I had known her during my residency days, and had always believed that kind words from faculty like her had everything to do with why I had come to mind when the chief’s position had opened in Virginia. She was close to my age and had never married, her short hair the same dark gray as her eyes, and she always wore the same gold cross necklace that looked antique. Her parents were American, but she had been born in England, which was where she had trained and worked in her first lab.
“Bloody meetings,” she complained as she got off the phone. “There’s nothing I hate more. People sitting around talking instead of doing.”
She pulled gloves from a box and handed a pair to me. This was followed by a mask.
“There’s an extra lab coat on the back of the door,” she added.
I followed her into the small, dark room, where she had been at work before the phone had rung. Slipping on the lab coat, I found a chair as she peered into a green phosphorescent screen inside the huge viewing chamber. The TEM looked more like an instrument for oceanography or astronomy than a normal microscope. The chamber always reminded me of the dive helmet of a dry suit through which one could see eerie, ghostly images in an iridescent sea.
Through a thick metal cylinder called the scope, running from the chamber to the ceiling, a hundred-thousand-volt beam was striking my specimen, which in this case was liver that had been shaved to a thickness of six or seven one-hundredths of a micron. Smears like the ones I had viewed with my light microscope were simply too thick for the electron beam to pass through.
Knowing this at autopsy, I had fixed liver and spleen sections in glutaraldehyde, which penetrated tissue very rapidly. These I had sent to Crowder, who I knew would eventually have them embedded in plastic and cut on the ultramicrotome, then the diamond knife, before being mounted on a tiny copper grid and stained with uranium and lead ions.
What neither of us had expected was what we were looking at now, as we peered into the chamber at the green shadow of a specimen magnified almost one hundred thousand times. Knobs clicked as she adjusted intensity, contrast and magnification. I looked at DNA double-stranded, brick-shaped virus particles, two hundred to two hundred and fifty nanometers in size. I stared without blinking at smallpox.
“What do you think?” I said, hoping she would prove me wrong.
“Without a doubt, it’s some type of poxvirus,” she hedged her bets. “The question is which one. The fact that the eruptions didn’t follow any nerve pattern. The fact that chicken pox is uncommon in someone this old. The fact that you may now have another case with these same manifestations causes me great concern. Other tests need to be done, but I’d treat this as a medical crisis.” She looked at me. “An international emergency. I’d call CDC.”
“That’s just what I’m going to do,” I replied, swallowing hard.
“What sense do you make of this being associated with a dismembered body?” she asked, making more adjustments as she peered into the chamber.
“I can make no sense of it,” I said, getting up and feeling weak.
“Serial killers here, in Ireland, raping, chopping people up.”
I looked at her.
She sighed. “You ever wish you’d stayed with hospital pathology?”
“The killers you deal with are just harder to see,” I replied.
The only way to get to Tangier Island was by water or air. Since there wasn’t a huge tourist business there, ferries were few and did not run after mid-October. Then one had to drive to Crisfield, Maryland, or in my case, go eighty-five miles to Reedville, where the Coast Guard was to pick me up. I left the office as most people were thinking about lunch. The afternoon was raw, the sky cloudy with a strong cold wind.
I had left instructions for Rose to call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, because every time I had tried, I was put on hold. She was also to reach Marino and Wesley and let them know where I was going and that I would call as soon as I could. I took 64 East to 360, and soon found myself in farmland.
Fields were brown with fallow corn, hawks dipping and soaring in a part of the world where Baptist churches had names like Faith, Victory and Zion. Trees wore kudzu like chain mail, and across the Rappahannock River, in the Northern Neck, homes were sprawling old manors that the present-generation owner couldn’t afford anymore. I passed more fields and crepe myrtles, and then the Northumberland Courthouse that had been built before the Civil War.
