I opened the two-pronged metal clasp at the top of the chart, and carefully pulled off all the pages through the two I was looking for. Then I took a pad of medical charting paper from a desk drawer, copied the date from the first page of the two originals, and wrote a careful description of the way I’d supposedly explained Density Gradient Separation to the Kennetts. On a second clean sheet, I copied the date from the second original page, and composed an account of insemination with treated sperm. If I could’ve doctored Giselle’s log entries that easily, I would have, but I knew I couldn’t copy her hand, and besides, her notes had no page breaks. I’d think of something, though. I had to.

  I re-read both new chart notes, slipped them in place of the originals under the more recent chartings I’d pulled off the clasp, and worked them all back on. Then I took the two original pages to the file cabinet, tipped the cabinet, and stashed the originals inside Giselle’s log book. More insurance than I needed? Not if Baumgartner decided to come back for another shot at the chart.

  On my way out, I stopped at file storage, behind the reception desk, and pushed the chart in, a few spaces from where it should’ve been. “That’s why I couldn’t find it,” I murmured, as if to Detective Baumgartner. “It had been misfiled.”

  Time for a good workout at the gym. Let the fuss die down, a few days, a week at the outside. Then I’d retrieve the original pages, put them back into the chart, and reschedule my press conference.

  Chapter Five

  Baumgartner

  Melville Richmond, the guy who took me on patrol when I was seventeen, became Emerald’s youngest-ever Chief of Police in 1955. Trying to live up to his expectations for twenty-two years was not always the easiest thing, but I knew that without Mel’s interest in me, I’d probably be putting in eight long hours, five days a week, at a desk in some insurance agency. I could count on a firm pat on the back when I got something right, a hard kick in the ass when I didn’t. If I was a good cop, a lot of the credit had to go to Mel. I’d have done anything for him.

  So, eight o’clock on a Friday night, there we were, sitting in his office, talking about this case. Mel has a habit when he’s nervous, he picks up a pencil and makes like a one-armed Gene Krupa with the eraser. All the time I filled him in about the case, he was beating out prizewinning riffs on the top of his desk. He wanted every little detail, and when I finally finished, he put down the pencil and smiled. “Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve got to think about it a little.”

  He shrugged, then held out his hands, palms up. “A head case who shouldn’t have a gun but does, forgets to take his pills, then blows away a doctor and himself. What’s to think about?”

  A few things. One, he didn’t keep his pills in any sort of daily counter, so we don’t know for sure he didn’t take them. Two, his wife said he went over to thank the doctor for doing the lab procedure that got her pregnant. Three, the woman’s doctor is this little guy with an ego the size of an elephant’s dick. I left word for him to come right over to the lab to talk to me, but he
first stopped to see the wife and tell her what happened, and then, when I talked to the wife, she seemed nervous as hell. Four, the doctor couldn’t quite manage to find her chart for me to look at. Is that enough?”

  Mel leaned across the desk. “Bernie, why do you get yourself so worked up over stuff that doesn’t matter? Seems reasonable the doc would want to talk to his patient when he found out her husband was dead. The wife was nervous? What did you want from her, right after she found out her husband killed someone, then shot himself? And I’ve had my chart get lost in a doctor’s office when I’ve had an appointment, haven’t you?”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t think it’s as clean as it looks.”

  I saw it in his eyes, just for a second, but it was there. Once upon a time, Mel Richmond had been Mr. Straight-from-the-Shoulder. But the last couple of years, coming up on retirement, he’d gotten to be more than a little careful not to piss off anyone who might respond by pissing on him. It hurt to see that. I tried to be as gentle as I could. “Mel, I think you and I can do better if I know the whole story. Is there somebody who’s unhappy about this case?”

  He took a deep breath. “Horace Bancroft.”

  There’s always a reason for everything. Bancroft was a big-time lawyer, and a member of the U Med Center Board of Directors. “What’s his problem? Seems like he’d want a murder-suicide in the Med School cleaned up.”

  Mel grabbed up the pencil, started a new riff. “Well, I’m sure he does…but he doesn’t want…you know how it is, Bernie. The papers and the TV reporters have field days on stuff like this, and the longer it goes on, the more lurid it gets. Bancroft hauled the mayor in here to tell us both he wants the case wrapped up quick and quiet. The med school lives by its reputation as a primo research and care center, and Bancroft thinks a juicy murder-suicide in the OB Department isn’t exactly great promotional strategy. And then…this is between us, Bernie. Bancroft’s son-in-law, the OB chairman—”

  “Dr. Camnitz.”

  Mel looked surprised. “You know him?”