Side Effects by Michael Palmer

instant, they were together, clutched to the chest of Bobby Geary as he tumbled down onto the dirt warning track to the roar of thirty thousand voices. It was a moment Kate would remember for the rest of her life.
    This, too, was such a moment.
    The body that had once held the spirit and abilities of Bobby Geary lay on the steel table before her, stripped of the indefinable force that had allowed it to sense and react so remarkably. To one side, in a shallow metal pan, was the athlete's heart, carefully sliced along several planes to
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    expose the muscle of the two ventricles--the pumping chambers--and the three main coronary arteries--left, right, and circumflex. Images of that night at Fenway more than four years ago intruded on Kate's objectivity and brought j with them a wistfulness that she knew had no place in this I facet of her work.
    "Nothing in the heart at all?" she asked for the second time. Stan Willoughby, leprechaunish in green scrubs and a j black rubber apron, shook his head. "Must a' bin something' I he et," he said, by way of admitting that, anatomically at least, he had uncovered no explanation for the pulmonary j edema, fluid that had filled Bobby Geary's lungs and, essentially, drowned him from within.
    Kate, clad identically to her chief, examined the heart under a high-intensity light. "Teenage heart in a thirty-six-year-old man. I remember reading somewhere that he intended to keep playing until he was fifty. This heart says he might have made it." "This edema says 'no way,' " Willoughby corrected. Page 35
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    "I'm inclined to think dysrhythmia and cardiac arrest on that basis. Preliminary blood tests are all normal, so I think it possible we may never know the specific cause."
    There was disappointment in his voice.
    "Sometimes we just don't," Kate said. The words were Willoughby's, a lesson he had repeated many times to her over the years.
    Willoughby glared at her for a moment; then he laughed out loud. "You are a saucy pup, flipping my words back at me like that. Suppose you tell me what to say to the police lieutenant drinking coffee and dropping donut crumbs right now in my office, or to the gaggle of reporters in the lobby waiting for the ultimate word. Ladies and gentlemen, the ultimate word from the crack pathology department you help support with your taxes is that we are absolutely certain we have no idea why Bobby Geary went into a pulmonary edema and died."
    Kate did not answer. She had grabbed a magnifying glass and was intently examining Geary's feet, especially between his toes and along the inside of his ankles. "Stan, look," she said. "All along here. Tiny puncture marks, almost invisible. There must be a dozen of them. No, wait, there are more." Willoughby adjusted the light and took the magnifier from her. "Holy potato," he said softly. "Bobby Geary an addict?" He stepped back from the table and looked at Kate, who could only shrug. "If he was, he was a bloomin' artist with a needle."
    "A twenty-seven or twenty-nine gauge would make punctures about that size."
    "And a narcotics or amphetamine overdose would explain the pulmonary edema." Kate nodded. "Holy potato," Willoughby said again. "If it's true, there must be evidence somewhere in his house."
    "Unless it happened with other people around and they brought him home and put him to bed. Why don't we send some blood for a drug screen and do levels on any substance we pick up?" Willoughby glanced around the autopsy suite. The single technician on duty was too far away to have heard any of their conversation. "What do you say we label the tube 'Smith' or 'Schultz' or something. I'm no sports fan, but I know enough to see what's at stake here. The man was a hero."
    "What about the policeman?"
    "His name's Detective Finn, and he is a fan. I think he'd prefer some kind of story about a heart attack, even if the blood test is positive."
    "Schultz