Read Online A Case of Need: A Novel by Michael Crichton, Jeffery Hudson - Free Book Online Page A

agreeable, but he couldn’t get insured. So he switched to sports-car racing and was doing very well until he drove a Lotus off the track, rolled it four times, and broke both clavicles in several places. After that, he decided he’d rather be insured than active, so he gave it all up.
    Murphy is so fast he even speaks in a kind of shorthand, as if he can’t be bothered putting all the articles and pronouns into his sentences. He drives his secretaries and technicians mad, not only because of his speech, but also because of the windows. Murphy keeps them wide open, even in winter, and he is an unrelenting opponent of what he calls “bad air.”
    When I walked into his lab in one wing of the BLI 1 I found it filled with apples. There were apples in the refrigerators, on the reagent benches, on desks as paperweights. His two technicians, wearing heavy sweaters under their lab coats, were both eating apples as I entered.
    “Wife,” Murphy said, shaking hands with me. “Makes a specialty. Want one? I have Delicious and Cortland today.”
    “No, thanks,” I said.
    He took a bite from one after polishing it briskly on his sleeve. “Good. Really.”
    “I haven’t got time,” I said.
    “Always in a rush,” Murph said. “Jesus Christ, always in a rush. Haven’t seen you or Judith for months. What’ve you been up to? Terry’s playing guard on the Belmont first eleven.”
    He lifted a picture from his desk and held it under my nose. It showed his son in a football uniform, growling into the camera, looking like Murph: small, but tough.
    “We’ll have to get together soon,” I said to him, “and talk about families.”
    “Ummmm.” Murph devoured his apple with remarkable speed. “Let’s do that. How’s bridge game? Wife and I had an absolutely devastating time last weekend. Two weekends ago. Playing with—”
    “Murph,” I said. “I have a problem.”
    “Probably an ulcer,” Murph said, selecting another apple from a row along his desk. “Nervous guy I know. Always in a rush.”
    “Actually,” I said, “this is right up your alley.”
    He grinned in sudden interest. “Steroids? First time in history a pathologist’s interested in steroids, I bet.” He sat down behind his desk and propped his feet up. “Ready and waiting. Shoot.”
    Murphy’s work concerned steroid production in pregnant women and fetuses. He was located in the BLI for a practical, if somewhat grisly, reason—he needed to be near the source of supply, which in his case was clinic mothers and the occasional stillbirths 2 assigned to him.
    “Can you do a hormone test for pregnancy at autopsy?” I asked.
    He scratched his head in swift, nervous, fluttery movements. “Hell. Suppose so. But who’d want to?”
    “I want to.”
    “What I mean is, can’t you tell at autopsy if she’s pregnant or not?”
    “Actually, no, in this case. It’s very confused.”
    “Well. No accepted test, but I imagine it could be done. How far along?”
    “Four months, supposedly.”
    “Four months? And you can’t tell from the uterus?”
    “Murph—”
    “Yeah, sure, it could be done at four months,” he said. “Won’t stand up in a courtroom or anything, but yeah. Could be done.”
    “Can you do it?”
    “That’s all we got in this lab,” he said. “Steroid assays. What’ve you got?”
    I didn’t understand; I shook my head.
    “Blood or urine. Which?”
    “Oh. Blood.” I reached into my pocket and drew out a test tube of blood I had collected at the autopsy. I’d asked Weston if it was O.K., and he said he didn’t care.
    Murph took the tube and held it to the light. He flicked it with his finger. “Need two cc’s,” he said. “Plenty here. No problem.”
    “When will you let me know?”
    “Two days. Assay takes forty-eight hours. This is post blood?”
    “Yes. I was afraid the hormones might be denatured or something …”
    Murph sighed. “How little we remember. Only proteins can be denatured, and steroids are not