Wesley dropped me off and said he was going to the Richmond Field Office for a while and would check with me later. My heels were loud as I walked down the corridor, bidding good morning to members of my staff. Rose was on the phone when I walked in, and the glimpse of my desk through her adjoining doorway was devastating. Hundreds of reports and death certificates awaited my initials and signature, and mail and phone messages were cascading out of my in-basket.
'What is this?' I said as she hung up. 'You'd think I've been gone a year.'
'It feels like you have.'
She was rubbing lotion into her hands and I noticed the small canister of Vita aromatherapy facial spray on the edge of my desk, the open mailing tube next to it. There was also one on Rose's desk, next to her bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care. I stared back and forth, from my Vita spray to hers, my subconscious processing what I was seeing before my reason did. Reality seemed to turn inside out, and I grabbed the door frame. Rose was on her feet, her chair flying back on its rollers as she lunged around her desk for me.
'Dr Scarpetta!'
'Where did you get this?' I asked, staring at the spray.
'It's just a sample.' She looked bewildered. 'A bunch of them came in the mail.'
'Have you used it?'
Now she was really worried as she looked at me. 'Well, it just got here. I haven't tried it yet.'
'Don't touch it!' I said, severely. 'Who else got one?' 'Gosh, I really don't know. What is it? What's wrong?' She raised her voice.
Getting gloves from my office, I grabbed the facial spray off her desk and triple- bagged it.
'Everybody in the conference room, now!'
I ran down the hall to the front office, and made the same announcement. Within minutes, my entire staff, including doctors still in scrubs, was assembled. Some people were out of breath, and everyone was staring at me, unnerved and frazzled. I held up the transparent evidence bag containing the sample size of Vita spray.
'Who has one of these?' I asked, looking around the room. Four people raised their hands.
'Who has used it?' I then asked. 'I need to know if absolutely anybody has.'
Cleta, a clerk from the front office, looked frightened. 'Why? What's the matter?'
'Have you sprayed this on your face,' I said to her.
'On my plants,' she said.
'Plants get bagged and burned,' I said. 'Where's Wingo?'
'MCV.'
'I don't know this for a fact,' I spoke to everyone, 'and I pray I'm wrong. But we might be dealing with product tampering. Please don't panic, but under no circumstances does anyone touch this spray. Do we know exactly how they were delivered?'
It was Cleta who spoke. 'This morning I came in before anybody up front. There were police reports shoved through the slot, as always. And these had been, too. They were in little mailing tubes. There were eleven of them. I know because I counted to see if there was enough to go around.'
'And the mailman didn't bring them. They had just been shoved through the slot of the front door.'
'I don't know who brought them. But they looked like they'd been mailed.'
'Any tubes you still have, please bring them to me,' I said.
I was told that no one had used one, and all were collected and brought to my office. Putting on cotton gloves and glasses, I studied the mailing tube meant for me. Postage was bulk rate and clearly a manufacturer's sample, and I found it most unusual for something like that to be addressed to a specific individual. I looked inside the tube, and there was a coupon for the spray. As I held it up to the light, I noticed edges imperceptibly uneven, as if the coupon had been clipped with scissors versus a machine.
'Rose?' I called out.
She walked into my office.
'The tube you got,' I said. 'Who was it addressed to?'
'Resident, I think.' Her face was stressed.
'Then the only one with a name on it is mine.'
'I think so. This is awful.'
'Yes, it is.' I picked up the mailing tube. 'Look at this. Letters all the same size, the postmark on the same label as the address. I've never seen that.'
'Like it came off a computer,' she said as her amazement grew.
'I'm going across the street to the DNA lab.' I got up. 'Call USAMRIID right away and tell Colonel Fujitsubo we need to schedule a conference call between him, us, CDC, Quantico, now.'
'Where do you want to do it?' she asked as I hurried out the door.
'Not here. See what Benton says.'
