Five Scarpetta Novels (53 page)

I sat up sweating, and waited for my muscles to stop twitching. It was as if there were an electrical disturbance in my entire system, and I might have a heart attack or a stroke. Taking deep, slow breaths, I blanked out my mind. I did not move. When the vision had passed, I rang for the nurse.

When she saw the look on my face, she did not argue about the phone. She brought it right away and I called Marino after she left.

“You still in jail?” he said over the line.

“I think he killed his guinea pig,” I said.

“Whoa. How 'bout starting over again.”

“Deadoc. The woman he shot and dismembered may have been his guinea pig. Someone he knew and had easy access to.”

“I gotta confess, Doc, I got no idea what the hell you're talking about.” I could tell by his tone he was worried about my state of mind.

“It makes sense that he couldn't look at her. The M.O. makes a lot of sense.”

“Now you really got me confused.”

“If you wanted to find a way to murder people through a virus,” I explained, “first you would have to figure out a way. The route of transmission, for example. Is it a food, a drink, dust? With smallpox, transmission is airborne, spread by droplets or by fluid from the lesions. The disease can be carried on a person or his clothes.”

“Start with this,” he said. “Where did this person get the virus to begin with? Not exactly something you order through the mail.”

“I don't know. To my knowledge there are only two places in the world that keep archival smallpox. CDC and a laboratory in Moscow.”

“So maybe this is all a Russian plot,” he said, sardonically.

“Let me give you a scenario,” I said. “The killer has a grudge, maybe even some delusion that he has a religious calling to bring back one of the worst diseases this planet has ever known. He's got to figure out a way to randomly infect people and be sure that it can work.”

“So he needs a guinea pig,” Marino said.

“Yes. And let's suppose he has a neighbor, a relative, someone elderly and not well. Maybe he even takes care of her. What better way to test the virus than on that person? And if it works, you kill her and stage her death to look like something else. After all, he certainly can't have her die of smallpox. Not if there is a connection between him and her. We might figure out who he is. So he shoots her in the head, dismembers her so we'll think it's the serial killings again.”

“Then how do you get from that to the lady on Tangier?”

“She was exposed,” I simply said.

“How? Was something delivered to her? Did she get something in the mail? Was it carried on the air? Was she pricked in her sleep?”

“I don't know how.”

“You think deadoc lives on Tangier?” Marino then asked.

“No, I don't,” I said. “I think he picked it because the island is the perfect place to start an epidemic. Small, self-contained. Also easy to quarantine, meaning the killer doesn't intend to annihilate all of society with one blow. He's trying a little bit at a time, cutting us up in small pieces.”

“Yeah. Like he did the old lady, if you're right.”

“He wants something,” I said. “Tangier is an attention-getter.”

“No offense, Doc, but I hope you're wrong about all of this.”

“I'm heading to Atlanta in the morning. How about checking with Vander, see if he's had any luck with the thumbprint.”

“So far he hasn't. It's looking like the victim doesn't have any prints on file. Anything comes up, I'll call your pager.”

“Damn,” I muttered, for the nurse had taken that, too.

The rest of the day moved interminably slowly, and it wasn't until after supper that Fujitsubo came to say good-bye. Although the act of releasing me implied I was
neither infected nor infectious, he was in a blue suit, which he plugged into an air line.

“I should keep you longer,” he said right off, filling my heart with dread. “Incubation, on average, is twelve to thirteen days. But it can be as long as twenty-one. What I'm saying to you is that you could still get sick.”

“I understand that,” I said, reaching for my water.

“The revaccination may or may not help depending on what stage you were in when I gave it to you.”

I nodded. “And I wouldn't be in such a hurry to leave if you would just take this on instead of sending me to CDC.”

“Kay, I can't.” His voice was muffled through plastic. “You know it has nothing to do with what I feel like doing. But I can no more pull something out from under CDC than you can grab a case that isn't your jurisdiction. I've talked to them. They are most concerned over a possible outbreak and will begin testing the moment you arrive with the samples.”

“I fear terrorism may be involved.” I refused to back down.

“Until there is evidence of it—and I hope there won't be—we can do nothing more for you here.” His regret was sincere. “Go to Atlanta and see what they have to say. They're operating with a skeleton crew, too. The timing couldn't be worse.”

