Fatal Reaction

to drug company, from university to university. Anyone could make up a story about an old colleague in another lab who’d struck pharmaceutical gold. But the first question ought not to be who could have plausibly approached Danny with the possibility of the drug, but who knew he had AIDS?”
    “Who knew?”
    “Stephen. Me. Other than that, it wasn’t common knowledge, though anyone who watched his habits or perhaps saw him take his medication would have been able to guess. I’ll try to ask around at Azor.”
    “Speaking of asking around, you’ve got to convince Stephen to let me come out and question the employees.”
    “There are over two hundred of them. Where would you start? Besides, they’re shutting the company down over the weekend. The whole building will be closed so they can put in new electrical transformers. After that, the Japanese will be here....”
    “That may be,” replied Elliott, getting up to clear the table, “but you said it yourself, these guys move around all the time from project to project and company to company.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning that the longer you wait the bigger the chance that whoever we’re looking for isn’t going to be there anymore.”
     
    I woke up at four o’clock in the morning surprised to find myself on the living room couch. The last thing I remembered was lying down to shut my eyes for a minute while Elliott finished doing the dishes. I told him to leave them until the morning, but he’d seemed almost offended by the idea. Somewhere between dinner and dessert I must have fallen asleep. I sat up and looked around.
    The apartment was dark and empty. The comforter from my bed lay on top of me. Elliott must have covered me up before he left. I shuddered at the thought of him seeing my bedroom. It had been so long since I’d picked up in there I didn’t think I could remember the color of the carpet.
    I got up feeling stiff. I knew that if I went back to sleep I’d either wake up feeling even worse than I did now or sleep until noon. Neither was a particularly attractive possibility. Instead, I picked up the comforter from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders, telling myself a shower would do me good. As I passed the telephone I noticed that the answering machine light was blinking. I must have been sleeping so soundly that I didn’t hear the phone.
    Yawning, I pushed the button that rewound the tape. As the tape rewound, my heart began beating wildly, even though more likely than not it was someone selling long distance service, spared from a tongue-lashing by the fact that I was an especially sound sleeper.
    The tape clicked.
    “Hi, Kate. It’s me, Stephen. I don’t know if you’re asleep or not, but I thought you’d want to know. I just got a fax from Takisawa. It’s too long for me to read the whole thing over the phone, but basically it says they’re willing to go along with our counterproposal in principle— whatever that means. I’ll leave a copy on your desk. I guess we’re not dead yet.”
    For a minute I just stood there, wrapped in the blanket, and stared at the phone. I pushed the rewind button and listened to the message again. Then I did a little dance around the living room before I went to get dressed.
     
    Friday was marked by a sense of urgency that infected every person at Azor Pharmaceuticals from the secretaries to the scientists. With the power shutdown set for five o’clock, many investigators had spent the night working in their labs, finishing up experiments, while others had arrived before dawn. Things were even more frantic in the ZK-501 labs, because the scientists were working feverishly not just to complete their work but to get their labs ready for Takisawa.
    By the time I arrived Carl Woodruff was already pacing the halls, clipboard in hand, looking as edgy as an expectant father in a film from the fifties. His goal, he announced to whoever would listen, was to have everyone out of their labs by four o’clock in order to give the cleaning crew an hour to go through before the lights went out and the building was sealed.
    By lunchtime tempers were flaring and emotions running high. Even behind the closed doors of my office I could hear Borland cursing as Carl explained that he would not only have to wear a lab coat during the Takisawa visit, but his girlie calendars would have to come down.
    I spent much of the day boxing up the various papers in Danny’s office that I would need to work on over