In Heathsville were cemeteries with plastic flowers and cared-for plots, and an occasional painted anchor in a yard. I turned off through woods dense with pines, passing cornfields so close to the narrow road, I could have reached out my window to touch brown stalks. At Buzzard’s Point Marina, sailboats were moored and the red, white and blue tour boat, Chesapeake Breeze, was going nowhere until spring. I had no trouble parking, and there was no one in the ticket booth to ask me for a dime.
Waiting for me at the dock was a white Coast Guard boat. Guardsmen wore bright orange and blue antiexposure coveralls, known as mustang suits, and one of the men was climbing up on the pier. He was more senior than the others, with dark eyes and hair, and a nine-millimeter Beretta on his hip.
“Dr. Scarpetta?” He carried his authority easily, but it was there.
“Yes,” I said, and I had several bags, including a heavy hard case containing my microscope and MicroCam.
“Let me help with those.” He held out his hand. “I’m Ron Martinez, the station chief at Crisfield.”
“Thanks. I really appreciate this,” I said.
“Hey, so do we.”
The gap between the pier and the forty-foot patrol boat yawned and narrowed as the surge pushed the boat against the pier. Grabbing the rail, I boarded. Martinez went down a steep ladder, and I followed him into a hold packed with rescue equipment, fire hoses and huge coils of rope, the air heavy with diesel fumes. He tucked my belongings in a secure spot and tied them down. Then he handed me a mustang suit, life vest and gloves.
“You’re going to need to put these on, in case you go in. Not a pretty thought but it can happen. The water’s maybe in the fifties.” His eyes lingered on me. “You might want to stay down here,” he added as the boat knocked against the pier.
“I don’t get seasick but I am claustrophobic,” I told him as I sat on a narrow ledge and took off my boots.
“Wherever you want, but it’s gonna be rough.”
He climbed back up as I began struggling into the suit, which was an exercise in zippers and Velcro, and filled with polyvinyl chloride to keep me alive a little longer should the boat capsize. I put my boots back on, then the life vest, with its knife and whistle, signal mirror and flares. I climbed back up to the cabin because there was no way I was going to stay down there. The crew shut the engine cover on deck, and Martinez strapped himself into the pilot’s chair.
“Wind’s blowing out of the northwest at twenty-two knots,” a guardsman said. “Waves cresting at four feet.”
Martinez began pulling away from the pier. “That’s the problem with the bay,” he said to me. “The waves are too close together so you never get a good rhythm like you do at sea. I’m sure you’re aware that we could get diverted. There’s no other patrol boat out, so something goes down out here, there’s no one but us.”
We began slowly passing old homes with widow’s walks and bowling greens.
“Someone needs rescuing, we got to go,” he went on as a member of the crew checked instruments.
I watched a fishing boat go past, an old man in hip-high boots standing as he steered the outboard motor. He stared at us as if we were poison.
“So you could end up on anything.” Martinez enjoyed making this point.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I said as I began to detect a very revolting smell.
“But one way or another, we’ll get you there, like we did the other doctor. Never did get his name. How long have you worked for him?”
“Dr. Hoyt and I go way back,” I sa
id blandly.
Ahead were rusting fisheries with rising smoke, and as we got close I could see moving conveyor belts tilted steeply toward the sky, carrying millions of menhaden in to be processed for fertilizer and oil. Gulls circled and waited greedily from pilings, watching the tiny, stinking fish go by as we passed other factories that were ruins of brick crumbling into the creek. The stench now was unbearable, and I was certainly more stoical than most.
“Cat food,” a guardsman said, making a face.
“Talk about cat breath.”
“No way I’d live around here.”
“Fish oil’s real valuable. The Algonquin Indians used cogies to fertilize their corn.”
“What the hell’s a cogy?” Martinez asked.
“Another name for those nasty little suckers. Where’d you go to school?”
“Doesn’t matter. Least I don’t got to smell that for a living. Unless I’m out here with schleps like you.”
“What the hell’s a schlep?”
The banter continued as Martinez pushed the throttle up more, engines rumbling, bow dipping. We sailed by duck blinds and floats marking crab pots as rainbows followed in the spray of our wake. He pushed the speed up to twenty-three knots and we cut into the deep blue water of the bay, where no pleasure boats were out this day, only an ocean liner a dark mountain on the horizon.
