Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  “We don’t have a last name. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Nathaniel. What did this man look like?”

  “He was— Wait, I have a picture.” I fished in my notebook for the photograph of Douglas Buchanan—Casey—and slid it across the table. When she saw it, her face changed: it could have been surprise, it could have been straining to see the picture clearly. I thought she might say something, but instead she glanced at me and handed back the picture.

  “I really need to be on my way, my dear. So wonderful to see you.” She reached for her canes. I stood, gave her my arm, and helped her up.

  “Dr. Tobel,” I said, “if you can think of anything, anything—”

  “It was wonderful to see you, Nathaniel.”

  And with that, she left me, her canes thumping along the polished stone floor.

  CHAPTER 46

  Baffled but heartened that at least someone seemed to know something, perhaps, about what was happening in Baltimore, I walked back to the car. As I passed the Heilmann Building, I paused. Although women should have been the last thing on my mind, I couldn’t shake seeing Alaine. I toyed with the idea of racing up to the third floor, sticking my head in the Tobel lab, and indulging in some witty repartee with Alaine Chen.

  But I was kidding myself. I made toward the parking lot and pulled out my cell phone. I had a case to crack.

  I paged Tim. Twenty minutes later, as I exited the highway into San Jose, the epidemiological wunderkind called me back.

  “I found the woman, Gladys Thomas,” I told him.

  “And?”

  “She’s dead. Hung herself early this morning.” A few long beats passed.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, that’s weird. Hung herself?”

  “Yes. I saw the body.” It was, as Tim said, weird. Not just the suicide itself, but the method. Though hanging is a relatively popular way of offing oneself, the stats say that women prefer swallowing pills.

  Tim asked, “Did you, ah, meet with her before that happened?”

  “Yes.” I told him about the love affair between Douglas Buchanan and Gladys Thomas, and explained the connection to Casey, Mr. Buchanan’s West Coast alias.

  “Weird.”

  “Well, here’s the really weird part.” I told him about Douglas Buchanan’s demise, resurrection, and demise. “So the way I figure it, it means that Casey, or Douglas, had two identities, one of which he stole from a dead man in Pennsylvania. Either he lived out here as Casey and moved east or he visited here as Casey. It’s the same guy, Tim. We confirmed it with a photo.”

  “Do you have a last name for Casey?”

  “No.”

  There was silence on the phone. “I don’t know what the heck to do with this. When did you find this out, by the way? About Douglas’s dying twice.”

  I lied. “Twenty minutes ago.”

  “Okay. You’re not sneaking around behind my back, are you? Still trying to keep your fingers in Baltimore?”

  “I’d never think of it,” I said. “I just happened to call Myers to say hello. Find out how his hemorrhoids were treating him.”

  “Right.” I heard his car stop and the door open. “Look, to keep you in the loop: we’re focusing on a rodent or arthropod reservoir. Baltimore’s a port town, so it’s not inconceivable that some insect or rat jumped ship and imported our bug. A few men in one of Jefferson’s homes actually work at the shipyard, so it’s not inconceivable. But . . .” He breathed loudly through his nose. “But with what you are telling me now, I have to talk to Detective Myers, tell him information should come to me first, not to you.”

  Tim took the phone away from his mouth and spoke to someone. A big shot has no time for phone etiquette. He came back without breaking tempo. “What we’ve discovered is creeping me out, Nate. It’s getting really oddball. I don’t like the way this thing walks, talks, or smells. We still don’t know thing one about Douglas Buchanan’s murder. . . .” He seemed to be thinking something over. “I’m not a cop. We’re not cops. The FBI has really been pushing to get involved—”

  “The FBI?” This was not good news. I could see the headlines: FBI INVESTIGATES POSSIBLE BIOTERRORIST ATTACK.

  “Yeah. I’ve been trying to hold them back, because we were sure this was a natural situation. But with what’s come to light in the last few hours, it can’t hurt—”

  “Tim, not yet. I’m making progress here. If you bring them in, they’re going to muck everything—”

  “What did I say about us not being cops? This ain’t our strength, Gunga Din. We deal with the disease, let the Bureau guys deal with the murder and the stolen identities.” There were sounds of people talking in the background; Tim lowered his voice. “Look, I know you’re ticked about this. You feel like glory’s been snatched from you every time you do some good work. But you know what, Nate? S happens. This isn’t about you—”

  Right, I thought. It’s about you, Tim.

  “—it’s about dealing with the situation—politics and everything—in the most effective way.” He paused. “Did they have sex?”

  “Who?”

  “Your girl out there, Gladys whatever, and Buchanan.”

  “She said they didn’t.”

  “You believe her?”

  “Yes. It seems she was really just in love with him.”

  “Right,” he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. “Whatever. Get tissue samples and send them. You’ll be back in Atlanta tomorrow?”

  I answered the question that wasn’t really a question. “Yes,” I told him. The sweat beaded on my forehead and dribbled down my cheek. I was pissed off. I pulled up to the no-parking zone in front of the Health Department. A security guard wandered over to the car. I stabbed a finger at the placard on the dash and he moved on.

  I changed the subject and asked whether there had been any new developments in Baltimore.

