by Ann Benson
Janie couldn’t argue; he looked as if he might have been sick before he died, but not fatally sick. But the possibility that Ted had died of some other cause was something she didn’t care to consider; instead of simplifying things, it made her situation even more complex.
“This is getting very confusing,” she said. “He’s dead. She’s not here. There’s plague in the refrigerator next door. We know for sure that Caroline handled it; Ted certainly might have. It was in the lab; so was he. I don’t know what to do next,”
And how well did she know Caroline, after all? Could she have done this? Janie wondered. There was an undeniably dead man in her room, and Caroline was nowhere to be found. Until they found her, they wouldn’t know for sure what had happened. Janie knew that she and Caroline would be spending far more time in England than they’d originally planned if there was a question of wrongful death. The pit of her stomach started to lurch.
She looked around the room for anything that might sway her from the conclusion that there had been some criminal aspect to Ted’s demise. “Nothing jumps out at me and screams, ‘Evidence!’ ” she said. “I’m not even sure what I should be looking for. And I’m studying this stuff.” She went into the bathroom, where she found Caroline’s nightdress lying on the floor and the toilet seat up, flecks of spittle splashed all around the rim. Though she couldn’t feel the fabric through her gloves, she could tell from its weight that it was soaked with sweat.
She went back into the main room and showed the nightdress to Bruce. “I found this on the floor in the bathroom. It’s drenched. I wonder if she was sick too.”
She folded it neatly and laid it on the dresser. Out of the corner of her eye the refrigerator caught her attention. She looked at it more closely.
“Someone left the door of the refrigerator open,” she said. She looked inside the small unit. “And it’s a mess in here. Someone was looking for something.”
But Bruce had his own discovery near the bed. He had begun looking through Ted’s pockets and had found one of the vials.
He stood up and showed it to her. “Janie, look at this. It’s tetracycline.”
She looked down at the corpse. “Obviously it didn’t work,” she said. “And where’s the syringe? Why would he have the tetracycline with him and not have some way to administer it?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said. “Maybe it’s lying around here somewhere.”
They looked around on the floor and checked the wastebaskets, but saw nothing suspicious.
“He might be lying on top of it,” Janie said. She bent down and placed her two hands under the side of Ted’s body. “Give me a hand. Let’s roll him.”
“Should we be moving him? What if we’re disturbing evidence?”
“What if we’re missing evidence by not moving him?” Her voice was full of exasperation. “We can put him back in position when we’ve looked underneath.”
Reluctantly, Bruce helped her. They tipped the stiffening body up on its side and beneath it they found the syringe and another vial. Janie moved the two items out from beneath the body very gingerly with one hand, taking care not to touch them any more than necessary. Ted’s deadweight was heavy, and they were both sweating by the time they replaced his body in its original position.
Bruce handed Janie the partly filled vial of tetracycline, then picked up the other almost empty vial. “Look at this.”
She read the label on the vial and let out a long, low whistle. “This would give an entire troop of Boy Scouts some very sweet dreams for a day or two.”
Stuck to the vial he had given Janie was a single long red hair, obviously one belonging to Caroline.
Janie sat down on the bed, considering everything they knew. Her head ached and she rubbed her forehead. Ignoring the pain, she went through the evidence, listing it aloud. “We have the dead body of a man who looked sick but wasn’t sick enough to have died of his disease and who had no other overt signs of fatal injury. We have a missing and possibly sick woman. We have a half-full vial of an antibiotic and a nearly empty vial of a sedative. We have a syringe.”
“We have, in other words, nothing that makes any sense at all.”
“One thing makes sense to me,” she said. “Whatever happened in here was initiated by Ted.”
He came to Ted’s defense almost instantly. “Janie, how can you say that? There’s no way to tell who did what here.”
“Come on, Bruce, think about it! How is she supposed to get these drugs? She has no access to any of this stuff. They took my aspirin at the airport, for crying out loud!”