“How far is it?” I asked Martinez, hanging on to the back of his chair, and grateful for my suit.
“Eighteen miles total.” He raised his voice, riding waves like a surfer, sliding in sideways and over, his eyes always ahead. “Ordinarily, it wouldn’t take long. But this is worse than usual. A lot worse, really.”
His crew continued checking depth and direction detectors as the GPS pointed the way by satellite. I could see nothing but water now, moguls rising in front, and behind, waves clapping hard like hands as the bay attacked us from all sides.
“What can you tell me about where we’re going?” I almost had to shout.
“Population of about seven hundred. Until about twenty years ago they generated their own electricity, got one small airstrip made of dredge material. Damn.” The boat slammed down hard in a trough. “Almost broached that one. That’ll turn you over in a flash.”
His face was intense as he rode the bay like a bronco, his crewmen unfazed but alert as they held on to whatever they could.
“Economy’s based on blue crabs, soft-shell crabs, ship ’em all over the country,” Martinez went on. “In fact, rich folks fly private planes in all the time just to buy crabs.”
“Or that’s what they say they’re buying,” someone remarked.
“We do have a problem with drunkenness, bootlegging, drugs,” Martinez went on. “We board their boats when we’re checking for life jackets, doing drug interdictions, and they call it being overhauled.” He smiled at me.
“Yeah, and we’re the guards,” a guardsman quipped. “Look out, here come the guards.”
“They use language any way they want,” Martinez said, rolling over another wave. “You may have a problem understanding them.”
“When does crab season end?” I asked, and I was more concerned about what was being exported than I was about the way Tangiermen talked.
“This time of year they’re dredging, dragging the bottom for crabs. They’ll do that all winter, working fourteen, fifteen hours a day, sometimes gone a week at a time.”
Starboard, in the distance, a dark hulk protruded from the water like a whale. A crewman caught me looking.
“World War Two Liberty ship that ran aground,” he said. “Navy uses it for target practice.”
At last, we were slowing as we approached the western shore, where a bulkhead had been built of rocks, shattered boats, rusting refrigerators, cars and other junk, to stop the island from eroding more. Land was almost level with the bay, only feet above sea level at its highest ground. Homes, a church steeple and a blue water tower were proud on the horizon on this tiny, barren island where people endured the worst weather with the least beneath their feet.
We chugged slowly past marshes and tidal flats. Old gap-toothed piers were piled high with crab pots made of chicken wire and strung with colored floats, and battle-scarred wooden boats with round and boxy sterns were moored but not idle. Martinez whelped his horn, and the sound ripped the air as we came through. Tangiermen with bibs turned expressionless, raw faces on us, the way people do when they have private opinions that aren’t always friendly. They moved about in their crab shanties and worked on their nets as we docked near fuel pumps.
“Like most everybody else here, the chief’s name is Crockett,” Martinez said as his crew tied us down. “Davy Crockett. Don’t laugh.” His eyes searched the pier and a snack bar that didn’t look open this time of year. “Come on.”
I followed him out of the boat, and wind blowing off the water felt as cold as January. We hadn’t gone far when a small pickup truck quickly rounded a corner, tires loud on gravel. It stopped, and a tense young man got out. His uniform was blue jeans, a dark winter jacket and a cap that said Tangier Police, and his eyes darted back and forth between Martinez and me. He stared at what I was carrying.
“Okay,” Martinez said to me. “I’ll leave you with Davy.” To Crockett, he added, “This is Dr. Scarpetta.”
Crockett nodded. “Y’all come on.”
“It’s just the lady who’s going.”
“I’ll ride you to there.”
I had heard his dialect before in unspoiled mountain coves where people really are not of this century.
“We’ll be waiting for you here,” Martinez promised me, walking off to his boat.
I followed Crockett to his truck. I could tell he cleaned it inside and out maybe once a day, and liked Armor All even more than Marino did.