“Or perhaps more deliberate,” I said. “If you were a bad person planning to commit serial crimes with a virus, what better time than when the significant federal health agencies are in extremis? And this furlough's been going
on for a while and not predicted to end anytime soon.”

He was silent.

“John,” I went on, “you helped with the autopsy. Have you ever seen a disease like this?”

“Only in textbooks,” he grimly replied.

“How does smallpox suddenly just reappear on its own?”

“If that's what it is.”

“Whatever it is, it's virulent and it kills,” I tried to reason with him.

But he could do nothing more, and the rest of the night I wandered from room to room in AOL. Every hour, I checked my e-mail. Deadoc remained silent until six o'clock the next morning when he walked into the M.E. room. My heart jumped as his name appeared on screen. My adrenaline began to pump the way it always did when he talked to me. He was on the line, it was up to me. I could catch him, if only I could trip him.

 

DEADOC
: Sunday I went to church bet you didn't

SCARPETTA
: What was the homily about?

DEADOC
: sermon

SCARPETTA
: You are not Catholic.

DEADOC
: beware of men

SCARPETTA
: Matthew 10. Tell me what you mean.

DEADOC
: to say he s sorry

SCARPETTA
: Who is he? And what did he do?

DEADOC
: ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of

 

Before I could answer, he was gone, and I began flipping through the Bible. The verse he quoted this time was from Mark, and again, it was Jesus speaking, which hinted to me, if nothing else, that deadoc wasn't Jewish. Nor was he Catholic, based on his comments about church. I was no theologian, but drinking of the cup seemed to refer to Christ's eventual crucifixion. So deadoc had been crucified and I would be, too?

It was my last few hours here and my nurse, Sally, was more liberal with the phone. I paged Lucy, who called me back almost instantly.

“I'm talking to him,” I said. “Are you guys there?”

“We're there. He's got to stay on longer,” my niece said. “There are so many trunk lines, and we got to line up all the phone companies to trap and trace. Your last call was coming in from Dallas.”

“You're kidding,” I said in dismay.

“That's not the origin, just a switch it was routed through. We didn't get any farther because he disconnected. Keep trying. Sounds like this guy's some kind of religious nut.”

L
ater that morning I left in a taxi as the sun was getting high in the clouds. I had nothing but the clothes on my back, all of which had been sterilized in the autoclave or gassed. I was in a hurry, and guarding a large white cardboard box printed with PERISHABLE RUSH! RUSH! and IMPORTANT KEEP UPRIGHT and other big blue warnings.

Like a Chinese puzzle, my package was boxes within boxes containing BioPacks. Inside these were Bio-tubes of Lila Pruitt's liver, spleen and spinal fluid, protected by fiberboard shields, and bubble and corrugated wrap. All of it was packed in dry ice with INFECTIOUS SUBSTANCE and DANGER stickers warning anyone who got beyond the first layer. Obviously, I could not let my cargo out of sight. In addition to its well-proven hazard, it could be evidence should it turn out that Pruitt was a homicide.
At the Baltimore-Washington International airport, I found a pay phone and called Rose.

“USAMRIID has my medical bag and microscope.” I didn't waste time. “See what you can do about getting them shipped overnight. I'm at BWI, en route to CDC.”

“I've been trying to page you,” she said.

“Maybe they can return that to me, too.” I tried to remember what else I was missing. “And the phone,” I added.

“You got a report back that you might find interesting. The animal hairs that turned up with the torso. Rabbit and monkey hairs.”

“Bizarre,” was the only thing I could think to say.

“I hate to tell you this news. The media's been calling about the Carrie Grethen case. Apparently, something's been leaked.”

“Goddamn it!” I exclaimed as I thought about Ring.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“How about calling Benton. I don't know what to say. I'm a little overwhelmed.”

“You sound that way.”

I looked at my watch. “Rose, I've got to go fight my way on a plane. They didn't want to let me through X-ray, and I know what's going to happen when I try to board with this thing.”

It was exactly what I expected. When I walked into the cabin, a flight attendant took one look and smiled.

“Here.” She held out her hands. “Let me put this in baggage for you.”

“It's got to stay with me,” I said.

“It won't fit in an overhead rack or under your seat, ma'am.” Her smile got tight, the line behind me getting longer.

