CHAPTER 14
The next morning, five a.m., I drove to Open Arms to talk with the residents there. Mary and Mike D’Angelo, I found out, lived in the town house next door, and greeted me with coffee. I drained two cups to shake off the fog of four hours’ sleep.
I sat in the living room as the residents came downstairs. Mary directed them to me, whereupon I asked them the usual questions. Nothing exceptional but for the obvious difference in how they felt about the two women. Helen, it seemed, was liked. Bethany was tolerated. Anyway, they were all worried about Bethany and Helen, and they were all petrified they would get sick. I tried to reassure them the best I could, which is to say I wasn’t very convincing. Part of me wanted to quarantine all of the residents, make sure we kept this thing in its hole. But it was too soon for that: we didn’t know modes of transmission or the chain of infection, we didn’t know the reservoir, we didn’t know the period of infectivity, we didn’t really know anything. You can’t keep a bunch of people locked in their homes if you don’t know anything, so I reluctantly let the women get started with their day.
After morning prayers, the nine of us sat down to breakfast. Then, to the domestic music of breakfast cleanup, I interviewed Mike D’Angelo, a bear of a man with a full beard and belly. He was more cooperative than his wife had been. His answers weren’t helpful—no packages or presents, no trips—but he wasn’t holding back.
Then I asked about the women and sex. Mary, who was sitting next to her husband, tightened her crossed arms and pinched her mouth to a thin line.
“We don’t allow that here,” Mike said, looking into his coffee. He stole a glance at his watch.
“I understand that. But I’m wondering if you knew of anything. Maybe they talked about boyfriends?”
“Not to me,” he said.
I let him have a moment to think; then I said, “I’m asking about this mostly because I’m wondering if they got any gifts. Sometimes lovers will use people to—well—deliver packages, things like that. Also, sex itself can transmit disease—” They were both looking intently at me. “Anyway, do you know anything?”
“No,” he said.
I asked a few more questions, finished my coffee, and stepped toward the kitchen to check the traps I had set the day before.
Mike D’Angelo stood when I did. “Dr. McCormick.”
Mary said sharply, “Michael—”
“Not now,” he said to her. To me, “Would you follow me into the living room? More coffee?”
I declined the coffee and followed him. Mary D’Angelo stuck close behind us.
Mike settled his bulk on a stiff vinyl couch. Like his wife, he was in his fifties. Like her, he was a social worker. He continued to counsel with, he made sure to point out, a forgiving, Christian bent.
“Dr. McCormick, running a home for mentally handicapped women is not an easy task—”
“I can imagine—”
“Allow me to finish, please, Doctor. I don’t want to spend more time with this than I need to.” He sipped at his coffee. “Though we are well aware of different approaches to managing the mentally handicapped, we feel that a strict moral management—a Christian management—is best for our residents.
“Bethany has been with us since we opened this home, since she was eighteen. She’s been with us through the ups and downs, learned with us as we learned how to manage a family like this. But, as in all families, there are problems, and problem children.”
Three women stuck their heads into the living room and waved good-bye. “Lunch?” Mary asked. All held up their brown bags and, like a line of ants, marched out of the house. When Mary D’Angelo looked back to me, there was real pain in her face.
Mike continued, “Bethany is a problem. Please don’t misunderstand me—we love her, and we are willing to forgive her. And we are worried sick about her. But she has tested us. Lord, has she tested us.”
Mary looked away, but I glimpsed tears in her eyes.
“Well,” Mike said, “you don’t need to hear our sob story. And I don’t believe that what I’m going to tell you will be of much help, but I don’t profess to be an expert in disease. So I will say it. It is the right thing to do. I just ask that you be judicious with this—”
Another woman, a straggler, shouted a good-bye. Again, Mary asked about lunch, keeping her wet eyes turned away from the foyer.
“We ask that you be careful with this information, Doctor. It would be terrible if the other girls found out. It would be terrible for us in the community. We do have a reputation.”
