“Nobody ever gave terrorists an A for appropriate targeting.”
“Bullshit,” I said, and it was. Still, Tim looked nonplussed. I stormed on. “If there’s anything criminal, it’s that Randall Jefferson has those people living in a shitpile.”
“I know. I’m trying to hold the FBI off. I am. But the longer this thing goes, the harder it’s going to be for me and Chief O’Donnel to hold them off.” He leaned back in the chair.
The fastest way to communicate that a public health issue had become a terrorist issue would be to involve the FBI. Their presence screams bioterrorism. Tim Lancaster and Division Chief Pat O’Donnel knew this in their bones.
Tim said, “We already have two people from the Army’s bioweapons lab at Fort Dietrich.”
“They’re here now?”
“Coming down later today.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“I don’t even know everything that’s going on here, Nate.”
“Great. Does Baltimore Public Health know about the Dietrich folks?”
“Sure they do. Ben Timmons requested them. I just hope he doesn’t let it drop to the press just yet. This whole thing’s threatening to become an F-ing mess.”
I should say something about Tim Lancaster’s language. The man doesn’t swear, though not for religious conviction or delicate upbringing. It has to do with a wife who doesn’t let him, out of concern for their four-year-old at home. Rumor has it that Tim used to be able to make sailors blush. But now everything is “Heck” and “F this” and “Holy S.” Way to go, Mrs. Lancaster.
“Well, then,” I said, “I’d better get back out there.”
“Nate—”
Just then, as if on cue, there was a knock at the door. Verlach poked his head in. “Dr. Verlach,” Tim said. “Dr. McCormick was just singing your praises.”
“Nothing too good, I hope,” Verlach said. “Don’t want to ruin my image. Not to interrupt, but Jefferson called off the dogs. He’s opening all his facilities to inspection.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“Got religion, I guess. And the fear of more bad press. Our lawyers called, Nate. They’re dropping the assault charges.”
“No more rat attack?”
“No more rat attack.”
“Freedom,” I said, half-joking. I moved toward the door.
Tim said, “Where are you going?”
“Hitting the streets, boss. We’ve got an outbreak, you know.”
“Wait,” Tim said, then was quiet. It was an uncomfortable moment, Verlach hanging in the doorway, me standing in the middle of the room. “Dr. Verlach, will you excuse us for a moment?”
Verlach nodded and closed the door. Tim motioned me back to my chair.
“Nathaniel, I told you we have a couple of people from the state department of health here to help out. I don’t need you on the street.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to file a full report with me this afternoon.”
“I can do that—”
“And I want you to work with Sonjit on a database of everyone you and the other health officials have talked to. Construct a spot map and chart the contacts so we can narrow our list—”
“We have narrowed our list.”
“And when Beth and Andy arrive, I want you to brief them on what you’ve been doing—”
“Beth and Andy? Why are they coming up?”
“Because I want them to. They’ll be here tomorrow morning.”
“You can’t do this, Tim.”
“It’s a promotion, Nate. You’re being vaulted to the Mount Olympus of administration. I want you to get all the data work finished; then I’ll want you to direct the feet on the street.”
“Tim, look, I’m much more useful out there—”
“No, Nate, you look. You’ve done a great job to this point—”
“So let me continue to do a great job.”
“You want me to spell it out? Being involved in an altercation with a member of the community? With a rodent that may be harboring a pathogen? Breaking down doors? By the way, how’s your shoulder?”
“I needed—”
“You needed to reel it in, Doctor. You’re not the FBI. There’s a reason we want to keep these guys in their nest at Quantico, and there’s a reason I want you here, in this office.”
Fucking Tim Lancaster. I should have seen this. I should have known I’d gotten off too lightly before. I should have known the compliments were just a way of preparing me for the blow. And really, when Tim told me to wait, I should have bolted past Verlach into the hallway and then to the street.
Instead, all I said was a pathetic “Why are you doing this?”
“I already told you. Sonjit’s set up in a cubicle outside. Go find her and get started.”
Perhaps I should elaborate on CDC here, its culture, its mores, its history, and the stifling of Dr. Nathaniel McCormick.
The “Communicable Disease Center” was established in the late forties—five years or so before the Epidemic Intelligence Service was created—in order to combat malaria in the U.S. Then, as now, we were part of the Public Health Service, which itself was born of the Navy. Though the PHS split from the Navy decades ago, we still have uniforms—Dress Blues, Dress Whites, Working Khaki—which look a lot like their military counterparts. Some folks really dig the uniform thing—former director Satcher always sported his medal- and ribbon-laden armor—but I don’t. Can’t get into the formality; can’t get into the scratchy material. One of the perks of being far from the home office is that I don’t have to don the stodgy duds all that often.