“Can we discuss this out of traffic?” I said, moving into the kitchen.

She was right next to me, hovering close. “Ma'am, this flight is overbooked. We simply don't have room.”

“Here,” I said, showing her the paperwork.

Her eyes scanned the red-bordered Declaration For Dangerous Goods, and froze halfway down a column where it was typed that I was transporting “Infectious substances affecting humans.” She glanced nervously around the kitchen and moved me closer to the rest rooms.

“Regulations require that only a trained person can handle dangerous goods like these,” I reasonably explained. “So it has to stay with me.”

“What is it?” she whispered, her eyes round.

“Autopsy specimens.”

“Mother of God.”

She immediately grabbed her seating chart. Soon after, I was escorted to an empty row in first class, near the back.

“Just put it on the seat next to you. It's not going to leak or anything?” she asked.

“I'll guard it with my life,” I promised.

“We should have a lot of vacancies up here unless a bunch of people upgrade. But don't you worry. I'll steer everyone.” She motioned with her arms, as if she were driving.

No one came near me or my box. I drank coffee during
a very peaceful flight to Atlanta, feeling naked without my pager or phone, but overjoyed to be on my own. In the Atlanta airport, I took one moving sidewalk and escalator after another, traveling what seemed miles, before I got outside and found a taxi.

We followed 85 North to Druid Hills Road, where soon we were passing pawnshops and auto rentals, then vast jungles of poison oak and kudzu, and strip malls. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was in the midst of the parking decks and parking lots of Emory University. Across the street from the American Cancer Society, CDC was six floors of tan brick trimmed with gray. I checked in at a desk that had guards and closed circuit TV.

“This is going to Bio Level 4, where I'm meeting Dr. Bret Martin in the atrium,” I explained.

“Ma'am, you'll need an escort,” one of the guards said.

“Good,” I said as he reached for the phone. “I always get lost.”

I followed him to the back of the building, where the facility was new and under intense surveillance. There were cameras everywhere, the glass bulletproof, and corridors were catwalks with grated floors. We passed bacteria and influenza labs, and the red brick and concrete area for rabies and AIDS.

“This is impressive,” I said, for I had not been here in several years.

“Yeah, it is. They got all the security you might want. Cameras, motion detectors at all exits and entrances. All
the trash is boiled and burned, and they use these filters for the air so anything that comes in is killed. Except the scientists.” He laughed as he used a card key to open a door. “So what bad news you carrying in?”

“That's what I'm here to find out,” I said, and we were in the atrium now.

BL-4 was really nothing more than a huge laminar flow hood with thick walls of concrete and steel. It was a building within a building, its windows covered with blinds. Labs were behind thick walls of glass, and the only blue-suited scientists working this furloughed day were those who had cared enough to come in anyway.

“This thing with the government,” the guard was saying as he shook his head. “What they think? These diseases like Ebola gonna wait until the budget gets straight?” He shook his head some more.

He escorted me past containment rooms that were dark, and labs with no one in them, then empty rabbit cages in a corridor and rooms for large primates. A monkey looked at me through bars and glass, his eyes so human they unnerved me, and I thought of what Rose had said. Deadoc had transferred monkey and rabbit hairs to a victim I knew he had touched. He might work in a place like this.

“They throw waste at you,” the guard said as we walked on. “Same thing their animal rights activists do. Kinda fits, don't you think?”

My anxiety was getting stronger.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Where the good doctor told me to bring you, ma'am,”
he said, and we were on another level of catwalk now, heading into another part of the building.

We passed through a door, where Revco ultra low temperature freezers looked like computers the size of large copying machines. They were locked and out of place in this corridor, where a heavy man in a lab coat was waiting for me. He had baby-fine blond hair, and was perspiring.

“I'm Bret Martin,” he said, offering me his hand. “Thanks.” He nodded at the guard, indicating he was dismissed.

I handed Martin my cardboard box.

“This is where we keep our smallpox stock,” he said, nodding at the freezers as he set my box on top of one of them. “Locked up at seventy degrees centigrade below zero. What can I say?” He shrugged. “These freezers are out in the hall because we have no room anyplace else in maximum containment. Rather coincidental you should give this to me. Not that I'm expecting your disease to be the same.”

“All of this is smallpox?” I asked, amazed as I looked around.

