Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  For a while we watched as the loadmaster and crew worked. They had put on chemical warfare gear, dark hoods and goggles and black gloves that looked rather scary, especially at night. They quickly backed the pickup and camper off the flatbed truck, unhooked them, and the HMMWV towed the camper inside the C-17.

  “Come on,” Lucy said, tugging my arm. “We don’t want to miss our ride.”

  We walked out onto the field, and I could not believe the power surging and the noise as we followed the automated ramp, picking our way around rollers and rings built into the flat, metal floor, miles of wires and insulation exposed overhead. The plane looked big enough to carry several helicopters, Red Cross buses, tanks, and there were at least fifty jump seats. But the crew was small tonight, only the loadmaster and paratroopers, and a first lieutenant named Laurel, who I assumed had been assigned to us.

  She was an attractive young woman with short dark hair, and she shook each of our hands and smiled like a gracious hostess.

  “Good news is you’re not sitting down here,” she said. “We’ll be up with the pilots. More good news, I’ve got coffee.”

  “That would be heaven,” I said, metal clanking as the crew secured the camper and HMMWV to the floor with chains and netting.

  The steps leading up from the cargo bay were painted with the name of the plane, which in this case, appropriately, was Heavy Metal. The cockpit was huge, with an electronic flight control system, and head-up displays like fighter pilots used. Steering was done with sticks instead of yokes, and the instrumentation was completely intimidating.

  I climbed up on a swivel seat, behind two pilots in green jumpsuits, who were too busy to pay us any mind.

  “You got headsets so you can talk, but please don’t when the pilots are,” Laurel told us. “You don’t have to wear them, but it’s pretty loud in here.”

  I was clamping on my five-point harness and noting the oxygen mask hanging by each chair.

  “I’m going to be down here and will check on you from time to time,” the lieutenant went on. “It’s about three hours to Utah, and the landing shouldn’t be too abrupt. They got a runway long enough for the space shuttle, or that’s what they say. You know how the Army brags.”

  She went back downstairs as pilots talked in jargon and codes that meant nothing to me. We began to take off a mere thirty amazing minutes after the plane had landed.

  “We’re going on the runway now,” a pilot said. “Load?” I assumed he meant the loadmaster below. “Is everything secure?”

  “Yes, sir,” the voice sounded in my headset.

  “Have we got that checklist completed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. We’re rolling.”

  The plane surged forward, bumping over the field with gathering power that was unlike any takeoff I had ever known. It roared more than a hundred miles an hour, pulling up into the air at an angle so sharp it flattened me against the back of my chair. Suddenly, stars spangled the sky, the lights of Maryland a winking network.

  “We’re going about two hundred knots,” a pilot said. “Command Post aircraft 30601. Flaps up. Execute.”

  I glanced over at Lucy, who was behind the co-pilot and trying to see what he was doing as she listened to every word, probably committing it to memory. Laurel returned with cups of coffee, but nothing would have kept me up. I drifted to sleep at thirty-five thousand feet as the jet flew west at six hundred miles an hour. I came to as a tower was talking.

  We were over Salt Lake City and descending, and Lucy would never come to earth again as she listened to cockpit talk. She caught me looking but was not to be distracted, and I had never really known anyone like her, not in my entire life. She had a voracious curiosity about anything that could be put together, taken apart, programmed and, in general, made to do something she wanted. People were about the only thing she couldn’t figure out.

  Clover Control turned us over to Dugway Range Control, and then we were receiving instructions about landing. Despite what we had been told about the length of the runway, it felt like we were going to be torn out of our seats as the jet crescendoed over a tarmac blinking with miles of lights, air roaring against raised slats. The stop was so abrupt, I didn’t see how it was physically possible, and I wondered if the pilots might have been practicing.

  “Tally-ho,” one of them said cheerfully.

  Fifteen

  Dugway was the size of Rhode Island with two thousand people living on the base. But we could see nothing when we got in at half past five A.M. Laurel turned us over to a soldier, who put us in a truck and drove to a place where we could rest and freshen up. There wasn’t time for sleep. The plane would be taking off later in the day, and we needed to be on it.

  Lucy and I were checked into the Antelope Inn, across from the Community Club. We had a room with twin beds on the first floor, furnished with light oak and wall-to-wall carpet, everything blue. It offered a view of barracks across the green, where lights were already beginning to come on with the dawn.

  “You know, there really doesn’t seem any point in taking a shower since we’ll have to put on the same dirty things,” Lucy said, stretching out on top of her bed.

  “You’re absolutely right,” I agreed, taking off my shoes. “You mind if I turn this lamp off?”

  “I wish you would.”

  The room was dark and I suddenly felt silly. “This is like a slumber party.”

  “Yeah, the one from hell.”

  “Remember when you used to come stay with me when you were little?” I said. “Sometimes we stayed up half the night. You never wanted to go to sleep, always wanting me to read one more story. You wore me out.”

  “I remember it the other way around. I wanted to sleep and you wouldn’t leave me alone.”

  “Untrue.”

  “Because you doted on me.”

  “Did not. I could scarcely tolerate being in the same room,” I said. “But I felt sorry for you and wanted to be kind.”

