I walked to a computer, took a seat, and placed the pictures facedown on the table. Next to me sat a woman in scrubs and a white coat. She hadn’t bothered to remove her cap or her shoe covers from the OR. Gross.
I felt her eyes bore into me.
“Well, isn’t this a surprise?”
I turned, glanced quickly at the ID badge, then back up to the toothy smile. No, I thought, no, no, no.
“Hi, Jenna,” I said.
“Nate…I can’t believe…What are you doing here?”
“My wife blocked my Internet and I still have two weeks’ subscription left on Tasty Teens.”
She laughed. “That’s funny.” Then her tone turned grave: “Seriously?”
“No. I lied. The subscription is actually for Bestiality.com.”
When you return to old haunts, you always run the risk of running into old ghosts. And I’d had the misfortune, a year before, of bumping into Jenna Nathanson, a former classmate and perennial pain in the ass. The woman seemed to be assigned to me somehow.
“So,” I said, “you’re on faculty, right? Neurosurgery?”
She pointed at her ID badge: Assistant Professor, Neurosurgery.
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Congratulations to you. You’re famous. That thing last year, what was it called?”
“Chimeragen.”
“Right. Well, you sure cracked the case, to use a phrase from your line of work.”
Cracked the case? Lord, deliver me.
“It’s not something you want to be famous for. People died, Jenna.”
“Oh, I know. I’m so sorry.” She reached out and touched my arm, and I felt my life force drain away. Maybe she really was a ghost. Or a vampire. “You dated that girl—”
“Alaine Chen.”
“Right. In med school. I knew you two dated.”
“Good memory.”
“Well, it’s par for the course. Don’t let them fool you: half of neurosurgery is just remembering things.”
I’d never been fooled, Jenna.
“So why are you back here?” she asked. “Another big investigation?”
Just then, her pager went off. My prayers had been answered.
“Darn, I have to get this, Nate. I’m sorry.”
“Please do.” Please, please do.
“Here.” She popped a pen from her white coat and scribbled a number on a scrap of paper. “Page me when you get some time. I’d love to catch up.”
And I wouldn’t. I nodded and took the paper and watched Jenna as she scuttled across the library, those OR booties dragging along whatever brain material still clung to them. The screen on her computer was still up: a wedding rental page for a vineyard up in Napa. Price tag: thirty grand. I wondered who the unlucky guy was.
Back to more pleasant tasks—hunting down Dorothy Zhang, whose name was on the folder on Murph’s jump drive. I began with an informational shotgun blast: Google. As you’d guess, there were thousands and thousands of references. Bingo.
From a two-year-old press release of the San Francisco Chinese-American Association:
Native daughter Dorothy Zhang, an anchor for ABC-affiliate Channel 7 News, returned to her community yesterday as a judge for the Bay Area Miss Chinatown beauty pageant. Ms. Zhang, herself a winner of the pageant in 1988, said that the pageant was “a wonderful builder of self-confidence” and gave her the self-esteem to involve herself in broadcast journalism.
But she was no longer a broadcast journalist, according to a local news story.
Dorothy Zhang, the striking co-anchor for Channel 7 Evening News, made the surprise announcement on the air yesterday that she would be taking an indefinite leave of absence from the station. “I need to spend more time with my son,” she told viewers. “He’s changing every day, and I feel I need to be there to see the changes. Though I love my job, I cannot sacrifice watching my son grow up.”
The story was dated over four months before. Eight other stories said more or less the same thing.
Incidentally, I could see at least part of the reason for Dorothy Zhang’s success: the woman was stunning. Sculpted face with high cheekbones, taut skin, almond eyes. Her most recent pictures were her best, a combination both of the youth she’d shown in her early photos and the maturity of someone who’d grown into full professional confidence. In a word, flawless.
I double-checked the picture of Dorothy Zhang on the computer against the pictures of Pt 1, Pt 2, and all the others. Since the flesh was so distorted, I concentrated on bone structure and facial dimensions. None seemed to match Zhang’s picture.