Outside, I ran down the sidewalk past my parking lot, and crossed Fourteenth Street. I entered the Seaboard Building where DNA and other forensic labs had relocated several years before. At the security desk, I called the section chief, Dr Douglas Wheat, who had been given a male family name, despite her gender.
'I need a closed air system and a hood,' I explained to her.
'Come on back.'
A long sloping hallway always polished bright led to a series of glass-enclosed laboratories. Inside, scientists were prepossessed with pipettes and gels and
radioactive probes as they coaxed sequences of genetic code to unravel their identities. Wheat, who battled paperwork almost as much as I did, was sitting at her desk, typing something on her computer. She was an attractive woman in a strong way, forty and friendly.
'What trouble are you getting into this time?' She smiled at me, then eyed my bag. 'I'm afraid to ask.'
'Possible product tampering,' I said. 'I need to spray some on a slide, but it absolutely can't get in the air or on me or anyone.'
'What is it?' She was very somber now, getting up.
'Possibly a virus.'
'As in the one on Tangier?'
'That's my fear.'
'You don't think it might be wiser to get this to CDC, let them…'
'Douglas, yes, it would be wiser,' I patiently explained as I coughed again. 'But we haven't got time. I've got to know. We have no idea how many of these might be in the hands of consumers.'
Her DNA lab had a number of closed air system hoods surrounded by glass bioguards, because the evidence tested here was blood. She led me to one in the back of a room, and we put on masks and gloves, and she gave me a lab coat. She turned on a fan that sucked air up into the hood, passing it through HEPA filters.
'Ready?' I asked, taking the facial spray out of the bag. 'We'll make this quick.' I held a clean slide and the small canister under the hood and sprayed.
'Let's dip this in a ten percent bleach solution,' I said when I was done. 'Then we'll triple bag it, get it and the other ten off to Atlanta.'
'Coming up,' Wheat said, walking off.
The slide took almost no time to dry, and I dripped Nicolaou stain on it and sealed it with a cover slip. I was already looking at it under a microscope when Wheat returned with a container of bleach solution. She dipped the Vita spray in it several times while fears coalesced, rolling into a dark, awful thunderhead as my pulse throbbed in my neck. I peered at the Guarnieri bodies I had come to dread.
When I looked up at Wheat, she could tell by the expression on my face.
'Not good,' she said.
'Not good.' I turned off the microscope and dropped my mask and gloves into biohazardous waste.
The Vita sprays from my office were airlifted to Atlanta, and a preliminary warning was broadcast nationwide to anyone who might have had such a sample delivered to them. The manufacturer had issued an immediate recall, and international airlines were removing the sprays from overseas travel bags given to business and first-class passengers. The potential spread of this disease, should deadoc have somehow tampered with hundreds, thousands of the facial sprays, was staggering. We could, once again, find ourselves facing a worldwide epidemic.
The meeting took place at one P.M. in the FBI's field office off Staples Mill Road. State and federal flags fought from tall poles out front as a sharp wind tore brown leaves off trees and made the afternoon seem much colder than it was. The brick building was new, and had a secure conference room equipped with audio-visual capabilities, so we could see remote people while we talked to them. A young female agent sat at the head of the table, at a console. Wesley and I pulled out chairs and moved microphones close. Above us on walls were video monitors.
'Who else are we expecting?' Wesley asked as the special agent in charge, or S.A.C., walked in with an armload of paperwork.
'Miles,' said the S.A.C., referring to the Health Commissioner, my immediate boss.
'And the Coast Guard.' He glanced at his paperwork. 'Regional chief out of Crisfield, Maryland. A chopper's bringing him in. Shouldn't take him more than thirty minutes in one of those big birds.'
He had no sooner said this than we could hear blades thudding faintly in the distance. Minutes later, the Jayhawk was thundering overhead and settling in the helipad behind the building. I could not remember a Coast Guard recovery helicopter ever landing in our city or even flying over it low, and the sight of it must have been awesome to people on the road. Chief Martinez was slipping off his coat as he joined us. I noted his dark blue commando sweater and uniform pants, and maps rolled up in tubes, and the situation only got grimmer.
