Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  “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.”

  “It’s called mission impossible,” someone sardonically said as the doors opened again.

  “If they even exist anymore,” Martin quipped. “We get fourteen thousand calls a year and have only two operators. Actually, right now we got none. Anybody who comes in, answers the phone. Including me.”

  “Please don’t let this wait,” I said as we reached the lobby.

  “Don’t worry.” He was into it. “I got three guys I’m calling in from home right away.”

  For half an hour, I waited in the lobby and used a phone, and at last my taxi was here. I rode in silence, staring out at plazas of polished granite and marble, and sports complexes that reminded me of the Olympics, and buildings of silver and glass. Atlanta was a city where everything aspired higher, and lavish fountains seemed a symbol of generosity and no fear. I was feeling light-headed and chilled and unusually tired for one who had just spent the better part of a week in bed. By the time I reached my Delta gate, my back had begun to ache. I could not get warm or think very clearly, and I knew I had a fever.

  I was ill by the time I reached Richmond. When Marino met me at the gate, the expression on his face turned to abject fear.

  “Geez, Doc,” he said. “You look like hell.”

  “I feel like hell.”

  “You got any bags?”

  “No. You got any news?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “One tidbit that will piss you off. Ring arrested Keith Pleasants last night.”

  “For what?” I exclaimed as I coughed.

  “Attempting to elude. Supposedly, Ring w
as following him out of the landfill after work and tried to pull him for speeding. Supposedly, Pleasants wouldn’t stop. So he’s in jail, bond set at five grand, if you can believe that. He ain’t going nowhere anytime soon.”

  “Harassment.” I blew my nose. “Ring is picking on him. Picking on Lucy. Picking on me.”

  “No kidding. Maybe you should’ve stayed in Maryland, in bed,” he said as we boarded the escalator. “No offense, but I ain’t gonna catch this, am I?”

  Marino was terrified of anything he could not see, whether it was radiation or a virus.

  “I don’t know what I’ve got,” I said. “Maybe the flu.”

  “Last time I got that I was out for two weeks.” His pace slowed, so he did not keep up with me. “Plus, you been around other things.”

  “Then don’t come close, touch or kiss me,” I said, shortly.

  “Hey, don’t worry.”

  This continued as we walked out into the cold afternoon.

  “Look. I’m going to take a taxi home,” I said, and I was so mad at him I was next to tears.

  “I don’t want you doing that.” Marino looked frightened and was jumpy.

  I waved in the air, swallowing hard and hiding my face as a Blue Bird cab veered toward me.

  “You don’t need the flu. Rose doesn’t need it. No one needs it,” I said, furiously. “You know, I’m almost out of cash. This is awful. Look at my suit. You think an autoclave presses anything and leaves a pleasant smell? The hell with my hose. I got no coat, no gloves. Here I am, and it’s what?” I yanked open the back door of a cab that was Carolina blue. “Thirty degrees?”

  Marino stared at me as I got in. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill, careful his fingers did not brush mine.

  “You need anything at the store?” he called out as I drove off.

  My throat and eyes swelled with tears. Digging tissues out of my purse, I blew my nose and quietly wept.

  “Don’t mean to bug ya, lady,” said my driver, a portly old man. “But where are we going?”

  “Windsor Farms. I’ll show you when we get there,” I choked as I said.

  “Fights.” He shook his head. “Dontcha hate ’em? I ’member one time me and the wife got to arguing in one these all-you-can-eat fish camps. She takes the car. Me, I take a hike. Five miles home through a bad part of town.”

  He was nodding, eyeing me in the rearview mirror as he assumed that Marino and I were having a lovers’ quarrel.

  “So, you’re married to a cop?” he then said. “I saw him drive in. Not an unmarked car on the road that can fool this guy.” He thumped his chest.

  My head was splitting, my face burning. I settled back in the seat and shut my eyes while he droned on about an earlier life in Philadelphia, and his hopes that this winter would not bring much snow. I settled into a feverish sleep. When I awoke, I did not know where I was.

  “Ma’am. Ma’am. We’re here,” the driver was saying loudly to wake me up. “Where to next?”

  He had just turned onto Canterbury and was sitting at a stop sign.

  “Up here, take a right on Dover,” I replied.

  I directed him into my neighborhood, the look on his face increasingly baffled as he drove past Georgian and Tudor estates behind walls in the city’s wealthiest neighborhood. When he stopped at my front door, he stared at fieldstone, at the wooded land around my home, and he watched me closely as I climbed out.

  “Don’t worry,” he said as I handed him a twenty and told him to keep the change. “I seen it all, lady, and never say nothing.” He zipped his lips, winking at me.

  I was a rich man’s wife having a tempestuous affair with a detective.

  “A good credo,” I said, coughing.

  The burglar alarm welcomed me with its warning beep, and never in my life had I been more relieved to be home. I wasted no time getting out of my scalded clothes, and straight into a hot shower, where I inhaled steam and tried to clear the rattle from my lungs. When I was wrapping up in a thick terry cloth robe, the telephone rang. It was exactly four P.M.

  “Dr. Scarpetta?” It was Fielding.

