Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Kay. Don’t you die on me.”

  I did not speak.

  “Don’t you dare.” His voice shook. “Don’t you dare!”

  “You won’t get off the hook that easy,” I said, getting out of my chair. “Let’s go to bed.”

  He slept in the room where Lucy usually stayed, and I was up most of the night coughing and trying to get comfortable, which simply was not possible. The next morning at half past six he was up, and coffee was brewing when I walked into the kitchen. Light filtered through trees beyond windows, and I could tell by the tight curl of rhododendron leaves that it was bitterly cold.

  “I’m cooking,” Wesley announced. “What will it be?”

  “I don’t think I can.” I was weak, and when I coughed, it felt as if my lungs were ripping.

  “Obviously, you are worse.” Concern flickered in his eyes. “You should go to a doctor.”

  “I am a doctor, and it’s too soon to go to one.”

  I took aspirin, decongestants and a thousand milligrams of vitamin C. I ate a bagel and was beginning to feel almost human when Rose called and ruined me.

  “Dr. Scarpetta? The mother from Tangier died early this morning.”

  “Oh God no.” I was sitting at the kitchen table and running my fingers through my hair. “What about the daughter?”

  “Condition’s serious. Or at least it was several hours ago.”

  “And the body?”

  Wesley was behind me, rubbing my sore shoulders and neck.

  “No one’s moved it yet. No one’s sure what to do, and the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s Office has been trying to reach you. So has CDC.”

  “Who at CDC?” I asked.

  “A Dr. Martin.”

  “I need to call him first, Rose. Meanwhile, you get hold of Baltimore and tell them that under no circumstances are they to have that body sent into their morgue until they’ve heard from me. What is Dr. Martin’s number?”

  She gave it to me and I dialed it immediately. He answered on the first ring and sounded keyed up.

  “We did PCR on the samples you brought in. Three primers and two of them match with smallpox, but one of them didn’t.”

  “Then is it smallpox or not?”

  “We ran its genomic sequence, and it doesn’t match up with any poxvirus in any reference lab in the world. Dr. Scarpetta, I believe you got a virus that’s a mutant.”

  “Meaning, the smallpox vaccination isn’t going to work,” I said as my heart seemed to drop right out of me.

  “All we can do is test in the animal lab. We’re talking at least a week before we know and can even begin thinking about a new vaccine. For practical purposes, we’re calling this smallpox, but we really don’t know what the hell it is. I’ll also remind you we’ve been working on an AIDS vaccine since 1986 and are no closer now than we were back then.”

  “Tangier Island needs to be quarantined immediately. We’ve got to contain this,” I exclaimed, alarmed to the edge of panic.

  “Believe me, we know. We’re getting a team together right now and will mobilize the Coast Guard.”

  I hung up and was frantic when I said to Wesley, “I’ve got to go. We’ve got an outbreak of something no one’s ever heard of. It’s already killed at least two people. Maybe three. Maybe four.”

  He was following me down the hall as I talked.

  “It’s smallpox but not smallpox. We’ve got to find out how it’s being transmitted. Did Lila Pruitt know the mother who just died? Did they have any contact at all, or did the daughter? Did they even live near each other? What about the water supply? A water tower. Blue. I remember seeing one.”

  I was getting dressed. Wesley stood in the doorway, his face almost gray and like stone.

  “You’re going to go back out there,” he said.

  “I need to get downtown first.” I looked at him.

  “I’ll drive,” he said.

  Twelve

  Wesley dropped me off and said he was going to the Richmond Field Office for a while and would check with me later. My heels were loud as I walked down the corridor, bidding good morning to members of my staff. Rose was on the phone when I walked in, and the glimpse of my desk through her adjoining doorway was devastating. Hundreds of reports and death certificates awaited my initials and signature, and mail and phone messages were cascading out of my in-basket.

  “What is this?” I said as she hung up. “You’d think I’ve been gone a year.”

