by Greg Iles
“Chemicals,” said Chris, making steadily for Jewish Hill. “As I suspected, the toxins known to cause cancer are some of the most persistent on the planet. You put one nanogram of dioxin into somebody, it’ll be there on the day they die. Detailed toxicology studies on autopsy would turn up things like that very quickly. As for volatile compounds like benzene, which you mentioned the second time we met, you’d have the same problem you have with radiation. Using enough to reliably kill people would almost certainly cause acute illness. So basically, as a class, chemicals are a less reliable oncogenic murder weapon than radiation, but more likely to get you caught. I suppose—”
“I’m sorry. Oncogenic?”
“Cancer-causing,” Chris clarified.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“I suppose someone could come up with an untraceable oncogenic poison—the CIA or the army, I mean—but in that case you’d have almost no practical hope of discovering it.”
Alex looked thoughtful. “But it’s something to consider. I haven’t been profiling intel or military officers as suspects, but maybe that’s a realistic option.”
“Not around here. Fort Detrick, Maryland, is where they keep the germs and toxins. You really need to talk to an expert, Alex. And I don’t mean a garden-variety hematologist. You need somebody from NIH or Sloan-Kettering or Dana-Farber.” Chris stopped and watched a half dozen butterflies flitting around a bush bursting with purple flowers. One had marks on its wings that looked almost psychedelic, rounded spheres of electric blue. “M. D. Anderson is probably the closest place.”
“That’s Houston?”
“Right. Seven hours by car.”
Alex held out her hand, and one butterfly danced around her extended finger. “And what do I ask these experts? What would you ask them?”
Chris started walking again. “If we dispense with radiation and chemicals in our little hypothetical, that leaves only one possibility I know of. And it’s a biggie.”
“What is it?”
“Oncogenic viruses.”
She turned toward him. “A professor I spoke to last week mentioned viruses, but a lot of what he said was over my head.”
“Do you know anything about retroviruses?”
“Only that AIDS is caused by one.”
“Reverse transcriptase?”
Alex looked embarrassed.
“Okay. Some viruses in the herpes family are known to cause cancer. And there’s at least one retrovirus that’s known to be oncogenic. If there’s one, there are probably more. There are theoretical models about this stuff, but it’s not my area. I was thinking of calling my old hematology professor from medical school. Peter Connolly. He’s up at Sloan-Kettering now. He’s done groundbreaking work on gene therapy, which actually uses viruses to carry magic bullets to tumor sites. It’s one of the newest forms of cancer therapy.”
“From Jackson, Mississippi, to New York?”
Chris laughed again. “It happens. Didn’t you know that the first heart transplant in the world was done in Jackson?”
“I thought that was in Houston, too.”
“The Jackson transplant was done on a monkey. But the technology was the same. The difficulty was the same. Kind of like the first space shot. Michael DeBakey and Alan Shepard—monkeys helped blaze the trail for both of them.”
They had reached Jewish Hill at last, but as they started toward its forward precipice, and the immense vista it offered, Chris glanced at his watch.
“Alex, I hate to say this, but I’ve got to run. Ben’s at a birthday party, and with Thora gone, I’ve got to pick him up.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. We can jog back to the car.”
They started trotting downhill, but Alex clearly didn’t intend to squander her remaining time with him. “I’ve wondered about someone simply injecting tumor cells from a sick person into a healthy one. I saw that done with mice on the Discovery Channel.”
A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, Chris reflected. “They can do that because the mice used for cancer research are either nude mice, which means they have no immune systems, or because they’re genetic copies of each other. Clones, basically. That’s like injecting cells from a tumor in my body into my identical twin. Sure, those cells would grow, or they’d have a chance to, anyway. But if I injected cells from my tumor into you, your immune system would quickly wipe them out. Very violently, too, on the cellular level.”
“Are you positive? Even with really aggressive tumors?”
“I’m pretty certain. Even with what we call undifferentiated tumors, those cancer cells began as part of a specific person, from their unique DNA. Any other person’s immune system is going to recognize that foreign tissue as an alien invader.”
“What if you somehow beat down your victim’s immune system beforehand?”
“You mean like with cyclosporine? Anti-organ-rejection drugs?”
