Pam was enjoying a night in her own home. Between staying with Jake in Gloucester and then going out to Michigan, she hadn’t been here for weeks. But Jake had gone to New York to testify in a case this afternoon and he wouldn’t be back until late tonight. So they agreed it would be okay for her to spend the night here. The fridge needed a major cleanout, she needed to replenish clothing and toiletries and it felt good to be in her own space.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the ping of an incoming email and she was surprised to see it was from Jake. He usually called or texted.

This just came in from Prescott. Is it your drug?

The message he’d forwarded from Prescott was almost as brief, addressed to Steve Morgan. Presumably Jake’s journalist cover name.

Dear Mr. Morgan:

As promised, please find attached a copy of the paper we discussed. It’s scheduled for publication in next week’s issue of Science. Please remember that you agreed not to publish anything before then, but this will give you an opportunity to review the paper in advance. Feel free to contact me if there are any questions, or any further comments you would like from me concerning the importance of our findings.

Eric Prescott

Attached to the message was a copy of Prescott’s manuscript, which Pam eagerly opened. She immediately checked the structure of the drug Prescott was reporting and calculated its molecular mass. But the results were disappointing. It looked quite different from hers. And its molecular mass was 447. Not the same as Pam’s drug, which had a mass of 388.

So he’s discovered an effective drug independently. Not stolen it after all. And in that case, he probably had nothing to do with framing me. Maybe Holly decided to steal the drug on her own and killed herself when she was about to be exposed.

And then the spectre of criminal prosecution resurfaced. If Prescott had a different drug, would the prosecutors believe her story? Or would they think that she’d tried to steal the drug, like her lawyer had suggested? And even suspect that she was the one who’d killed Holly. She couldn’t get the image of being arrested again out of her head. This time for murder.

It was close to eleven when she emailed Jake the news. He’d get her message sometime tonight and they could talk about it in the morning. She thought about going to bed, but knew sleep would be impossible. Instead, she started reading Prescott’s paper in detail.

• • •

Jake had been trying to work through Prescott’s paper when Pam’s email came in. He hadn’t been able to get much out of the manuscript. It was too technical for him. And her message was a downer, so he decided to get a few hours of sleep.

He was awakened by someone knocking at his bedroom door and calling his name. He sat up with a start and looked at the clock. Not yet six in the morning. What the hell was going on! Then he saw Pam, looking excited and a bit frantic.

“Pam, what’s up? I didn’t expect you this early, but come on in.”

“I’m sorry, I guess I woke you. But I couldn’t keep this to myself any longer.”

“I know, I got your email last night. It is disappointing.”

“No, that’s not it! Forget my email. Look at this.”

She pulled out two sheets of paper and laid them on the bed next to him. There was a chemical structure written on each of them.

“This is the compound from Prescott’s paper on the left, and this is my drug on the right. Totally different, with a big difference in their molecular masses.”

Jake was puzzled. “Yes, that’s what you said in your email last night.”

She turned the paper with Prescott’s compound ninety degrees to the right. “Now look again, more carefully. They’re actually not so different after all. In fact, they’re the same basic structure, just modified in three places.”

She drew circles around three parts of each structure. “There’s a fluorine instead of a hydrogen here, an azide instead of a hydroxyl here, and a sulfur instead of an oxygen here. They’re not really different compounds, but closely related derivatives.”

“Damn! So you’re thinking that Prescott came up with his drug based on your compound after all? Why would he have gone to the trouble of making these changes instead of just stealing your drug?”

“To make sure it wasn’t an existing compound, especially not anything in the Langmere chemical library. This way he can patent it as a totally novel drug, worth lots more money and unrelated to anything I might have had.”

“Got it.”

“Plus, there’s something else weird about his paper. It doesn’t give any rationale for having tested the drug in the first place. We did a large-scale screen to find the drug in my lab, but Prescott couldn’t have done that because he didn’t have my cell culture system working. So his paper just reports the results of using the drug in his genetically engineered mice. That’s fine, but he never could have tested enough mice to have discovered it that way in the first place. And instead of saying how he found it, the paper reads like it dropped out of the sky. He doesn’t even say how it was synthesized, just gives a footnote saying the synthesis will be published separately.”

“How could he get away with that? I’m no scientist, but I do know that Science is a top journal. Wouldn’t they expect him to say how he discovered the drug he’s reporting?”

“They would. But there’s a lot of politics in this kind of publishing, and he probably gave them some cock and bull story about not wanting to go into the background. He has a lot of pull and I suspect they were so anxious to publish the paper that they let him get away with it. And once the paper is out and an effective treatment has been reported, nobody’s going to care where it came from.”

“So much for the objective purity of science. But this is great. Given this, my next move is to talk with Prescott and press him on how he came up with his drug. That would make sense for the story I’m supposedly writing.”

“Do you think that’ll work? He’ll probably just give you whatever cover story he gave Science.” She smiled. “I’m no investigator, but I have another idea. Prescott’s paper says that the main author of the paper that’s going to describe the synthesis of his compound is Satoshi Kimura. I googled him and he’s the lead chemist at a company called Neuchem, which Prescott founded.”

“Interesting. So you’re thinking that Prescott gave him the formula for your compound and asked him to make other things that were related? And then Prescott had a small number of possibles to test in his mice.”

“Exactly. And I think Kimura is the person we should talk to next. If we take him by surprise and press him on how he synthesized this stuff, I bet we can learn more than talking to Prescott.”

“Good idea, I like it. But what do you mean we?”

“I mean that I’m going with you for this. You may be a super detective, but you don’t know enough of the science to pull off an interview with a chemist on your own. You can introduce me as your technical assistant and we’ll do it together.”