Fatal Reaction

indeed. What has he done this time?”
    “I went down to the modeling room this morning to talk about what he’s going to have to do to get ready for the electrical shutdown over the weekend. Naturally, he handed me a long list of things to be done and immediately announced that of course he would not be available to do any of it himself. He’s leaving for Boston on Friday for some conference so he expects Michelle and me to get the crystallography labs ready. I also had the nerve to mention that I needed the radiation logs for crystallography before he leaves.”
    “What are radiation logs?”
    “Every employee who works in an area where they may be exposed to radiation wears one of these little red devices clipped to their ID card.”
    Carl pulled his card off his belt and handed it to me. The device was a red rectangle about two inches long and half an inch wide attached to his ID.
    “It measures the amount of radiation you’ve been exposed to. Everybody in the crystallography lab is required by the EPA and OSHA to wear one. The radiation levels have to be recorded once a week and we have to submit the readings to the government or we’re slapped with a fine.
    “Naturally Childress considers himself above government regulation. How could he be expected to be bothered with something as trivial as keeping track of how much hazardous radiation people in his department are exposed to? At Baxter they had people who did that for you. Scientists were not expected to clutter their craniums with such trivia. Oh god, how I miss Danny.”
    “Why Danny?”
    “While Danny was alive Childress complained to him.”
    “Why? Were they friends?”
    “Are you kidding? Danny hated Childress’s guts.”
    “Why?” I asked. This was hardly the answer I had expected.
    “Because Childress is a complete tick. He was always sauntering into Danny’s office with some grievance that he insisted was a breach of his employment contract.”
    “What kind of things did he complain about?”
    “Important stuff—his office was too small, he insisted on flying first-class but accounting would only reimburse him for coach. The man is a first-class pain in the ass.”
    “Why didn’t he come to you with these complaints? As the project administrator I’d think you’d be the natural one to go to.”
    “I think he just liked going over my head and Danny was gracious enough to put up with it.”
    “Speaking of Danny,” I said, trying to sound casual, “did he try to get in touch with you at all when he got back from Tokyo? I found a note he’d made to call you, but I couldn’t tell whether he ever managed to get in touch.”
    “He phoned me the day he got back,” replied Woodruff easily. “He left a message on my voice mail that he wanted to have a look at the files I had on the integrase project. Normally I’m in all day on Saturday, but my wife’s parents were visiting that weekend, so I didn’t find out he’d called until Monday. It’s strange to think that by the time I got the message he must have been dead.”
    “Was there anybody from the company who Danny was friends with outside of work?”
    If Carl thought my question strange he didn’t show it. instead he thought for a minute. “It’s hard to say, really. Over the years the projects change, people come and go. Danny was always in a funny position. As you have no doubt noticed some of the labs can be quite close-knit. It always depends on which project was taking a lot of his time. A couple of years back, when the company was going flat out to develop a new antirejection drug for transplant patients, he got real friendly with a molecular chemist named Gregg Waskowitz. But Gregg’s been back at M.I.T. for a couple years....”
    “What about recently?”
    “These days Danny was working almost full time on finding funding sources for ZK-501 so those were the people he had the most interaction with. But really he didn’t seem particularly close to anybody. He occasionally liked to go to Remminger’s lab and give her a hard time, but I don’t know whether they ever got together outside of the office. Every once in a while I’d see Michelle in his office, but I think they were just commiserating about Childress. I must say I’m beginning to acquire a renewed understanding of what that poor woman has to put up with working in the same lab as that man.”
    “Was there anybody besides Childress that Danny didn’t get along with?”
    “You knew Danny, he