Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  DEADOC: toil and trouble

  SCARPETTA: What do you want!

  DEADOC: we re angry tonight

  SCARPETTA: Yes, we are.

  DEADOC: why should you care about ignorant fishermen and their ignorant families and those inept people who work for you

  SCARPETTA: Stop it. Tell me what you want to make this stop.

  DEADOC: it s too late the damage is done it was done long before this

  SCARPETTA: What was done to you?

  But he did not answer. Oddly, he did not leave the room, but he did not respond to any further questions from me. I thought of Squad 19 and prayed they were listening and following from trunk to trunk, tracing him to his lair. Half an hour passed. I finally logged off as my telephone rang.

  “You’re a genius!” Lucy was so excited she was hurting my ears. “How the hell have you managed to keep him on that long?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, amazed.

  “Eleven minutes so far. You win the prize.”

  “I was only on with him maybe two minutes.” I tried to cool my forehead with the back of my hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But she didn’t care. “We nailed the son of a bitch!” She was ecstatic. “A campground in Maryland, agents from Salisbury already en route. Janet and I gotta plane to catch.”

  • • •

  Before I got up the next morning, the World Health Organization put out another international alert about Vita aromatic facial spray. WHO reassured people that this virus would be eliminated, that we were working on the vaccine around the clock and would have it soon. But the panic began anyway.

  The virus, dubbed by the press Mutantpox, was on the cover of Newsweek and Time, and the Senate was forming a subcommittee as the White House contemplated emergency measures. Vita was distributed in New York, but the manufacturer was actually French. The obvious concern was that deadoc was making good on his threat. Although there were yet no reports of the disease in France, economic and diplomatic relations were strained as a large plant was forced to shut down, and accusations about where the tampering was done were volleyed back and forth between countries.

  Watermen were trying to flee Tangier in their fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard had called in more backups from stations as far south as Florida. I did not know all the details, but based on what I had heard, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Tangiermen in the Tangier Sound, boats anchored and going nowhere as winter winds howled.

  Meanwhile, CDC had deployed an isolation team of doctors and nurses to Wingo’s house, and word was out. Headlines screamed and people were evacuating a city that would be difficult, if not impossible, to quarantine. I was as distressed and sick as I’d ever been in my life, drinking hot tea in a bathrobe early Friday morning.

  My fever had peaked at a hundred and two, and Robitussin DM didn’t do a thing except make me vomit. Muscles in my neck and back hurt as if I had been playing football against people with clubs. But I could not go to bed. There was far too much to do. I called a bondsman and received the bad news that the only way to get Keith Pleasants out of jail was for me to drive downtown and pay in person. So I went out to my car, only to have to turn around ten minutes later because I’d left my checkbook on the table.

  “God, help me please,” I muttered as I sped up.

  Rubber squealed as I drove too fast through my neighborhood, and then moments later, back out, flying around corners in Windsor Farms. I wondered what had happened in Maryland during the night as I worried about Lucy, for whom every event was an adventure. She wanted to use guns and go on foot pursuit, fly helicopters and planes. I feared such a spirit would be crushed in its prime, because I knew too much about life and how it ended. I wondered if deadoc had been caught, but believed if he had, I would have been told.

  I had never needed a bondsman in my life, and this one, Vince Peeler, worked out of a shoe repair shop on Broad Street, along a strip of abandoned stores with nothing in their windows but graffiti and dust. He was a short, slight man with waxed black hair and a leather apron. Seated at an industrial-sized Singer sewing machine, he was stitching a new sole on a shoe. As I shut the door he gave me the piercing look of one accustomed to recognizing trouble.

  “You Dr. Scarpetta?” he asked as he sewed.

  “Yes.”

  I got out my checkbook and a pen, not feeling the least bit friendly as I wondered how many violent people this man had helped back out on the streets.

  “That will be five hundred and thirty dollars,” he said. “If you want to use a credit card, add three percent.”

  He got up and came to his scarred counter piled with shoes and tins of Kiwi paste. I could feel his eyes crawling over me.

  “Funny, I thought you’d be a lot older,” he considered. “You know, you read about people in the news and sometimes get flat-out wrong impressions.”

  “He’ll be freed today.” It was an order as I tore out the check and handed it to him.

  “Oh, sure.” His eyes darted and he looked at his watch.

  “When?”

  “When?” he echoed rhetorically.

  “Yes,” I said. “When will he be freed?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

  “Good,” I said as I blew my nose. “I’m going to be watching for him to be freed like that.” I snapped my fingers, too. “And if he isn’t? Guess what? I’m also a lawyer and in a really, really shitty mood. And I’ll come after you. Okay?”

  He smiled at me and swallowed.

  “What kind of lawyer?” he asked.

  “The kind you don’t want to know,” I said as I went out the door.

  I got to the office maybe fifteen minutes later, and my pager vibrated and the phone rang as I sat behind my desk. Before I could do anything, Rose suddenly appeared and looked unusually stressed.

  “Everybody’s looking for you,” she said.

  “They always are.” I frowned at the number on my pager’s display. “Now who the hell is that?”

