Two
Lee wore a tight, pale-green T-shirt and second-skin jeans. The T-shirt did not reach the top of the jeans and revealed a line of tan flesh. A large pink bag dangled from her hand. Tears rolled down her cheeks, one at a time, leaving dark-lined tracks.
“Dead?” Harry asked.
“Yes. I mean…don’t know. She wasn’t breathing. She looked dead.”
Harry raised his arms to pull her close to comfort her. She turned away. He dropped his arms to his side. “Ready to go?” he asked.
She nodded. The bouncer glared at Harry. Behind them, the sounds of the bar returned to normal. Strobe lights flashed through the air. The music boomed. It was disorienting, as if a woman had not just died, as if death were an everyday event.
Harry hurried out the door and felt relief at the cool air on his face. The sun had set. Black clouds spat fat drops on the dark macadam. The two wound through the lot until they reached his car. Getting in, he grimaced at the fast-food litter on the floor. The old Chevy was no prize. The blue velvet seats looked worn.
“Sorry about your roommate,” he said, wanting to break the silence.
The sign for the Bare Nights Club blinked, casting an occasional shadow across the sharp lines of her face. She finally nodded. “We weren’t that close. I mean, we’re all pretty close at the club, but I wasn’t any closer to her than to anyone else. She was always going out. She had a boyfriend, and then there was Elaine. I almost never saw Susie. But it wasn’t like she was bad or anything. We were just different.” She hugged her arms across her chest.
Harry turned the key, backed up, and then pulled forward into the entrance to the six-lane street. “Which way now?”
“Down Buford till you pass Clairmont, and then it’s the first apartments on the left.”
“You don’t drive?”
“No.” She turned her body to the window, her back to him.
He focused on the road. The lights stayed green. Lee stared out the window. They drove down a street of plastic signs all sporting references to the Georgia Games. The food stores had Oriental characters on their windows. Atlanta had become an international city.
Minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot and at her direction angled into a space before her apartment. He felt like he should say something. “Uh, I enjoyed—”
“Thanks for the ride,” she interrupted. “Come back and see me dance again. OK?” She smiled briefly, a stray light to her previous radiant grin.
“Yeah.” He shrugged and watched as she ran up the concrete steps. Her jeans were tight. She slid in a key, turned the doorknob, and disappeared into a lighted hallway. The closing door was white with a corroded bronze kickplate. A shutter dangled from an upstairs window.
No, he would not go back to see her dance. In fact, he wished he’d never gone. As far as a story, to hell with it, the editor would never buy it. He put the car in reverse and then slammed on the brakes as Lee burst from the apartment screaming. Harry’s car shuddered to a halt.
She yanked open the car door and vaulted in next to him. “Go—get out of here!”
She sounded near hysteria. She slammed the door shut.
Two men—a thick, meaty-looking one and then a thinner man—emerged from the entrance to her apartment.
“Wait a—”
“Now,” she screamed at him.
He let off the brake. The men raced toward the car, the bigger man circling behind. Harry hit the accelerator. The car surged back. Cursing, Harry shifted to drive. The transmission groaned. He swung the wheel to the side, and the car pulled into the parking lot’s exit. In the rearview mirror, he saw the thinner man pointing.
There was something dark in his hand—a gun?
“Holy shit, what the—”
Harry floored the accelerator and stared wide-eyed at a tractor trailer speeding down from the left.
The truck drew closer. The Chevy hesitated. The breath froze in Harry’s chest as the car bolted from the parking lot into the street. Brakes shrieking, the truck bore down. The high bumper grew immense. Harry yanked the steering wheel in the other direction, and the Chevy slewed from the oncoming lane and almost into the side of a panel truck that sheared off to the left. Horns raged. Harry flattened the gas pedal. They sped down the road.
Over the top of the hill, he slid left into a residential neighborhood, drove a couple blocks, and slammed the car to a stop under a streetlight.
“Jesus.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead and then glared at the dancer. “What the hell is happening here?”
Her expression went rigid.
He twisted around to face her. “I damn near got killed. What is going on?”
“Don’t know,” she shrieked back at him.
“The hell you don’t.”
“I’m telling the truth. I walked in, and they came running down the stairs. Never seen them before.”
He took a deep breath and held it for a moment. The rain pattered on the roof. His heart stopped pounding. He realized his hands still gripped the steering wheel, and he pulled his white-tipped fingers loose from the hard plastic. He wasn’t going anywhere until he knew what was going on. “OK then,” he said. “Let’s start with, how come you were in such a hurry to leave the club?”
“I was scared. That was my roommate that…died.”
“I know that,” he said. “But could the men in your apartment have been friends of hers?”
“No…I mean…I don’t know. I’ve never seen them, but she went out a lot. I didn’t know all her friends.”
“Then why’d you run from them?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she spat out her words. “What would you have done? They were in my apartment.”
He stopped and thought about that a moment. “Did one of them have a gun?” he finally said.
She faced him; the fire in her eyes turned to a question. “I didn’t see a gun.”
“Better call the police.”
“No, please, just take me back to the club.”