The agent at the console was working controls as Commissioner Miles strode in and took a chair next to mine. He was an older man with abundant gray hair that was more contentious than most of the people he managed. Today, tufts were sticking out in all directions, his brow heavy and stern as he put on thick black glasses.
'You look a little under the weather,' he said to me as he made notes to himself.
'The usual stuff going around,' I said.
'Had I known that, I wouldn't have sat next to you.' He meant it.
'I'm beyond the contagious stage.' I said, but he wasn't listening.
Monitors were coming on around the room, and I recognized the face of Colonel
Fujitsubo on one of them. Then Bret Martin blinked on, staring straight at us.
The agent at the console said, 'Camera on. Mikes on. Someone want to count for me.'
'Five-four-three-two-one,' the S.A.C. said into his mike.
'How's that level?'
'Fine here,' Fujitsubo said from Frederick, Maryland.
'Fine,' said Martin from Atlanta.
'We're ready anytime.' The agent at the console glanced around the table.
'Just to make sure all of us are up to speed,' I began. 'We have an outbreak of what appears to be a smallpox-like virus that so far seems to be restricted to the island of Tangier, eighteen miles off the coast of Virginia. Two deaths reported so far, with another person ill. It is also likely that a recent homicide victim was infected with this virus. The mode of transmission is suspected to be the deliberate contamination of samples of Vita aromatherapy facial spray.'
'That hasn't been determined yet.' It was Miles who spoke.
'The samples should be getting here any minute,' Martin said from Atlanta. 'We'll begin testing immediately, and will hopefully have an answer by the end of tomorrow. Meanwhile, they're being taken out of circulation until we know exactly what we're dealing with.'
'You can do PCR to see if it's the same virus,' Miles said to the video screens. Martin nodded. 'That we can do.'
Miles looked around the room. 'So what are we saying here? We got some loonytune out there, some Tylenol killer who's decided to use a disease? How do we know these little spray bottles aren't the hell all over the place?'
'I think the killer wants to take his time.' Wesley began what he did best. 'He started with one victim. When that paid off, he began on a tiny island. Now that's paying off, so he hits a downtown health department office.' He looked at me. 'He will go to the next stage if we don't stop him or develop a vaccine. Another reason I suspect this is still local, is it appears the facial sprays are hand-delivered, with bogus bulk-rate postage on the tubes to give the appearence that they were mailed.'
'You're definitely calling this product tampering, then,' Colonel Fujitsubo said to him.
'I'm calling this terrorism.'
'The point of it being what?'
'We don't know that yet,' Wesley told him.
'But this is far worse than any Tylenol killer or Unabomber,' I said. 'The destruction they cause is limited to whoever takes the capsules or opens the package. With a virus, it's going to spread far beyond the primary victim.'
'Dr Martin, what can you tell us about this particular virus?' Miles said.
'We have four traditional methods for testing for smallpox.' He stared stiffly at us from his screen. 'Electron microscopy, with which we have observed a direct visualization of variola.'
'Smallpox?' Miles almost shouted. 'You're sure about that?'
'Hold on,' Martin interrupted him. 'Let me finish. We also got a verification of antigenic identity using agar gel. Now, chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane culture, other tissue cultures are going to take two, three days. So we don't have those results now, but we do have PCR. It verified a pox. We just don't know which one. It's very odd, nothing currently known, not monkeypox, whitepox. Not classic variola major or minor, although it seems to be related.'
'Dr Scarpetta,' Fujitsubo spoke. 'Can you tell me what's in this facial spray, as best you know?'
'Distilled water and a fragrance. There were no ingredients listed, but generally that's what sprays like this are,' I said.
He was making notes. 'Sterile?' He looked back at us from the monitor.
'I would hope so, since the directions encourage you to spray it over your face and contact lenses,' I replied.