  “Marino’s on his way here,” she went on. “They’re sending a helicopter. To the helipad at MCV. USAMRIID’s in the air right now, heading here. They’ve let the Baltimore Medical Examiner’s office know a special team’s going to have to handle this, that the body will have to be autopsied in Frederick.”

  I gave her my eyes as my blood seemed to freeze. “Body?”

  “Apparently there’s some campground where the FBI traced a call.”

  “I know about that.” I had no patience. “In Maryland.”

  “They think they’ve found the killer’s camper. I’m not clear on all the details. But it has what might be a lab of some type. And there’s a body inside.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Whose body?”

  “They think, his. A possible suicide. Shot.” She peered at me over the top of her glasses, and shook her head. “You should be home in bed with a cup of my chicken soup.”

  Marino picked me up in front of my office as wind gusted through downtown and whipped state flags on tops of buildings. I knew instantly that he was angry when he pulled out before I’d barely shut the door. Then he had nothing to say.

  “Thanks,” I said, unwrapping a cough drop.

  “You’re still sick.” He turned onto Franklin Street.

  “I certainly am. Thank you for asking.”

  “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said, and he was not in uniform. “Last thing I want to do is get near some goddamn lab where someone’s been making viruses.”

  “You’ll have special protection,” I replied.

  “I should probably have it now, being around you.”

  “I have the flu and am no longer infectious. Trust me. I know these things. And don’t be mad at me, because I have no intention of putting up with it.”

  “You’d better hope the flu’s what you got.”

  “If I had something worse, I would be getting worse and my fever would be higher.
I would have a rash.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re already sick, don’t that mean you’re more likely to catch something else? Like, I don’t know why you want to be making this trip. ’Cause I sure the fuck don’t. And I don’t appreciate being dragged into it.”

  “Then drop me off and be on your way,” I said. “Don’t even think about whining to me right now. Not when the entire world’s going to hell.”

  “How’s Wingo?” he asked in a more conciliatory tone.

  “I’m frankly scared to death for him,” I replied.

  We drove through MCV, turning into a helipad behind a fence where patients and organs arrived when they were medflighted to the hospital. USAMRIID had not arrived yet, but in moments we could hear the powerful Blackhawk, and people in cars and walking along sidewalks stopped and stared. Several drivers pulled off the road to watch the magnificent machine darken the sky as it hammered in, blasting grass and debris as it landed.

  The door slid open and Marino and I climbed inside, where crew seats were already occupied by scientists from USAMRIID. We were surrounded by rescue gear, and another portable isolator that was collapsed like an accordion. I was handed a helmet with a microphone, and I put this on and fastened my five-point harness. Then I helped Marino with his as he perched primly on a fold-down seat not built for people his size.

  “God knows I hope reporters don’t get wind of this,” someone said as the heavy door shut.

  I plugged the cord of my microphone into a port in the ceiling. “They will. Probably already have.”

  Deadoc liked attention. I could not believe he would leave this world silently, or without his presidential apology. No, there was something else in store for us, and I did not want to imagine what that might be. The trip to Janes Island State Park was less than an hour, but complicated by the fact that the campground was densely wooded with pines. There was nowhere to land.

  Our pilots set us down at the Coast Guard station in Crisfield, in a marina called Somer’s Cove, where sailboats and yachts battened down for winter bobbed on the dark blue ruffled water of the Little Annemessex River. We went inside the tidy brick station long enough to put on exposure suits and life vests while Chief Martinez briefed us.

  “We got a lot of problems going at the same time,” he was saying as he paced the carpet inside the communication room, where all of us were gathered. “For one thing, Tangier folk have kin here, and we’ve had to station armed guards at roads leading out of town because now CDC is concerned about Crisfield people going anywhere.”

  “No one’s gotten sick here,” Marino said, as he struggled to get cuffs over his boots.

  “No, but I’m worried that at the very start of this thing, some people snuck through the cracks, got out of Tangier and came here. Point being, don’t expect much friendliness in these parts.”

  “Who’s at the campground?” someone else asked.

  “Right now, the FBI agents that found the body.”

  “What about other campers?” Marino said.

  “Here’s what I’ve been told,” Martinez said. “When the agents went in, they found maybe half a dozen campers and only one with a phone hookup. That was campsite sixteen, and they banged on the door. Nothing, so they look in a window and see the body on the floor.”

  “The agents didn’t go inside?” I said.

  “No. Realizing it might be the perp’s, they worried it could be contaminated and didn’t. But I’m afraid one of the rangers did.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You know what they say. Curiosity killed the cat. Apparently one of the agents had gone to the airstrip where you landed to pick up two other agents. Whatever. At some point, no one was looking and the ranger went inside, came right back out like a ball of fire. Said there was some kind of monster in there straight out of Stephen King. Don’t ask me.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes.

  I looked at the USAMRIID team.

  “We’ll take the ranger back with us,” said a young man whose Army pins identified him as a captain. “By the way, my name is Clark. This is my crew,” he said to me. “They’ll take good care of him, put him in quarantine, keep an eye on him.”

  “Campsite sixteen,” Marino said. “We know anything about who rented that?”

