Unnatural Exposure

by Patricia Cornwell

  I went down the steps, careful to keep my air line from tangling. He was in front of the camper, squatting by the area of the tongue where the VIN had been obliterated. Having polished the metal mirror-smooth with fine grit sandpaper, he was now applying a solution of copper chloride and hydrochloric acid to dissolve scarred metal and restore the deeply stamped number underneath that the killer thought he had filed away.

  “People don’t realize how difficult it is to get rid of one of these things,” his voice filled my ears.

  “Unless they’re professional car thieves,” I said.

  “Well, whoever did this didn’t do a very good job.” He was taking photographs. “I think we got it.”

  “Let’s hope the camper’s registered,” I said.

  “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “What about prints?”

  The door and aluminum around it were smudged with black dusting powder.

  “Some, but God knows whose,” he said, getting up and straightening his back. “In a minute, I’ll tear up the inside.”

  Meanwhile, Lucy was tearing up the computer, and like me, not coming up with anything that might tell us who deadoc was. But she did find files he had saved of our conversations in the chat rooms, and it was chilling to see them on screen, and wonder how often he had reread them. There were detailed lab notes documenting the propagation of the virus cells, and this was interesting. It appeared work had begun as recently as early in the fall, less than two months before the torso had turned up.

  By late afternoon, we had done all we could do with no startling revelations. We took chemical showers as the camper was blasted with formalin gas. I stayed in my army-green house clothes because I did not want my suit after what it had been through.

  “Kind of hell on your wardrobe,” Lucy commented as we left the changing room. “Maybe you should try pearls with that. Dress it up a little.”

  “Sometimes you sound like Marino,” I said.

  • • •

  Days crept into the weekend, and next I knew that was gone too with no developments that were anything but maddening. I had missed my mother’s birthday. Not once had it crossed my mind.

  “What? You got Alzheimer’s now?” she unkindly told me over the phone. “You don’t come down here. Now you don’t even bother to call. It’s not like I’m getting younger.”

  She began to cry, and I felt like it.

  “Christmas,” I said what I did every year. “I’ll work something out. I’ll bring Lucy. I promise. It’s not that far away.”

  I drove downtown, uninspired and weary to the bone. Lucy had been right. The killer’s only use of the phone line at the campground was to dial into AOL, and in the end, all that came back to was Perley’s stolen credit card. Deadoc did not call anymore. I had gotten obsessive about checking and sometimes found myself waiting in that chat room when I could not even be sure the FBI was watching anymore.

  The frozen virus source I found in the camper’s nitrogen freezer remained unknown. Attempts at mapping its DNA continued, and scientists at CDC knew how the virus was different, but not what it was, and thus far, vaccinated primates remained susceptible to it. Four other people, including two watermen who turned up in Crisfield, had come down with only mild cases of the disease. No one else seemed to be getting sick as the quarantine of the fishing village continued and its economy foundered. As for Richmond, only Wingo was ill, his willowy body and gentle face ravaged by pustules. He would not let me see him, no matter how often I tried.

  I was devastated, and found it hard to worry about other cases because this one would not end. We knew the dead man in the trailer could not be deadoc. Fingerprints had come back to a drifter with a long arrest record of crimes mostly involving theft and drugs, and two counts of assault and attempted rape. He was out on parole when he had used his pocketknife to pry open the camper door, and no one doubted that his shotgun death was a homicide.

  I walked into my office at eight-fifteen. When Rose heard me, she came through her doorway.

  “I hope you got some rest,” she said, more worried about me than I’d ever seen.

  “I did. Thanks.” I smiled, and her concern made me feel guilty and shamed, as if I were bad somehow. “Any new developments?”

  “Not about Tangier.” I could see the anxiety in her eyes. “Try to get your mind off it, Dr. Scarpetta. We’ve got five cases this morning. Look at the top of your desk. If you can find it. And I’m at least two weeks behind on correspondence and micros because of your not being here to dictate.”

  “Rose, I know, I know,” I said, not unkindly. “First things first. Try Phyllis again. And if they still say she’s out sick, get a number where she can be reached. I’ve been trying her home number for days and no one answers.”

  “If I get her, you want me to put her through?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  That happened fifteen minutes later when I was about to go into staff meeting. Rose got Phyllis Crowder on the line.

  “Where on earth are you? And how are you?” I asked.

  “This wretched flu,” she said. “Don’t get it.”

  “I did and am still getting rid of it,” I said. “I’ve tried your house in Richmond.”

  “Oh, I’m at my mother’s, in Newport News. You know, I work a four-day week and have been spending the other three days out here for years.”

  I did not know that. But we had never socialized.

  “Phyllis,” I said, “I hate to bother you when you’re not well, but I need your help with something. In 1978 there was a laboratory accident at the lab in Birmingham, England, where you once worked. I’ve pulled what I can on it, and know only that a medical photographer was working directly over a smallpox lab . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” she interrupted me. “I know all about it. Supposedly, the photographer was exposed through a ventilator duct, and she died. The virologist committed suicide. The case is cited all the time by people who argue in favor of destroying all frozen source virus.”