After a half hour, the Google search was producing pretty picayune stuff—charity events and such—so I switched to LexisNexis to check out what the papers and magazines had to say. Two hours later, after my eyes had dried out and I felt disconnected from my body, I took a breather. By then, though, I had pieced together something of a biography for the “striking” Ms. Zhang.
She was born thirty-five years ago in San Francisco to parents who’d emigrated from southern China. Dad was a gift shop owner on Grant Avenue, mom stayed at home. One brother, a year older. She graduated from Galileo Senior High, went on to win the Bay Area Miss Chinese contest. Then to UC Berkeley, where she studied political science and Asian history. She spent a year working for an East Bay newspaper, then returned to Cal to their journalism school. Two more years working for newspapers in the area, before she broke into broadcast journalism as a reporter. From the look of it, her beat was just about everything. I found references to stories on real estate, political campaigns, snakeheads, and immigrant smuggling in Chinatown. Three years ago, Dorothy won the plum job of anchoring the weekend spot on Channel 7. A year later, she was warming the station’s co-anchor’s chair.
She married in grad school, an ear-nose-throat surgeon named Kendall Kim. They had a kid a year later. She divorced within two months of getting the anchor’s job. Dr. Kim, a little research showed, fled to Chicago.
Dorothy Zhang’s life was very publicly sprinkled through the web pages and databases; she even had a little fan club online. But something odd happened. Four months ago, after her announcement of a leave of absence, everything stopped. No charity events, no public appearances, no speeches. No mentions of death or trips to rehab. A few blogs wondered about her, but their interest only lasted for a couple weeks before even the most devoted Dorothy Zhang fans got tired and switched allegiance to another minor celeb.
The whole situation struck me as weird. And a little disturbing, too. How do you go from something to nothing? From the glare of TV lights to nonexistence?
And how was it that her name appeared in a folder with my name on it, on the storage device of a dead man?
31
I FLIPPED THROUGH THE PICTURES again, one after the other, struggling to make a diagnosis based on two dimensions and little else. By that time, I was liking some of the soft tissue cancers, the cancers of muscle and fibrous tissue. I was way out of my league on this, though. Cancer wasn’t my thing.
CDC was the natural place to call. I still had friends there, believe it or not, and could get a relatively quick read on the images. But I could get a quicker read in California. And I could put out feelers to see if this was happening in my backyard. If Brooke wouldn’t help, I knew someone who would.
On the Web, I found the number for the California Department of Health Services in the East Bay, and punched it into the phone. The operator patched me through.
“Ravinder Singh.”
“Ravi. Nate McCormick.”
There was a pause.
“Jesus Effing Christ, Dr. McCormick. You’re calling me.”
“I am, Dr. Singh.”
“Your raggedy-ass car leave you stranded in Grand Junction, or did you make it out here?”
“I’m out here.”
“And I bet you’ve been out here for two months now, and just finally got around to calling your old buddy.”
“I’ve been busy, Ravi.�
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“Doing what?”
“You know, kicking ass, taking names.”
“Man, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Way to go, EIS alumni.”
Ravi Singh had been one of my better friends at CDC. An EIS officer in my same year, he’d been with the National Center for Infectious Diseases, working on meningitis outbreaks in this country and in Benin. He was whip-smart, didn’t wear a turban, and had enough energy to light a small city. In an informal poll at the end of our tenure, Ravi was voted “Most Likely to Stroke Out Before Forty.” It didn’t help that he never exercised, ate only saturated fats, and, until he got the word from our bosses, smoked like a dragon.
“Ravi, I got some questions—”
“And the answer is yes, I’m still single, so feel free to give me her number—”
“I have some real questions.”
“This sounds serious.” He cleared his throat. “Hit me. I got answers. I am the answer man.”