  “We don’t have those details yet,” Martinez said. “Everybody suited up?” He scanned us and it was time to go.

  The Coast Guard took us in two Boston Whalers because where we were going was too shallow for a cutter or patrol boat. Martinez was piloting mine, standing up and calm as if racing forty miles an hour on choppy waters was a very normal thing to do. I honestly thought I might sail overboard at any moment as I held hard to the rail, sitting on the side. It was like riding a mechanical bull, air rushing so fast into my nose and mouth, I could barely breathe.

  Marino was across the boat from me and looked like he might get sick. I tried to mouth a reassurance to him, but he stared blankly at me as he held on with all his strength. We eventually slowed in a cove called Flat Cat, thick with cattails and spartina grass, where there were NO WAKE signs as the park got near. I could see nothing but pines. Then as we got closer, there were paths and bathrooms, a small ranger station, and only one camper peeking through. Martinez glided us into the pier, and another Guardsman tied us to a piling as the engine quit.

  “I’m gonna puke,” Marino said in my ear as we clumsily climbed out.

  “No you’re not.” I gripped his arm.

  “I ain’t going inside that trailer.”

  I turned around and looked at his wan face.

  “You’re right. You’re not,” I said. “That’s my job, but first we need to locate the ranger.”

  Marino stalked off before the second boat had docked, and I looked through the woods toward the camper that was deadoc’s. Rather old and missing whatever had towed it, it was parked as far from the rangers’ station as was possible, tucked in the shadow of loblolly pines. When all of us were ashore, the USAMRIID team passed out the familiar orange suits, air packs and extra four-hour batteries.

  “Here’s what we’re doing.” It was the USAMRIID team leader named Clark who spoke. “We suit up and get the body out.”

  “I would like to go in first,” I said. “Alone.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Then we see if there’s anything hazardous in there, which hopefully there’s not. We get the body out, and the camper’s hauled out of here.”

  “It’s evidence,” I said, looking at him. “We can’t just haul it out of here.”

  I knew what he was thinking by the look on his face. The killer may be dead, the case closed. The camper was a biological hazard and should be burned.

  “No,” I said to him. “We don’t close this so quickly. We can’t.”

  He hesitated, blowing out in frustration as he stared off at the camper.

  “I’ll go in,” I said. “Then I’ll tell you what we need to do.”

  “Fair enough.” He raised his voice again. “Guys? Let’s go. No one inside but the M.E until you hear otherwise.”

  They followed us through the forest, the portable isolator in our wake, an eerie caisson not meant for this world. Pine needles were crisp beneath my feet, like shredded wheat, and the air was sharp and clean as the camper got closer. It was a Dutchman travel trailer, maybe eighteen feet long, with a fold-out orange-striped awning.

  “That’s old. Eight years, I bet,” said Marino, who knew about such things.

  “What would it take to tow it?” I asked as we put on our suits.

  “A pickup,” he said. “Maybe a van. This doesn’t need nothing with a lot of horsepower. What are we supposed to do? Put these over everything else we already got on?”

  “Yes,” I said, zipping up. “What I’d like to know is what happened to the vehicle that hauled this thing here.”

  “Good question,” he said, huffing as he struggled. “And where’s the license plate?”

  I had just turned on my air when a young man emerged from t
rees in a green uniform and smoky hat. He seemed rather dazed as he looked at all of us in our orange hoods and suits, and I sensed his fear. He did not get close to us as he introduced himself as the night shift park ranger.

  Marino spoke to him first. “You ever see the person staying in there?”

  “No,” the ranger said.

  “What about guys on the other shifts.”

  “No one remembers seeing anyone, just lights on at night sometimes. Hard to say. As you can see, it’s parked pretty far from the station. You could go out to the showers or whatever and not necessarily be noticed.”

  “No other campers here?” I asked over the rush of air inside my hood.

  “Not now. There were maybe three other people when I found the body, but I encouraged them to leave because there might be some kind of disease.”

  “Did you question them first?” Marino asked, and I could see he was irritated by this young ranger who had just chased off all of our witnesses.

  “Nobody knew a thing, except one person did think he ran into him.” He nodded at the camper. “Evening before last. In the bathroom. Big grubby guy with dark hair and a beard.”

  “Taking a shower?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am.” He hesitated. “Taking a leak.”

  “Doesn’t the camper have a bathroom?”

  “I really don’t know.” He hesitated again. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t stay in there. Minute I saw that. Well, whatever it was. I was gone like a second.”

  “And you don’t know what towed this thing?” Marino then asked.

  The ranger was looking very uncomfortable now. “This time of year it’s usually quiet out here, and dark. I had no reason to notice what vehicle it was hooked up to, and in fact don’t recall there even being one.”

  “But you got a plate number.” Marino’s stare was unfriendly through his hood.

  “Sure do.” Relieved, the ranger pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Got his registration right here.” He opened it. “Ken A. Perley, Norfolk, Virginia.”

  He handed the paper to Marino, who sarcastically said, “Oh good. The name the asshole stole off a credit card. So I’m sure the plate number you got is accurate, too. How did he pay?”