Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  At the top of the park stood Baltimore’s tribute to George Washington: an immense marble pillar topped with a bronze statue of the president. I stood looking at the monument through the gauzy, humid air, wondering if the great man ever envisioned a world where men like me worked for the government he created, for a part of that government that had a bankroll eight hundred times what the entire U.S. government had in 1790. I assume he never envisioned a world where a single retarded guy, sowing his poison seed, would ever be such a threat.

  I turned from the monument and walked to my building, an old granite mansion that had been split into tiny units. CDC normally puts us up in hotels, but I’d wanted to be in Mount Vernon Place, relatively close to where I lived during med school. So, I’d found the flat myself: small, furnished, perfect. CDC obliged me, as did the landlord, who gave me a week-to-week rental. But any ideas of personalizing the apartment never materialized. I’d done virtually no nesting since I arrived in Baltimore, except for the three beers and the pack of American cheese in the refrigerator. And the box of granola in the cupboard. I ate the cheese and washed down a few handfuls of granola with a beer. Life was good.

  In bed, I did my best to sleep but could not. My mind locked on Douglas Buchanan and wouldn’t budge. Where was the guy? Had Randall Jefferson moved him to another of his homes to keep him from talking to us? Had he relocated Douglas to a motel somewhere? Had Douglas simply had enough and run? And if any of these ruminations were true, then why the ransacked room? What had been removed? Why the discontinued phone service?

  Where are you, Douglas? What have you done?

  CHAPTER 26

  Sonjit was already in the office, typing away, when I arrived the next morning around seven.

  “Not here all night,” I said.

  “I slept.” She nodded toward the break room down the hall. “The couch is very comfortable.”

  “Taking one for the team.”

  “Dr. Verlach came in last night with more names and data. From him and the state epidemiologists.”

  “How many?”

  “Nearly one hundred—”

  “They’ve been busy.”

  “I’ve been busy. I’ve entered about forty so far,” she said.

  “And?”

  Sonjit’s hands flew over the keyboard.

  I walked behind her and looked at the screen. There was a web of boxes and lines, much too large for the small computer screen. Later, we’d use a special printer to put the whole thing on large pieces of paper. In the middle of the tangle, like a fat spider, sat Douglas Buchanan’s name.

  “Our man,” I said. As if there were any doubt. “This should be enough to convince them.”

  “Who?” Sonjit asked.

  “Whoever needs convincing.”

  “I don’t have all the information yet,” she said.

  “We don’t need any more information. This is—”

  Just then, Verlach craned his head around the flimsy wall of the cubicle. “Dr. McCormick—”

  “Did you see this?” I asked him.

  He looked at the graph on the screen. “Whoa. Any word on Buchanan’s whereabouts?”

  I told him I hadn’t heard anything. I didn’t tell him about my meeting the day before with John Myers, about the telephone calls to San Jose. That was my little piece of the action. “I’ll touch base with the detective on the case.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I think it’s time we involved the state police and the departments of surrounding counties to keep an eye open for this guy. We need to talk to him.”

  “That might already be under way. The cops seem pretty worried.”

  “Good.” He ran a hand over his pate. “Did you find anything out . . .”

  “I’ve been stuck in the office,” I said. “You heard about my promotion.”

  “Yeah. Forgot about that. Sorry.” Verlach looked at his watch. “Press conference is starting in an hour.”

  And he left.

  To calm a jittery public, the bosses wanted to get something official out before the morning news programs ended. I had a fantasy of sorts: whipping up some fake blood, then bolting in front of the cameras and coughing up gobs of the stuff. I’d have sent half of Baltimore fleeing to the hills.

  My mood notwithstanding, I went down to watch the press conference. It was decided that Ben Timmons would make the speech and take most of the questions. Verlach would be introduced at the end to fill in any holes. Looks like politics won out over presentation, which wasn’t a surprise. Besides, it would have raised some questions if Verlach, relatively low on the totem pole, had presented everything while Ben Timmons waited silently in the wings.