  “Were you working in that lab when this happened?”

  “No, thank goodness. That was some years after I left. I was already in the States by then.”

  I was disappointed, and she went into a coughing spell and could hardly talk.

  “Sorry.” She coughed. “This is when you hate living alone.”

  “You don’t have anyone looking in on you?”

  “No.”

  “What about food?”

  “I manage.”

  “Why don’t I bring you something,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “I’ll help you if you’ll help me,” I added. “Do you have any files on Birmingham? Concerning the work going on when you were there? Anything you could look up?”

  “Buried somewhere in this house, I’m sure,” she said.

  “Unbury them and I’ll bring stew.”

  I was out the door in five minutes, running to my car. Heading home, I got several quarts of my homemade stew out of the freezer, then I filled the tank with gas before going east on 64. I told Marino on the car phone what I was doing.

  “You’ve really lost it this time,” he exclaimed. “Drive over a hundred miles to take someone food? You coulda called Domino’s.”

  “That’s not the point. And believe me, I have one.” I put sunglasses on. “There may be something here. She may know something that could help.”

  “Yo, let me know,” he said. “You got your pager on, right?”

  “Right.”

  Traffic was light this time of day, and I kept the cruise control on sixty-nine so I did not get a ticket. In less than an hour, I was bypassing Williamsburg, and about twenty minutes later, following directions Crowder had given me for her address in Newport News. The neighborhood was called Brandon Heights, where the economic class was mixed, and houses got bigger as they got nearer the James River. Hers was a modest two-story frame recently painted eggshell white, the yard and landscapi
ng well maintained.

  I parked behind a van and collected the stew, my pocketbook and briefcase slung over a shoulder. When Phyllis Crowder came to the door, she looked like hell, her face pale, and eyes burning with fever. She was dressed in a flannel robe and leather slippers that looked like they might once have belonged to a man.

  “I can’t believe how nice you are,” she said as she opened the door. “Either that or crazy.”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  I stepped inside, pausing to look at framed photographs along the dark paneled entrance hall. Most of them were of people hiking and fishing and had been taken in long years past. My eyes were fixed on one, an older man wearing a pale blue hat and holding a cat as he grinned around a corncob pipe.

  “My father,” Crowder said. “This was where my parents lived, and my mother’s parents were here before that. That’s them there.” She pointed. “When my father’s business started doing poorly in England, they came here and moved in with her family.”

  “And what about you?” I said.

  “I stayed on, was in school.”

  I looked at her and did not think she was as old as she wanted me to believe.

  “You’re always trying to make me assume you’re a dinosaur compared to me,” I said. “But somehow I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe you just wear the years better than I do.” Her feverish dark eyes met mine.

  “Is any of your family still living?” I asked, perusing more photographs.

  “My grandparents have been gone about ten years, my father about five. After that, I came out here every weekend to take care of Mother. She hung on as long as she could.”

  “That must have been hard with your busy career,” I said, as I looked at an early photograph of her laughing on a boat, holding up a rainbow trout.

  “Would you like to come in and sit down?” she asked. “Let me put this in the kitchen.”

  “No, no, show me the way and save your strength,” I insisted.

  She led me through a dining room that did not appear to have been used in years, the chandelier gone, exposed wires hanging out over a dusty table, and draperies replaced by blinds. By the time we walked into the large, old-fashioned kitchen, the hair was rising along my scalp and neck, and it was all I could do to remain calm as I set the stew on the counter.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  She was hardly coughing now, and though she might be ill, this wasn’t why she initially had stayed away from her job.

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  She smiled at me but her eyes were penetrating, and as we sat at the breakfast table, I was frantically trying to figure out what to do. What I suspected couldn’t be right, or should I have figured it out sooner? I had been friendly with her for more than fifteen years. We had worked on numerous cases together, shared information, commiserated as women. In the old days, we drank coffee together and smoked. I had found her charming, brilliant, and certainly never sensed anything sinister. Yet I realized this was the very sort of thing people said about the serial killer next door, the child molester, the rapist.

  “So, let’s talk about Birmingham,” I said to her.

  “Let’s.” She wasn’t smiling now.

  “The frozen source of this disease has been found,” I said. “The vials have labels on them dated 1978, Birmingham. I’m wondering if the lab there might have been doing any research in mutant strains of smallpox, anything that you might know . . . ?”

  “I wasn’t there in 1978,” she interrupted me.

  “Well, I think you were, Phyllis.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She got up to put on a pot of tea.

  I did not say anything, waiting until she sat back down.

  “I’m sick, and by now, you ought to be,” she said, and I knew she was not referring to the flu.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t create your own vaccine before you started all this,” I said. “Seems like that was a little reckless for someone so precise.”

  “I wouldn’t have needed it if that bastard hadn’t broken in and ruined everything,” she snapped. “That filthy, disgusting pig.” Enraged, she shook.