CDC changed a lot from the early days. For starters, the name became the “Center for Disease Control”; the s was added later as one center begat others. “Prevention” came in ’92 to emphasize an expanded mission. By the last century’s close, there were twelve centers, a budget north of six billion dollars. But the goddamned uniform code was still in place, as well as a quasi-military hierarchy. I was a commissioned officer, if you can believe it. And that—the rigid martial structure—really got under my skin. Though not as restrictive as, say, Mother Navy, it still meant that orders were orders. As much as I complained to Tim Lancaster about not wanting to take a desk job, he was my commanding officer and, at the end of the day, his word was law. If he told me to drop and give him twenty, I could bitch about it for ten minutes, but by the end, I’d be huffing through a bunch of push-ups. This was a slight problem for a lot of us at CDC. We were a bunch of strong-willed and independent docs and epidemiologists who, if the situation called for it, could be ordered around like Army grunts. Luckily, I hadn’t shipped out to Iraq, but friends of mine had. Five days’ notice and you were bound for exotic Baghdad.
Anyway, CDC wasn’t the military, so I had some wiggle room vis-à-vis the Commandant. Apologies to Tim, but I didn’t find Sonjit and I didn’t get started. Instead, I walked to the front desk and bummed a cigarette from one of the security guards. The guy caught the “MD” on my badge and said, “Those things will kill you, Doc.”
“I don’t inhale,” I said. What a card I am.
It was in the mid-nineties that afternoon, with humidity just as high. I walked away from the entrance of the building, which was definitely a no-smoking area. I half-hoped Tim Lancaster would look out his window and see me. That would throw him into a fit.
With the heat, it was pretty unpleasant to be standing on the concrete, puffing away. But I sure didn’t want to be back in the air-conditioned hellhole I’d been assigned to, helping Sonjit crunch numbers, or typing up reports, or administering whatever else I was supposed to be administering.
So, I smoked my way through one cigarette, then bummed another one from a guy sauntering past me. He gave me one without saying a word. What a great country.
Two individuals in Army uniforms, a man and a woman, walked by. The folks from Fort Dietrich, I guessed. They gave me sideways glances that said: Individual smo
king outside public health building. Suspicious. Make note.
You’d think I had the plague.
Anyway, as I stubbed out number two and resigned myself to going back inside and seeing Tim Lancaster again, my pager vibrated.
“Goddamn it, Tim,” I grumbled. Though I didn’t want to call him back, I wasn’t stupid. I was already playing fast and loose with my career, and I didn’t need to be petty anymore. I checked the number. It wasn’t Tim’s.
I called the number. A gravelly voice said, “John Myers.”
“It’s Dr. McCormick.”
“Oh, hey. Listen, Doc, we have something you might be interested in.”
“What is it, Detective?”
“Why don’t you come down to the station?”
“You want to put me under arrest?”
“Would if I could.” He laughed. “No, I got something else. Bring that other doc, too.”
“Herb Verlach?”
“Yeah.”
I thought about that for a second. Now, what I should have done was tell Verlach the cops had called, then tell Tim. Dr. Lancaster could then make the decision about whether or not I should go. But I knew what his decision would be and I knew I wouldn’t agree. So, no call to Tim. And there was no reason to involve Verlach, who’d be put in an awkward position by the call.
“Dr. Verlach’s out of the office,” I told Myers. “But I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
I called Sonjit, told her I was going out for some food and that she could start without me.
CHAPTER 24
Having spent some formative years in Baltimore, I knew exactly where to find the police station and I arrived there less than ten minutes after John Myers called.
So there I was, sitting across a table from the detective himself and some sort of technician in a nondescript, windowless room.
“We got Mr. Buchanan’s number from Cingular,” Detective Myers said. “Thought we’d give him a call, make our job easy. But his phone service had been disconnected.”
I said, “That must have happened recently. He got a call on it when I was talking to him yesterday. There was a voice mail, too. The phone kept beeping after he didn’t pick up the call.”
“We checked that. Any messages he had were cleared out when the phone service was disconnected.”
“Who disconnected it?”
“We got to assume it was Mr. Buchanan. We dug into the details of the phone use. First off, he had some prepaid plan, so he never had to go through credit checks or anything like that. Makes sense, we figured. He didn’t want to be getting bills at the home if he wasn’t supposed to have the phone. And I don’t know what kind of credit he had, considering. We’re checking on that. Anyway, there was a lot of time he paid for. And he used it.”
“He had a lot of girlfriends.”
“That’s what you would think.”
“What do you mean?”
“We got Cingular to give us the phone records. Your Mr. Buchanan blew through at least five hundred minutes a month calling one number. One number only. Nothing else. No calls for pizza. No calls to Mom and Dad, but that’s another story. No calls other than to one number in San Jose, California.”
“Who’s at the number?”
“That’s why we wanted you to come down.” Myers nodded to the technician, who had a small tape recorder in front of him. The tech hit a button.
A few rings, then a voice: “Casey! You bad man. Why didn’t you call me?”
Another voice: “Ma’am, this is Detective John Myers with the Baltimore City Police—”
Then the line went dead.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
“Who’s the woman? Who’s Casey?”
“I was hoping you might be able to help us with that.”
“I’m hoping, too, but I don’t know anything about it.”
“Mr. Buchanan didn’t say anything at all about a woman on the West Coast or someone named Casey?”