“Not all, and not for long, though, since for the first time ever on this planet we've made a conscious decision to eliminate a species.”

“The irony,” I said. “When the species you're talking about has eliminated millions.”

“So you think we should just take all this source disease and autoclave it.”

His expression said what I was used to hearing. Life was much more complicated than I presented it, and only
people like him recognized the subtler shades.

“I'm not saying we should destroy anything,” I replied. “Not at all. Actually, probably we shouldn't. Because of this.” I looked at the box I had just given him. “Our autoclaving smallpox certainly won't mean it's gone. I guess it's like any other weapon.”

“You and me both. I'd sure like to know where the Russians are hiding their variola stock virus these days, and if they've sold any of it to the Middle East, North Korea.”

“You'll do PCR on this?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Right away?”

“As fast as we can.”

“Please,” I said. “This is an emergency.”

“That's why I'm standing here now,” he said. “The government considers me nonessential. I should be at home.”

“I've got photographs that USAMRIID was kind enough to develop while I was in the Slammer,” I said with a trace of irony.

“I want to see them.”

We took the elevator back up, getting off on the fourth floor. He led me into a conference room where staff met to devise strategies against terrible scourges they couldn't always identify. Usually bacteriologists, epidemiologists, people in charge of quarantines, communications, special pathogens and PCR assembled in the room. But it was quiet, no one was here but us.

“Right now,” Martin said, “I'm all you've got.”

I got a thick envelope out of my purse, and he began to go through the photographs. For a moment, he stared as if transfixed, at color prints of the torso and those of Lila Pruitt.

“Good God,” he said. “I think we should look at transpiration routes right away. Everybody who might have had contact. And I mean, fast.”

“We can do that on Tangier,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Definitely not chicken pox or measles. No way, Jose,” he said. “Definitely pox-related.”

He went through photographs of the severed hands and feet, his eyes wide.

“Wow.” He stared without blinking, light reflecting on his glasses. “What the hell is this?”

“He calls himself deadoc,” I said. “He sent me graphic files through AOL. Anonymously, of course. The FBI's trying to track him.”

“And this victim here, he dismembered?”

I nodded.

“She also has manifestations similar to the victim on Tangier.” He was looking at vesicles on the torso.

“So far, yes.”

“You know, monkeypox has been worrying me for years,” he said. “We survey the hell out of West Africa, from Zaire to Sierra Leone, where cases have occurred, along with whitepox. But so far, no variola virus has turned up. My fear, though, is that one of these days, some poxvirus in the animal kingdom is going to figure out a way to infect people.”

Again, I thought about my telephone conversation with Rose, about murder and animal hairs.

“All that's got to happen is the microorganism gets in the air, let's say, and finds a susceptible host.”

He went back to Lila Pruitt, to her disfigured, tormented body on her foul bed.

“Now she was obviously exposed to enough virus to cause devastating disease,” he said, and he was so engrossed, he seemed to be talking to himself.

“Dr. Martin,” I said. “Do monkeys get monkeypox or are they just the carrier?”

“They get it and they give it where there is animal contact, such as in the rain forests of Africa. There are nine known virulent poxviruses on this planet, and transmission to humans happens only in two. The variola virus, or smallpox, which, thank God, we don't see anymore, and molluscum contagiosum.”

“Trace evidence clinging to the torso has been identified as monkey hair.”

He turned to look at me and frowned. “What?”

“And rabbit hair, too. I'm just wondering if someone out there is conducting their own laboratory experiments.”

He got up from the table.

“We'll start on this now. Where can you be reached?”

“Back in Richmond.” I handed him my card as we walked out of the conference room. “Could someone maybe call for a taxi?”

“Sure. One of the guards at the desk. Afraid none of the clerical staff is in.”

Carrying the box, he pushed the elevator button with his elbow. “It's a nightmare. We got salmonella in Orlando from unpasteurized orange juice, another potential cruise ship outbreak of E. coli O-one-five-seven-H-seven, probably undercooked ground beef again. Botulism in Rhode Island, and some respiratory disease in an old folks' home. And Congress doesn't want to fund us.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

We stopped at each floor, waiting as other people got on. Martin kept talking.

“Imagine this,” he went on. “A resort in Iowa where we've got suspected shigella because a lot of rain overflowed in private wells. And try to get the EPA involved.”