No police? He narrowed his eyes. If it had been him, he would be on the phone now. But then, maybe it was different for her. The police often closed the dance places. Or was there something else happening here?
“OK.” He turned the car around in an azalea-lined driveway and headed back for Buford Highway and the club. The adrenaline had left his blood. He felt beat, empty inside.
“I didn’t mean to scream at you.” Her voice had returned to normal, and the corners of her lips worked at a smile.
Cars sped past him on the left. He stayed in the slow lane. “You were scared. Guess I sounded like a prosecuting attorney. Don’t blame you.”
Her smile grew suddenly wide. “Just let me off at the door to the club. Those men must have known Susie. How else could they get inside? The door was locked. I’ll just stay tonight with one of the other girls. Tomorrow, I’ll go back over.”
“OK,” he said and studied her. The smile looked a little too wide; the change in expression too fast for him to believe her. She was brushing him off. Up ahead angry red lights bounced off the clouds. An ambulance and a police car were parked next to the club door. A policeman stood by his car, radio in hand.
Lee grabbed Harry’s shoulder. “Don’t stop.”
Harry drove by the club and felt a twinge in his stomach. “Something you haven’t told me?”
“No. I don’t want to talk to the police. Susie was fine today. She wasn’t sick or anything. There’s nothing I could say. They’d just hassle me ’cause I’m a dancer.”
He frowned and thought about that. She was probably right. Still…They topped the hill beside the outlet mall, leaving the club behind. He glanced over at her. Her jaw was set hard; her eyes, wide and staring. She looked frightened.
“You could stay at my place,” he said.
She moved closer to the
door. “Look, just ’cause I work at that place doesn’t mean I’m some kind of whore. It’s a job. That’s all. I don’t even know you.”
“I’ve got a couch in the living room. You can sleep there. That’s all I meant,” he said and wondered why he had. Whatever was going on, this girl seemed trouble. Then, how could it hurt to offer a place to stay for one night? Besides, he rationalized to himself, where there’s trouble, there’s a story.
He turned onto Shallowford and wound down the dark street. A few driveways and the entrances to apartment complexes broke the solid line of the curb. She stared at him as he drove. “I’m quite good at defending myself.”
He shrugged. “You won’t have to.”
From the corner of his eyes, he saw her relax and slump down into the seat. “You never know,” she said. “People really do think…”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Guess I could wait and go back to the club, but I’d just like to get somewhere and sit down and not have to worry. I feel so…”
“That’s fine. I won’t bother you.” He took Interstate 85 up to the Perimeter and then the Stone Mountain Freeway. A car pulled up close behind him. He tensed.
The headlights were blinding in the mirror. Was it the men from the apartment? There were two people in the front seat. It was hard to see over the glare, but they looked like men. Harry accelerated. The distance between the cars grew, but not by much.
He turned off at the Stone Mountain Village exit. The car behind followed. He considered turning again and decided against it. Cars often followed close in Atlanta. The interstates had become combat lanes for the aggressive.
Ahead, the metal towers on top of Stone Mountain shone against the dark clouds. Traffic was light in the Village. The rain started to pour. The car behind them went straight when Harry pulled into his apartment complex. He stared after it.
The car kept going, and he sighed with relief. Parking under the bare branches of the dogwood tree in front of his apartment, he got out and locked the car.
The neighbor’s calico cat hungrily eyed them from behind the next-door apartment’s living-room window. Harry fumbled with the lock and then ushered Lee into the townhouse and closed the door. The air felt warm and smelled of dirty clothes and burned TV dinners. She stopped on the entrance mat, taking in the long, narrow living room with the small dining table at its far end. The room was sparsely furnished.
She sniffed. “Don’t you ever open the windows?” Without asking permission, she walked over to the nearest one and opened it. “It’s too stuffy in here.”
Harry blinked. She ignored him. Window cracked open, she prowled the room, picking up books and magazines, closing all the curtains and continuing to ignore him.
“You read too much,” she finally said, apparently summing up his life and finding it lacking.
“Yeah.” Shaking his head, he went to the kitchen. “Want a drink?”
“No, don’t drink.” She settled herself in his favorite chair. “I’d really like to watch TV, something mindless.”
He turned on the set, drank a martini, tried to read with the noise, and finally gave up and went upstairs. She paid no attention to him. Maybe she was in shock.
Later, when he came downstairs to have a drink of orange juice, he saw her stretched out on the couch, a green afghan wrapped around her and a blond wig sitting on top of a folded pair of jeans on the corner table. Her hair was thick, jet black, and shortly cropped. She looked sound asleep. He watched her sleep-softened face for a moment, enjoying the beauty of her.
In the morning, she was gone.
Thomas Rendon, MD, sat up in bed, yawned, and stretched. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and angular features. He ran a hand across his forehead, pushing the blond hair from his eyes. The bedroom was large. Stapled papers, copies of research articles, covered every flat surface. He rubbed his eyes. He shouldn’t have stayed up so late last night. Not that he had a hangover. He’d been the designated driver of the group of partiers from the Centers for Disease Control. Still, he’d been out until three in the morning and now it was eight thirty. At thirty-five he was beginning to feel too old for that. Yet single with no regular girlfriends, he liked to go out with his new coworkers at the CDC.
