Tainted

by Ross Pennie

  “Hamish,” said Ken, his tone all business. “You’d better call the hospital. You were supposed to check in by now. That man with malaria?”

  Hamish threw Ken a puzzled frown. There was no man with malaria.

  Ken pointed to the farmhouse. “Since your cellphone isn’t working,” he enunciated loudly, “you need to use the phone — in the house.”

  Hamish turned to Ken and whispered, “Forget it.”

  “But Hamish, the hospital expected you to call half an hour ago.”

  Hamish rolled his eyes at Ken. Then he coughed and grabbed his empty water bottle. “Okay, okay,” he said. He called through the crack in the window, “Lanny, can I use your phone? My cell isn’t working, and I need to call the hospital.”

  Lanny shrugged. “I suppose.”

  Hamish’s heart raced. His throat tightened. He couldn’t bring himself to open the door.

  Lanny dipped his eyebrows. “Are you gonna come in or not?”

  Hamish pointed to the dog.

  “It’s okay. Jake’s out the back with Morty and the hogs. And Millie here won’t bite.” He threw a stick ahead for the dog to chase, then chuckled. “Not unless I turn my back.”

  Outside the car, Hamish made the introductions. He felt vulnerable standing in the farmyard in his stocking feet, Lanny towering over him.

  “What happened to your shoes?”

  “Lost them in the mud. On the Bruce Trail.”

  Lanny shook his head and mumbled something about city slickers. His mouth tightened into a smirk as he studied Hamish’s face. “Excuse my French, Doc, but you look like hell. Lose your water bottle, too?”

  “No.”

  Ken nudged Hamish. “But it is empty.”

  Lanny led them to the back door. Piles of dishes towered in the kitchen sink on the other side of the window. “I’ll open a couple of brewskies,” he said, pulling off his boots.

  “Could you make that a Coke?” asked Hamish.

  “What’s wrong with you, Doc? Beer too strong for you?”

  Hamish stiffened. He looked at his filthy wet socks and hesitated.

  “Now what’s your problem?” Krooner asked, opening the door.

  A blast of warm air, heavy with the smell of cooked cabbage, poured from the doorway. Hamish stepped into the kitchen.

  Lanny pointed through an open swinging door. “If you wanta use the phone, there’s one in the dining room.”

  The phone was sitting on a large metal safe beneath a window. A television blared to an audience of empty armchairs in the adjacent living room.

  Lanny watched from the kitchen as Hamish dialled the number. It felt as if the farmer was making sure Hamish didn’t try to crack the safe. It took ages for the hospital switchboard to answer, and even longer for someone in the intensive care unit to pick up. Lanny lost interest and swung the door closed. When a nurse came on the line, Hamish inquired about a patient he’d been following and ordered a new set of blood cultures. He ended the call and returned to the kitchen.

  Ken and Lanny were sitting at the table, each holding a bottle of beer. Hamish took a can of Coke from the table and gulped it gratefully.

  “Ken, here, knows my sausages,” Lanny said. For the first time, his eyes looked friendly, civil. “Says he buys them all the time at Four Corners.” He drained the bottle and set it on the badly marked tabletop — not a coaster in sight. “Have you tried the ones I gave you?” Lanny asked.

  Hamish’s stomach twisted. “Not yet. Been too busy to cook this week.”

  Lanny looked disappointed. “Hope you froze them.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Lanny opened the refrigerator. “Another beer?”

  Ken’s bottle was still two-thirds full. “I’m good with this one.” He smirked and pointed to Hamish. “I’m driving this guy’s car.” He raised an eyebrow. “You still look pretty dry, Hamish. You better have another Coke.”

  Lanny set a fresh Coke on the table and pulled on his second beer. “I was telling Ken, here, how you guys missed all the excitement by just a couple of days.”

  As far as Hamish was concerned, there had been more than enough excitement over Ned’s arm.

  “Yep,” Lanny continued, “the pelting’s over for another year. The Mexicans are gone, the pelts are all sold, and most of the carcasses are in the compost.” He scraped his thumbnail across the label on his bottle. “Sold them to your people, I figure,” he said to Ken.

  Ken leaned forward. “Sorry?”

