Stigma

by Philip Hawley Jr.

  Megan started down the path. Almost immediately the overgrowth formed a low canopy above her head. She felt closed in, as if in a tunnel. Gangly fronds caught the flashlight’s beam, and disorienting fragments of light bounced back at her.

  She had gone about twenty yards down the path when she heard a sound to her right.

  It was a snap, like a twig breaking.

  She turned off the light, lowered herself into a crouch and listened — waiting for the sound to return and hoping it wouldn’t.

  Her bladder could wait. She felt around for vines and branches, marking the perimeter of the path, then began duck-walking backward.

  After a few awkward strides she stood and turned toward the village.

  A muted crack sent her back into a crouch.

  Seconds passed.

  Her thighs began to burn. She aimed her darkened flashlight through the undergrowth, toward the sound. Her hand was wobbling when she switched the light on, then off again.

  Through the brush she saw a tiny reflected glint. Water? Metal?

  It didn’t matter.

  Megan shot up and started sprinting toward the village.

  “She saw me!” a man yelled in Spanish.

  Then heavy footfalls. Several.

  A flashlight beam shot across the trail in front of her. She lunged to her right and collided with a tree limb. The sting didn’t register, but the hand reaching through the thicket and grabbing her jacket did. She twisted violently but the grip held firm.

  Her teeth clamped down on a finger. She tasted blood.

  “She’s biting me. Come around and get her.”

  The man’s voice — composed, in control — sent a shudder through her. His grip didn’t loosen.

  Megan found a thumb and bit down again, this time like a crazed animal trying to dismember its prey. The man’s grip weakened for an instant. It was long enough.

  She took off toward the village, her flashlight beam jerking wildly, her arms thrashing at low-hanging branches.

  A beam of light came at her before she’d taken ten steps. Megan turned and plunged headlong into the jungle.

  28

  Luke had the bogey’s head in his nightscope’s crosshairs when his team leader, Alpha, ordered him to kill the unidentified man.

  “Omega, the bogey is now your target. Take him out.”

  Kappa, the lead element of the insertion team, was tucked into a shallow inset between two warehouse buildings on the far side of the pier. The unidentified bogey had come within five meters of Kappa’s position. He had strayed into the mandatory kill zone. He was now a target to be destroyed.

  “Anyone have an identity on the target?” Luke whispered into his throat mic while moving his rifle scope back and forth between the target and Kappa.

  The target had no weapon. He was likely a civilian worker at the seafood-processing plant that North Korea used to camouflage a naval installation at the far end of the pier.

  “Omega, take out the target. Now!”

  Even in a whisper, Alpha’s voice carried the force of a locomotive at full throttle.

  Luke clicked back one magnification setting on his scope — he didn’t want to see the man’s face — and re-centered the target’s head in his crosshairs.

  “Omega, do you read me?” the team leader said. “I am ordering you to take out the target.”

  The target suddenly turned toward him like a deer sensing danger. Luke took out the last few millimeters of slack from his trigger.

  A muted spit came from his rifle.

  Four hundredths of a second later, the target’s head lurched back and he slumped onto the pier.

  Kappa leapt from his shadowed recess and dragged the lifeless body into his small hideaway.

  “Insertion team, move in,” came the order in Luke’s earpiece.

  By the time he and the other members of the insertion team reached the pier, Kappa had taken a position farther out on the concrete platform, and Luke was crouched in the inset that Kappa had just abandoned.

  Beside him, lying face down on the concrete deck, was the target he had destroyed a few minutes earlier.

  The small male figure was dressed in tattered civilian clothing and his feet were bare. His limbs were spread at unnatural angles, and the pool of blood under his head was still spreading.

  Luke grabbed the dead body by a shoulder and turned it over.

  Blood oozed from a single bullet hole above the right eye.

  Just below the entry wound, staring back at Luke, were the wide-open eyes of an adolescent boy.

  Luke pitched forward in his bed, his chest heaving.