“I have some pictures of women and—”
“Good, good. You finally discovered the power of the Internet. Hey, how’s things working out with that fox you came out here for?”
“Fantastic. Everything’s great. So I got these pictures and—”
“And when you saw the women, you became excited…I have to tell you, Nate, that’s normal.”
You can see the character of Ravi’s and my relationship.
I tried again. “The pictures are of women and men, Ravi. Eight women, two men. They show severe tumor-like involvement of the face. I only have head and neck shots—”
“Okay, so now we’re talking kimchi.”
“We’re talking kimchi.”
“Okay. Tumors on the face.”
“Some are just nodules, others look like frank tumors with involvement of the orbit, gums and teeth. Some are ulcerated. Distribution generally follows the NLF, around the eyes—”
“I’m not a dermatologist, man.”
“You have people there, though.”
“Why didn’t you call CDC?”
“I don’t want some people there to know what I’m doing.”
Ravi was silent a heartbeat, taking this in. “You going off the reservation?”
“I’m between jobs. Plus, I’m wondering if you guys picked up anything like this, if anything came over the transom from local docs or county health departments.”
“Hold on. You’re in luck. I sit right next to our in-house disgusting-skin maven.” I heard the phone hit the desk and then Ravi, in a full voice, say: “Yo, Monica, you get wind of any reports of lumpy-bumpy things popping up on faces?” There was a pause, then Ravi said, “Not acne, tumors.” Another pause, then he came back to the phone. “Hey, Nate, you sure they were tumors and not infectious?”
“I think they were tumors. Maybe with something like dioxin poisoning thrown in.” Dioxin was the substance that purportedly caused the disfigurement of Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president, a few years back.
Ravi belted, “Tumors with some dioxin thrown in.” A pause. “No?” He picked up the phone. “We haven’t heard anything.”
“Good.”
“You think it’s here?”
“If there was a cluster here, you guys would have picked it up. The pictures are…they’re pretty dramatic.”
“Yum. Send them.”
“As soon as I’m off the phone.”
“These pictures,” Ravi said, “where’d they come from?”
“A friend.”
“Ask him about ’em.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“He’s dead.”
There was a silence on the phone, and immediately I regretted what I’d said. Pictures of disease don’t necessarily arouse suspicion. Pictures of disease from a dead man do. “What’s going on here, McCormick?”
“I’ll fill you in when I can. Right now, I just need this little favor. Some diagnostic help, a little surveillance.”
Another lull in the conversation. Ravi, I assumed, had just realized the pros and cons of helping out his old pal. This was not a decision to be made lightly, and he knew it. As he said, I was off the res, and I hadn’t gone quietly.
“Ah, McCormick. Skin stuff gives me the creeps. I always start itching when I hear about these things.”
“That’s the crabs, Ravi. Watch what you do with your free time.”
He guffawed into the phone, and I was happy to have crossed back into chummy ball-busting. “Okay, keep us informed about tumor faces. And let’s get beer. I can’t believe you didn’t call before you needed something from me. It hurts, McCormick. It hurts.”
I hung up the phone, went back into the library to e-mail the pictures to Ravi and make him itch. Then I got into the car and drove north, to try and make someone sweat.
32
THE DRIVE TO TETRA SHOULD have taken me forty minutes, but took over an hour. Wanting to avoid any run-ins with a dragon-necked thug from central casting, I was more careful in my journey this time: parking lots were cut through, red lights run, double-backs doubled back.
Alex Rodriguez stood at the far end of the lot at Tetra. I pulled up in front of her and popped open the passenger-side door.
“I can spare about fifteen—”
“Get in,” I said.
She didn’t move.
“Get in,” I repeated. “I don’t want anyone to see us together.”
Something crossed her face I couldn’t read. I softened my voice. “Trust me, Alex. Just get in.”
After a beat, she did.
I tossed the envelope of pictures in her lap, then left the lot. “Look at those. Tell me if they seem familiar.”