  “Hong Kongers. Bought the whole damn lot this year. Fifteen thousand pelts. Usually we sell to a broker in Montreal, but this year they all went straight to Hong Kong. Gave us top dollar.”

  Ken smiled as though fascinated by the notion of his relatives purchasing all of Lanny’s pelts and turning them into expensive garments. “Those would be the mink sheds we saw as we drove in?”

  “Yep. Most of them’re empty now. Just our docile breeders left. Got rid of all the crazy biters like the one that got Ned.” He drained his beer, smacked his lips, and drew the back of his hand across his mouth. “Mating starts again in February.”

  Ken poked Hamish’s shin under the table, then said to Lanny, “What do you do with the carcasses?”

  “Used to send them to a rendering plant. They turned them into chicken feed and pet food. But not anymore. Against the law now. Ever since mad cow.” He shook his head as if frustrated by the vagaries of governmental bureaucracy. “Gotta compost ’em or burn ’em.” He took a third beer from the refrigerator and swigged a couple of drafts. “Besides, mink’s got a strong taste — on account of the scent glands.” He studied his bottle and chuckled to himself, a private joke. “A little goes a long way.”

  Ken ran his finger around the mouth of his bottle. “You really put fifteen thousand mink carcasses in the compost? Sounds like a terrible waste of meat.”

  Lanny leaned on his elbows. “Well, I save a few, eh?” He cupped his hand to the side of his mouth. “For the dogs, and on the QT for the neighbours. Mixed with Morty’s leftover pork — well, I mean, it’s a real delicacy.” His eyes clouded as he ripped a strip from his beer label. “Like I said, just for the dogs.”

  Ken turned to Hamish and ever so slightly dropped his jaw. With a flick of his eyes and a subtle jerk of his head he made it clear he wanted out of there. He coughed into his fist. “What time do they expect you back at the hospital, Hamish?”

  Hamish checked his watch. “Oh, look at that. It is time we got going.”

  They swigged their drinks, thanked Lenny, said their goodbyes, and headed toward the car.

  Back in the Saab, neither of them said a word until they reached the end of the driveway.

  Ken groaned, “Oh my God.”

  “I know.”

  Ken turned left, gunned the engine, then swerved to miss a rabbit dashing across the road.

  “Hey, take it easy,” said Hamish, gripping his shoulder belt. “This isn’t your Accord, you know.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “What?”

  “I told you I’d heard everything. You know, from working in the courts?” Ken glanced in the mirror. “That was until today.”

  Hamish wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “And I was wrong about the sausages,” he said. “Not a scrap of cat meat in them. No wonder those tests were only weakly positive. They were picking up mink meat.”

  “As soon as he started talking about the mink, he got that guilty look. I can spot it a mile away.”

  Hamish wiped his palms against his thighs. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Dog food, my ass. He’s concocting the ultimate delicacy — ground pork enhanced with fine Canadian ranch mink.” He thumped the steering wheel. “And he’s flogging it at Four Corners. I’ll never be able to look at a Melton Mowbray again.”

  Hamish took one last look at the farm. The massive hog barn sparkled in the sun. “I bet he’s mixing mink into the head cheese, as well.”

  “So now what? You going to phon
e Zol Szabo this afternoon?”

  “You must be kidding. This all sounds crazier than the cat meat. I’ve got to prove it before I say anything to Zol. Got to get Krooner’s stuff tested for mink mitochondria.”

  “Mink might-oh what?”

  “That test I’ve been fiddling with. For detecting bacteria. If they’ve got test kits for pork and beef and elk, they must have one for mink.”

  “But won’t that take a while?” Ken’s face crumpled. His hands trembled on the steering wheel. “You’ve got to shut this guy down right away. Owen’s dead. I’ve eaten a tonne of those pies and sausages. And people are snapping them up every day at Four Corners.”

  A spray of gravel clattered against the undercarriage as the Saab’s rear wheels fishtailed on the shoulder.

  Hamish gripped Ken’s arm. “Watch it!”

  “This car can take it.”

  “No. Pull over. I’ve got to tell you something.”

  Ken sighed noisily, then geared down and drew the car to a stop. He stared straight ahead. “What?”