Mary said, “Michael—”
“Please, woman. A few weeks ago, I happened to have a cancellation during the day—a counseling session—and decided to come over and fix some lights that had been neglected. I often come over to do work when I have a cancellation, so I don’t know what they were thinking—”
“They weren’t thinking,” Mary said.
“Mary.” Mike cleared his throat. “I went to the second floor, where the lights were out, and I heard some noises coming from Bethany and Helen’s room. I walked to the door to their room and opened it, and . . . and I opened the door, and I saw a man on the floor . . . kneeling behind a woman on all fours. They were naked. Bethany was there, on her back on the floor. But the woman on her knees was Helen.”
CHAPTER 15
I drove fast to St. Raphael’s, elements of this—what? outbreak?—gamboling in my head.
Sex, I thought. Three actors so far, two of them sick. It was by no means conclusive that we were dealing with anything at all like a sexually transmitted disease—the epidemiological lore is filled with red herrings and rabbit trails—but the idea was taking hold.
I built a chart of sexual contact in my head, a spiderweb of boxes and lines, each box with a name. Then it was small, only three boxes: Helen and Bethany and this unnamed, unknown man. Unfortunately, Mike D’Angelo didn’t get the name of the man. He didn’t even get a good look at him. After discovering the ménage à trois, he slammed the door and walked back downstairs to the living room. A minute later, he heard footsteps on the stairs, through the foyer, and out the door. He didn’t press Bethany or Helen on the name. “Who it was wasn’t important,” he’d said. He hadn’t spoken about it with Bethany or Helen, hoping, he said, that the shock of being discovered would cure them of any sexual desire. Hoping, I thought, that the whole nasty mess would just fade away.
Well, it didn’t.
So, because she was a known quantity and promiscuous, I put Bethany in the center of my contact tree, drew lines connecting her to Helen and the unknown man with them. I drew lines to five other partners that Bethany might or might not have had. I drew a line from one of these partners to Deborah Fillmore. But Helen was the index case, the first patient, and not the promiscuous Bethany. Why?
Because these diseases don’t follow a set script. For whatever genetic reason, perhaps Bethany was just a little more resistant. The contact tree began to look like a huge web, with Bethany at the center, a black widow surrounded by her victims.
The parking lot at St. Raphael’s was nearly empty, the evacuation having been largely completed. The bigwigs at CDC, according to Verlach, had been contacted that morning by Ben Timmons, the Commissioner of Public Health for Baltimore. I thought for a moment about that call, about its repercussions. With it, Timmons was bringing in the cavalry. They’d help wipe out the enemy, sure, but they might trample me in the meantime.
Well, I’d been trampled plenty of times before, and I was still kicking. Timmons might have signaled his SOS, but the best he could probably do—trying to make it seem like Baltimore was in control while still asking for help—was to get another EIS officer or two. I was scared enough now that I wanted to bump this up a few notches. So I climbed out of my car and put in my own call to CDC, to the branch chief, Dr. Timothy Leary Lancaster. My boss.
“I think we need help, Tim,” I said. Then I filled him in.
The old plan, as of yesterday, was to keep m
e in Baltimore and to use the local guys for everything but the lab work and what I could contribute. But for me, things changed with the possibility of sexual transmission. AIDS is still fresh in everyone’s mind—how swiftly and silently it moved, not to mention its near-complete mortality—so I knew my story would resonate. My idea that the disease would burn itself out, that it was too hot, may well have been bullshit. We had no idea how long these girls had been sick. We had no idea how many others harbored the bug and may have been asymptomatic.
I wiped a trickle of sweat that trailed from my ear onto the phone. It was eight thirty a.m. and already in the mid-eighties with that Baltimore one hundred percent humidity. I might as well have been in Uganda.
“I’m worried,” I told Tim.
“So am I.” I heard him heave a breath through his nose. “I want to say it’s not terrorism, but”—another long breath—“but you’re giving me signs and symptoms we haven’t seen before.”
Giving me symptoms. Ha. Good one, Tim.