  A pillow sailed through the dark and hit me on the head. I threw it back. Then Lucy pounced from her bed to mine, and when she got there didn’t quite know what to do, because she was no longer ten and I wasn’t Janet. She got up and went back to her bed, loudly fluffing pillows behind her.

  “You sound like you’re a lot better,” she said.

  “Better, but not a lot. I’ll live.”

  “Aunt Kay, what are you going to do about Benton? You don’t even seem to think about him anymore.”

  “Oh yes I do,” I answered. “But things have been a little out of control of late, to say the least.”

  “That’s always the excuse people give. I should know. I heard it all my life from my mother.”

  “But not from me,” I said.

  “That’s my point. What do you want to do about him? You could get married.”

  The mere thought unnerved me again. “I don’t think I can do that, Lucy.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I’m too set in my ways, on a track I can’t get off. Too much is demanded of me.”

  “You need to have a life, too.”

  “I feel like I do,” I said. “But it may not be what everybody else thinks it should be.”

  “You’ve always given me advice,” she said. “Maybe now it’s my turn. And I don’t think you should get married.”

  “Why?” I was more curious than surprised.

  “I don’t think you ever really buried Mark. And until you do, you shouldn’t get married. All of you won’t be there, you know?”

  I felt sad and was glad she could not see me in the dark. For the first time in our lives, I talked to her as a trusted friend.

  “I haven’t gotten over him and probably never will,” I said. “I guess he was my first love.”

  “I know all about that,” my niece went on. “I worry that if something happens, there will never be anybody else for me, either. And I don’t want to go the rest of my life not having what I’ve got now. Not having someone
you can talk to about anything, someone who cares and is kind.” She hestitated, and what she said next was honed to an edge. “Someone who doesn’t get jealous and use you.”

  “Lucy,” I said, “Ring won’t wear a badge again in this lifetime, but only you can strip Carrie of her power over you.”

  “She has no power over me.” Lucy’s temper flared.

  “Of course she does. And I can understand it. I’m furious with her, too.”

  Lucy got quiet for a moment, and then she spoke in a smaller voice. “Aunt Kay, what will happen to me?”

  “I don’t know, Lucy,” I said. “I don’t have the answers. But I promise I will be with you every step of the way.”

  The twisted path that had led her to Carrie eventually bent us back around to Lucy’s mother, who, of course, was my sister. I wandered the ridges and rills of my growing-up years, and was honest with Lucy about my marriage to her ex-uncle Tony. I spoke of how it felt to be my age and know I probably would not have children. By now, the sky was lighting up, and it was time to start the day. The base commander’s driver was waiting in the lobby at nine, a young private who barely needed to shave.

  “We got one other person who came in right after you did,” the private said, putting on Ray-Bans. “From Washington, the FBI.”

  He seemed to be very impressed with this and clearly had no idea what Lucy was, nor did the expression change on her face when I asked, “What does he do with the FBI?”

  “Some scientist or something. Pretty hot stuff,” he said, eyeing Lucy, who was striking-looking even when she’d been up all night.

  The scientist was Nick Gallwey, head of the Bureau’s Disaster Squad, and a forensic expert of considerable reputation. I had known him for years, and when he walked into the lobby, we gave each other a hug, and Lucy shook his hand.

  “A pleasure, Special Agent Farinelli. And believe me, I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said to her. “So Kay and I are going to do the dirty work while you play with the computer.”

  “Yes, sir,” she sweetly said.

  “Is there anywhere to have breakfast around here?” Gallwey asked the private, who was tangled in confusion and suddenly shy.

  He drove us in the base commander’s Suburban beneath an endless sky. Unsettled western mountain ranges surrounded us in the distance, high desert flora like sage, scrub pine and firs, dwarfed by lack of rain. The nearest traffic was forty miles away in this Home of the Mustangs, as the base was called, with its ammunition bunkers, weapons from World War II and air space restricted and vast. There were traces of salt from receding ancient waters, and we spotted an antelope and an eagle.

  Stark Road, aptly named, led us toward the test facilities, which were some ten miles from the living area on base. The Ditto diner was on the way, and we stopped long enough for coffee and egg sandwiches. Then it was on to the test facilities, which were clustered in large, modern buildings behind a fence topped with razor wire.

  Warning signs were everywhere, promising that trespassers were unwelcome and deadly force used. Codes on buildings indicated what was inside them, and I recognized symbols for mustard gas and nerve agents, and those for Ebola, Anthrax and Hantavirus. Walls were concrete, the private told us, and two feet thick, refrigerators inside explosion-proof. The routine was not so different from what I had experienced before. Guards led us through the toxic containment facilities, and Lucy and I went into the women’s changing room while Gallwey went into the men’s.

  We stripped and put on house clothes that were Army green, and over these went suits, which were camouflage with goggled hoods, and heavy black rubber gloves and boots. Like the blue suits at CDC and USAMRIID, these were attached to air lines inside the chamber, which in this case was stainless steel from ceiling to floor. It was a completely closed system with double carbon filters, where contaminated vehicles like tanks could be bombarded with chemical agents and vapors. We were assured we could work here as long as we needed without placing anyone at risk.