  “I know you’re worried about getting CJD, but there’s a really good chance you’re not going to end up like Owen.”

  Ken turned and fixed Hamish with his eyes. “Come off it, Hamish. A really good chance doesn’t cut it. I ate more of those pies than Owen ever did.”

  “Not everyone is susceptible to prions. To get CJD, you have to have both the prions and the gene that codes for susceptibility.”

  “Owen had the gene?”

  “He must have. That’s why he got CJD. But there’s every chance you don’t have it.”

  Ken’s eyes pleaded. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Look at you. You ate the same food and you’re fine. Perfectly well.”

  Ken buried his face in his hands and muttered into his palms. “Jesus. I haven’t slept a wink since Wednesday, since you told me about the cat meat.” He lifted his head, then rubbed his eyes and the back of his neck. “Anything else?” he asked, his voice flat.

  “There’s a guy at the University of Guelph who’s been helping me with my mitochondrial project. He’s got colleagues at the university who are experts on prions.”

  Ken’s eyes brightened. “We could get to Guelph in half an hour.”

  “But the samples of Krooner’s stuff are back in my lab.”

  “You think they’ll test them for you?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  Ken slapped the steering wheel and threw the Saab into gear. “We’re going to put that bugger away. Forever.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Four Corners brooded in darkness that Friday afternoon — doors bolted and blinds drawn. As Zol drove by, posters in every window declared Closed For Inventory. No mention of when they expected to reopen, their shelves cleared of Wyatt Burr’s demon gelatin.

  Several blocks along, the parking lot at Kelly’s SuperMart buzzed with panic and anger. The past three days had seen so much honking, revving, and squealing that a team of Hamilton’s finest had been installed to corral the mayhem. The officers’ hand-waving and whistle-blowing made little impact on the bedlam. Pickup trucks and compact cars stuffed with groceries jousted for the smallest patch of pavement, a beachhead from which to unload every prion-infested item the rumour mill had condemned. Three television vans, their antenna cranes extended, their satellite dishes gleaming, surveyed the rowdiness as they broadcast the city’s humiliation to the world.

  The morning’s paper had run photographs of similar commotion in Geneva and Montreal. This scene was replicating itself across the country and around the globe. Panic was infectious and, thanks to television news, its transmission more efficient than any prion. And all for nothing. The Swiss had opened their books and their factories to the experts of the World Health Organization and the American Centers for Disease Control. As permanent hosts of the WHO, and conscious of their nation’s synonymy with perfection, the Swiss showed proof they’d tested every batch of food-grade gelatin before releasing it for consumption. Despite this assurance, Wall Street had suspended trading in the stocks of the food-processing giants on both sides of the Atlantic. Overnight, the makers of comfort foods and treats had become pariahs, their products shunned like poisons.

  Where was Wyatt Burr going to hide when the experts found no prions in any Swiss products, including Max’s favourite chocolates? He wouldn’t need to hide, of course. He was such an expert on doublespeak that even when the bare facts proved him wrong he made it sound like he’d executed every move with perfection. It still puzzled Zol that no one else remembered how just two years ago Burr had hijacked the international media for a week and convinced the world that Hamilton was the epicentre of a Lassa fever outbreak. When the tests had come back negative, the story fizzled, the media moved on, and no one bothered to explain that the patient had nothing more than a case of malaria.

  Sitting tall in his minivan, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel, Zol felt the thrill of the hunt. Hard on a trail far more promising than chocolates and gelatin. He was on his way to Caledonian for a rendezvous with Julian Banbury. Colleen had called with the fantastic tidbit she’d gleaned from Hugh McEwen’s GP. As Natasha had suspected after searching the Internet, a specialist in Toronto had been injecting Hugh’s esophagus with Extendo-Tox to relax the overactive sphincter impeding the flow of food into his stomach.

  That made it seven victims out of seven.

  Julian Banbury peered at Zol from his laboratory doorway, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, showing his spindly arms. His legendary eyeballs, moist and bloodshot, bulged from their sockets as he scanned the corridor with his lizard-like gaze. It was common knowledge he had the worst case of exophthalmia anyone at Caledonian had ever seen.