It’s true, he thought; Ted could just walk into the Institute’s medical office and take whatever he wanted, as long as he wasn’t too greedy about it.…
“I’ve been staying next door to her, we’ve been working together,” Janie continued, growing shrill, “and I can’t tell you how out of character this would be for her. She’s almost pathetically normal.” She took the vial of sedative from Bruce’s hand. “This is a class-five drug! She has no possible way to get hold of it.” She held it up in front of Bruce’s face. “And it’s almost gone! You can’t tell me that she planned all this, obtained the materials, pulled it off, and then ran!”
She picked up the soaked nightgown again. “And if you want evidence, check this out.” This time she tossed it at him; he missed it and it hit the floor. “Maybe Ted knew she was sick. Maybe he had something to do with it. Maybe he’s been sedating her and that’s why she didn’t answer the phone. She was probably out like a light.”
She could see the look of disbelief on Bruce’s face. “Then where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She could be anywhere. But if I woke up from a drug-induced sleep to find a dead man in my room, Td get the hell out as fast as I could.”
“All right, all right,” Bruce said, “you’ve got a point. Maybe there’s more here than what we’re seeing. But it’s all just so unfathomable.” He threw up his hands in disgust. “I haven’t got the faintest notion of what we should do now.”
“I think the first thing we should do is get out of this room. I can’t think anymore with this stink. It’s giving me a headache.” She thought about the ibuprofen in the toe of Caroline’s shoe and went to the closet. She opened the door and saw four neatly arranged pairs of shoes on the floor. As she was checking through each one, she remembered something Caroline had told her. With the bottle of ibuprofen in hand, she stood up again.
“If Caroline bolted, she bolted shoeless. I remember she told me she brought four pairs of shoes. There are four pairs in the closet. And she hasn’t had time to buy new ones, so she had to have been drugged or delirious. Maybe both,” she said.
Taking their evidence with them, they returned to Janie’s room. “My head is swimming,” she said. “There are just too many possibilities. But my primary concern is for Caroline. She’s probably out wandering around in a state of semidelirium, either from sickness or from shock at what’s happened to her. We’ve got to find her, either way.”
Bruce took on a troubled look. “You’re right,” he said, “but London is a pretty big place, Janie. We’re going to need help. And if she’s got plague, she’s probably incredibly contagious. Plague is a level-four biohazard. We have to call Biopol.”
“Wait a minute, Bruce. If it’s a level-four, you know they’ll shoot to kill if she tried to resist. She probably doesn’t have any idea what’s happening to her. She will resist, I assure you. And we don’t know if she’s got plague or not. It’s certainly a possibility, but it’s not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination. If we alert the Biocops, they’ll probably operate on the assumption that she does, and worry about it later. We can’t tell anyone.”
Bruce looked shocked. “What do you mean, we can’t tell anyone? We have to tell Biopol. If we suspect there’s bubonic plague loose in London, if there’s even the slightest possibility that it’s true, then we don’t have a choice!”
He headed for the telephone.
Janie moved toward him.
“Bruce, please, we might be wrong … they’ll kill her … we can’t let that happen if she’s not a threat.…”
His hand was on the receiver. “That’s the problem, Janie—we don’t know if she’s a threat. I don’t think that assuming the worst is an unreasonable position in this type of situation! Look what happened in the U.S. when reasonable assumptions were ignored in the case of the Outbreak—”
“That was different!”
“How was it different? It was a contagious disease with a short incubation period.…”
For a few more tense exchanges Bruce’s hand remained on the telephone. “Bruce, please,” Janie finally said, “I’m begging you. Please don’t.”
“Janie, I’m a public official in a position of responsibility and I have information that leads me to believe that the public is in jeopardy! What do you suggest I do?”
“Look,” she said frantically, “we can find out for sure. We have stuff we can test. We have access to one of the best labs in England, and we can go there right now and do it in a flash … then we’ll know! We won’t just be guessing anymore.”
