Quarantined (7 page)

I drew in a breath through clenched teeth. “They died, honey. That’s what the ribbon means.”

She thought about that. Turned it over in her mind the way bright children do when they discover something strange about the world. I wanted her to be free of that knowledge. I wanted her to be five years old, untouched by the horrors of the world. But at the same time I knew that was both unpractical and unwise.

“He looks sad, Mommy,” she said.

“He is, honey. Very sad.”

“Does the ribbon make him feel better, Mommy?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

Connie watched Mr. Wilkerson. Watched him watching the bunting.

She turned to me suddenly, and in a conspiratorially quiet voice, she said, “Mommy, I don’t think it does.”

Somebody sent me a forwarded email a few months after the wall went up. It showed a picture of one of those bumper sticker ribbons, like the ones that say
SUPPORT
OUR
TROOPS
, only this one said
REMEMBER
SAN
ANTONIO
.

I thought about my job at the Scar, thought about all those bodies crammed into unmarked mass graves, and I thought, Ain’t that a great notion. Remember San Antonio. How quaint.

Chunk was raised by his maternal grandmother, a woman about one-third his size, but twice as tough. She took a big black boy who was destined to become yet another east side gangsta thug and whooped his ass daily until he’d finally had enough and joined the police department.

On a brutally hot morning in early June, we were called away from the Scar to the Medina Health Clinic on the east side. Chunk’s grandmother was there, dying by slow strangulation. The inside of her lungs had been scorched by acute respiratory distress syndrome, and her body was being eaten alive by its own immune system. Her skin was covered in blisters, and as she moved, feebly, upon the floor of the hallway, for every inch of that small clinic had been packed with the dead and the dying and the grieving, the blisters popped. She made a crackling, popping sound as she rolled over to say goodbye, and the sound reminded me of a child playing with bubble wrap.

That woman, that great, good soul, had become yet another canvas upon which H2N2 had painted death.

Later, we stood on the white brick steps of the clinic, not speaking, for there were no words up to the task.

Chunk couldn’t afford a grave site, or even a coffin. He dreaded taking that beautiful woman to a mass grave at the Scar.

Billy made a coffin, his first.

That evening, as a warm breeze blew through the oaks near the back of our property, Billy and Chunk hacked into the ground with picks and shovels.

Chunk’s voice faltered during the prayer. Billy finished it for him.

At that moment I thought of the deer I wrote about in my journal, and the rather cryptic message that death is not all there is, and I remembered what it was that I had to tell Connie.

It is not so horrible that we die. The horror is when we allow the fact that we must die to rob our lives of meaning, for they do mean something.

Even in the quietest moments, they mean something.

I got to the Scar early the next morning, but Chunk was already there. He was on the phone, muttering and grunting.

When he hung up, he wasn’t happy.

“What’s wrong?”

“I spoke with the sergeant in charge of security at Arsenal Station. Kenneth Wade’s truck hasn’t moved since yesterday when he arrived to escort Dr. Bradley.”

“Oh.” That is bad news. “What about Treanor?”

“That was him on the phone.”

“And?”

“Nothing. He hasn’t heard from Wade, either.”

That really was bad news. Chunk had the same sinking feeling in his gut that I had in mine, I could tell. We’d investigated a cop once before, a 20 year veteran who got drunk and ran over his neighbor with his truck, then dumped the truck and tried to call it in stolen. Making that arrest had been one the worst assignments of our careers, almost as bad as the Scar.

“So, what do you want to do now?” I asked him.

“Let’s go to Arsenal first. Then we can go into the GZ and try to find that van.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “But today, you drive.”

On the way to Arsenal Station, Chunk had to steer with one hand and wrestle with his surgical mask with the other. They never made the tie straps long enough for big guys like Chunk, and the thing was always threatening to pop off his face.

Finally, when he got it to where it was comfortable, he said, “Okay, Kenneth Wade.”

It was the opening move in an old game between us, but one that we hadn’t gotten to play much since we started working at the Scar.

“Kenneth Wade and Emma Bradley are lovers,” I said. “But they have to keep it under wraps.”

“Why?”

