The Pinocchio Syndrome

by David Zeman

  “To make sure your husband doesn’t get into the White House,” the woman said.

  Susan thought for a moment. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I love my country.”

  Susan thought this over.

  “Are you part of a terrorist group?” she asked.

  The woman gave a short, cold laugh. “Before this is over you’ll understand how funny that question is,” she said.

  “What has he done that’s so terrible?” Susan asked.

  The woman looked at her. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “No,” Susan said. “I don’t.”

  “I thought you didn’t,” the woman said. “It’s amazing that you can live in such close proximity to evil, and see nothing.”

  “Evil?” Susan asked.

  “Finish your breakfast. We’ll talk later.”

  “I want to talk now,” Susan said. “I need to know why I’m here.”

  “You’re here to hear the truth. That takes time.”

  The woman got up and left. Susan didn’t see her again for many hours.

  47

  —————

  JOE KRAIG first met Michael Campbell when they were classmates at Choate. They found themselves at the same table in the dining hall one day and struck up a conversation. Both were tennis fans, and they talked about their favorite tennis players. At the end of the meal they agreed to play tennis that weekend. They played two sets, which were closely contested. In the end Michael’s quick reflexes and instinct for the game triumphed over Kraig’s speed and power.

  After that day they were friends. Later they competed together on the track team, until Kraig abandoned track for wrestling. By the time Michael’s back problem was diagnosed, Kraig was close enough to visit him regularly in the hospital.

  The two were temperamentally suited to each other. Both were well behaved and kept their own counsel. Both were hardworking athletes and high academic achievers. Kraig was attracted by Michael’s charm and physical courage. Michael liked Kraig for his honesty. They hung out together and told each other the normal things teenaged boys tell. They often studied together.

  They double-dated. Michael was there when Kraig broke up with his girlfriend, a pretty girl named Joy who went to Rosemary Hall. Kraig was there when Michael lost his virginity in the backseat of Rafe Johnston’s 1973 Audi. He could not remember the girl’s name, but he remembered the callow, frightened look on Michael’s face when he said later, “I didn’t know it would feel like that. I hope she’s not pregnant.”

  One spring vacation Kraig came home to the Campbell house on the Chesapeake Bay and spent an enjoyable week with Judd and Margery and Ingrid. Stewart was off at college and had a different spring vacation schedule.

  Judd treated Kraig like an adopted son. Kraig took to Margery by instinct, for Margery was much more caring and maternal than Kraig’s mother had ever been.

  After that spring Kraig felt a special bond with the Campbells. He wrote to Margery and sometimes spoke to her on the phone when Michael called her.

  When Margery committed suicide Kraig felt as though he had lost a mother.

  It was only natural for Kraig and Michael to room together at Harvard. By now Kraig felt as though he had known Michael all his life. Then Michael’s second spine problem came along, and with it Susan. Kraig took a backseat in Michael’s life, as male friends always do when a woman enters the picture.

  Kraig watched on television as Michael won his two Olympic gold medals. He found it hard to believe that his old friend was capable of such amazing physical courage. He realized there were things about Michael that even he, a close friend, did not know. Michael was not an ordinary person. He was a hero.

  In the years since then Kraig had rarely seen Michael without Susan present. This necessarily circumscribed their relationship. Kraig was alarmed by his own feelings for Susan, which had not dissipated when he married Cathy. After his divorce he saw the Campbells less and less.

  It was because of his long familiarity with Michael that Kraig had not taken seriously the admonition of Susan’s crank caller to ask Michael about “what happened at Harvard.” Kraig had been Michael’s roommate at Harvard. He had gone drinking with Michael in Cambridge, gone on double dates with him, picked up girls with him in Boston. He had listened to Michael’s complaints about his demanding father, helped him get drunk the night he found out he would need another operation, watched him work with maniacal concentration on his rehabilitation. He felt he knew Michael Campbell as well as anyone in the world. Except Susan, of course.

  Rightly or wrongly, Kraig had reassured Susan about the crank phone calls and given the matter no more thought. In retrospect he wished he had tapped her telephone. If the crank caller had anything to do with Susan’s disappearance, Kraig would have had a taped voice to help him in his search.

  But as a federal agent Kraig knew that you do not tap the home telephone of a United States senator without a powerful reason. If Michael had found out about such a thing and taken it amiss, the consequences for Kraig would have been serious.

  The phone was tapped now, of course, because the agents were waiting for ransom calls. But Kraig feared the people who had abducted Susan would be too smart to use the phone for a ransom demand.

  In any case, the voice on Susan’s phone might well have been just a crank. The enigmatic reference to Harvard was probably the delirium of a telephone nutcase. It was well known that Michael had gone to Harvard.

  There was nothing to do but pick up the pieces where they lay. And that meant following Susan’s trail to the Green Lake cabin in the hope of finding a witness who saw her being followed. In the meantime the intelligence agencies would scour the ranks of terrorists, militiamen, and political radicals, hoping for the best. And they would wait for a ransom demand.

  It had now been four days since Susan disappeared. The combined work of several thousand agents had brought no results. Susan had vanished without a trace.