“It’ll mean too long a delay. This should be taken care of immediately.”
“It won’t take more than an hour or two at most! Bruce, please listen to me.…” She picked up the nightdress and extended it toward him. “If we find Yersinia pestis on this nightdress, then we’ll call Biopol instantly. I won’t give you an argument. I just don’t want to see Caroline imprisoned for no reason. They might shoot her, for God’s sake … please just think about it before you do anything that might get her hurt.”
Finally his stony resistance to her plan melted. “All right,” he said. “But I have to tell you that I’m really opposed to this … if there’s bacteria on her nightdress, we call immediately.”
“Agreed,” Janie said with relief. It’ll buy me some time, she thought frantically. But what if it’s loaded with bacteria? What then?
She didn’t know. The thought of it being free of bacteria was no more appealing.
“Before we leave,” Bruce said, “we have to make sure no one is going to go into that room. And we have to take that piece of fabric out of the refrigerator in this room. We can’t run the risk of someone from housekeeping getting their hands on it.”
He went to the refrigerator and pushed the door open with the tip of his elbow. In the center of a wire shelf was the circle of fabric, wrapped in plastic. He removed it carefully, taking great care not to touch the shelf itself with his potentially pestilential hands. Janie took a sealable biosample bag out of her briefcase and Bruce dropped the wrapped fabric into the bag. She put the nightdress in another plastic bag.
She removed her gloves, turning them inside out as she did, and Bruce followed suit. Janie set hers down on a piece of paper. “Put your gloves on here,” she said. “I’m going to burn them.”
“Good idea,” he said, and did so; she wrapped the paper around the contaminated gloves and placed the entire crumpled assembly inside a water glass. Then she opened her window and set the glass on the ledge. With one match she lit the paper, which caught immediately and burned brightly.
Without warning, the glass cracked from the molecular strain of the sudden heat. It broke into two neat pieces, one of which began to tumble into the room from the window ledge. Bruce leapt forward to catch it, exhibiting surprising athletic skill as he broke the fall of the glass with his right hand. Then he said, “Ow!” and let the hot glass fall onto the carpet. In the center of his palm, Janie saw a half-moon-shaped burned area.
She rushed to his side and took hold of his hand. “Are you all right?” she asked.
He grimaced. “Not really!” he said through his gritted teeth. “It hurts like a sonofabitch!”
She looked to be sure that the fire had extinguished itself and that nothing else had caught fire when the glass fell. “Come into the bathroom and run some cold water on that,” she said to Bruce.
The welt was red and angry, and Janie knew it would be even more painful when the initial shock wore off. She cleaned it and bandaged it as well as she could, then took another latex glove from her briefcase and put it on over the bandage.
“Sit down for a few moments,” she said, and he complied without resistance. “I’m just going to call downstairs.” She picked up the phone and pressed the number for the front desk. As he fought off the pain of his burned hand, Bruce heard her say, “This is Caroline Porter in Room 708. I’d like to ask that the housekeeping staff stay out of my room for a while. I’ve got some research papers spread around and I don’t want anyone to disturb them. I’ll put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle.” The desk clerk said something Bruce couldn’t hear, then Janie said, “Thanks very much,” and hung up the phone.
“Okay,” she said, and quickly put both the fabric circle and Caroline’s nightdress into her briefcase. “Now let’s get going.”
“There’s one small problem,” Bruce said.
“What?” Janie said. “We’ve covered everything. The room, the fabric circle …”
“It’s none of those things,” Bruce said, still grimacing. “We won’t be able to get into the lab.”
“Why not?” Janie almost shrieked. Her plan was about to crumble; she could feel it coming.
“I need to use my right hand to open the lab door. With this burn, it won’t read properly. Ted and Frank are”—he stopped and corrected himself—“were the only others with unlimited access. We’ll have to get a security guard to open it for us.”
“Do we want a guard seeing us go in there?”