  Still, the Wonder Boy was right. Timmons did look like a politico. Some moron had even let the man go in front of the cameras with his hair slicked. Jesus.

  The conference began. Timmons acknowledged CDC both for setting up the surveillance program and for their help in the first days of the outbreak. Tim, from the sidelines, caught my eye and gave me a thumbs-up. I pretended not to see him.

  The first questions were, predictably, about the what and who of the pathogen. There was a question about terrorism, which Timmons handled admirably, saying simply that there was no evidence to support the claim. Things began to get good when a reporter from one of the television stations asked about harassment of community members during the investigation. Everyone there knew who the community member in question was.

  “We are working hand in hand with members of the community to identify the cause and the source of this outbreak, and we trust that they will give their full cooperation in this matter. We cannot conduct an effective investigation without the cooperation of community members. We need their help.”

  Ouch. Randall Jefferson must have felt the heat crank up about a hundred degrees. Timmons, it turned out, was pretty damn good in front of the cameras.

  About ten minutes into the Q and A, my pager vibrated. Detective John Myers’s number was on the little LED screen. I silenced it and clipped it back to my belt.

  A minute later, the pager vibrated again. This time, I called back.

  CHAPTER 27

  “We found him.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “We found him. Douglas Buchanan.” Myers’s voice was steady, though he might have been forcing it.

  “Where?”

  “In the woods in Carroll County up near Westminster.”

  “What the hell is he doing—”

  “He’s dead.”

  The noise of the press conference filtered into the hallway where I stood. I pushed the telephone harder into my right ear and jammed my finger into my left. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know. But it sure as hell wasn’t suicide and it wasn’t an accident.”

  “Is Douglas—is the body with you?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t an accident?”

  “Believe me. Look, your friend’s twenty minutes north. It’s a Carroll Sheriff and Maryland State Police case now. They share jurisdiction up there, but we’ll be working with them. You want to get some guys over to the station?”

  I looked down the hall to the press conference, to the frenzy of shouted questions and camera lights. Verlach, Tim, and everyone else would be so involved, I wouldn’t want to intrude. Or at least that’s what I’d tell them.

  “Everyone else is tied up right now.” I walked through the hallway toward the exit. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  We were in the car, John Myers and I, speeding north along I-795 into Maryland farm country.

  “How did they identify the body?” I asked.

  “When we put the word out to all PDs in the region yesterday, we faxed them a picture and gave them the heads-up on how urgent it was.”

  “You were one step ahead of us.”

  “We do this for a living, Doctor. Anyway, Carroll called us about thirty minutes ago. Seems a farmer was out with his dogs at dawn this morning and came acro
ss the grave.”

  “How did he die?”

  “We’re going to have to wait to determine that. Looks like it might be hard.”

  “Why?”

  “The body was mutilated pretty bad.”

  “Then how’d they ID him?”

  “I guess the face was still there, Doc.”

  We pulled off the highway to one of the rural roads that cut through the farmland, and if I had been driving through for almost any other purpose, it would have been pleasant. Ample spring and summer rain meant the corn was already waist-high and verdant. The sun was clearing the mist that hung over the fields. It was a picturesque scene, truly, except for the blue and red emergency lights glinting ahead of us.

  And except for the heat. “Jesus,” Myers muttered when he opened the door and the humid air rolled in.

  We were off to the side of the road, hoofing it along the cornfield to the hubbub. A coroner’s van had maneuvered its back end to the edge of the wood, flattening a semicircle of corn as it ground forward and back to get flush against the trees. Three other vehicles—a state police crime scene investigation truck and two Carroll County Sheriff’s trucks—were parked in the short strip of grass between the field and the tree line. I caught the blue-white flash of a photographer’s camera. The vegetation absorbed the voices; it was weirdly quiet.