  “No new cases. But it’s only been thirty-six hours.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah, but I’m worried. I wonder when the floodgates will open.”

  “Well, if they do, and you need more manpower—”

  “Then it’ll be good to have you in Atlanta to coordinate. Look, I have to go. I have a press conference to deal with. Question, though: you’re not ticking everybody off out there, are you?”

  “No, Tim.”

  “Are you ticking anybody off?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t mean whether you think you’re ticking them off. Would I think you’re ticking them off?”

  Bastard. “No, Tim. You wouldn’t.”

  “Good. Anyway, you won’t have much time to. I want you in Atlanta tomorrow.” I wanted to thank him for reminding me when I was to be in Atlanta. I’d almost forgotten in the past two minutes. “All right, I need to go. Try to keep the natives from rioting.”

  “Tim?” I said. “There’s something else.”

  But the line was already dead.

  “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  Brooke called me two minutes later.

  “Where are you?” she asked straightaway.

  “Outside your offices. I need to—”

  “You need to get down here. I’m at the medical examiner’s.”

  “That’s what I was calling about. What are you doing there? This isn’t your respons—”

  “I told you, work is slow. You have to get down here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just come over,” she snapped, and hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER 47

  By the time I’d walked to the building that housed the county medical examiner’s offices, cleared myself through security, and made my way through the tangle of hallways to the basement, it was past three o’clock. I assumed by that time the pathologists would have been well into Gladys Thomas’s autopsy.

  And indeed they were; I could see that from the other side of a large glass window that separated the administrative offices from the s
uite. There were three figures in the room, all of them gowned and gloved and masked: two bent over the body, one looking over their shoulder. The observer, who looked vaguely female, waved me over to my right. Brooke. I made my way around the desks—only one of which was occupied, by a middle-aged secretarial type who looked half-dead herself—and pushed through a door emblazoned with Autopsy Suite. I entered into a vestibule stocked with gowns, gloves, et cetera, and suited up. A door marked with all kinds of warnings about contamination led to the autopsy room itself.

  Brooke was waiting for me.

  “Took you long enough,” she said.

  “Daedalus couldn’t have designed a more confusing labyrinth.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind.”

  She led me past two stainless steel autopsy tables, one with a covered body on it, one without. On the third table lay Gladys Thomas, looking, well, nothing like Gladys Thomas: her chest cavity had been opened; her viscera lay on a table two feet away from the rest of her.

  Brooke introduced me to the doctor. Luis Gonzales was in the final year of a two-year forensic pathology fellowship. The tech was a guy named Peter, who didn’t look too happy to be there. After introductions, the first thing Dr. Gonzales asked was “Is it really Ebola? What’s happening in Baltimore, I mean.” I saw Peter, up to his elbows in gore, pause for my answer.

  Brooke looked at me. “I already told them it’s not, Nate.”

  “We just want all the information we can get,” Gonzales said as he weighed the liver and jotted something down.

  I told him we didn’t know what it was, but it was unlikely his current body had been infected with . . . well, whatever it was.

  “That’s what I told them,” Brooke said.

  Gonzales looked at her. “You scared the hell out of us when you called. Nobody wanted this one, after the word came down. Except me and Peter.”

  “I didn’t want it,” Peter said.

  “But you’re a brave man and will go far in life,” Gonzales replied.

  Brooke stepped up to the table. “Dr. Gonzales, tell Dr. McCormick what you told me.”

  Gonzales hesitated. “This is not official,” he said. “This is just my opinion, right?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, looking down into the corpse, “she died of asphyxiation, that’s for sure. You saw her, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You take a good look at the contusions?”

  “No. The detective wouldn’t let me touch.”

  Gonzales began to paw over Gladys’s body, and I, for the first time, got a good look at the deceased.

  Anyone who thinks death is peaceful has not seen enough death. Gladys Thomas’s swollen lips jutted out so that it looked almost as if she were about to blow a raspberry at us. Her eyes were open, and if she’d been alive, I’d say she looked frightened. A great jagged Y ran from each shoulder and down her abdomen, and the flaps of flesh around the Y had fallen inward toward the chest and abdominal cavities. It was grotesque.

  Gonzales moved his hands to the head and turned it to the side, exposing the neck. “We got about a thousand pics of the neck and head, but let me see. . . .” Gonzales rinsed the area with a hose. “We got all the scrapings and fiber samples this morning. That stuff just went to the lab. We won’t hear back for a few days.”

  He played with the neck, taking his time. The flesh had been opened around the trachea, and he was working his way through layers of tissue, peeling muscles back so they flapped down over the chest like a bib. “You saw her hanging, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the noose?”

  “I did.”

  “Then you saw it wasn’t the best knot. Not a surprise, considering no one knows how to tie a good knot anymore. Especially a vic like . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. “What I’m saying is that she didn’t die from a broken neck. She strangled.”

  “I figured.”

  “But look at this. See?” He carefully reassembled the neck and ran his finger along the line of the bruises. “There are two sets of abrasions here.” He pointed to an area that ran around the neck like an ugly, smudged necklace. There was another, fainter abrasion slightly above it, angled upward. You really had to look to see the difference.