He went on. “Also, if you think about who it’s striking first . . . You sow the seeds of this thing in a population that’s not that sexually responsible, goes like wildfire through them, jumps to the larger population. . . .”
“We thought about that,” I said, making sure he knew we were on the ball up here.
“Let me talk to the EPO”—the Epidemiology Program Office—“and see what we can spare. My plate is pretty clear. Talk to the Health Department, scare them, then call me back.”
“They’re already scared.”
“Good. We should be able to get you another investigator, me probably, and a data hound.”
Good little drummer that I am, I told him I’d do my best.
But I didn’t tell him other things: that I’d no idea he would come, that I now regretted calling him, that I didn’t want him within a hundred miles of Baltimore, that the local health department and EIS officer Nathaniel McCormick had it all under control. This mess could be a career-making event. And I was cracking it. Me. I sure as hell didn’t want Tim Lancaster up there with me, stealing the spotlight.
My stomach churned. The bad ol’ Nate McCormick was clawing his way out of the grave, worried about snatching his piece of the glory, the public be damned. I pushed him back into the dirt and, disgusted with myself, dialed Verlach’s number.
Verlach seemed as jazzed as Tim, half with worry, half with joy that we were making some progress in the case. He was at Deborah Fillmore’s home, talking to the residents there, and he’d started hitting the sex angle hard. In the meantime, he suggested I track down Bethany Reginald’s and Helen Jones’s lovers or lover.
I asked Verlach whether he’d heard anything from the lab about the samples sent from the sick women.
“I heard from them, and they found nothing.”
“Our mystery bug,” I said.
“Keeps things interesting.”
“Unfortunately.”
When he said this, I was at the entrance to St. Raphe’s, fishing for my ID to show the security guard stationed outside.
CHAPTER 16
There are few things as spooky as a deserted hospital. Hospitals just don’t close. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, decade after decade, snowstorms, Christmas, terrorist attacks, these places are open and alive. Most likely, St. Raphe’s had not been this empty since its construction in 1915. When the human race finally does itself in, alien archeologists are going to find the hospitals much like I did that day. Except the elevators won’t work for them.
I made my way up to M-2, where there were once again signs of life, or at least half-life: a couple of bleary-eyed residents and a skeleton crew of nurses. Gary Hammil was the attending on duty, looking as if he hadn’t slept since medical school. I said a quick hello, danced around questions about how the investigation was going, and suited up. I went in to see the girls.
First, I went into Bethany’s room. She was asleep, and she didn’t look good. The disease was moving rapidly through her. Humanitarian that I am, I decided to let her rest. I went in to see Helen.
“Hi, Helen, I’m Dr. McCormick. Do you remember me from yesterday?”
She shook her head.
“I’m here to help find out what made you sick.” Helen said nothing. “How are you feeling?”
“I want to go home.” This was a good sign; she was well enough to want to go home. The disease seemed to be fading.
“Hey,” I said. I pulled a chair to the side of the bed and sat, giving myself a moment to figure out how to approach this. “I need to ask you some more questions. Just like we did yesterday. Is that okay?”
Helen lolled her head toward me. The pinprick hemorrhages in her mouth were dark brown now as they clotted and were being reabsorbed. “Okay.”
“I need you to answer these questions. With the truth, okay? Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” she said weakly.
“It’s very important.” I took a couple of blank sheets from the folder I carried with me, which I’d feed into the fax machine after I was finished and pick up again on the outside.
Here goes, I thought. “Helen, has a man ever touched you in your private parts?”
“No—” she whined.
“Please. I need to know who has touched you.”
She turned her head away from me; I wasn’t able to ease into this as I’d hoped.
“Did you have sex with a man in your bedroom?”
The whining “no” again, which seemed not so much an answer to my question as a protest against it.
“Helen, who was the man with you and Bethany when Mike walked into your room?”
Her head turned away from me, she squeezed her eyes shut.
“Helen,” I said. She was, I thought, pretending to sleep. I placed my hand on her arm. No response. Do I deserve this?