“Or corticosteroids,” Alex suggested.
She had been doing her homework. “If you compromised someone’s immune system sufficiently to accept cancer cells from another person, they’d be vulnerable to all sorts of opportunistic infections. They’d be noticeably sick. Very ill. Do the medical records of your victims show strange illnesses before their cancer diagnosis?”
“I only have access to the records of two victims. But, no, those records don’t show anything like that.”
The Corolla was forty yards away. Chris cut across the grass, picking his way between the tombstones. “If you had the records of every victim, you might be able to learn a lot. You could really move this thing forward.”
Alex stopped beside a black granite stone and looked at him with complete candor. “I feel so inadequate in this investigation. I mean, my genetics stops at the high school level. Mendel and his peas. But you speak the language, you know the experts we need to talk to—”
“Alex—”
“If I can get hold of the other records, will you consider helping me analyze them?”
“Alex, listen to me.”
“Please, Chris. Do you really think you’re going to be able to avoid thinking about all this?”
He grabbed her hands and squeezed hard. “Listen to me!”
She nodded almost violently, as though aware she had crossed some line.
“I’m not sure what to do yet,” he said. “Everything that’s happened is swirling around inside me, and I’m trying to come to terms with it. I’m working on it, okay? In my own way. I am going to call my friend at Sloan-Kettering tomorrow.”
Alex closed her eyes and exhaled with relief. “Thank you.”
“But right now I need to pick up Ben, and I don’t want to be late.”
“Let me give you a ride to your truck. Where is it?”
He dropped her hands. “At home.”
“Home! It’ll take you an hour just to get there.”
“A half hour.”
“You have to let me take you.”
He walked the rest of the way to the car, and she followed. “I need to be alone, Alex. I’ve had all I can take for now.” He unlocked his bike and took it off her rack. “I’m going to call in a prescription for you, to help you sleep.”
“Those things don’t work for me. Not even Ambien.”
“I’m going to give you Ativan. It can’t not work, unless you’re already addicted to it. If you don’t sleep, you’ll still relax. Is Walgreens pharmacy okay? That’s near your motel.”
“Sure.”
He climbed onto the Trek and held out his hand. When Alex took it between both of hers, he felt her hands shivering.
“Promise me you’ll be careful,” she implored. “Stay away from the traffic.”
“I’ll be fine. I do this all the time. Now, let me go. We’ll talk later.”
“Tonight?”
“Maybe. By tomorrow for sure.”
“Promise?”
“Jesus.”
Alex bit her bottom lip and looked at the ground. When she raised her head, t
he sclera of her eyes were shot with blood. “I’m out on the edge here, Chris. You are, too. Only you don’t know it.”
He looked back long enough for her to see that he meant what he was going to say. “I do know.”
She obviously wanted to say more, but before she could, he kicked his right foot forward and sprinted for the cemetery gate.
CHAPTER 22
Eldon Tarver exited from I-55 South and drove his white van deep into the low-rent commercial sprawl of south Jackson. Soon he was lost in an aluminum jungle of small engine-repair shops, pipe yards, automotive-repair shacks, and the few sundry retail shops that had survived the coming of Wal-Mart and the other bulk retail outlets. His destination was an old bakery building, one of the only brick edifices in the entire area. Built in the 1950s, it had once filled the idyllic neighborhood with the rich aroma of baking bread every morning. But the bakery, like the neighborhood, had died a slow death in the late 1970s, and a succession of owners had failed to make a go of whatever businesses they installed there.
Dr. Tarver pulled up to the gate of the high Cyclone fence that guarded the parking lot, got out, and unlocked a heavy chain. He had thought someone might remark on the razor wire mounted atop the fence, but no one had. Everyone knew that this area suffered some of the highest crime rates in the United States. Dr. Tarver closed the gate behind the van but did not lock it, as he was expecting a delivery.
In this neighborhood, he was known not as Eldon Tarver, MD, but as Noel D. Traver, DVM. The bakery was ostensibly a dog-breeding facility, selling beagles, mice, and fruit flies to research institutions around the country. Because “Dr. Traver” accepted no federal funds, he was not subject to many of the oversight regulations that caused other breeding facilities such inconvenience. This was a necessity since the dog-breeding operations were merely a cover for what really took place inside the old bakery.