Then he remembered and hurried to the shower. There’d been a call from his old roommate in med school. An unusual sudden death had occurred in Fulton County.
Out of the shower, Rendon dressed quickly while he scanned the note he had stuffed in his coat pocket the afternoon before. The medical examiner had first noticed the case. The deceased had been young and healthy, yet the heart was definitely pathologic. There was gross enlargement of all four cardiac chambers, particularly the right atrium and ventricle, with flabby myocardium throughout most of the walls.
He glanced down the page. Fulton had done a microscopic analysis of the heart muscle. It revealed excessive fluid between the layers of muscle tissue. There was also a marked infiltration of inflammatory cells—he stopped, held the paper closer—predominantly mononuclear cells with relatively few neutrophils.
That was the key.
The mononuclear cells could suggest chronic illness, though unlikely in a young, healthy male. Or the cells could be a sign of an acute viral condition. But which virus?
The phone rang. He picked it up and frowned. There had been more deaths overnight that fit the pattern of sudden death: a male jogger, a female ad executive at an exercise place, and “an exotic dancer.” The meeting with his old roommate had been upgraded. It was now an official request from state health for a CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer to investigate the cause of the deaths.
Rendon was wanted downtown by ten and at the office before that.
On the floor in a huddled lump was the Georgia Games T-shirt he’d worn the night before. He picked it up and threw it at the clothes basket. The games were getting close. Soon, Atlanta would be swarming with athletes. He paused and brushed the hair from his eyes again. From what he’d heard of these deaths, it struck people while they exercised: a disaster with athletes practicing for their events, if the cause of death was communicable—a big if.
He dismissed the notion. An unknown virus was only one explanation for the deaths. Besides, he’d heard of no other such pattern around the Southeast, and he would have heard.
A number changed on the digital clock next to his bed. With a bit of an anxious hollow in his gut, he went to the closet and shoved his arms into a blue sports coat. He found a tie that matched.
When he arrived at work, there was a note on his desk. Another case: a man had died late last night. He’d been “exercising” too, apparently in the wrong bedroom.
Three
Atlanta. Born of a railroad intersection, now the Georgia sun glares off glassed-in office towers and looming hotels. Squeezed between the public hospital and the police department in the dense heart of the city is Georgia State. Like an old farmhouse, the university has grown by the patchwork addition of new buildings to old. Between classes the students pour from the wide, airy walkways of the new construction into the dark, narrow stretches of the old.
Clutching the straps of her pink bag, Lee slipped through the crowd that filled the narrow, linoleum-tiled hall. The morning classes passed quickly. Lee had sat in the back row. She remembered nothing the professor had said. The night’s events had crashed down on her, leaving her numb.
“Ree?”
It took Lee a moment to recognize her real name. She turned to see Denise, clad in a gray Georgia State sweatshirt, prefaded jeans, and Nikes.
“Ready for that math test?” Denise said.
“Huh…yeah,” Ree finally managed.
Denise crooked her eyebrows. “Something the matter?”
“No, I’m fine. Just in a hurry.”
“Sure? You don’t look so good.”
“Yes.”
“Well, see you.” Denise turned and with a frown disappeared into the cafeteria.
Ree grimaced. She couldn’t risk friends, not if she wanted to keep her two lives separate. Feeling suddenly stifled by the cramped hall with its echoing voices, Ree pushed her way to the door. Outside, the wind gusted and flapped a Georgia Games banner. She zipped up the jacket she’d borrowed from Harry’s closet. She forced herself to focus on the present. She’d get food, go to the park, eat, and then go back to her apartment. Whoever had broken in would be…gone?
Determined, she separated herself from the crowd and paced down the hill to the intersection of Courtland and Decatur. Across the street, Sparks Hall squatted, a monstrous brick matchbox.
The traffic light flicked yellow and then red. Nearby, a car squealed to a start. The walk signal lit. She stepped off the curb, and a man snatched her from behind, yanking her back from the street. She tried to pull away, but he held her securely.
“You Ree Andrews?” he said into her ear.
Alarmed, she nodded and tried to squirm from his grasp.
“Don’t make a sound,” he said in a low voice and turned her sideways to him. His other hand was stuck in his coat pocket. A gun was outlined against the cloth, the barrel pointed toward her. She froze, though her breath raced with fear.
“What do you want?”
“Shut up and do what I say.” He pushed her forward. Taller and heavier than she, he easily forced her across the street and away from the rest of the students.
On the other side, he stopped and turned her to him. His eyes were bloodshot. “OK, where is it?” he demanded.
“Let go,” she yelled at him.
“Don’t play games, girl.” His grip tightened, his fingers dull knives that pressed into her flesh.
The pain wakened anger. A car jerked to a stop in front of them. Heart pounding, she recognized the driver. He’d been at her apartment. Her anger exploded into rage. She screamed, twisted, jabbed her knee into her attacker’s groin, and burst away from him.
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