Page 132 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Airtight

He fell silent. “Come on, Larry.” Ray knew him well; Larry had to
be prodded gently at times. “This is us you’re talking to, remember?
What about Laurel’s health?”
“I really shouldn’t violate doctor-patient confidentiality, you know,
but I guess it can’t hurt Laurel anymore. All of you underwent
complete physical exams before you were accepted for this project.
You had to be single, with no history of respiratory disease or mental
illness. You had to work well with other people, as demonstrated by
the absence of a criminal record. But that is not relevant. What is
important, and I told Lt. Gramercy this, is that after a few weeks,
during one of your routine examinations, I detected a lymph node
tumor just starting in Dr. Reath’s armpit. Then she told me about the
history of breast cancer in her family, something she had suppressed
on her medical records.”
That took me and, I assumed, everyone else completely by
surprise. Ray forgot to prod for a minute, but recalled his role. “You
mean she asked you to keep it quiet, to save the project?”
Dr. Kapil nodded. “Yes, I think that’s how she saw it. I explained
her chances to her. Letting it go without treatment for the duration
of our quarantine, she ran a serious risk. Potentially life-threatening.
But she took it in stride, made me swear to secrecy and all that. It was
against my better judgement, but I felt an obligation to the rest of
you, and to the project. I guess I got swept up in the evangelical
fervor, even though I was just along for the ride. Amazingly, she did
not become depressed; if anything, she became happier as time went
on. That year in the Ecodome represented the climax of her career, a
justification of her theoretical work and a chance to establish her
credibility in a very competitive field.”
“But still...” It was Waldo, this time.
“Still I kept her under observation, and still I reserved the right, in
my own mind, at least, to blow the whistle if the nodule—which was
barely detectable—started to enlarge. It never occurred to me that
she might develop a fatalistic notion of going out with a bang at the
end of the project.”
“Nonsense.” Toro had spoken, his booming bass crashing over
the end of Larry Kapil’s last statement like a tall breaker on a smooth
white beach. “Laurel wasn’t depressed. I knew about her illness. It
didn’t make her suicidal.”

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