  The stabbing pain punched through his forehead. He spread a hand across the front of his head and squeezed. When the pain finally left, he threw his legs over the edge of the mattress and turned on his bedside lamp.

  “God damn me to hell,” he whispered.

  Twelve years later he still could not fathom how easily he had crossed over into the darkness of Proteus. He had chosen an unholy alliance with some perverse inner demon, and a young boy had paid for that choice with his life.

  He had slaughtered an innocent. He carried the weight of that truth like an iron yoke. It never left him.

  The clock on his bed stand read 3:07 A.M. He was done sleeping for the night.

  * * *

  Megan sprinted into the jungle. The trail quickly narrowed into a tunnel-like passageway, and a tangle of branches grabbed at her shoulder. The roots and vines were closing in around her.

  Behind her the heavy footfalls grew louder with each stride.

  A flashlight beam flickered through the latticework of thick jungle growth on her right. Then another light. Both were moving faster than she was, angling toward her. Megan tried to scream, but the sound came out as a throaty whisper. She was already out of breath.

  A man behind her yelled in Spanish, “Cut her off at the clearing.”

  They were herding her like stray cattle through a chute. She hadn’t been on this side of the village and had no idea what was ahead.

  Megan painted the other side of the trail with her light, looking for a break in the path, a way out. She guzzled air but couldn’t get enough to keep up her pace. Her legs were weakening, her strides shortening.

  She was oxygen-starved, and the footsteps behind her sounded like thunderclaps.

  The trail suddenly widened and the vegetation thinned on both sides. The flashlights to her right were clearer now, bobbing up and down in cadence with the thrashing legs and angry grunts converging on her.

  The shielding walls of jungle on either side of her path were disintegrating into a clearing!

  Megan glimpsed a small break in the undergrowth on her left and dove through it. She rolled down an embankment, tumbling blindly, her arms wrapped around her head. Soon she was flipping end over end, picking up speed as the slope turned down. Branches reached out of the blackness and slashed her arms and face. While fighting to tuck herself into a tight curl, something hard punched her ribs and pushed the last pockets of air from her lungs. She fell limp and bounced down the incline until the ground below her finally gave way and she plunged into a free fall.

  Thump. She hit a soggy patch of earth.

  There was no pain, but her thoughts were slow to come and her body didn’t want to move. Fear left her. There was only the feeling that all of this was coming to an end. The shouted commands and angry voices flitted at the periphery of her mind as though they did not matter anymore. She felt her chest rising and falling. The sound of running water soothed her.

  It was a river, and soon it was the only sound she heard. A stream of unanswered questions and what-ifs — life’s unfinished journey — tumbled through her mind, carried by the watery cascade.

  A hand touched her face. Fingers stroked her forehead. She soon realized that they were her fingers.

  Megan opened her eyes just as a flashlight beam passed over her. Her head began to ache.

  The voices again, still searchi
ng for her. Who were they? Why were they chasing her?

  Her head tilted back and she gazed upside down at the lights zigzagging down the embankment — first one, then two more — like fireflies jinking toward their prey.

  She rolled onto her side and a groan came out of her.

  She staggered to her knees and stared up the hill. Her senses slowly awakened and she turned back to the sound of rushing water. The wash of her pursuers’ flashlights painted a tall thicket of jungle that stood like a barricade in front of the pulsing watercourse.

  Dropping to her stomach, she belly-crawled toward the wet sounds.

  More voices behind her — hunters trying to reacquire their target.

  The rushing water grew louder.

  A massive tree stopped her progress. Megan ran her hand over the gnarled surface of an enormous root cap that stretched upward from the tree’s base like a rocket fin. She edged around the tree and propped her back against an inset between two root fins.

  “Behind the tree,” a voice shouted in Spanish.

  The wet grass on either side of her glimmered with patches of light. The wall of jungle growth that stood between her and the water was only a few feet away, but it was so thick, it might as well have been made of stone. She was trapped.

