Fatal Reaction

Japan. There was an incoming call at four forty-six for seventeen minutes followed by a twenty-six-second call to Stephen’s home number. Five minutes later Danny made an outgoing call that lasted just under two minutes. Besides the call to Stephen I recognized that the other numbers were all at Azor Pharmaceuticals.
     
    As I drove to Azor Pharmaceuticals the business of the phone numbers nagged at me. While Elliott was confident that the identity of the mystery man who was in Danny’s apartment when he died would emerge from the scores of numbers that appeared earlier in the month, somehow I kept coming back to the three calls that were made the Saturday Danny returned from Japan. I was convinced they were important.
    I remembered that Blades had said there was no cassette tape among the evidence the police had gathered. Presumably whoever had been with Danny when he died had taken the trouble to remove it from the answering machine and take it with him. Granted, the evidence he was attempting to conceal may have come from any one of the half-dozen short incoming calls received at Danny’s number during the ten days he was in Japan. However, I figured it was safe to assume that whoever was with Danny when he died knew him well enough to be aware of the trip to the Orient—and when he was scheduled to return. That put the focus squarely on the calls received the day immediately preceding his death.
    Of course, there was also the chance of some other perfectly logical explanation for the cassette tape’s absence—perhaps it had broken before Danny had left for Japan, and he hadn’t had the chance to replace it before leaving for his trip—but then there would have been no record of calls received by his number. No, the cassette was important.
    As soon as I arrived at Azor I pulled a copy of the company’s internal phone book out of Danny’s desk drawer and began looking for anything that matched the incoming calls received by Danny to the numbers I had copied from the sheet Detective Blades had shown us. It took me a while because I had only numbers and the book was arranged alphabetically according to department, lab, or employee, but eventually I found a match. The two-minute call had been made to Carl Woodruff’s office. I couldn’t find the other number, though it was clearly one of those assigned to Azor Pharmaceuticals. I checked the cover of the internal directory and noted that it had been more than six months since it had been last updated. Perhaps the number had only been recently assigned. For the hell of it I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang four times before the company’s internal voice-mail system picked it up.
    “Hello, this is Dr. Michael Childress. I am away from my office at the moment, but if you will leave a message, I will promptly call you back.”
     

CHAPTER 15
     
    What was Michael Childress to Danny Wohl? Why had the crystallographer called him at home on the day before he died? It had always struck me as odd how, with the exception of Stephen, no one at Azor seemed particularly affected by Danny’s death. I’d assumed it was because science was a closed fraternity. Now I learned that Michael Childress and Danny had had seventeen minutes’ worth of things to talk about in the last twenty-four hours of Wohl’s life. What else did they have in common?
    The phone rang, jarring me from my reverie. It was Stephen, wondering whether I had forgotten about our meeting and reminding me he had yet another meeting, this one with the virology group, scheduled to begin in an hour. I grabbed a legal pad and hurried to his office. However, no sooner had we begun than we were pelted with a steady stream of interruptions—a question from Carl Woodruff, a phone call from a German enzymologist whom Stephen had been trying to get in touch with for days and whom he had high hopes of recruiting, Dave Borland stopping by to lobby for money to hire another technician. Before I knew it the virologists were knocking on the door and I was forced to contemplate the fact that the only place I was able to command Stephen’s complete attention was in bed.
    I arrived back at Danny’s office feeling frustrated and discontent. I sighed and forced myself to shake it off. I decided the time had come to get all of Danny’s personal things out of the office. Not only did I need room to work, but all the reminders of Danny were too distracting. I found a couple of empty boxes in the