“Oh my God,” she said, unsheathing the photos. “Oh my God. What is this?”
“That’s what I need to ask you. Paul left them for me.”
“I have no idea, Nate.”
“He didn’t say anything about this to you?”
“Of course not.” We stopped at a light and I leveled my eyes at her. “What? Oh, come on, Nate. I told you. We were just friends.”
A car—a big black American behemoth—rolled to a stop behind us. “Friends,” I repeated, keeping my eyes on the rearview now. There was no cross traffic, and I accelerated through the red light.
“What are you doing?” Alex yelped.
“Being paranoid. Nothing at Tetra like those?”
“These photos? Good Lord, no. What would make you think that?”
The black car hadn’t followed.
“Murph got those pictures from somewhere.”
“But not from Tetra. Slow down.”
“Aren’t they part of his cancer research?”
“No. Why would they be? He’s a basic scientist—he was a basic scientist. He never even touched a patient. Besides, he was working on cancers of the gut, not this.”
“Look at the pictures, Alex—” I careened onto the freeway, screeching the tires a little.
“I have been—Jesus! Are you trying to scare me with the driving?”
“I’m trying to scare you with the damned pictures,” I answered. “Whatever this is is bad. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where it is. All I know is that Paul wanted me to know about it.”
“Which doesn’t mean that Tetra had anything to do with it.”
“Why are you so sure of that?”
“Because I’ve been asking around. The police have been asking around.”
“You’ve been asking around?”
“Someone at your company is killed, you start poking around a little. At least I start to.” I ripped past a semi and Alex gripped the seat. “Don’t believe me, then. Go crawling around the company and my friendship with Paul. Waste your time if you want. Slow down!”
The sign for the next exit appeared, hanging over the center of the freeway, and I slanted us into the right lane, back toward Tetra. “Okay, Alex,” I said, slowing the car. “Like you said, Tetra had nothing to do with this.”
33
IN THE TETRA PARKING LOT, I dropped off one attractive woman and called another.
“Brooke, it’s me,” I said. “I checked Tetra to see if anyone there knew about the people with the tumors. They didn’t.” She gave no response. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. These people look awful. Not the kind of stuff you recover from.” Nothing. “You’ve got to be kidding me with the silent treatment.” Brooke was not kidding with the silent treatment. “Okay, cupcake, I have a question for you: You ever heard of a newscaster named Dorothy Zhang? She fell off the radar a few months ago. Doesn’t seem like there was any manhunt or anything, more like she just up and left.” Nothing. “Can you use your contacts and see if anyone knows anything?” I waited for any sign of life. “And I don’t want any questions.” She didn’t have any questions. “Good.”
Quiet except for the muted conversation of a couple of passing physicians.
“If you want to meet me…If you want to talk about things, I’ll be at the campus coffee shop in about an hour. I’ll wait there for you. We should talk about things.”
Brooke obviously didn’t want to talk about things, since she said nothing.
“My aortic aneurysm just dissected. I’m bleeding out right now.”
I couldn’t even hear breathing. There was a good chance Brooke had set the phone on her desk and I was chattering away at a couple of paper clips.
“If I live, I’ll call you from the hospital.”
One of the many problems with cell phones is that you can’t slam them down. But I hit the End button extra hard.
34
TEN YEARS AGO, WHEN I had that short-lived job at the place, the campus coffee shop was dark and cavelike, a strange venue to grab a cup of joe when the California sun glittered outside nine months out of the year. Now, however, it looked like even the CoHo wasn’t immune from a sublethal marketing virus that had softened university hosts around the country. Colleges boasted fully outfitted “fitness complexes,” “student centers” with big-screen TVs and plush couches, cafeterias with menus dreamed up by brand-name chefs. When I was an undergrad, we slept in mud huts and ate cockroaches. We studied by moonlight and wrote essays with blocks of charcoal. Really.
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