  Maybe, Kraig mused, shehad run away. Maybe she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.

  Kraig shook his head: Susan was too loyal to Michael. She would never run away.

  Maybe someone bad had taken her. Someone without a political motive. That was the worst thought of all. Casual rapists and killers came in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Many of them had left no trail behind them in official records, as political terrorists had. Such a man could have Susan tied up in the back of a van right now, and all the federal agents in the country would not know where to look for him.

  Kraig closed his eyes as he struggled to banish the image from his mind. If Susan died, a great part of his world would die with her. And he would never be able to share his loss with a living soul.

  48

  —————

  April 2

  KAREN HAD done her usual advance work before leaving for Boston.

  She had sent e-mails to Boston reporters she had known over the years, asking them to check their files for instances of unexplained illness in the Boston area during the past fifteen to twenty years. The responses were interesting. Karen made an appointment with a public health officer at the Commonwealth’s center for disease control. She also made some inquiries about events at Harvard during Michael Campbell’s time there.

  She flew from D.C. in the early morning so as to allow herself a full day of work. Spring was a long way away in Boston, but there were joggers along the walkways by the river, and sailboats on the Bay. Karen recognized everything. She had grown up in this city, and perhaps inherited some of its inhabitants’ ingrained caution and stubbornness. She liked the place. But she knew she would never live there again. Too many bad memories.

  The national manhunt was big news. It blared from every newspaper and magazine and from every television screen Karen saw on her way through Logan airport. When she checked in at a Sleep Inn not far from the airport, the face of Susan Campbell was on the TV in the lobby.

  “Where do you think sh
e is?” Karen asked the young woman behind the motel’s registration desk.

  “The Bahamas,” the girl smiled. “Soaking up some sun and trying to forget everything back home.”

  “No way,” threw in the male desk clerk. “She’s dead.”

  “Do you think so?” Karen asked.

  “Sure,” the young man said. “You can’t hide a woman like that. Whoever took her killed her right away and either buried her or dumped her in the ocean. Something like that. Wherever she is, she’s dead.”

  “Mark, you’re crazy,” said the female clerk. Karen sensed the young man was needling his colleague. Yet his logic was persuasive.

  Karen spent a long day investigating Michael Campbell’s years at Harvard. She found nothing that did not accord with the official history of his college years. He was a 3.9 student with a fine attendance record. Refused membership in the Porcellian Club, he belonged to a couple of lesser clubs and participated in intramural sports until his second back operation, which took place at the end of his junior year. He met Susan on the eve of his surgery, and their romance began when she visited him in the hospital and later helped him with his rehabilitation.

  After his surgery Michael became a varsity swimmer, and his times in the freestyle and breaststroke were so remarkable that he began training for the Olympics. Susan continued as his companion and informal coach, timing his swim practices, rubbing his sore back, and, probably, sharing his bed.

  The rest, of course, was history. Michael Campbell charged through his rehabilitation and went on to win two Olympic gold medals. The famous image of him being helped from the pool by his teammates became the symbol of that entire Olympics.

  But that was later, when Michael was at Columbia Law. The question Susan Campbell’s caller had asked was “What happened atHarvard ?”

  Michael’s college personality was typical of a future politician. He studied hard, got good grades, was involved in student politics, and avoided the more dangerous pursuits of male undergraduates—drugs, whores, and the like. Except for the back operations and his swimming career, his was a boring story. His friends found him loyal, friendly, trustworthy. There was nothing to him except ambition, hard work, and a well-developed talent for making friends.

  Karen had also researched Michael’s earlier years, which were scarcely more interesting. He was the last and best-loved child of Judd Campbell, a hugely successful conglomerator who was unfaithful to his wife and demanding of his children. Judd’s overbearing personality had caused a rift with his older son Stewart, who was not on speaking terms with his father. The only sister, Ingrid, was an overweight spinster who seemed to have had no love life at all, and who devoted herself to her widowed father and to Michael, whom she regarded as a surrogate son.

  Michael was the family “star,” the beloved youngest son whom everybody fiercely protected. By all accounts he had also been his mother’s favorite, before her suicide.

  Somehow this flat, dull story line made Karen’s antennae quiver with suspicion. No one’s life was that boring. Everyone had a skeleton in a closet somewhere. Michael Campbell was too good to be true.

  Ask him what happened at Harvard. The voice on the phone at Susan Campbell’s Georgetown house haunted Karen. There was something hidden behind Michael’s well-documented career as a Harvard student. Her journalist’s nose had never so clearly scented a story.

  But she could find no answer to the riddle.

  Remembering Grimm’s admonition to “follow the trail of the sick,” Karen made calls to her reporter friends, who informed her of a number of unusual or unexplained outbreaks of illness in the greater Boston area during the period in question. Most of what she heard was useless: an outbreak of food poisoning that turned out to have been caused by tainted seafood caught on the Maine coast after a toxic waste spill; an epidemic of typhoid that was, thankfully, contained and stopped by the aggressive and efficient Commonwealth public health authority. A remarkable outbreak of phosphate poisoning caused by a pesticide company whose formula was mixed too strong.