  It might even be possible that some evidence could be decontaminated and saved. But it was hard to say. None of us had ever worked a case like this before. We started by propping open the camper’s door and arranging lights directed inside. It was peculiar moving around, the steel floor warping loudly like saw blades as we walked. Above us, an Army scientist sat in the control room behind glass, monitoring everything we did.

  Again, I went in first because I wanted to thoroughly survey the crime scene. Gallwey began photographing tool marks on the door and dusting for fingerprints, while I climbed inside and looked around as if I had never been there before. The small living area that normally would have contained a couch and table had been gutted and turned into a laboratory with sophisticated equipment that was neither new nor cheap.

  The rabbit was still alive, and I fed him and set his cage on top of a counter neatly built of plywood and painted black. Beneath it was a refrigerator, and in it I found Vero and human embryonic lung fibroblast cells. They were tissue cultures routinely used for feeding poxviruses, just as fertilizers are used for certain plants. To maintain these cultures, the mad farmer of this mobile lab had a good supply of Eagle minimal essential medium, supplemented with ten percent fetal calf serum. This and the rabbit told me that deadoc was doing more than maintaining his virus, he was still in the process of propagating it when disaster had struck.

  He had kept the virus in a liquid nitrogen freezer that did not need to be plugged in, but refilled every few months. It looked like a ten-gallon stainless steel thermos, and when I unscrewed the lid, I pulled out seven cryo-tubes so old that instead of plastic, they were made of glass. Codes that should have identified the disease were unlike anything I’d ever seen, but there was a date of 1978, and the location of Birmingham, England, tiny abbreviations written in black ink, neatly, and in lowercase. I returned the tubes of living, frozen horror to their frigid place, and rooted around more, finding twenty sample sizes of Vita facial spray, and tuberculin syringes that the killer, no doubt, had used to inoculate the canisters with the disease.

  Of course, there were pipettes and rubber bulbs, petri dishes, and the flasks with screw caps where the virus was actually growing. The medium inside them was pink. Had it begun to turn pale yellow, the PH balance would indicate waste products, acidity, meaning the virus-laden cells had not been bathed in their nutrient-rich tissue culture medium in a while.

  I remembered enough from medical school and my training as a pathologist to know that when propagating a virus, the cells must be fed. This is done with the pink culture medium, which must be aspirated off every few days with a pipette, when the nutrients have been replaced by waste. For the medium still to be pink meant this had been done recently, at least within the last four days. Deadoc was meticulous. He had cultivated death with love and care. Yet there were two flasks broken on the floor, perhaps due to an infected rabbit hopping about, somehow accidentally out of its cage. I did not sense suicide here, but an unforeseen catastrophe that had caused deadoc to run.

  Slowly, I moved around some more, through the kitchen, where a single bowl and fork had been washed and neatly left to dry on a dish towel by the sink. Cupboards were orderly, too, with rows of simple spices, boxes of cereal and rice and cans of vegetable soup. In the refrigerator was skim milk, apple juice, onions and carrots, but no meat. I closed the door as my mystification grew. Who was he? What did he do in this camper day after day besides make his viral bombs? Did he watch TV? Did he read?

  I began to look for clothes, pulling open drawers with no luck. If this man had spent a lot of time here, why had he nothing to wear except what he had on? Why no photographs or personal mementos? What about books, catalogues for ordering cell lines, tissue cultures, reference material for infectious diseases? Most obvious of all, what had happened to the vehicle that had towed this? Who had driven off in it and when?

  I stayed in the bedroom longer, the carpet black from blood that had been tracked through other rooms when we had
removed the body. I could not smell or hear anything but air circulating in my suit as I paused to change my four-hour battery. This room, like the rest of the camper, was generic, and I pulled back the flower-printed spread, discovering the pillow and sheets on one side were wrinkled from having been slept on. I found one short gray hair, and collected it with forceps as I remembered that the dead man’s hair was longer and black.

  A print of a seaside on the wall was cheap, and I took it down to see if I could tell where it had been framed. I tried the love seat beneath a window on the other side of the bed. It was covered in bright green vinyl, and on top was a cactus plant that had to be the only thing alive in the camper except for what was in the cage, the incubator and the freezer. I stirred the soil with my finger and it was not too dry, then I placed it on the carpet and opened up the love seat.

  Based on cobwebs and dust, no one had been inside in many years, and I sifted through a rubber cat toy, a faded blue hat and a chewed-on corncob pipe. I did not sense that any of this belonged to the person who lived here now, or had even been noticed by him. I wondered if the camper had been used or in the family, and got down on my hands and knees and crawled around until I found the shot shell and the wad. These, too, I sealed inside an evidence bag.

  Lucy was just sitting down at the laptop computer when I returned to the laboratory area.

  “Screen saver password,” she said into her voice-activated microphone.

  “I was hoping you’d get something difficult,” I said.

  She was already rebooting and going into DOS. Knowing her, she would have that password removed in minutes, as I’d seen her do before.

  “Kay,” Gallwey’s voice sounded inside my hood. “Got something good out here.”