  A uniformed officer saw us coming and intercepted. Myers flashed his badge, and the uniform waved us toward a fat man in the woods twenty feet away. The man was squatting, looking at something below him. He wore shirtsleeves, large wet circles blooming from the armpits. A shoulder holster hung below his left arm.

  From the edge of the wood, Myers called out, “O’Leary.” The fat man stood and crunched the dried leaves as he walked over to us. Like everyone else in the woods, he wore a surgical mask. Unlike everyone else, he wore aviator sunglasses.

  “Dee-tec-tive Myers,” he said, pulling off the mask. “How goes it battling the dregs of humanity?”

  “Shouldn’t talk that way about my chief.”

  O’Leary laughed richly. “Hell, he never liked me anyway.”

  Myers told me, “O’Leary here used to work for the Baltimore PD. But he got soft and moved to the burbs.”

  “I moved to avoid just the kind of sick shit we’re dealing with here. You never can quite escape, can you?”

  “That’s real philosophical, O.”

  O’Leary looked at me. “This a new recruit?”

  “Nathaniel McCormick, the Centers for Disease Control,” I said. O’Leary was gloved, so we dispensed with handshakes.

  “Dr. Nathaniel McCormick,” Myers added.

  “Pete O’Leary. Detective Pete O’Leary.” O’Leary gave a pinched smile that quickly faded. “John told me you’re the guy that put the fear of God into us, Doc. We’re all going to get hit with the plague, we don’t find your friend. That’s what John said.” O’Leary moved to scratch his face and paused two inches from the skin. He stripped off a latex glove, threw the glove on the ground, and scratched.

  “Detective Myers said you found him,” I said.

  “What’s left of him. Jesus Christ, it’s pretty fucking— Let’s put it this way. I almost puked. And I never puke.” O’Leary twisted his head and gave his neck a crack. “The Broken Man. That’s what the boys are calling him.”

  “‘The Broken Man’?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Humpty-Dumpty, the Eggman, Hollow Man. I liked the Broken Man, ’cause it sounds more . . . you know.” I didn’t know. O’Leary, I guess, sensed it and sensed I didn’t really groove on the gallows humor. He said, “Anyway, why don’t you guys grab some gear. We’ll take a look at your friend.”

  Myers and I went to the coroner’s van, grabbed gloves and masks with face shields, but didn’t put them on. O’Leary led us into the woods.

  “Try to follow me close, would you?” O’Leary said. “The state crime scene guys been here all morning, got casts of a couple footprints, a few treads. They may want to take more.”

  The mood darkened as we crossed the tree line. No more jokes here, not much speaking. Police tape had been woven through the trees, marking off an area about twenty feet square; streamers of the yellow tape also ran into a different part of the woods. A couple of men stood in a hole up to their shoulders. Masks and gloves only.

  “The body’s in there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” O’Leary said, looking ahead.

  “They’re in the hole with the body?”

  O’Leary glanced at me. “The grave was real deep. We excavated around it so we wouldn’t have to jump in there with him.”

  We covered a few more feet before the smell hit me.

  It was incongruous, the smell, not the organic stench of rotten leaves or even of decaying flesh. It was a pungent chemical scent. I knew it instantly.

  “Bleach,” I said.

  “Yeah,” O’Leary said. “Fucking weird.”

  Earth had been removed in a rough semicircle about ten feet in radius. The hole sloped from its edge downward; the crime scene guys were standing on a lower level, looking into the bottom of the crater. Though I was only five feet away, I still couldn’t see the body.

  In a line near the edge of the grave sat a number of thick plastic bags.

  “What’s in those?” I asked.

  “Fast-set concrete. Your guy was covered in it.”

  “For what?”

  “Hell if I know. Cut down on the stink. Keep us from getting to him. Maybe make him into a mother of a paperweight.” O’Leary grinned. I didn’t. “Anyway, looks like they just poured some bags of Sakrete down the hole, then threw in some water. Only a couple inches covering the body. Still, it took five guys three hours to dig the hole and chip out the concrete.”

