BLIND TRIAL by Brian Deer (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

any thought since she’d learned of the arrest, it was to wonder why she’d bothered in the first place.

Her boyfriend stood behind her, cupping her breasts. Since his release, he’d been childlike, needy. She’d been glad to lend support at this moment of crisis, but what could she say now to explain?

Hiroshi fingered her nipples, his penis limp on her buttocks. “So, tell me then please, why is he here?”

She let go the blind. “Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. That company. Once you’re on its payroll, they never leave you alone. It’s one thing after another.”

His nails nipped her flesh. “Before nine Saturday morning? This is important business, I think.”

She moved from the window and stared at the bed, at the nightstand, at the clock, at her yellow flannel robe: anywhere but near his gaze. In such needling interrogations, he sounded like her father. Would life be like this in Nagoya?

“Oh, more of the same. More BerneWerner Biomed. They think they actually own your whole life.”

He reached out and dug his thumbs into her levator scapulae. “And still you don’t answer him. Mr. Louviere will be offended, I think. With my car, he will know we are here.”

She rolled her head as he kneaded her trapezius. “They always want something, those people.”

“He’s attracted to you, yes, I think.”

She studied the bed in which two men had slept—one after another, night after night—as she’d given herself up to sensation. “Let me make coffee. And we can go out for breakfast. Get our heads round this drugs charge insanity.”

“He knows the back stairs? Yes? He’s been here before, I think. We met outside when you came from the hospital, but he has come here more times, I think.”

She grappled for shoes and struggled for an answer. Ben hadn’t seen the fire escape Tuesday. She lifted a hairbrush, returned it to the dressing table, stepped toward Hiroshi, and took his hand.

“Breakfast can wait. Come and lie down. There’s something I’ve got to confess.”

THE FREEWAY ran clear, right through to the airport. But Ben’s mood didn’t pass so easy. “Guess Sanomo will be laughing when she tells them what she knows. That Murayama guy will be so happy.”

Beside him, Doc Mayr studied a map on her phone and compared it with signs above the road. She’d begun talking a little more since Potrero Hill, as if something in that incident broke the ice. “Perhaps he will. But I’m not so sure. If our vaccine gets stalled, the whole field will fall under suspicion, and that’ll damage his work for Sanomo.”

Ben signaled left as they approached a ramp. “So, you and Murayama then? Looks like you don’t exactly hit it off. Is it impolite to ask what that’s about?”

“Nasty. So sly.” Her voice gained an edge. “Comes over oh-so innocent, in his cute little tie. But, believe me, he’s not. No, he’s not.”

Ben hung another left. “You knew him before the conference then?”

“Oh, we go way back. Way back.”

“Looks kind of young for what he’s doing.”

“Didn’t waste any time, that one. Was on his PhD—not even a post-doc—when he appeared on our radar. Approached us, he did. Came to us, of course. ‘Oh,’ he goes, ‘can you help me with this little problem?’ And, before we knew it, he turned real ugly.”

“Seems kind of mean. Like an unscrupulous kind of vibe.”

“You got it. ‘Unscrupulous.’ That’s the word. No scruples. Of course, he came to us. My lab published twice as much as any on all this. So, when we got a patent on something we developed, he went out and claimed we stole the idea from him.”

Didn’t Wilson say that on Wednesday morning? Stole any patents lately? “And did you? Sorry, I mean did the company. I mean, did the company use something? I mean, what happened with that, do you know?”

Doc Mayr ducked like a dog under a bridge. “There’s the rental place there. Don’t you go past. There. Go past and we gotta go round again.”

He pulled into the returns lot and joined a line of vehicles. Maybe five were Nissan Sentras. An attendant waved him forward, inspected the car, and logged its barcode with a scanner.

Ben rubbed his bruised face, unshaved for days, looked under the seats, grabbed Doctorjee’s briefcase and dumped it into a trash can. Then he helped Doc Mayr open a pack of Dorals and hauled their baggage from the trunk.

“You reckon they’re in it together then?” he asked, as she wobbled beside him toward a Dollar shuttle bus. “I mean, you reckon they’ll make trouble for us Monday?”

Even before she responded, he realized his premise—and recalled what she’d said on the freeway. “If our vaccine gets stalled,” she’d said, framing a conditional. “If it gets stalled,” she’d said. If.

They were talking—both talking—as if the license might happen, as if what they learned yesterday meant nothing.

At the steps of the bus, she dropped the cigarette and scraped it to death beneath a shoe. “They might try to make trouble for us. They might. Yes, they might. But, when all’s said and done, what does she know? Doctorjee forged a couple of SPIRE forms?”

“Isn’t that fraud though, if it was government-funded?”

“It’s not good, I’ll grant you. Be the end of his career in medical research, I’m glad to say. But is she going to jeopardize her own future to raise something petty like that? And she’s only got forty-eight hours.”

Fifty

HIROSHI MURAYAMA lay on his back and stared at the bedroom ceiling. So, this would be it? Another conversation. Perhaps worse than his grilling downtown. At least with the police he knew where the truth lay. He knew he’d prove himself innocent. But with Sumiko he feared that events may have occurred that might not be so assuredly reversed.

For days, he’d sensed they were drifting from their moorings. Their relationship felt subtly altered. In all the hotels where they’d slept since that night in Shanghai, she was always so passionate, so loving. But here in San