  He beckoned Zol inside and closed the door, then heaved a jumbled stack of papers from the only chair in the room. He half-sat, half-leaned against the anarchy of his cluttered desk. Decades of scribbled musings, printed data, and neurological journals stood in piles two feet high on the desk. A dozen paper coffee cups, bearing various stages of scum and mould, wobbled atop the unstable columns. A framed photograph, propped against the desk lamp, showed a falcon chick teetering on the ledge of a tall building, contemplating two tractor-trailers on the street below. An inscription along the bottom said, Peregrine Baby Jackson and the Hamilton Naturalists’ Club thank you for supporting Falconwatch.

  Banbury motioned Zol to have a seat. “Now, what’s all this about Extendo-Tox and CJD?” His Adam’s apple bobbed above the pale scar of his thyroidectomy.

  The chair lurched as Zol sat down. It was missing a rear caster, forcing him to hunch forward and balance on the three good legs. “As I mentioned on the phone, Dr. Banbury, all seven of our victims underwent Extendo-Tox injections.”

  Banbury swept back his unruly mop of grey hair. “Bloody hell. How certain are you about that?”

  “Very.”

  He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the spittle from the corners of his mouth. “When did they receive them?”

  “About eighteen months before their symptoms started.”

  “And you actually think Extendo-Tox caused their CJD?” He squeezed his handkerchief and balled it in his palm. “Come now.” His lips formed a patronizing smirk.

  The room felt freezing cold. Zol tugged at his lapels and closed the gap in his blazer. “Well,” he said, losing his balance as the chair dipped with a jolt, its shortened leg grating against the floor. “It is a neurotoxin.”

  “My good man, you should have done your homework. Extendo-Tox affects the peripheral, not the central nervous system.” Banbury ran a finger along the inside of his forearm from his elbow to his wrist, as if tracing the path of the median nerve. “It targets only motor nerves. It doesn’t affect the brain.”

  Zol studied the floor. Between the rickety chair and Banbury’s smirk, he felt like a schoolboy up for a reprimand in the principal’s office.

  “Furthermore,” said Banbury, “your time frame is to
o bloody short. Too short by far.”

  “For regular CJD, yes. But you said yourself, this isn’t regular CJD. It’s something new. Maybe it has a much shorter incubation period.”

  Banbury’s eyes strayed to a photograph on the wall beside the desk. It showed him standing beside a podium, shaking the hand of a well-groomed man in a business suit. Behind them a banner said, Extendo-Tox: Harnessing a Natural Wonder. “Highly unlikely,” Banbury said, crossing his arms. “Anyway, your Ministry friends have found the culprit.”

  The notion that Wyatt Burr was a friend or colleague was nauseating. “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “Why not?” Banbury glanced again at the photo. “Better than falsely implicating one of our finest achievements.”

  “But why is this cluster showing up only in Hamilton?”

  “It’s the job of you food-inspection people to figure that out. I don’t speculate — I just report what I see.” Banbury crossed his shins and puffed his chest. “I trust you saw my posting on ProMed?”

  Zol raised his eyebrows, then slathered butter onto his voice: “You took the world by surprise.” He hoped his smile looked at least vaguely sincere. “And created a lot of buzz among the experts.”

  Banbury’s lips tightened in a grin as he gazed toward the far wall.

  Zol allowed the man to revel in a private moment of self-satisfied fame, then rose carefully from the wobbly chair. “If the gelatin in those chocolates were loaded with prions, your tulip CJD would be popping up all over the world.” Zol’s fist tightened inside his pocket. Banbury and his Extendo-Tox chums were not a bunch of choirboys. They had their gold mine to protect. “And the British have been testing their gelatin for years and never found any prions in it. If England’s is clean, Switzerland’s must be, too.”

  “Hmm.” Banbury ran a hand through his mop of hair. “I suppose the Brits ought to know. The blighters have had most of the world’s mad cows grazing in their fields.”

  Zol let Banbury ponder the tribulations of his homeland for a moment, then said, “So, Dr. Banbury, could you help me at least explore the Extendo-Tox connection? Your expertise, your inside knowledge would be invaluable.”