"Levinson, Paul - Dr Phil D'Amato 02 - The Consciousness Plague 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levinson Paul)

"But it hardly matters," Everett continued. "She didn't do it the worst attorney in the world could get her off."
"Right," Elaine said. "Bring in Ms. Michosky," she said to one of the detectives.
Carol Michosky joined us a minute later. She did look a lot like Jillian Murphy a disconcerting observation, because the only way I had ever seen Murphy was stretched out dead on Ed's autopsy table.
The detective painstakingly explained the lineup process to Michosky she should take her time, be absolutely sure, just like they do it on television ...
The curtain opened on the five women standing on the other side of the one-way-vision partition.
Michosky looked very carefully at the lineup.
"That's her!" she spoke up. "She tried to strangle me!"
At least one detective standing next to me hissed.
The finger on Michosky's outstretched hand was pointed at Claudia Gonzales.

"SHE LIKELY GOT a glimpse of Gonzales in the precinct last night," Elaine said. She, Ed, Dugan, and I were in Dugan's office for a postmortem of the dead-end lineup.
"Gonzales was there part of the evening," Dugan admitted, tiredly. "It's unclear if they actually met." He wiped a spot of something off his cherrywood desk with a tissue.
"All she'd need is a glimpse," I said. "If she was unclear or forgot the actual incident, Gonzales' face would be the only one that looked familiar." And Michosky had indeed become confused, now claiming that she remembered less and less of the attack, and couldn't be certain if she was remembering what had actually happened, or what people all around her were talking about.
All too familiar to me....
"But she was crystal-clear last night," Dugan insisted. "What the hell happened, someone got to her?"
"Nah," I said. "This doesn't look to be a mob thing."
"Amnesia of various types can sometimes be brought on by this kind of trauma," Ed offered. "It's textbook, unfortunately."
"You think trauma from the attack caused this, or did the memory thing that you're investigating?" Dugan asked me. "Damn it, I had a feeling something like this was going to happen that's why I called you back from California."
"I asked her if she'd been sick," I replied. "She says she's been under the weather a little lately, but nothing serious."
"So we catch Boland an hour after the attempted crime, on a pinpoint-accurate description given by the victim," Elaine finally said, having listened with growing impatience to our seminar on memory, "and she goddamn walks." She straightened her plain, beige suit jacket and shook her head.

AN ARTICLE IN the Wall Street Journal a few days later DOCS

SELF-MEDICATE WITH ANTIBIOTICS AS A PRECAUTION got me thinking about the memory problem from a slightly different angle. Unidentified public-health officials quoted in the article worried that M.D.s who used antibiotics to keep themselves from getting sick might be exacerbating the danger of bacteria building up resistance to antibiotics via too much exposure in the population. "It starts for some in medical school," the article explained, but "there are no statistics on how many M.D.s continue to take powerful antibiotics prior to the appearance of any symptoms, as a precaution against falling ill."
I leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on my office desk, and wondered if Steinbuck, my doctor, was one of those who self-medicated. He apparently hadn't had the cough, but I was virtually certain that he'd suffered a memory loss. I could call and ask him, but who knew if he'd tell me the truth?
Okay, put Steinbuck aside, for the moment.
Dugan had had the cough, took medication, had the memory loss. Same with Jenna, Claudia, and me.
But McNair was sick as a dog, and so far had no memory loss. And he abhorred antibiotics.
What about Carol Michosky?
She hadn't been feeling well lately, she'd said. Could she have been a bit of a hypochondriac, and self-medicated with Omnin?
It wasn't too difficult to get a prescription from an obliging doc, or maybe a friend had been prescribed Omnin but didn't take it, or maybe someone in her family was a pharmacist... Lots of possible avenues.
I picked up the phone and called her.
"Oh no," she said. "I hate antibiotics they make me break out in hives. I never take them unless I'm really at death's door with something."
Damn it. I believed her. Why would she lie about something like that?
I hung up, and fiddled with my papers and notes.
It looked like I might have been on to something Omnin, the cure, not the illness, as somehow being the source of the memory loss.
But Carol had a memory problem, and hadn't taken Omnin. And I certainly had no proof about Steinbuck.
I sighed.
Cross the antibiotic off the list, or at least put a couple of more question marks after it. The people and their behavior and symptoms just didn't seem to add up on that one.
But what did, in this creeping amnesia that was now seriously undermining police work and who-knew-how-many personal relationships?
A lone shaft of late-afternoon sunlight illuminated the particles of dust suspended in the air between the window of my office and my desk. It fell just short of my face.
At this point, I was still mostly in the dark about what was going on.


FOUR

I drove up to Cape Cod on the weekend to see Andy Weinberg, who was at a conference at the Ocean Edge mansion in Brewster, on the bay. The conference was titled Deadly Plagues in the New Millennium: How Likely?
I couldn't think of a much more important topic. But I had my mind on slightly smaller things.
The sand was a bit too cold to be comfortable, but the sun was bright on this late-April day. I took my sneakers off anyway and rolled up my jeans and walked barefoot on the beach. Andy wasn't quite as adventurous he kept his sneakers on. I did take the precaution of tying mine together in a knot and hanging them around my neck, just in case the soles of my feet got numb from the cold.
"The flu is receding with the winter, like it always does," Andy said, looking at the water, which like the winter was also in ebb tide.