  “It feels like you have.”

  She was rubbing lotion into her hands and I noticed the small canister of Vita aromatherapy facial spray on the edge of my desk, the open mailing tube next to it. There was also one on Rose’s desk, next to her bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care. I stared back and forth, from my Vita spray to hers, my subconscious processing what I was seeing before my reason did. Reality seemed to turn inside out, and I grabbed the door frame. Rose was on her feet, her chair flying back on its rollers as she lunged around her desk for me.

  “Dr. Scarpetta!”

  “Where did you get this?” I asked, staring at the spray.

  “It’s just a sample.” She looked bewildered. “A bunch of them came in the mail.”

  “Have you used it?”

  Now she was really worried as she looked at me. “Well, it just got here. I haven’t tried it yet.”

  “Don’t touch it!” I said, severely. “Who else got one?”

  “Gosh, I really don’t know. What is it? What’s wrong?” She raised her voice.

  Getting gloves from my office, I grabbed the facial spray off her desk and triple-bagged it.

  “Everybody in the conference room, now!”

  I ran down the hall to the front office, and made the same announcement. Within minutes, my entire staff, including doctors still in scrubs, was assembled. Some people were out of breath, and everyone was staring at me, unnerved and frazzled.

  I held up the transparent evidence bag containing the sample size of Vita spray.

  “Who has one of these?” I asked, looking around the room.

  Four people raised their hands.

  “Who has used it?” I then asked. “I need to know if absolutely anybody has.”

  Cleta, a clerk from the front office, looked frightened. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “Have you sprayed this on your face,” I said to her.

  “On my plants,” she said.

  “Plants get bagged and burned,” I said. “Where’s Wingo?”

  “MCV.”

  “I don’t know this for a fact,” I spoke to everyone, “and I pray I’m wrong. But we might be dealing with product tampering. Please don’t panic, but under no circumstances does anyone touch this spray. Do we know exactly how they were delivered?”

  It was Cleta who spoke. “This morning I came in before anybody up front. There were police reports shoved through the slot, as always. And these had been, too. They were in little mailing tubes. There were eleven of them. I know because I counted to see if there was enough to go around.”

  “And the mailman didn’t bring them. They had just been shoved through the slot of the front door.”

  “I don’t know who brought them. But they looked like they’d been mailed.”

  “Any tubes you still have, please bring them to me,” I said.

  I was told that no one had used one, and all were collected and brought to my office. Putting on cotton gloves and glasses, I studied the mailing tube meant for me. Postage was bulk rate and clearly a manufacturer’s sample, and I found it most unusual for something like that to be addressed to a specific individual. I looked inside the tube, and there was a coupon for the spray. As I held it up to the light, I noticed edges imperceptibly uneven, as if the coupon had been clipped with scissors versus a machine.

  “Rose?” I called out.

  She walked into my office.

  “The tube you got,” I said. “Who was it addressed to?”

  “Resident, I think.” Her face was stressed.<
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  “Then the only one with a name on it is mine.”

  “I think so. This is awful.”

  “Yes, it is.” I picked up the mailing tube. “Look at this. Letters all the same size, the postmark on the same label as the address. I’ve never seen that.”

  “Like it came off a computer,” she said as her amazement grew.

  “I’m going across the street to the DNA lab.” I got up. “Call USAMRIID right away and tell Colonel Fujitsubo we need to schedule a conference call between him, us, CDC, Quantico, now.”

  “Where do you want to do it?” she asked as I hurried out the door.

  “Not here. See what Benton says.”

  Outside, I ran down the sidewalk, past my parking lot, and crossed Fourteenth Street. I entered the Seaboard Building where DNA and other forensic labs had relocated several years before. At the security desk, I called the section chief, Dr. Douglas Wheat, who had been given a male family name, despite her gender.

  “I need a closed air system and a hood,” I explained to her.

  “Come on back.”

