Blindsight

“Thank you,” Peter said. He sat and gazed around the office. “Nice place.”

“You think so?” Laurie questioned.

“Better than my broom closet,” Peter said. “Anyway, I won’t take too much of your time. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve finally picked up a trace contaminant or at least a foreign compound in the sample you sent up from Randall Thatcher.”

“Really!” Laurie said with interest. “What did you find?”

“Ethylene,” Peter said. “It was only a trace since the gas is so volatile, and I haven’t been able to isolate it from two other cases that I tested.”

“Ethylene?” Laurie questioned. “That’s odd. I don’t know what to make of that. I’ve heard of using ether in free basing, but not ethylene.”

“Free basing is associated with smoking cocaine,” Peter said, “not taking the drug IV the way the folks in your series did. Besides, even in smoking, ether is only used as a solvent for extraction. So I don’t know why ethylene turned up. It could even be a laboratory error for all I know. But since you’ve been so interested in the possibility of a contaminant, I wanted to let you know right away.”

“If ethylene is so volatile,” Laurie said, “why don’t you look for it in the samples from Robert Evans? Since you determined he’d died so quickly, maybe there would be more of a chance to find it if it had been involved.”

“That’s a good idea,” Peter said. “I’ll give it a whirl.”

Laurie kept her eyes on the empty doorway for a moment after Peter had left. Ethylene was hardly the kind of contaminant she’d expected. She thought that they might find some exotic central-nervous-system stimulant like strychnine or nicotine. Laurie wasn’t familiar with ethylene. She’d have to do a little research.

Glancing through the pharmacology book she and Riva kept in the office, Laurie didn’t find much on the gas. She decided to check the office library upstairs. There she found a long article on ethylene in an old pharmacology book. Ethylene was featured more prominently in the older book because it had been used as an anesthetic agent a number of years ago. It had ultimately been abandoned because it was lighter than air and flammable. Those two qualities made the gas too dangerous for use in operating rooms.

In another book Laurie found that ethylene had been noted around the turn of the century to prevent carnations in Chicago greenhouses from opening. The ethylene had been in the greenhouse illuminating gas. On a more positive note she read that the gas was used to hasten the ripening of fruit and in the manufacture of certain plastics like polyethylene and Styrofoam.

Although this background information was interesting, Laurie still didn’t see why ethylene would turn up in cocaine overdose/toxicity cases. Feeling discouraged, she replaced the books on their respective shelves and returned to her office, hoping she hadn’t missed Bingham’s call. Maybe Peter was right: his finding of ethylene had resulted from a laboratory error.

When Lou got back to police headquarters, he was handed a stack of urgent messages from his captain, the area commander, and the police commissioner. Clearly all of officialdom was in an uproar.

Going into his office, he was surprised to find a newly appointed detective sitting patiently by his desk. His suit was new, suggesting he’d only recently become a plainclothesman.

“Who are you?” Lou asked.

“Officer O’Brian,” the policeman said.

“You have a first name?”

“Yes, sir! It’s Patrick.”

“Nice Italian name,” Lou said.

Patrick laughed.

“What can I do for you?” Lou asked, trying to decide on the order in which to return his messages.

“Sergeant Norman Carver asked me to come by to try to collate the medical information you have relating to those gangland killings. You know, all those people who were also patients of Dr. Jordan Scheffield. He thought I might be good at it because I’d been premed for a while in college and had worked in a hospital summers before switching to law enforcement.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Lou said.

“I came up with something that might be important,” Patrick said.

“Uh huh,” Lou said. He stared at the messages to call the police commissioner. That was the one that was the most disturbing. He’d never gotten a message to call the police commissioner. It was like a parish priest getting a call from the pope.

“All the patients had different diagnoses,” Patrick continued, “but they did have one feature in common.”

Lou looked up. “Oh?”

Patrick nodded. “They were all scheduled to have surgery. They were all going to have operations on their corneas.”

“No kidding?” Lou said.

“No kidding,” Patrick said.

After Patrick had left, Lou tried to make sense of it. He’d been disappointed when he’d failed to find a common link between the murder victims besides the fact they’d been patients of Jordan Scheffield. But now there might be something after all. It couldn’t be simple coincidence.