“Maybe it’s bad for her at work if their relationship gets out. Them being lovers would explain why Bradley called and requested him yesterday morning. Even after the fight.”

“Maybe. But why the fight?”

“Wade doesn’t care if the others know. He’s drunk. He’s horny. He wants to go back to her place for some fun.”

“Why wouldn’t she go? Because she’s not happy with the way she looks naked?”

“Ha ha. She doesn’t go because she thinks that’s going to give them away.”

“So after the fight, Wade storms out.”

“Yeah. When she’s had some time to think it over, Bradley calls him. Says, let’s make up.”

“So they have sex?”

“Chunk, you’ve got a one track mind, you know that?”

He laughed. “I’m being serious, Lily. They’ve got to have sex. Or at least be headed in that general direction.”

“Why?”

“The dirt on the bottom of her feet, remember? How else is she gonna get dirt on the bottom of her feet unless she’s naked?”

I frowned. That was a hard one.

“Maybe,” I concede. “But what’s she doing naked in the middle of ground zero? She would know better than that.”

It was Chunk’s turn to frown. “Danger sex?” he offered.

“Yeah, right.”

“Okay, so they had sex in the
WHO
van they took out.”

“How? There’s no room in those things.”

“Oh come on,” he said. “You’re a married woman. You ought to know there’s more than one way to have sex.”

I punched him in the shoulder, hard. “That still doesn’t explain the dirt. Somehow, she’s got to be naked outside the van.”

“Hmmm.” Chunk wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, deep in thought. It looked like a toy in his huge hands.

“Okay,” I said, sensing we’d stalled out. “Doctor John Myers.”

“Mr. Lonelyhearts?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Chunk said. “Same set up. Wade and Bradley are getting it on. Only, they don’t want the rest of the
WHO
staff to know.”

“Why?”

“Because if hippo woman finds out, she’ll throw her off the team. Or, if she doesn’t throw her off the team, she’ll demand that Wade be sent to another station for his duty assignment. Either way, she’ll bust them up for the good of her whole staff.”

“Wait a minute, Hippo woman?”

“Yeah, you know. Dr. Laurent.”

“I know who you mean. I just can’t believe you called her hippo woman. Now I’m not going to be able to get that out of my head.” It was a spot on description of her.

He laughed, but it didn’t last long. We were entering the hard scrabble parts of town. We passed a long line of people waiting in line for their weekly rations of groceries. Two women started to fight. No one jumped in to break it up, and when one of the women got thrown out of line, no one bothered to listen to her pleas for help.

Chunk let out a heavy sigh, more out of frustration than tiredness, even though he was feeling the strain of the long hours same as me.

“Myers,” he said, “has some small idea that maybe something’s going on between Wade and Bradley. He wants Bradley for himself, though, so he provokes Wade into a fight.”

“Why?”

“Maybe he’s drunk enough he thinks he can win,” Chunk said.

“I doubt it.”

“Maybe he thinks it will earn him sympathy from Bradley when he gets his ass kicked.”

“Pathetic, but maybe. They did walk back to their trailers together.”

“Yeah,” he said. “So they get back to the trailers. He makes a move. Gets turned down.”

“Okay, that works. So the next morning he sees Wade coming to pick up Bradley?”

“And he gets pissed. He follows them out to the GZ.”

“Doesn’t work,” I said. “He’s got an alibi till ten thirty, eleven o’clock.”

“He does it before they leave,” Chunk counters.

“To do that, he has to go past the security desk, get rid of the van, and then come back, on foot, to put Bradley’s body onto Hernandez’ truck. And we haven’t accounted for Wade’s body. Did he dump it somewhere? Did he put it on another truck that somehow slipped through at the Scar? And you’ve still got to put dirt on Bradley’s feet.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and sighed again. “What about Isaac Hernandez?”

“Opportunity, but no motive,” I pointed out.

“What about revenge?”

“For what?”

“His family. He’s lost most of them to H2N2. Maybe he’s out in the GZ, sees the
WHO
van, and loses it. He overpowers Wade and kills Bradley.”

