Got it?”
“I’m the” sheriff,” Maggie said, tucking her blouse back in. “I’ll do whatever the hell I want to.”
“Fine,” Savich said. “That’s the spirit. What we’d really like is for you to sit down and tell us if you’ve heard anything about Mac’s sister.”
“Not a blessed thing,” Maggie said, looking over at Paul. “I even spoke to Minton this morning, not something I was crazy about doing, but he didn’t have anything new, just sputtered and whined about not knowing what you and Ms. Scott are up to. I told him that if it had been any of his business, you would have told him.” She smiled. “He called me a bitch. Made my day. I’m leaving now. If I stay in the room any longer with this jackass, I’ll lose it. Call me if you find out anything, Mac.” She nodded. “Agent Savich, thank you for your generous help. I’m sure you’ll let me know if you need anything.”
“Wait a minute, Maggie, I’ll walk you out,” I said.
“He’s a pathetic jerk,” Maggie said in my direction as we walked out of the house.
“What did he say this time to make you blow up?”
“You won’t believe it, Mac. He tried to get in my pants. Well, to get under my uniform so he could find my pants. The little jerk. It took me a while to get him off me, so I could beat the crap out of him.”
“Why would he do that?”
“God knows. I’ve always thought he was weird.”
“Okay, Maggie. We’ll keep in touch.”
I waited until she drove off, waving at me. When I came back into the living room, Savich was waiting. “All right, Paul,” he said as I came in, “tell us about the drug you’ve developed.”
“Yes. We’re real interested in that, Paul.”
Paul just sat there, staring down at his hands that were clasped between his legs. “I don’t have a damned thing to tell either of you. Go away.”
“No, we’re not going anywhere until you tell us about it.”
Paul looked as if he wanted to fold in on himself. Again, I thought he looked scared. “Talk,” I said.
He walked around the room a couple of times, pausing in front of one of the stark modern paintings. We waited until finally he turned back to us and said, “It’s all experimental, Mac. It’s doubtful anything will come of it, truth be told. You know the odds against developing successful drugs these days. The business of pharmaceutical research is astronomically expensive, demands incredible numbers of man-hours and highly specialized computer programs. And then there’s the PDA to contend with.”
He paused a moment and pulled at a loose thread on his tweed jacket. “I wanted to continue along a certain line of research. The people at VioTech deemed it too expensive to continue the research, not enough projected payback even if the drug could be perfected, and so they canceled it. They wanted Jilly and me to go into AIDS research. Our interests just don’t lie there. When Alyssum Tarcher offered to finance us, we took him up on it.”
“What exactly is the drug, Paul?” I asked. “It’s a memory drug, nothing more than that.” “I don’t know what you mean by a memory drug,” Savich said. “We know so little about the mind, about how memory even works. What does it do to the memory?”
“It’s meant to take away the physical responses to bad memories when they surface. You see, the drug seems to be activated when there are sudden physical manifestations of distress-heightened adrenaline levels, rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils-things like that. Its purpose is to shut down the power of the memory by reducing the physical distress and substituting a sense of well-being.
“The benefits might be enormous in treating someone who has lived through something terrible, for example, soldiers surviving battles, or physical or sexual abuse as a child. Once the emotional baggage of the memory is dissipated, so is its physiological power.”
I sat forward on the sofa, my hands clasped between my knees. Finally he was talking. I had to keep him going. “The physical reactions you’re describing, Paul, aren’t just prompted by a bad memory. They can happen with a whole lot of things, like fear, excitement, tension.”