  Megan looked up. The shadow of a root fin disappeared into black sky above her. She grabbed hold, straddled the root, and began to climb using its bulbous edging as a handhold.

  She had climbed about fifteen feet when the root started to disappear into the tree trunk like a pleat. She couldn’t go any farther.

  Her arms burned. In another minute she’d fall back to the ground.

  She craned her head, glanced down. Something thin and sinewy brushed up against her head but she couldn’t make it out. Everything was a mass of dark shadows.

  Her right foot slipped. She clawed at the tree to regain her purchase but the noise brought to it a beam of light from below. To her left, a tangle of hanging vines glistened.

  “She’s going up the tree!” a man yelled.

  Megan launched herself at the vines with everything she had left in her legs. She clutched at them, slipped, then caught hold with one hand. Her body spun slowly around the ropy plants, and them around her, but the force of her leap sent the twisted bundle into a lazy arc.

  She struck a tree branch, grabbed hold, and curled herself up and onto the bulky limb.

  Below her a faint click, then metal sliding against metal. She looked down just as an orange flash broke through the darkness. With it came a loud bang.

  She had to get to the river. She rolled into a standing position, arms outstretched, and moved out onto the limb. The shouted voices pushed her into a slow trot. With each step the sound of churning water swelled. The branch narrowed and eventually started to bow under her weight.

  When the second gunshot sounded, she ducked into a crouch. The limb wobbled. She joggled right, then left, and nearly recovered her balance before falling again into the darkness.

  29

  Luke spent the second half of the night in his living room, sitting in front of his computer and searching the medical Internet site, Medline. He had cross-referenced a stew of medical terms — lung diseases, sudden death, cystic fibrosis, tropical infections, lymphocytosis, leukemia — hoping to tease out some fragment of information that explained the deaths of two children whose only apparent link were some arcane microscopic findings.

  He had come up empty, but at least he’d burned through three hours of night’s darkness without having to relive torments from long ago, or roil in the nascent nightmare of Erickson’s murder.

  Even before a cab delivered Luke home from his session at LAPD headquarters yesterday, homicide detectives had interviewed his father and Ben about their dinner meeting at Kolter’s. After debriefing both of them and satisfying himself that their recollections and answers had coincided with his, Luke had called an old acquaintance from the Naval Academy who lived in Seattle — the only criminal defense attorney he knew. The lawyer agreed to help him find a defense attorney in L.A. only after berating him for talking with homicide detectives.

  Luke expected to hear back from the guy this morning, but he was more eager to talk to Ben. The pathologist had promised to call no later than 9:00 A.M. with a progress report on his probe into Jane Doe’s death.

  The clock in the bottom corner of Luke’s computer screen read 6:12 A.M.

  He glanced out the front window and took in the L.A. basin — streetlights were still burning across the darkened city — then hefted himself from the chair and made his way out the front door. He was about to start down the stairway for his newspaper when he spotted it in the corner of the landing. On a good day, the L.A. Times landed on his driveway. It had never made it to his doorstep before. He scanned the street before picking up the paper.

  Underneath the paper was a large manila envelope.

  He looked back at the street, then scooped up the unmarked package.

  Once inside, he tossed the paper onto a table and tore open one end of the envelope. Inside were two letter-size sheets of paper. The first page was printed and read:

  From:

  ktartaglia@simcast.net

  Sent:

  Friday, January 30 @ 5:12 PM

  To:

  LukeMcKenna@uch.university.edu

  Subject:

  [None]

  Luke,

  Look at the attached, then call me ASAP.

  Please, we need to talk.

  Kate

  He threw the envelope aside and turned to the second page.

  It was a color photograph, and its images tightened his throat like a wire ligature.

  Two men and a woman with bronze skin and round faces were sitting on a crude wooden bench in front of a thatched hut. In front of them, on the ground, were a boy and a girl. The children were naked from the waist up — he guessed their ages at about two and four years — and they were leaning heavily against one another, as if barely able to sit upright.