I looked at Chunk seriously for a moment. It occurred to me that only someone who has actually lost a family member in this damn quarantine can understand the frustration that would drive somebody to commit a completely illogical crime like the one he described.

“What’s wrong?” he said, looking at me curiously. It seemed to me a very long time since I’d seen his face, that bent-toothed grin of his. By that August, all you ever saw of anybody were their eyes above that damn white surgical mask.

“Nothing,” I said after an uncomfortably long pause. “Just thinking.”

I watched more angry faces staring at us from the curbs and the porches we passed, and said, “So he blames the WHO? Why?”

“A convenient scapegoat maybe. Or maybe he sees them as a symbol of the medical establishment that failed his family.”

“Maybe.”

“You like that one?”

I looked at him and smiled. My head started to clear a little, at least after I’d stopped thinking about his grandmother.

“Two problems,” I told him.

“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”

“He kills Wade and Bradley. Why only take Bradley’s body back?”

“Hmmm,” he said, thumping his thumbs on the steering wheel. “What’s the second problem?”

“He kills Wade. Bradley, maybe. But Wade? I don’t think so. If Wade managed to knock you on your butt, I doubt seriously an over the hill, beer-bellied slouch like Hernandez could have gotten the better of him.”

“Maybe,” Chunk said, except there was a serious, strained edge in his voice when he said it. “Still, don’t ever sell a man short who’s got that kind of anger in him. After all, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

When we got to the Arsenal Station Morgue we started filling in some holes.

We checked with the security detail and found that Kenneth Wade entered the lot at five-fifteen. Under the ‘reason for access’ section of the log the gate officer had written ‘escort research personnel.’ Dr. Bradley checked out a
WHO
van at five-twenty. She didn’t list a destination, which according to the security guys wasn’t all that uncommon. The security detail checked them out of the gates at five-forty. Their destination was listed only as ‘field research.’

“Twenty minutes between the time they check out a van and the time they leave,” Chunk observed. “Not enough time to have sex.”

“That depends on who you ask?” I said.

Chunk chose to ignore that one.

“Well,” he said, “at least we know that whatever happened, happened while they were out.”

“That’s true,” I agreed. “But we still have to explain how Emma Bradley got naked in the GZ and then made her way back here.”

Chunk flipped the security log forward to the next page.

“Well, it doesn’t look like she came in on Hernandez’ truck. The gate officer shows him coming in with an empty truck at ten after ten. Leaving with a full truck at eleven-twenty.”

“What about his first run of the day? We had him at the Scar the first time at ten after eight.”

He flipped through the log, stopped on a page towards the front, and nodded. “In at six fifty-eight, out at seven-forty. That fits.”

“Okay,” I said. “So whatever happened to her happened between five-forty at the earliest, and eleven-twenty at the latest?”

“Right.”

“And Myers has an alibi for that time?”

“Right.”

“And it doesn’t look like Hernandez could have done it?”

“Right.”

“So that leaves Wade?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

I shook my head sadly. “While we’re here, you want to check on the autopsy?”

“Sure,” he said.

“That’s not exactly what we were expecting to hear,” I told Dr. Herrera.

He looked at us curiously. He’d thrown us a curve, and he apparently didn’t understand why. A bullet hole in the chest must have seemed perfectly obvious to him.

“You said you found pieces of fabric inside the wound?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

Chunk grumbled under his breath. Herrera looked confused.

“We had sort of assumed that she was naked when she was killed,” I explained.

His eyebrows arched expressively. “Why in the world would you think that?”

I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck. I was beginning to feel just as much the amateur as Lt. Treanor believed me to be.

“We thought there was a possible sexual relationship between Dr. Bradley and Officer Wade of the
SAPD
Research Protection Detail.”

He shrugged. “Well, that’s possible, I guess. It’s also possible that she was shot with his gun.”

“How’s that?”

“The bullet passed cleanly between the ribs. No real deformation upon entry. I was able to identify it pretty easily as a Speer Gold Dot .40 S&W, one hundred and fifty-five grain hollow point. That’s an expensive bullet.
SAPD
and the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office are the only ones inside the wall who still have access to them.”