Fatal Reaction

unemotional scientist had come from. From my brief experience at Azor it was obviousthat nothing could be further from the truth. I had come to see firsthand that a laboratory is a frustrating place from which to view the world. It took passion, obsession even, to see an investigator through the daily grind of making experiments work.
    “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” I said, having no choice but to just break in on them, “but I need a word in private with Stephen.”
    “We’ll just be another couple of minutes,” replied Stephen.
    “I’ve just come from the medical examiner’s office...” I ventured.
    “I’m sorry, Michelle,” said Stephen, turning to the crystallographer. “I’ll stop down in the modeling room for that reprint. We can finish up then.”
    For a minute I thought she hadn’t heard him, but finally she rose to her feet. She was a tall woman, with the blocky, squared-off gait of a triathlete. Michelle’s physical assurance stood in strange contrast to her abrupt social mannerisms. Whenever I saw her outside of her lab I got the sense that she felt most at home in the computergenerated world of crystallography and she was eager to get back to it as soon as she could.
    “What did the medical examiner want?” demanded Stephen, as soon as the door had closed behind Michelle.
    “You, actually. Julia Gordon and I were both trying to reach you last night. Where were you?”
    “I was going over our results on Hemasyn with Gus Sandstrom and a couple of the other senior investigators. We worked all night getting them ready to send to the FDA.”
    “I tried you at the office.”
    “We were upstairs in the hematology conference room. I must have forgotten to switch my line over. What did Julia Gordon want?”
    “She wanted you to have a look at these.” I took the photographs out of my briefcase and handed them to Stephen. While he studied them I sat down in the chair Michelle Goodwin had just vacated. It still felt warm. “What am I looking at?”
    “They’re photographs of kidney tissue taken under the microscope.”
    “Why does Julia want me to look at photomicrographs?”
    “It wasn’t Julia Gordon who suggested that you look at them. It was her husband.”
    “Why?” he asked, looking closely at the photographs for the first time. “What could I possibly tell Hugh about kidney tissue? Why are there all these thrombi in the small blood vessels?”
    “That’s the question. Is there anything at Azor that could have caused that kind of clotting?”
    He looked up and his eyes met mine. I saw the weariness in his face and my heart went out to him. As much as he hated to admit it, Danny’s death, his high-wire act with the Japanese, the dissension on the board—they were all taking their toll.
    “PAF would do this,” he said, quietly.
    “What’s PAF?”
    “Platelet activating factor. It’s a powerful procoagulant. They use it upstairs in the Hemasyn labs as a control in clotting studies. But you didn’t tell me where the tissue in this photograph came from.”
    “It was taken from Danny.”
    Stephen dropped the photograph onto the surface of his desk and leaned back in his chair as if trying to get some distance.
    “Is there some way to test for this PAF stuff?” I asked.
    “I wouldn’t think so. PAF is metabolized by the body almost instantaneously. It disappears without a trace.”
    “So how does it work? What does it do?”
    “Just like the name says, it’s a powerful enzyme that makes blood clot, especially in the very high concentrations we use in our labs. Even a tiny dose injected into a person would cause almost immediate D.I.C. The PAF causes the body’s clotting mechanisms to spring into action, which is why you’d see all that microscopic evidence of clotting in the tissues.”
    “But then why would you bleed to death?” I demanded. “Wouldn’t all your blood just clot?”
    “No. The body’s clotting mechanisms, the platelets and proteins that cause the blood to clot, aren’t sufficient for the body’s entire blood supply. Once they’re exhausted— which would happen almost instantaneously with PAF— the remaining blood wouldn’t clot at all.”
    “So tell me, if Danny hadn’t had a perforated ulcer, would the PAF have killed him?”
    “Most definitely, but in that case he would have bled to death internally. Compared to what went on in that apartment it would have been a relatively quiet, comfortable death. He might not even have known