  “So?” I asked.

  “From the damage to the carotids and to the hyoid bone, it looks like this lower one did her in. This wasn’t done by this upper abrasion. See? The carotids don’t spasm that high.”

  I looked at the mess of flesh on the table in front of me and saw in a flash the woman. Alive, twenty-four hours ago. Crying, walking, clutching at Brooke. Now she was split like an animal carcass in front of me. The contrast was too jarring: I closed my eyes and removed images of the living Gladys Thomas from my brain.

  She’s dead, McCormick. Simple as that.

  “Dr. McCormick?” Gonzales was staring at me.

  “Yeah. I’m looking.” I focused and ran through my anatomy and pathology and tried to see the difference between a spasmed and nonspasmed carotid. It was a lost cause. Nevertheless, I said, “Yes. I see.”

  Gonzales continued. “Now, our victim didn’t tie the best knot. And I’m assuming that she didn’t jump off the chair, find out the rope wasn’t quite tight enough, readjust, and try it again.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What I’m saying is that whatever made this lower mark killed her.”

  Things began to click for me. “Go on, Doctor.”

  “Somehow, a ligature pulled more horizontally and caused most of the damage. That’s this lower one. After the lower injury—the one that did her in—another ligature made this upper mark. See how the abrasion isn’t nearly as bad and blends into the lower bruise? That’s because she was almost dead when this was made. We’ll have to look at the crime scene photos, but I’ll bet the rope she was hanging by matched the position of this upper mark.”

  “Which means she was killed by something pulling horizontally on her neck.”

  “Exactly. It’s not totally inconsistent with her hanging herself. But she would have had to lean very far out on the chair to get the horizontal mark.”

  “So let’s be frank: it looks as if someone stood behind her and pulled a rope horizontally, and that’s the injury that killed her. That’s what you’re saying?” I asked.

  Gonzales backed up from the body. “Whoa. I’m not a cop. I’m not saying any of this is true. I’m just saying what it looks like to me.”

  “And I’m just asking you to say what you think.”

  There was a nasty silence. Finally, Brooke interrupted. “Luis, you already told me.”

  “But you are one person. I tell you, then I tell him, then I get a call from my boss asking me what the hell I’m doing making these conclusions.” He let out a sigh. “Okay, but I’m speaking unofficially now.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m the king of unofficial. In terms of criminal investigation, I’m the furthest thing from official. I’m just a lowly public servant trying to keep people from getting sick.”

  Gonzales sighed again. “Okay. What I think is that whoever did this didn’t do the best job of covering up a strangulation.”

  “So you think that she was murdered.”

  “Going out on a limb, I’d say so. But like I said, it’s not the best job. It would have been easy enough to line up the marks. These don’t.” He looked up at me. “Whoever did this was sloppy.”

  “Or they didn’t care about us finding it,” I said.

  CHAPTER 48

  After filling out the FedEx information, preparing the biohazard containers for transporting samples of Gladys Thomas’s tissue to CDC, I left the ME’s. Outside, I called Detective Walker, asked her about the investigation on the dead woman.

  “We’re making progress,” she said.

  “Can you give me any details?”

  “Dr. McCormick, the San Jose Police Department is doing its job.”


  “You can’t tell me any more than that?” I asked, maybe a little too sharply.

  She shot back, “I have a question for you, Doctor. Just what, exactly, is your jurisdiction?”

  That was a stumper. The California and Santa Clara health departments had invited me in. The San Jose PD had not. And unless I proved a significant public health concern to someone, any jurisdictional argument I’d make was certain to be a dog. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  “I told you,” I said. “Gladys Thomas is tied to a case concerning an outbreak in Baltimore.” Even as I said it, I realized how weak it sounded. “Her murder—”

  “Murder? Now we’re calling it a murder? Isn’t that funny—we’re the police and we deal in this stuff every day, and the best we’ve managed so far is to call it a suspicious death. What makes you so sure it was murder?”

  I saw no reason to involve Luis Gonzales at that point, so I said, “I’m inquiring, Detective.”

  “We’ll take care of the inquiries, Doctor. I have your number. I will contact you as soon as we have any information that bears on your investigation.”

  “I’m leaving for Atlanta tomorrow.”

  “Well, you’ll be missed in San Jose.”

  “Listen, would you do me the favor of calling me when you find anything out? Whatever you may think, it does have a bearing—”

  “I have your number,” she repeated, and hung up. I wondered if the double entendre was intentional.

  It was dinnertime when I reached Santa Ana; the smell of food drifted over the front porch through open windows. I hit the doorbell.

  A woman who was not Rosalinda Lopez answered the door. She looked vaguely official, so I introduced myself and told her that I needed to talk to everyone in the home.

  “The police already talked to everyone here,” the staffer informed me.

  “I know. I’m not the police. I’m a doctor.”

  I flashed her my ID and told her it was federal government business—whatever that meant—which seemed to do the trick.

  She led me to the dining room, where seven women sat around the table, eating. There wasn’t much conversation, not surprising considering the empty place setting that looked like a missing tooth. Why they’d laid out a plate and utensils, I didn’t know. Honoring the dead, I guess.