  I moved to the lip of the excavation.

  Even from that vantage, I couldn’t see much. But what I could see was, simply, a fucking mess. Liquid slicked one of the tech’s hands. And these guys had on masks and gloves only, mucking through the gore as if this were just another death.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I snapped. “Get out of there. Get away from the body.”

  The techs looked up.

  “Hey,” O’Leary said. “What the hell are—”

  “Get out of there!” I yelled.

  The techs looked at me curiously. I might as well have been flapping my arms and clucking for the reaction I got. “Step out of the hole,” I said slowly.

  “Who the hell is this?” one of the crime scene guys said.

  “Guys. Everyone.” I was trying to calm down, realizing that my reaction could have been a bit more diplomatic. Diplomacy was hard, though, considering I saw these poor bastards in the hole, protected by next to nothing, smeared with blood and God knows what other bodily juices, picking up some bug, spraying it into their girlfriends or wives. “This body may be hot. You know what that means? It might be crawling with virus or something else. And if you catch this virus, it can kill you.”

  “We got masks. O’Leary—?”

  “Get out of there, fellas.”

  “Why the hell didn’t somebody tell us? Jesus, O’Leary, they said the guy might be sick, but . . .”

  As the techs scrambled themselves out of the hole, I became aware of everyone around watching us. Myers looked at me like I’d just pulled a gun. O’Leary stared as if he wanted to pull a gun. On me.

  “Okay, everyone, my name’s Nathaniel McCormick. I’m a doctor with the Centers for Disease Control. You know why I’m here?” No one ventured a guess. I pointed to the crater. “I’m here because this guy—or the guy we think this is, or who it probably is—” I was getting a lot of blank stares. Great work, McCormick, I thought, getting up on your soapbox before you’re even sure it’s Douglas Buchanan in the hole. I powered on. “The man whose body this is might have had a disease. A pretty bad one. So I have just two questions to determine whether we have to worry. First, did anyone get any blood or secretions on their skin? Any bodily contact with any fluids?” Mumbled n
os. “Good. That’s great. Two, does everyone know what universal precautions are?” A couple of mumbled yeses. “Great. Do it. Take universal precautions. From now on, anyone touching the body needs to have on goggles and a gown in addition to the mask and gloves. We just want to be as careful as we can.”

  The crime scene techs walked slowly past me. “Hey,” I said to them. “If you took the precautions, you’re okay. I just wanted to scare everyone.”

  “Well, you did it, Doc,” one of the techs groused.

  I said, “You’ll be fine.” Then, to O’Leary, “You have a list of everyone who’s been in contact with the body?”

  “Sure, Doc. Anything you want.” He shook his head. “Anything you want.”

  “I just want to make sure everyone’s safe.”

  “Sure you do.”

  O’Leary was still eye-fucking me. I’d basically cut off his balls and handed them to him in front of his crew. And I’m sure the detective was also thinking about—God forbid—the lawsuits that would open up if anyone here actually got sick. Screw it, I thought. These guys should be better than that.

  My public health duty finished for the hour, I put on my face mask and gloves and stepped to the edge of the crater. Gingerly, I crept-slid down the slope toward the body. The smell of bleach got stronger and I felt like a doughboy on the Western Front, in a trench recently knocked by chlorine gas. Myers was behind me. At the bottom, I stopped.

  John Myers coughed. “Holy Jesus,” he said.

  It was Douglas Buchanan, all right. He lay on his back, six feet of dirt rising in a wall on one side of him. The body bag that encased him had been unzipped. Chips of damp concrete clung to the outside of the thick black plastic. The grave, if it could be called that, had an uneven floor, so that Douglas’s hips sank lower than the rest of him. Liquid, which I assumed to be bleach, pooled there. His shirt had been removed, and his pants were pulled down to his knees.