“I assume you’ve been inside the house,” I said to him as he cranked the engine.
“I haven’t. Was a neighbor that did. And when I was noticed about it, I called for Norfolk.”
He began to back up, a pewter cross swinging from the key chain. I looked out the window at small white frame restaurants with hand-painted signs and plastic sea gulls hanging in windows. A truck hauling crab pots was coming the other way and had to pull over to let us pass. People were out on bicycles that had neither hand brakes nor gears, and the favorite mode of travel seemed to be scooters.
“What is the decedent’s name?” I began taking notes.
“Lila Pruitt,” he said, unmindful that my door was almost touching someone’s chain link fence. “Widder lady, don’t know how aged. Sold receipts for the tourists. Crab cakes and things.”
I wrote this down, not sure what he was saying as he drove me past the Tangier Combined School, and a cemetery. Headstones leaned every way, as if they had been caught in a gale.
“What about when she was last seen alive?” I asked.
“In Daby’s, she was.” He nodded. “Oh, maybe June.”
Now I was hopelessly lost. “I’m sorry,” I said. “She was last seen in some place called Daby’s way back in June?”
“Yes’em.” He nodded as if this made all the sense in the world.
“What is Daby’s and who saw her there?”
“The store. Daby’s and Son. I can get you to it.” He shot me a look, and I shook my head. “I was in it for shopping and saw her. June, I think.”
His strange syllables and cadences sprung, tongued and rolled over each other like the water of his world. There was thur, can’t was cain’t, things was thoings, do was doie.
“What about her neighbors? Have any of them seen her?” I asked.
“Not since days.”
“Then who found her?” I asked.
“No one did.”
I looked at him in despair.
“Just Mrs. Bradshaw come in for a receipt, went on in and had the smell.”
“Did this Mrs. Bradshaw go upstairs?”
“Said she not.” He shook his head. “She went on straight for me.”
“The decedent’s address?”
“Where we are.” He was slowing down. “School Street.”
Catty-corner to Swain Memorial Methodist Church, the white clapboard house was two stories, with clothes still on the line and a purple martin house on a rusting pole in back. An old wooden rowboat and crab pots were in a yard scattered with oyster shells, and brown hydrangea lined a fence where there was a curious row of white-painted cubbyholes facing the unpaved street.
“What are those?” I asked Crockett.
“For where she sold receipts. Quarter each. Drop it in a slot.” He pointed. “Mrs. Pruitt didn’t do direct much with no one.”
I finally realized that he was talking about recipes, and pulled up my door handle.
“I’ll here be waiting,” he said.
The expression on his face begged me not to ask him to go inside that house.
“Just keep people away.” I got out of his truck.
“Don’t have to worrisome about that none.”
I glanced around at other small homes and trailers in their sandy-soil yards. Some had family plots, the dead buried wherever there was high ground, headstones worn smooth like chalk and tilted or knocked down. I climbed Lila Pruitt’s front steps, noticing more headstones in the shadows of junipers in a corner of her yard.
The screen door was rusting in spots, and the spring protested loudly as I entered an enclosed porch sloping toward the street. There was a glider upholstered in floral plastic, and beside it a small plastic table, where I imagined her rocking and drinking iced tea while she watched tourists buying her recipes for a quarter. I wondered if she had spied to make sure they paid.
The storm door was unlocked, and Hoyt had thought to tape on it a homemade sign that warned: SICKNESS: DO NOT ENTER!! I supposed he had figured that Tangiermen might not know what a biological hazard was, but he had made his point. I stepped inside a dim foyer, where a portrait of Jesus praying to His Father hung on the wall, and I smelled the foul odor of decomposing human flesh.
In the living room was evidence that someone had not been well for a while. Pillows and blankets were disarrayed and soiled on the couch, and on the coffee table were tissues, a thermometer, bottles of aspirin, liniment, dirty cups and plates. She had been feverish. She had ached, and had come in here to make herself comfortable and watch TV.
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