Dr. Tarver had not chosen the old bakery for its location. He had chosen it because beneath the factory floor lay one of the most extensive bomb shelters he had ever seen. The owner of the bakery, a right-wing zealot named Farmer, had feared the Soviet Union as much as he hated it. Consequently, he had constructed an elaborate shelter capable of protecting not only his family from a nuclear attack, but also selected members of his workforce. While Eldon believed that the bomb shelter might well save his life in the next ten or fifteen years, his primary reason for purchasing it was as a clandestine primate research facility.
He unlocked the front door and walked quickly through the large holding area in the front of the building. Two hundred beagles began barking wildly in their cages. Dr. Tarver had grown inured to the racket, and indeed was thankful for it, as it masked the more curious noises that sometimes emerged from the bowels of the old bakery. He had passed into the breeding area and was searching for his adoptive brother when the blare of a horn penetrated the walls of the building.
Cursing, he turned on his heel and hurried back outside. A refrigerated panel truck with ice cream sundaes painted on its side was rumbling up to the front door. Dr. Tarver waved his arm, indicating that the truck should drive around to the delivery entrance. The truck swerved accordingly, and Eldon jogged along in the foul wake of its exhaust. He was eager to see what the Mexicans had brought him this time.
Luis Almedovar jumped down from the cab and nodded excitedly to the doctor. A heavyset man with a black mustache, Luis wore an almost perpetual smile, but today Dr. Tarver saw anxiety in the taut flesh around his black eyes.
“Did you just get here?” Dr. Tarver asked.
“No, no. We’ve been here for hours. Javier wanted a hamburger.”
“How many do you have for me?”
“Two, señor. This is what you asked for, no?”
“Yes. Open the truck.”
Again the shadow of anxiety crossed Luis’s face. He unlocked the door at the rear of the truck, and Dr. Tarver stepped up onto the bumper. The stench hit him in a solid wave that would have incapacitated anyone but a pathologist.
“What the fuck happened?” he asked.
Luis was wringing his hands in obvious terror. “The refrigerator, señor. He broke.”
“Jesus.” Dr. Tarver pressed his shirt over his nose and mouth. “How long ago?”
“At Matamoros, señor.”
Dr. Tarver shook his head in disgust and marched into the truck. It was filled with animals of various species, with at least a dozen NHPs, or nonhuman primates, locked in cages against the front bulkhead. The smell of excrement was almost suffocating in the heat, which had probably built to above 160 degrees under the Mississippi sun. Flies had gotten into the truck, and their buzzing droned at an intensity that would drive a human mad were one confined in the truck with it.
Walking forward, Eldon saw that two Indian-origin rhesus monkeys had died in their cages. That would cost the Mexican traders dearly, but the loss to his research was what concerned him. Indian-origin macaques were the best animals for HIV research, and he had made good use of them in his own studies. But Eldon’s prize cargo lay against the front bulkhead. In a single large cage sat two lethargic chimpanzees, their eyes gazing up at him with exhausted reproach. The cheeks of one chimp were covered with mucosal drainage, and the coat of the other had several bald patches that might indicate any number of diseases. It was obvious that the chimps had not eaten for days, and possibly weeks.
“Goddamn idiots,” he muttered. “Fucking Mexican morons!” He turned in the darkness and roared at the squat shape silhouetted in the door. “Get these cages out of here!”
Luis nodded again and again, then forced his way past Dr. Tarver in the narrow aisle between the cages.
“You stupid bastard,” Eldon said to Luis’s back. “Do you know what kind of delay this causes? I have to get them back to normal weight before I can run any tests. And I can’t begin to measure the effects of the stress you put them through. Stress directly impacts the primate’s immune system.”
“Señor—”
“If you were delivering a sixty-thousand-dollar car in your fucking truck, you’d take care of that, wouldn’t you?”
“Sí, señor!” Luis grunted as he struggled to lift the cage. “But these monkeys—”
“Chimpanzees. Where’s your retarded partner?”
“Señor, these are vicious animals.”