  “I just got home,” I said.

  “You don’t sound good.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well, my news isn’t going to help,” he said. “They’ve got possibly two more cases on Tangier.”

  “Oh no,” I said.

  “A mother and daughter. Fever of a hundred and five, a rash. CDC’s deployed a team with bed isolators, the whole nine yards.”

  “How’s Wingo?” I asked.

  He paused, as if puzzled. “Fine. Why?”

  “He helped with the torso,” I reminded him.

  “Oh yeah. Well, he’s the same as always.”

  Relieved, I sat down and shut my eyes.

  “What’s going on with the samples you took to Atlanta?” Fielding asked.

  “They’re doing tests, I hope, with what few people they can muster now.”

  “So we still don’t know what this is.”

  “Jack, everything points to smallpox,” I said to him. “That’s the way it looks so far.”

  “I’ve never seen it. Have you?”

  “Not before now. Maybe leprosy is worse. It’s bad enough to die of a disease, but to be disfigured in the process is cruel.” I coughed again and was very thirsty. “I’ll see you in the morning, and we’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “It doesn’t sound to me like you should be going anywhere.”

  “You’re absolutely right. And I don’t have a choice.”

  I hung up and tried Bret Martin at CDC, but his phone was answered by voice mail, and he did not call me back. I also left a message for Fujitsubo, but he did not return my call, either, and I figured he was at home, like most of his colleagues. The budget war raged on.

  “Damn,” I swore as I put a kettle of water on the stove and dug in a cupboard for tea. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  It was not quite five when I called Wesley. At Quantico, at least, people were still working.

  “Thank God someone is answering the phones somewhere,” I blurted out to his secretary.

  “They haven’t figured out how nonessential I am yet,” she said.

  “Is he in?” I asked.

  Wesley got on the phone, and sounded so energetic and cheery that it instantly got on my nerves.

  “You have no right to feel this good,” I said.

  “You have the flu.”

  “I don’t know what I’ve got.”

  “That’s what it is, right?” He was worried and his mood went bad.

  “I don’t know. We can only assume.”

  “I don’t mean to be an alarmist . . .”

  “Then don’t,” I cut him off.

  “Kay,” his voice was firm. “You’ve got to face this. What if it’s not?”

  I said nothing because I could not bear to think such thoughts.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t blow this off. Don’t pretend it’s nothing like you do with most things in your life.”

  “Now you’re making me mad,” I snapped. “I fly into this goddamn airport and Marino doesn’t want me in his car so I take a taxi and the driver thinks we’re having an affair and my rich husband doesn’t know, and all the while I have a fever and hurt like hell and just want to go home.”

  “The taxi driver thinks you’re having an affair?”

  “Just forget it.”

  “How do you know you’ve got the flu? That it’s not something else?”

  “I don’t have a rash. Is that what you want to hear?”

  There was a long silence. Then he said, “What if you get one?”

  “Then I’m probably going to die, Benton.” I coughed again. “You’ll probably never touch me again. And I’d never want you to see me again, if it goes its course. It’s easier to worry about stalkers, serial killers, people you can blow away with a gun. But the invisible ones are who I’ve always feared. They take you on a sunny day in a public place. They sl
ide in with your lemonade. I’ve been vaccinated for hepatitis B. But that’s just one killer in a huge population. What about tuberculosis and HIV, and Hanta and Ebola? What about this? God.” I took a deep breath. “It started with a torso and I did not know.”

  “I heard about the two new cases,” he said, and his voice had gotten quiet and gentle. “I can be there in two hours. Do you want to see me?”

  “Right now I don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m on my way.”

  “Benton,” I said, “don’t.”

  But he had his mind made up, and when he pulled into my driveway in his throaty BMW, it was almost midnight. I met him at the door, and we did not touch.

  “Let’s sit in front of the fire,” he said.

  We did, and he was kind enough to make me another cup of decaffeinated tea. I sat on the couch, he was in a side chair, and flames fed by gas enveloped an artificial log. I had turned the lights low.

  “I don’t doubt your theory,” he said as he lingered over cognac.

  “Maybe tomorrow, we’ll know more.” I was perspiring as I shivered, staring into the fire.

  “Right now I don’t give a shit about any of that.” He looked fiercely at me.

  “You have to give a shit about that.” I wiped my brow with a sleeve.

  “No.”

  I was silent as he stared at me.

  “What I care about is you,” he said.

  Still, I did not respond.

  “Kay.” He gripped my arm.

  “Don’t touch me, Benton.” I shut my eyes. “Don’t. I don’t want you sick, too.”

  “See, and that’s convenient for you. To be sick. And I can’t touch you. And you the noble doctor caring more about my well-being than your own.”

  I was quiet, determined not to cry.

  “Convenient. You want to be sick right now so nobody can get close. Marino won’t even give you a ride home. And I can’t put my hands on you. And Lucy won’t see you and Janet has to talk to you behind glass.”

  “What is your point?” I looked at him.

  “Functional illness.”

  “Oh. I guess you studied that in school. Maybe during your master’s in psychology or something.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I never have.”

  I could feel his hurt as I turned my face to the fire, my eyes closed tight.