A Long December (18 page)

I just looked at him. “Good luck.”

Henry gave us each a sheet of paper with a list of things he’d like us to find out about the late Jose Gonzales, and questions to ask of any of his close friends, relatives, and coworkers. He also told us to report to him at the clinic at 08:00.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “Therefore, I don’t know how long it takes from exposure to onset of symptoms. We get to stick you again tomorrow morning.” He grinned. “That’s the fun part of my job.”

The list of things Henry wanted answered ran as follows:

1. Did the victim(s) travel outside the U.S. in the last thirty days?

2. List common denominators of victims:

3. What do the victims think made them ill?

4. Do the victims know of anyone else who has become ill?

5. Did they see any unusual activities or devices?

6. Have they noticed any unusual odors or tastes?

7. Have they noticed any sick or dead animals?

“We’re gonna have a little problem with the items under question two here,” I said. “The ACLU would be all over us like stink if we started asking those sorts of questions.”

“At least he doesn’t want questions asked regarding sexual preferences,” she said. “Did you check out number seven?”

Actually, I’d been too busy talking. I looked at seven again, and we both had the same thoughts. First, our newly acquired mascot, Big Ears, had been found under the victim’s bed and was still alive and well a short time ago. Second, these guys were meatpacking plant workers, and they’d likely seen lots and lots of dead animals recently. We went back into the clinic and told Henry.

“Where’s the dog now, and where will he be? I want the vet to examine him as soon as possible.”

“We’ll keep him at the jail,” I said.

“Okay…just don’t let the other personnel be exposed to him until we get him checked out.”

Talk about way too late. “How about if we just don’t let the next shift be exposed,” I asked. “Little dogs attract lots of attention.”

“Sure. That’s the little dog I petted, isn’t it?”

“Yep, that was him. He belongs to Hester,” I said, and got a dirty look.

HESTER AND l MET AT THE CLINIC TO HAVE OUR BLOOD TESTED
. I wasn’t too worried, as I’d checked with Pam at Dispatch and discovered that Big Ears was still alive, well, and had peed on the floor. He’d been checked by the vet and pronounced healthy. Our personal canary, so to speak.

We were in the little waiting room outside the lab, just starting to get organized, when a nurse stuck her head around the corner, looked at us, and then disappeared. I heard her say, “They’re right in there,” and then Judy Mercer, intrepid reporter for KNUG, came hustling around the corner, followed by a cameraman.

I stood up and said, “No camera in here. Period.”

“Sure, sure,” she said. “No problem, we’ll do an interview outside anyway. Better graphics. So, just what can you tell me about all this?”

“All what?” Not exactly a brilliant response, but she’d come right out of nowhere.

“The man who died from the toxic exposure. The sheriff said you were up here, and you’d talk to us about it.”

“Just a sec,” I said, and pulled out my cell phone. Before dialing, I checked. Damn. The signal strength indicator wasn’t even visible. Well, of course not. I was probably five feet from the X-ray room. I closed the case and said, “Excuse me, but I need to move away from the lead shielding,” and pointed to the X-ray sign. I indicated Hester. “You can ask her about the dog we have in custody,” I said, indicating Hester, “while I call the office.”

I hustled down the hall as I heard Judy Mercer said, “Dog? This can’t be a dog-bite case.”

I had to stand inside the rest room, near the little window, before the cell phone worked. Lamar was gone already, Pam told me. Didn’t say where he was headed. But, yes, he’d told the media to talk to me. He really, really hates the media, but honest to God, he could have warned me.

“Look, did he give you any idea what he wants me to say?”

“Not really. He just said, ‘My investigator is at the clinic; you better talk to him,’ and left.” Pam was new. Sally would never let him get away with that.

I sighed. “Okay. Hey, you should be off by now…”

“Midnight to eight,” she said brightly. “Just finishing my logs.”

“Lucky you. Well, give my best to Big Ears, and I’ll see what I can do with the media crap.”

“Okay,” she said, sounding altogether too happy. “It’s always great seeing you on the tube.”