“No. But it makes some sense, I suppose.”
“What does?”
“All the San Francisco stuff in his room. I guess he had ties out West after all. Did you find anything interesting there? In his room?”
“Besides the posters, no. No pictures, no letters, nothing. I’ll be questioning Randall Jefferson later this afternoon, but he’s already tried to put me off. Tells me he doesn’t know individual residents that well.”
“I was told that Randall Jefferson was cooperating now.”
“Not with us.”
“He opened all his properties to the Health Department.”
“Maybe that’s all he’s doing. He’s not talking to us.” Myers leaned back in his chair. “Cocksucker’s playing games.”
“Did you call the San Jose number again?”
“Yeah, about ten times. It just rings and rings until a recording picks up. You know, ‘The blah-blah subscriber is unavailable.’ Seems our mystery woman doesn’t keep voice mail. We’re talking to her phone company to try to get her name, but they’re not playing ball with us. Say it’s a matter of privacy and since she’s not the one missing . . . That kind of crap.”
I ran through what I could remember of the conversation I had with Douglas Buchanan. Definitely no mention of a woman in California, no mention of anyone called Casey. And nothing whatsoever that might clue us in to where Douglas Buchanan went. Well, nothing except this number and the woman who owned it. I said, “You told me he never called his parents.”
“That’s right.”
“Still, they might have some idea where he is.”
“The story is they were in York, PA—just up the road—until ’97. They’re probably still there, for all we know.”
“Well, talk to them, Detective.”
“Don’t think they can talk to us. They’re six feet under. Both of them. Father kicked off in the beginning of that year, ’97; mother followed a few months later.”
“Where was Douglas before he came to Baltimore?”
“We’d like to ask Douglas that. Nobody knows. We’re checking state institution records now, and we’ll try to get more from Dr. Jefferson. Jefferson’s administrative folks claim they don’t know where Douglas Buchanan came from. They assumed it was from his parents’ home in York.”
This was definitely not adding up. And the fact that it wasn’t adding up with this particular guy at this particular time was disconcerting.
“When did he get to Baltimore Haven?”
“According to their records, he arrived in ’97. Right after his parents died.”
“So, Detective, you’re telling me that we have a possible sexual predator on the loose, a sexual predator who might be carrying some deadly disease, and not only do we not know where he is, we don’t know anyone who might have any idea where he is?”
He was getting a little annoyed. “I’m sure as hell not happy about it.”
“What about his friends? Any other social ties?”
“Guy seemed to be a loner.”
“Except when he was sticking it into anything with a hole. How can he have nobody?”
“Happens more often than you think, Doctor.”
Visions of Douglas Buchanan pumping poison into an unsuspecting population were making me sweat. “Your missing persons stay missing for long, Detective?”
“It’s been years, but I had a good track record.”
“Great, so you’re over the hill. That’s just great.”
He laughed. “Now I look for the ones who make people go missing. I’m homicide. They wanted to bring out the big guns for this.”
“You’re big guns?”
“What? You don’t expect a prick like me has the second-highest close rate in the department?”
“Where’s the guy with the highest?”
He smiled. “How’d a guy as young as you, and a doctor to boot, get to be such an asshole?” He looked at me, deadeye. “You scared us good, Doctor. We’re not taking chances. I vol
unteered for this. I got a family here.”
CHAPTER 25
As per Herr Lancaster’s dictate, I drove back to the Department of Health to work on the database of names with Sonjit, a homely woman with a knack for numbers and the work ethic of an early Protestant. The report I was to file for Tim could wait; he’d already gotten all the important information from me. He knew filing the report was busywork, and he knew I knew, which is why he didn’t ride me about getting it done. And so grind the delicately nuanced gears of bureaucracy.
By eleven p.m., Sonjit and I had about thirty people in the database: name, sex, age, all of the identifiers. We also had fields for all the notes we’d taken on the individuals. The names themselves would be dumped into a geographic software program—for the spot map—and into the flowchart program. Together, these would allow us to see graphically who’d had contact with whom and where they lived and worked. It’s amazing what the graphics can make clear—little boxes with lines spreading out connecting those who’d had contact with one another. Amazing how much information notebooks and lists of names can hide.
But any more clarification would have to wait. Sonjit was on her fourth cup of coffee, and I’d been up since four that morning.
“Time to wrap up for the night,” I said.
She looked at me, bleary-eyed. “I’m going to stay a little longer,” she said.
“Get some sleep,” I said, smiling. “Tomorrow’s a big day.”
“Aren’t they all?”
I nodded, wondering if she was going to pull an all-nighter. And they call government employees lazy.
I drove to my apartment in Mount Vernon Place, a nice little residential neighborhood on a rise west of the Inner Harbor. There was a park here, lush and long, cascading downhill to the north. Periodically, the city would put public art throughout the grounds. Years before, when I first arrived for medical school, the place was dotted with brightly colored sculptures of fish. That exhibit stayed until vandals made off with one of the pieces, entitled, aptly, Rogue Grouper. The irony made headlines.
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