  These were interesting public health stories, worthy of documentation by the great Berton Roueché had he still been alive to write about them. But they were not the sort of thing Karen was looking for. They were easily explained. They were mysteries that had already been solved.

  The exception came to her attention when she visited Gavin Doering, a physician at the department of health who had worked as a pathologist at the chief medical examiner’s office during the period in question. A native Bostonian, Doering was a walking encyclopedia of fact and anecdote about major and minor outbreaks of illness in the city since the 1950s. A smiling, somewhat fussy man in his sixties with snow-white hair and bright, inquisitive eyes, he greeted Karen with a look that told her he was not interested in women. Then he gave her a chair and a cup of coffee from the percolator in his outer office.

  “I appreciate your finding time to see me, Doctor,” Karen said.

  “Frankly,” he told her, “I didn’t expect to get questions from a reporter about the episode. It was a long time ago. It’s old news. The only interesting thing about it, I think, is how baffling it was.”

  “Baffling in what way?”

  “Well, we investigated it every way we knew how, and nothing in medical science at the time shed any light on it at all. It’s one of my greatest failures.”

  Karen nodded thoughtfully. “On the phone you said the victims were all girls.”

  Dr. Doering nodded. “All girls, all young. About eighteen, if I remember correctly. They came from communities in the Greater Boston area. They didn’t seem to have a great deal in common except their sex and age. And, of course, the symptoms.”

  “What were the symptoms?” Karen asked.

  He looked at a file on the desk before him. “Cognitive dysfunction,” he said. “Amnesia. Motor dysfunction. Difficulty with language, suggesting aphasia. Coma, in several of the cases. Permanent disability in the rest. Of the fourteen we saw, eight are dead. The rest are in nursing homes or living at home. I’ve followed them up to some extent, checking in once or twice a year. There’s been no change in any of the cases, except for one girl who died a couple of years ago, apparently of an organic problem unrelated to her original trouble.”

  “How were the initial symptoms discovered?” Karen asked.

  “The girls were found in various locations around the city,” the doctor said. “One was discovered on a bus. Another at an MTA station. Another was lying on the ground in a public park. Most were noticed by strangers. The police were called, or the parents. The girls were confusional, wandering, talking gibberish. Most of them ended up in the emergency room and then were taken to hospitals for observation.”

  “And the results were . . . ?” Karen asked.

  “Inconclusive.” He shook his head. “Their symptoms were suggestive of any number of things. Drug overdose was at the head of the list, but we couldn’t find anything in their blood or tissues to suggest that. Exposure to some sort of organic or inorganic toxin was next in line, but we drew a blank there as well. Blood and tissue tests ruled out infection. We even gave some thought to the notion of a bizarre mass hysteria, but there was no evidence to support that theory, so we gave up. In the end the outbreak remained completely unexplained. There was concern in public health quarters for a while, because if it spread—whatever it was—we had no way of stopping it. But after that first year there were no more cases reported.”

  “Did you do cerebral angiography on the comatose ones?” Karen asked. “Brain imaging?”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “I see you’ve done your homework. Yes, we did. We couldn’t find a brain or vascular lesion. It was quite a mystery. Still is,” he added.

  Karen nodded ruminatively.

  “What was the time frame of the episode?” she asked.

  “Let me see . . .” The doctor flipped through the pages of his file. “About seven months, from October to April of that year.”

 
; There was a silence. Karen was studying the doctor’s face.

  “Did you consider foul play?” she asked.

  The doctor nodded. “Absolutely. Almost from the beginning. The girls appeared drugged when they were found. The toxic connection seemed obvious. We worried about terrorism. Remember the Tylenol killer? That sort of thing. But as I say, the tests we did came back normal.”

  “No official explanation was given?” Karen asked.

  “No. What could we say? We simply had no clue as to what had caused the illness.”

  Karen was taking notes. After a moment she looked up.

  “Tell me,” she asked. “Did you do the routine tests that are performed on crime victims? For instance, did you look for evidence of rape? Semen?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We had no evidence for that kind of connection. And frankly, we weren’t quick enough to think along those lines. By the time we tested the girls, they had already been in the hospital for a number of days.”

  Karen nodded.

  “Have you kept in touch with the families?” she asked.

  “Loosely, yes.” The doctor shook his head. “It’s painful. The circumstances are so tragic. Some of the families never recovered.”

  “Would you mind if I visited them myself?” Karen asked.

  The doctor’s eyes narrowed. “To what purpose?”

  “To get their reaction,” Karen said in her blandest voice. “To see how they’re coping.”

  Dr. Doering was silent for a long moment, thinking her request over.

  “You’re not after anybody in the medical profession, are you?” he asked.

  “Not at all. I’m just doing research on public health topics, with emphasis on the effects on families,” Karen said. “I’m not out to embarrass the medical profession. You can read my past articles, Doctor. I’m a great fan of your profession.” Karen was not lying. She considered public health professionals to be some of the most honest and selfless people she had ever known.

  “It’s in the public record in any case,” she prodded, “but I thought I would ask you.”