I looked at the rest room window. My only other way out, and I’d probably get stuck. The way Judy Mercer worked, I figured I’d still end up on the ten o’clock news, explaining how a man died from some toxic substance while I was protruding from a rest room window. Not quite the image I wanted to project. Reluctantly, I went back out into the hall and began to walk toward Hester and the TV pair. I heard the muted sound of at least two separate phones ringing. Just before I got to the waiting area, I heard Henry’s muffled but hearty hello from behind the closed door of the lab. Maybe I could palm this one off on him, if I could just get him out in the hall.

Hester, as usual, had things firmly under control. “Why don’t you,” she said, as she saw me approaching, “tell Carl what you just told me. I’m sure he’d be interested.”

There was no camera running, no recorder. The best way to talk to the media, as far as I’m concerned.

“Well,” said Judy, “like I said, I got a phone call really early this morning. A friend who said that there was something really interesting over at the U of I med complex, and that I should check it out.” She shrugged. “Just chatting, really, over coffee. I found out that there were people suddenly donning protective gear, that there was a seal down in one of the labs…that they’d encountered a dangerous substance.” She looked at me in a kind of personal way, totally unlike the “reporter being sincere and caring” look we normally get. “My friend said it involved a cadaver that had been received from up here in Nation County. Yesterday. Is this your murder victim, the one found on the road?”

Okay. In my mind, the words “dangerous” and “protective gear” just screamed contagious. That was my first concern.

“Contagious?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The personnel at the clinic have protocols they follow. Some of it is precautionary. But I’m assuming that it’s contagious.”

“But nobody said so,” persisted Hester.

“No. Nobody.”

“Maybe not,” interjected her cameraman, “but you might tell ‘em about the hazmat gear in the back of our rig.”

“That’s just in case,” said Judy. “But don’t stray on me, here. Is this the murder victim from the roadway? And if so, how could a gunshot make him contagious? Or was it suicide?”

Just then, Henry stuck his head out of the lab doors. “Oh, hello,” he said to Judy and the cameraman. “I didn’t know you were here. Carl, Hester, could you come in here a moment?”

We certainly could. “We’ll get right back to you,” I said to Judy. “Just a few minutes…” I thought it would be best to keep her in one place, instead of wandering all around the hospital and clinic, prying. I hoped it worked.

Once in the lab with the door firmly shut, Henry just said, “How do they do it?”

“Who?”

“The TV people. They are here about the Gonzales case?”

“Yep,” I said. “I don’t know. Tips, mostly, I guess.”

“Amazing,” said Henry. “Anyway, I just got a call from the U of I labs. The good news is that it’s not contagious,” he said. “Not from secondary aerosol exposure, which is what you seem to have had.”

That was a genuine relief.

“The bad news is that they think it’s a toxic agent, one that is frequently mentioned in the chemical and biological warfare handouts.”

“What? “That was from Hester.

“I’m afraid so. They think it’s ricin, or something very like it, aerosolized, and with the Gonzales exposure within the last forty-eight to sixty hours.”

I’d never heard of ricin. Hester obviously had.

“That’s made from castor beans,” she said, “isn’t it.” A statement, not a question.

“Yes.”

“Is it only dangerous in aerosol form?” Hester’s background as a crime-lab technician was showing.

“Well, I’ve got the info right here,” said Henry, and reached over and picked up a brochure. “It says that ricin’s also potentially fatal if ingested. But that the preferred method of distribution is airborne.”

It took a second for me to realize some of the implications. “Gonzales works with food. Worked. Is that a big factor?”

“Maybe,” said Henry. “I know he worked at the plant. We don’t know how he contracted the stuff. What kind of work did he do there?”

“He carried swinging meat into the refrigerated trucks,” I said.

“Then I suspect there’s a reason for concern,” said Henry. “Direct physical contact.” He picked up the phone. “There’s going to be a lot of activity around the plant,” he said. “A lot.” He began pressing keys. “Thank God it’s a mechanical vector,” he said, half to himself.

“A what? “I knew what a vector was. I also knew what mechanical meant, but I wasn’t connecting.

Henry looked at me and held up his hand, then began to talk on the phone. I looked at Hester. She’d started her career in the Iowa Crime Lab.