  A long sloping hallway always polished bright led to a series of glass-enclosed laboratories. Inside, scientists were prepossessed with pipettes and gels and radioactive probes as they coaxed sequences of genetic code to unravel their identities. Wheat, who battled paperwork almost as much as I did, was sitting at her desk, typing something on her computer. She was an attractive woman in a strong way, forty and friendly.

  “What trouble are you getting into this time?” She smiled at me, then eyed my bag. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Possible product tampering,” I said. “I need to spray some on a slide, but it absolutely can’t get in the air or on me or anyone.”

  “What is it?” She was very somber now, getting up.

  “Possibly a virus.”

  “As in the one on Tangier?”

  “That’s my fear.”

  “You don’t think it might be wiser to get this to CDC, let them . . .”

  “Douglas, yes, it would be wiser,” I patiently explained as I coughed again. “But we haven’t got time. I’ve got to know. We have no idea how many of these might be in the hands of consumers.”

  Her DNA lab had a number of closed air system hoods surrounded by glass bioguards, because the evidence tested here was blood. She led me to one in the back of a room, and we put on masks and gloves, and she gave me a lab coat. She turned on a fan that sucked air up into the hood, passing it through HEPA filters.

  “Ready?” I asked, taking the facial spray out of the bag. “We’ll make this quick.”

  I held a clean slide and the small canister under the hood and sprayed.

  “Let’s dip this in a ten percent bleach solution,” I said when I was done. “Then we’ll triple bag it, get it and the other ten off to Atlanta.”

  “Coming up,” Wheat said, walking off.

  The slide took almost no time to dry, and I dripped Nicolaou stain on it and sealed it with a cover slip. I was already looking at it under a microscope when Wheat returned with a container of bleach solution. She dipped the Vita spray in it several times while fears coalesced, rolling into a dark, awful thunderhead as my pulse throbbed in my neck. I peered at the Guarnieri bodies I had come to dread.

  When I looked up at Wheat, she could tell by the expression on my face.

  “Not good,” she said.

  “Not good.” I turned off the microscope and dropped my mask and gloves into biohazardous waste.

  The Vita sprays from my office were airlifted to Atlanta, and a preliminary warning was broadcast nationwide to anyone who might have had such a sample delivered to him. The manufacturer had issued an immediate recall, and international airlines were removing the sprays from overseas travel bags given to business and first-class passengers. The potential spread of this disease, should deadoc have somehow tampered with hundreds, thousands of the facial sprays, was staggering. We could, once again, find ourselves facing a worldwide epidemic.

  The meeting took place at one P.M. in the FBI’s field office off Staples Mill Road. State and federal flags fought from tall poles out front as a sharp wind tore brown leaves off trees and made the afternoon seem much colder than it was. The brick building was new, and had a secure conference room equipped with audio-visual capabilities, so we could see remote people while we talked to them. A young female agent sat at the head of the table, at a console. Wesley and I pulled out chairs and moved microphones close. Above us on walls were video monitors.

  “Who else are we expecting?” Wesley asked as the special agent in charge, or S.A.C., walked in with an armload of paperwork.

  “Miles,” said the S.A.C., referring to the Health Commissioner, my immediate boss. “And the Coast Guard.” He glanced at his paperwork. “Regional chief out of Crisfield, Maryland. A chopper’s bringing him in. Shouldn’t take him more than thirty minutes in one of those big birds.”

  He had no sooner said this than we could hear blades thudding faintly in the distance. Minutes later, the Jay-hawk was thundering overhead and settling in the helipad behind the building. I could not remember a Coast Guard recovery helicopter ever landing in our city or even flying over it low, and the sight of it must have been awesome to people on the road. Chief Martinez was slipping off his coat as he joined us. I noted his dark blue commando sweater and uniform pants, and maps rolled up in tubes, and the situation only got grimmer.

