Living Proof, стр. 6
With a sigh, he walked down the hall to the meeting room, with its oval table and downtown view. Jed, Banks, and Dopp were already there.
“We were just talking progress,” Dopp said, “or lack thereof.”
Jed nodded, his lips tight. His orange hair looked flattened. Trent had never seen him wear anything but a suit and tie, but now he had on jeans, which Trent eyed enviously.
Jed reluctantly explained that none of the patients would talk to him, and Banks reported that the clinic had passed the inspection.
On the table, Banks dropped a form with a slanted signature—Arianna Drake. “There weren’t any embryos missing or damaged, but the numbers are quite high.” He paused, wagging his hand in the air as if to summon the right words. “There’s something about that woman, the doctor. I can’t explain it, but I don’t like it.”
“What do you mean?” Dopp said.
Banks’s lips curled up. “Some people give off bad vibes, and she’s one of them.”
Trent smiled to himself. He could not have hoped for a better lead-in.
Dopp’s thick brows knotted. “That’s something to consider. But we need facts.” He turned to Trent. “What do the numbers tell us?”
“Let me show you what I found.” Trent rose, shutting off the lights, and slipped the disc into the projector. “This slide shows six bar graphs representing the number of infertility patients at each of these six clinics over the past year. The clinics are all similar in size and location.” He clicked through the next six slides slowly, each of which showed a large graph mapping a single clinic’s data. “These six clinics all show a steady, relatively fixed influx of IVF patients each month. Some months are more popular in all the clinics, but none show especially volatile shifts. With minor variations, they all tend to get busier in the summer and slower in the winter. But now, look at this graph.”
With a flourish, he clicked to the next slide. Across August, September, and October, the bars on the graph rocketed off the chart.
“This is a graph of the Washington Square Center. For the first nine months, the graph is like the others. But over the past several months, this clinic has been treating double the number of patients, leading to over four hundred EUEs each month. It’s inexplicable. The clinic has not hired a new doctor, increased their advertising, offered any new services, or lowered their rates. There is no reason for this spike that we know of.” Trent paused, relishing the perplexed faces. Oh, how he was going to blow them away.
“There’s something here,” Dopp said, frowning. Trent noticed that when his boss was upset, his features drooped, as if his face had emerged from the side of a melting candle.
Trent looked away. “There are a few more facts that you might find interesting.”
“Go on.”
“I did some research on the doctor who owns the clinic, Arianna Drake. Her father, who’s now deceased, was one Edmond Drake.”
Trent clicked the slide so a newspaper article filled the screen.
“When I started researching her, I didn’t find anything much right away, but one thing led to another, and I finally stumbled across this op-ed by her father in a small Brooklyn newspaper that folded over a decade ago. Here is the first paragraph. I won’t make you read any more of it.”
HOW THE DEP IS DRAGGING AMERICA BACK TO THE MIDDLE AGES
By Edmond Drake
In outlawing the destruction of human embryos, the newly formed DEP is, in essence, freezing science itself, tucking it away in the same liquid nitrogen that freezes each embryo. How long it will remain confined there depends on the courage of future thinkers left untainted by today’s religiosity. It will be up to those minds—in a decade, a century, perhaps longer—to break the ideological stranglehold on this country and use those embryos to carry on the scientific revolution that we are now ending.
The men stared.
“That’s right,” Trent said. “Edmond Drake was a dissenter. He wrote this article while his daughter was in college at Columbia. No doubt, she picked up on his radicalism, because she became a cheerleader for a biochemist at the school who was later found to be spearheading illegal research. She organized protests each time a DEP investigator visited the campus.”
“How do you know this?” Dopp demanded.
“Digging deep into the campus library’s archives. Columbia ended up firing the scientist, a Dr. Samuel Lisio, and her group held a sit-in for two days.”
“Disgusting,” Banks muttered. “It’s unbelievable how young people can be brainwashed like that.”
“I tried to track down Lisio himself,” Trent said, “but he disappeared after he got out of jail.”
Dopp’s pen stopped moving across his notepad. “What else does she do now, besides work? Any clubs, groups, associations?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t been in the news or published anything except in medical journals. She could still be a rebel, but we can’t be sure.”
“Exactly,” Dopp said. “We need to dig deeper. Her embryo count is always perfect, every inspection, and she passed the audit six weeks ago. We can’t find fault with her clinic, and we can’t swing enough fact-based suspicion to get a warrant for a wiretap. But I can feel something is off. How often do people like her find their way back?”
“What are you saying?” Banks asked with interest.
“I’m saying, this could be exactly what we need.” Dopp leaned in, his eyes lit with eager suspicion.
The three men nodded. Trent was sure they were all thinking the same thing: a shutdown—a legal permanent closing of a fertility clinic for ethical transgressions. For every shutdown, the state allotted more money to the department. There hadn’t been a shutdown in two years, and though no one had stated it, it was becoming more of a priority than ever: the department was struggling to defend its very existence. The liberals in the state assembly were gaining strength for the first time in a decade, and