“They’re wild animals, Luis.”
“Sí, but they’re smart. Like people smart.”
Probably smarter than you are, Eldon thought.
“They fake you out, make you think they’re sleeping, or that they’ve given in, and then, Dios mio!—they rip your head off and try to make a break for it.”
“Wouldn’t you do the same if you were being starved?”
“Sí, but…I am human. Javier nearly lost his eye after one of these chimps went at him. That eye was hanging out of Javier’s head. I do not lie, señor.”
Tarver smiled at this image.
“What do you do with these monkeys, anyway?”
“I make them sick,” said the doctor.
“Señor?”
“Then I make them well again. The work I do here could save your life one day, Luis. It’s worth losing an eye over.”
Luis nodded, but it was clear that he questioned this assertion.
Unable to remove the cage on his own, Luis finally coaxed Javier Sanchez from the cab of the truck. It took a $100 bill from Dr. Tarver’s pocket to get Javier to enter the trailer, but together the two Mexicans finally manhandled the cage out of the truck and into the bakery. Dr. Tarver resented having to bribe his drivers, but after paying $30,000 apiece for the black-market chimps, what did a hundred bucks matter?
He escorted the Mexicans outside and sent them on their way. No deliveryman had ever penetrated deeper into the bakery than the shipping area just inside the door. When Eldon walked back in, his adoptive brother Judah had loaded the cage onto a piano dolly and was moving it toward the lift platform that led to the bomb shelter. One of four brothers
in the family that had adopted Eldon as a boy, Judah could easily have carried the cage downstairs. At fifty-five, he was still as wide and hard as a tree trunk, with a shock of black hair and pale eyes beneath his low forehead. He had been a willful child until his father decided to break him. Since then, Judah had not spoken much, but he was devoted to his adoptive brother, who had always taken care of him in the “outside world,” which was so unlike the one they had known as children in Tennessee. As the lift groaned downward, Eldon instructed Judah to delouse and bathe the chimps, then sedate them for a complete physical examination. Judah nodded silently.
When the lift hit bottom, Eldon turned the wheel that opened the air-lock door and walked into the primate lab. No one driving on the surface streets above could have guessed that such a facility existed beneath them. An obsessive-compulsive with a cleanliness fetish could happily eat dinner off of any surface in the lab; Judah cleaned it daily with ritualistic attention to detail. Sterility was essential when one considered the opportunities for cross-contamination in a lab like this. Dr. Robert Gallo had learned as much in his AIDS lab; and only two years ago, half the nation’s flu vaccine had to be destroyed because of such a mistake.
The west wall of the lab held the primate cages, luxurious custom-built affairs designed by Dr. Tarver and welded together by Judah. At the moment, they held four chimpanzees, two dozen macaques, four marmosets, two baboons, and a cottontop tamarin. All the primates, even those suffering from terminal diseases, rested in obvious comfort. Dr. Tarver provided round-the-clock climate control and music to keep the social animals happy. Even now, Mozart’s Seventh Symphony was rising to a crescendo in the background.
The mouse cages—prefab plastic things—were stacked against the north wall. Near the east wall hung breeding bubbles for the fruit flies: Drosophila melanogaster. Beneath these stood three stacks of aquariums that seemed to contain nothing but foliage. But close inspection would reveal the scaled bodies of some of Dr. Tarver’s prize serpents.
Most of the floor space was occupied by massive refrigerators used for storing cell cultures, and testing machines built by the Beckman Coulter company. Two were newer models of analyzers in the oncology and genetics departments at UMC. Dr. Tarver had initially tried to carry on his experiments at the medical school, under cover of his legitimate work, but budget constraints had resulted in a level of oversight that made this impossible. On occasion he ferried samples from this lab to the medical school to view them under the biochemistry department’s electron microscope, but for the most part he’d had to construct a virtual mirror of the UMC labs right here. He could do PCR amplification on the spot, and with remote connections to the computers in the commercial pathology lab he operated in north Jackson, he could use Sequence software to do genetic analysis. To date, he had spent more than $6 million on the facility. Some of the money had come from his wife, an early believer in his talent, but after her death he’d been forced to find more creative sources of financing.