“I don’t think we have much choice.”
She could feel it all unraveling. Then an idea came to her; she surprised herself by even thinking it.
“We’ll take Ted with us,” she said.
“Come on, Janie, this is no time for jokes. How are we going to do that?”
“I used to be a surgeon, remember? We’re only going to take the part we need.”
And before Bruce could recover enough to speak, she was poking around in her briefcase for the knife she kept in her field kit.
She left him there with his jaw hanging open, and went to do what she did best, thinking how good it would feel to have something resembling a scalpel in her hands again.
There was nothing they could do to completely mask the vile smell of Ted’s hand, and in keeping with the rest of the day’s luck, the London traffic was bumper-to-bumper when Janie and Bruce raced out of the hotel lobby.
As they hurried to the nearest Underground station, the heavens opened. They just managed to catch an outgoing train. It was crowded with homebound commuters, most of them dripping wet, and there were no seats. The pungent smell of wet wool rose up from dripping overcoats all around them, but inevitably people began to move away from Bruce and Janie, whose hidden cargo was quite a bit more fragrant.
At the beginning of the ride they stood holding overhead straps to keep from falling, wobbling back and forth as the train pulled away from the station and gathered speed. As the ride smoothed out, the rush of adrenaline subsided and shock began to set in. A numbing surge of dread rushed through Janie and she bit her lip to keep her tears in check; misty-eyed, she looked up at Bruce and found him staring at her, the same look of horror on his face, the look of dear God what have we done.
She looked back down at the briefcase. There’s a severed hand in there, she thought, a hand I once shook in greeting … a hand I watched smoothing the hair of its former owner, not some medical school plastic part, but a real human hand that’s signed a Mother’s Day card or two.…
Finally a seat came available and Janie sat down wearily, shaking from the horror of her own thoughts. She left the briefcase on the floor at Bruce’s feet. She looked up at him and caught his eye again, then nodded at the briefcase almost imperceptibly, indicating that he should keep watch over it. He nodded his acknowledgment.
The train sped closer and closer to the I
nstitute; there were just a few more stops until they reached it. Bruce’s hand was throbbing from the burn, and for one brief moment he gave in to the pain and closed his eyes. It didn’t take long for a young local predator to notice that the bag was unwatched. The teenager stood up and walked closer to Bruce as the train neared a station, his eyes nervously darting all around to see who might be observing. His nose was too far gone from snorting various white powders to notice the offensive smell wafting up from the briefcase, and as the train ground to a stop, he grabbed the case’s leather handle and leapt toward the opening door.
As she watched the boy, the bag, and its toxic contents fly out the opening, Janie felt the hot bile of fear rise up in her gorge. Her heart pounded as adrenaline poured into her bloodstream. She jumped up and gave chase, calling out to Bruce as she left the train. He jerked to attention from the commotion and joined in after them, just making it out the door before it closed. The thief bounded over the turnstile as if he were running hurdles at a track meet, and Bruce stared in awe as his middle-aged companion did exactly the same, never missing a step in her crazy pursuit.
She couldn’t take the time to look back, but Janie could feel that Bruce was losing ground and falling behind. Suddenly, she felt terribly vulnerable and small; I can’t stop now to wait for him, she thought, her horror growing, I’ll either catch this guy on my own or not at all.
Three miles a day for the last ten years … this is the payback.… She ordered herself to run faster, and forced her legs to pump harder. Her fitness notwithstanding, she was no match for the lightfooted young man she pursued. Janie knew she would soon begin to lose steam, but she didn’t dare call out for help. Try explaining to a Biocop why the briefcase they had recovered for her contained a severed, pestiferous hand. Or why, despite the obvious danger, she had pursued it so vigorously. As her feet pounded rhythmically on the wet cobblestones, in shoes not suited to the task, she saw the boy gain ground. He was the master of this game and clearly in his element, and Janie knew that unless something unexpected happened soon, he would surely win the race.