  The five faces stared at the camera lens with vacant expressions. They were physically wasted. His first thought might have been malnutrition — caloric deprivation would explain their hollow cheeks, protruding ribs, and wasted limbs — but this wasn’t malnutrition. Of that, he was certain. The tattoos on their skin told him so. The men and boy had a crescent-shaped mark on their chests, just like Josue Chaca’s. The girl had three blue circles on her lower abdomen; they looked identical to those he’d seen in the postmortem pictures of Jane Doe.

  The photo’s background showed forested peaks rising into an incongruously beautiful sapphire sky streaked with gauzy clouds. In the distance behind the hut, a slender waterfall streamed down the center of a massive cup-shaped rock formation at the convergence of two mountains.

  Luke glanced at the footer on the bottom of the page: MAYAKITAL.JPG. He was looking at a print of a digital photograph.

  Amid the avalanche of questions and puzzles that bombarded him at that moment, two inescapable facts emerged. The photograph in his hand confirmed the link between Josue Chaca and Jane Doe, and Kate’s e-mail established her connection to both children.

  Luke thought back to the lethal precision of Kate’s bullet wounds. What had been a nagging suspicion suddenly wailed like a klaxon. Someone had killed her before she could unravel the mystery of those children’s deaths for him.

  And somewhere out there was a person who had made certain that he knew the truth.

  But who?

  * * *

  “C’mon, talk to me.” Ben was sitting over the microscope in his study at home. He grabbed an eyebrow and started twirling.

  It was already six-fifteen and he needed to get to the office, but he couldn’t let it go. He had spent most of the night poring over nearly one hundred slides from the Jane Doe case and still couldn’t match the pattern of what he was seeing to any known disease.

  He picked up the last folder. It contained just three slides — the only slides produced
in his lab — one each of the girl’s lungs, pancreas, and bile ducts. He took the first slide from the cardboard jacket, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed it between his fingers as if hoping that a genie would appear with some answers.

  He agreed with most of Jay Whatchamacallit’s findings. The girl’s smaller airways, pancreatic glands, and bile ducts were decimated, while adjacent tissues were virtually untouched. The damage was selective and precise. Whatever had caused her death was an exquisitely orchestrated process.

  But the M.E. had missed at least one finding — damage to the girl’s ovaries. It was subtle. In fact, the gross structure of the ovaries was almost entirely normal. Only when Ben examined them under higher magnification did he find that the oocytes were severely depleted. There were very few eggs. An overworked M.E. could easily have overlooked it or assumed that it had nothing to do with the girl’s death.

  Ben also wanted to write it off as unrelated to the cause of death — he already had enough puzzles to solve — but there were a few things that tugged at his curiosity. There were too many lymphocytes in the ovaries; not nearly as many as he had found in the most heavily damaged tissues, but more than he could explain. And unlike the lungs, pancreas, and bile ducts, there were almost no cells undergoing destruction at the moment of Jane Doe’s death. Whatever had damaged her ovaries had occurred sometime before she died.

  What was the connection between this case and Josue Chaca? Ben couldn’t let go of the conspicuous similarities — the pattern and precision of the tissue destruction in both cases was unlike anything he had ever seen. But then there was the glaring inconsistency between the cases, too. Adam Smith, a damned good oncologist, had been certain that the boy had leukemia. After reviewing Jane Doe’s bone marrow slides, Ben was just as certain that the girl did not.

  He tapped the slide against his palm, then slipped it onto the microscope tray and leaned over the eyepiece. It was a section of Jane Doe’s lung tissue that his lab had stained with an immunofluorescent dye, which selectively bound to Killer T-cells. After hearing Elmer describe how his prototype flu vaccine had caused the toxic reaction in those lab mice, Ben had decided to try the special staining on a hunch. He didn’t like being reduced to hunches, but then, he had very few leads to pursue.