“Whatever caused the condition,” she said, “won’t grow. Won’t change. Not like a mutating bacteria. More like a poisonous chemical.”

“Good,” I said. “We only have one thing to deal with, then.”

“Right,” she agreed. “But that should really be plenty.”

Henry hung the phone up, and said, “U of I lab. Good news. They say that it has to be in a pretty heavy concentration for ingestion to kill somebody. The greatest risk is with the elderly or infants. Infants don’t eat much beef.”

Better and better.

“Now all we need to do,” said Hester, “is find out how Gonzales was exposed to the agent. That’s our key.”

“Well,” I said, ever hopeful, “where do they use that stuff?”

“Nobody uses it,” said Henry. “It’s toxic. No benefit whatsoever. It’s a natural by-product of the castor bean. Ricin is a small percentage of what you have left over when you make castor oil.”

“Waste,” said Hester. “Or it should be. This stuff, if I remember, would only be used as a weapon, intentionally, and after some difficulty.”

“That’s true,” said Henry.

“Wonderful,” I said. “By who?”

“Whom,” said Hester automatically. “Hard to tell. But if you thought that the 9/11 anthrax-in-a-letter stuff was a tough one, this is ten times worse to trace. Ricin doesn’t even require a particularly sophisticated lab to produce.”

“Where does this stuff grow? Castor beans, I mean.”

Henry held up his brochure again. “This thing is a gold mine. It says that the plant originated in Africa, but it grows throughout the southwest United States. For example. Anybody manufactures castor oil, they probably have the waste that contains this protein.”

“It’s a protein?” High school biology and chemistry were a very, very vague memory. I knew that meant something, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what.

“That it is,” said Henry. “It’s just a whitish substance. But it’s very toxic.”

“So, I’m trying to remember
anything
about proteins…”

“It’s synthesized by living things,” he said, keeping it simple. “But it isn’t alive itself. So it’s biologically produced, but can’t reproduce. That’s good news, by the way. We’re dealing with finite quantities here. Not a rapidly expanding and mutating organism.”

“Okay.” Sometimes a simple response is best for changing the subject, and at the same time concealing ignorance. “Do we know anybody who manufactures castor oil?”

“Well,” said Henry, “nobody springs to mind. It can be used as a medicine, to treat constipation…and I think as a lubricant and as a replacement for other hydraulic fluids in machinery…”

“But the oil itself isn’t harmful, is it?” said Hester.”

“No.”

“So, even if they used it as machine fluid at the plant, the ricin wouldn’t be present…”

“True,” said Henry.

“It’s a kosher plant,” I said. “Very high standard for cleanliness. And they’re even careful about what lubricants are used in the machines.”

“The whole plant?” asked Hester. “I mean, is there some sort of nonkosher processing, too?”

“Well, Ben told me that they only use about the front half of the beef in kosher stuff, and that’s the half that gets the full treatment. The back half is used for nonkosher, but the plant’s the same, really. The difference is that the nonkosher stuff doesn’t get soaked and salted, that’s all.” I’d asked Ben about that stuff a while back.

Even while I told them all that I knew about kosher, I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about the case. I think it had something to do with the “front half/back half” part of my explanation. My mind works that way. But if somebody wanted Rudy Cueva dead, and did him…and the same somebody wanted Rudy’s good buddy Jose Gonzales dead, and did him—very likely over a drug deal—and we had a Colombian connection, which we did…and castor beans were grown in southern climates…

“This ricin stuff’s really hard to trace, isn’t it?”

“That’s pretty much what we’ve been saying,” said Hester.

I ignored that. “So, let’s say you wanted to poison somebody, and you were from a warmer area where castor beans can grow, and you had access to ricin…”

“You think our two cases here are connected?” Hester raised one eyebrow. “Well, sure. Sure, I think you might be right. Which takes us back to a dope connection…”

“Which,” I said, with some relief, “takes the case away from the connection with the packing plant, and gets us out of that little problem.”

“Not quite,” said Henry. “Noninvolvement with the plant has to be confirmed. That’s a very urgent requirement. Very urgent. If he was exposed at the plant, there could be lots of people at risk. We have to know for sure.”