  “While you were on AOL, talking to me,” I said. “That’s when you stayed on the line and never logged off, because he started prying open your door. And you shot him and fled in your van. I guess you just went out to Janes Island for your long weekends, so you could passage your lovely disease to new flasks, feed the little darlings.”

  I was beginning to feel the rage as I spoke. She did not seem to care, but was enjoying it.

  “After all these years in medicine, are people nothing more than slides and petri dishes? What happened to their faces, Phyllis? I have seen the people you did this to.” I leaned closer to her. “An old woman who died alone in her soiled bed, no one to even hear her cries for water. And now Wingo, who will not let me look at him, a decent, kind young man, dying. You know him! He’s been to your lab! What has he ever done to you!”

  She was unmoved, her anger flashing, too.

  “You left Lila Pruitt’s Vita spray in one of the cubbyholes where she sold recipes for a quarter. Tell me if I don’t get it right.” My words bit. “She thought her mail had been delivered to the wrong box, then dropped off by a neighbor. What a nice little something to get for free, and she sprayed it on her face. She had it on her nightstand, spraying it again and again when she was in pain.”

  My colleague was silent, her eyes gleaming.

  “You probably delivered all of your little bombs to Tangier at once,” I said. “Then dropped by the ones for me. And my staff. What was your plan after that? The world?”

  “Maybe,” was all she had to say.

  “Why?”

  “People did it to me first. Tit for tat.”

  “What did anybody do to you that’s even close?” It was an effort to keep my voice controlled.

  “I was at Birmingham when it happened. The accident. It was implied that I was partly to blame, and I was forced to leave. It was completely unfair, a total setback to me when I was young, on my own. Scared. My parents had left for the United States, to live here in this house. They liked the outdoors. Camping, fishing. All of them did.”

  For a long moment, she stared off as if there, back in those days.

  “I didn’t matter much, but I had worked hard. I got another job in London, was three grades below what I had been.” Her eyes focused on me. “It wasn’t fair. It was the virologist who caused the accident. But because I was there that day, and he conveniently killed himself, it was easy to pin it all on me. Plus, I was just a kid, really.”

  “So you stole the source virus on your way out,” I said.

  She smiled coldly.

  “And you stored it all these years?”

  “Not hard when every place you work has nitrogen freezers and you’re always happy to monitor the inventory,” she said with pride. “I saved it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Her voice rose. “I was the one working on it when the accident happened. It was mine. So I made sure I took some of it and my other experiments with me on my way out the door. Why should I let them keep it? They weren’t smart enough to do what I did.”

  “But this isn’t smallpox. Not exactly,” I said.

  “Well, that’s even worse, now isn’t it?” Her lips were trembling with emotion as she recalled those days. “I spliced the DNA of monkeypox into the smallpox genome.”

  She was getting more overwrought, her hands trembling as she wiped her nose with a napkin.

  “And then at the beginning of the new academic year, I get passed over as a department chairman,” she went on, eyes flaming with furious tears.

  “Phyllis, that’s not fair . . .”

  “Shut up!” she screamed. “All I’ve given to that bloody school? I’m the senior one who has potty-trained everyone, including you. And they give it to a man because I’m not a doctor. I’m just a Ph.D.,” she spat.

  “They gave
it to a Harvard-trained pathologist who is completely justified in getting the position,” I flatly stated. “And it doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse for what you’ve done. You saved a virus all these years? To do this?”

  The teakettle was whistling shrilly. I got up and turned the burner off.

  “It’s not the only exotic disease I’ve had in my research archives. I’ve been collecting,” she said. “I actually thought I might do an important project someday. Study the world’s most feared virus and learn something more about the human immune system that might save us from other scourges like AIDS. I thought I might win a Nobel Prize.” She had gotten oddly quiet, as if pleased with herself. “But no, I wouldn’t say that in Birmingham my intention was to one day create an epidemic.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” I replied.

  Her eyes narrowed like evil as she looked at me.

  “No one’s gotten sick except for those people suspected of using the facial spray,” I said. “I’ve been exposed several times to patients, and I’m okay. The virus you created is a dead end, affecting only the primary person but not replicating. There’s no secondary infection. No epidemic. What you created was a panic, disease and death for a handful of innocent victims. And crippled the fishing industry for an island full of people who probably have never even heard of a Nobel Prize.”

  I leaned back in my chair, studying her, but she did not seem to care.

  “Why did you send me photographs and messages?” I demanded. “Photographs taken in your dining room, on that table. Who was your guinea pig? Your old and infirm mother? Did you spray her with the virus to see if it worked? And when it did, you shot her in the head. You dismembered her with an autopsy saw so no one ever connected that death with your eventual product tampering?”

  “You think you’re so smart,” she, deadoc, said.

  “You murdered your own mother and wrapped her in a drop cloth because you could not bear to look at her as you sawed her apart.”

  She averted her eyes as my pager vibrated. I pulled it out and read Marino’s number. I got out my phone, my eyes never leaving her.

  “Yes,” I said when he answered.