“Helen, listen to me. If you don’t tell me . . . if you don’t tell me the truth, I will talk to Mike and Mary about you. . . .” About what, I didn’t know, and pushed on with a lie. “If you don’t tell me, they will take you away from the home. You won’t get in trouble if you do tell me. If you don’t tell me, they will send you away. Do you want that?”
Her eyes were now open, her head shaking in quivering movements. Doing this to her was killing me, but desperate times, right?
I continued. “They’ll take Bethany away, too. Do you want that, Helen?”
The shaking stopped. “Yes,” she hissed.
Well, now, that was a surprise. “Why do you want Bethany to go away?”
“She brings them.”
“Who?”
“Men. She brings them.”
Aha. So Bethany and Helen’s little daytime trysts were regular occurrences. The poor benighted D’Angelos, believing this was a single occurrence. Or pretending to believe.
“Were there many men, Helen?”
She was crying now. “Some.”
“How many?”
“Some.”
Okay, that was not so helpful.
“Do you remember their names? Please, Helen, this is really important. Do you remember their names?”
“No,” she said. I tried not to let my exasperation show. After a moment, she said, “Jerry, Henry. More.”
I wrote the names in my notebook; I was getting used to Helen’s logical dips and turns. “Do you remember any of their last names?”
Confusion and crying. I tried to clarify. “Do these men work with you? Do they work with you and Bethany at Mr. Miller’s?”
She nodded.
“Helen, do you remember who was with you when Mike saw you in your room? When Mike saw you and you and Bethany were naked?”
She started shaking her head violently. “No, no! Don’t tell, don’t tell.”
“I won’t tell.” Then I added, “Mike and Mary love you,” which was true. “What was the name of the man who was naked with you and Bethany?”
She clutched at my gown. Remembering what happened the day before, I pulled a
way, then thought fuck it and let her pull.
“Don’t tell. Don’t tell. Douglas. Please!”
“Douglas?”
“Don’t tell!”
Okay. Bingo. We have a Casanova to Bethany’s Catherine the Great.
“How many times were you with Douglas?” I asked. “Were you with Douglas one time?”
Painfully, she nodded.
“Were you with him two times?”
She nodded. “Please don’t tell. Please don’t tell,” she warbled. She muttered something. Prayers, I think.
“I won’t,” I lied. “I promise you won’t get in trouble,” I said, trying to soften the lie. I’d pretty much do anything now not to get Helen Jones in trouble. Hell, if she got into hot water, I’d take her into my home. Brave girl.
Helen clutched my gown tighter. “Don’t tell about Bethany. Don’t tell.”
“Bethany? Helen, I thought you—”
“I love her so much. Please. I love her so much.”
I stayed with Helen for another ten minutes, stroking her hair as she wept. The pieces began to fall into place. Poor Helen. So smitten with Bethany she was willing to become a sexual addendum to her lover’s powerful drives. I imagined the two of them in their room, together. What was it? Weeks? Months? Years, before Bethany got bored and began to bring others into the bedroom?
What was it like for Helen to see her girlfriend slipping away? What kind of heartbreak was it, not to be able to tell anyone?
Bethany was awake now, but her fever was creeping north, and she was a little delirious. She was, however, able to confirm the names given to me by Helen, as well as to contribute Mitchell to the list.
I asked her if she loved Helen. She said yes. I asked her if she loved Douglas and Jerry and Henry. She said she did.
In Bethany’s mouth, I could see the spots of blood in that livid shotgun pattern.
CHAPTER 17
My boss called to tell me he would be arriving in Baltimore that evening with a data guru called Sonjit Mehta. Tim Lancaster had been instrumental in setting up surveillance for West Nile in New York in ’99 and then for the entire country as that disease spread west and south. He was a first responder to the attacks on 9/11, back when we feared that the terrorists might have attacked secondarily with germs. He knew most of the major players in public health in the Northeast. Because of his experience, his indefatigable energy, his ability to lead, and his political savvy, he was one of CDC’s golden boys. He was someone I wouldn’t mind being, but had a difficult time following. He was also thirty-five. Two years older than me.
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