  The agent at the console was working controls as Commissioner Miles strode in and took a chair next to mine. He was an older man with abundant gray hair that was more contentious than most of the people he managed. Today, tufts were sticking out in all directions, his brow heavy and stern as he put on thick black glasses.

  “You look a little under the weather,” he said to me as he made notes to himself.

  “The usual stuff going around,” I said.

  “Had I known that, I wouldn’t have sat next to you.” He meant it.

  “I’m beyond the contagious stage,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  Monitors were coming on around the room, and I recognized the face of Colonel Fujitsubo on one of them. Then Bret Martin blinked on, staring straight at us.

  The agent at the console said, “Camera on. Mikes on. Someone want to count for me.”

  “Five-four-three-two-one,” the S.A.C. said into his mike.

  “How’s that level?”

  “Fine here,” Fujitsubo said from Frederick, Maryland.

  “Fine,” said Martin from Atlanta.

  “We’re ready anytime.” The agent at the console glanced around the table.

  “Just to make sure all of us are up to speed,” I began. “We have an outbreak of what appears to be a smallpox-like virus that so far seems to be restricted to the island of Tangier, eighteen miles off the coast of Virginia. Two deaths reported so far, with another person ill. It is also likely that a recent homicide victim was infected with this virus. The mode of transmission is suspected to be the deliberate contamination of samples of Vita aromatherapy facial spray.”

  “That hasn’t been determined yet.” It was Miles who spoke.

  “The samples should be getting here any minute,” Martin said from Atlanta. “We’ll begin testing immediately, and will hopefully have an answer by the end of tomorrow. Meanwhile, they’re being taken out of circulation until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “You can do PCR to see if it’s the same virus,” Miles said to the video screens.

  Martin nodded. “That we can do.”

  Miles looked around the room. “So what are we saying here? We got some loonytune out there, some Tylenol killer who’s decided to use a disease? How do we know these little spray bottles aren’t the hell all over the place?”

  “I think the killer wants to take his time.” Wesley began what he did best. “He started with one victim. When that paid off, he began on a tiny island. Now that’s paying off, so he hits a downtown health department office.” He looked
at me. “He will go to the next stage if we don’t stop him or develop a vaccine. Another reason I suspect this is still local, is it appears the facial sprays are hand-delivered, with bogus bulk-rate postage on the tubes to give the appearance that they were mailed.”

  “You’re definitely calling this product tampering, then,” Colonel Fujitsubo said to him.

  “I’m calling this terrorism.”

  “The point of it being what?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Wesley told him.

  “But this is far worse than any Tylenol killer or Unabomber,” I said. “The destruction they cause is limited to whoever takes the capsules or opens the package. With a virus, it’s going to spread far beyond the primary victim.”

  “Dr. Martin, what can you tell us about this particular virus?” Miles said.

  “We have four traditional methods for testing for smallpox.” He stared stiffly at us from his screen. “Electron microscopy, with which we have observed a direct visualization of variola.”

  “Smallpox?” Miles almost shouted. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Hold on,” Martin interrupted him. “Let me finish. We also got a verification of antigenic identity using agar gel. Now, chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane culture, other tissue cultures are going to take two, three days. So we don’t have those results now, but we do have PCR. It verified a pox. We just don’t know which one. It’s very odd, nothing currently known, not monkeypox, whitepox. Not classic variola major or minor, although it seems to be related.”

  “Dr. Scarpetta,” Fujitsubo spoke. “Can you tell me what’s in this facial spray, as best you know?”

  “Distilled water and a fragrance. There were no ingredients listed, but generally that’s what sprays like this are,” I said.

  He was making notes. “Sterile?” He looked back at us from the monitor.

  “I would hope so, since the directions encourage you to spray it over your face and contact lenses,” I replied.

  “Then my question,” Fujitsubo went on via satellite, “is what kind of shelf life might we expect these contaminated sprays to have? Variola isn’t all that stable in moist conditions.”