'Then my question,' Fujitsubo went on via satellite, 'is what kind of shelf life might we expect these contaminated sprays to have? Variola isn't all that stable in moist conditions.'
'A good point,' Martin said, adjusting his ear piece. 'It does very well when dried, and at room temperature can survive months to a year. It is sensitive to sunlight, but inside the atomizers, that wouldn't be a problem. Doesn't like heat, which, unfortunately, makes this an ideal time of year.'
'Then depending on what people do when they have these delivered,' I said, 'there could be a lot of duds out there.'
'Could be,' Martin hoped.
Wesley said, 'Clearly, the offender we're looking for is knowledgeable of infectious diseases.'
'Has to be,' Fujitsubo said. 'The virus had to be cultured, propagated, and if this is, in fact, terrorism, then the perpetrator is very familiar with basic laboratory techniques. He knew how to handle something like this and keep himself protected. We're assuming only one person is involved?'
'My theory, but the answer is, we don't know,' Wesley said.
'He calls himself deadoc,' I said.
'As in Doctor Death?' Fujitsubo frowned. 'He's telling us he's a doctor?'
Again, it was hard to say, but the question that was most troublesome was also the hardest to ask.
'Dr Martin,' I said as Martinez silently leaned back in his chair, listening. 'Allegedly, your facility and a laboratory in Russia are the only two sources of the viral isolates. Any thoughts on how someone got hold of this?'
'Exactly,' Wesley said. 'Unpleasant thought that it may be, we need to check your list of employees. Any recent firings, layoffs? Anybody quit during recent months and years?'
'Our source supply of variola virus is as meticulously monitored and inventoried as plutonium.' Martin answered with confidence. 'I personally have already checked into this and can tell you with certainty that nothing has been tampered with. Nothing is missing. And it is not possible to get into one of the locked freezers without authorization and knowledge of alarm codes.'
No one spoke right away.
Then Wesley said, 'I think it would be a good idea for us to have a list of those people who have had such authorization over the past five years. Initially, based on experience, I am profiling this individual as a white male, possibly in his early forties. Most likely he lives alone, but if he doesn't or he dates, he has a part of his residence that is off limits, his lab…'
'So we're probably talking about a former lab worker,' the S.A.C. said.
'Or someone like that,' Wesley said. 'Someone educated, trained. This person is introverted, and I base this on a number of things, not the least of which is his tendency to write in the lower case. His refusal to use punctuation indicates his belief that he is not like other people and the same rules do not apply to him. He is not talkative and may be considered aloof or shy by associates. He has time on his hands, and most important, feels he has been mistreated by the system. He feels he is due an
apology by the highest office in the land, by our government, and I believe this is key to this perpetrator's motivation.'
'Then this is revenge,' I said. 'Plain and simple.'
'It's never plain or simple. I wish it were,' Wesley said. 'But I do think revenge is key, which is why it is important that all government agencies that deal with infectious diseases get us the records of any employees reprimanded, fired, laid off, furloughed or whatever, in recent months and years.'
Fujitsubo cleared his throat. 'Well, let's talk logistics, then.'
It was the Coast Guard's turn to present a plan. Martinez got up from his chair and fastened large maps to flip charts, as camera angles were adjusted so our remote guests could see.
'Can you get these in?' Martinez asked the agent at the console.
'Got them,' she said. 'How about you?' She looked up at the monitors.
'Fine.'
'I don't know. Maybe if you could zoom in more.'
She moved the camera in closer as Martinez got out a laser pointer. He directed its intense pink dot at the Maryland-Virginia line in the Chesapeake Bay that cut through Smith Island, just north of Tangier.
'We got a number of islands going up this way toward Fishing Bay and the Nanticoke River, in Maryland. There's Smith Island. South Marsh Island. Bloodsworth Island.' The pink dot hopped to each one. 'Then we're on the mainland. And you got Crisfield down here, which is only fifteen nautical miles from Tangier.' He looked at us.
'Crisfield's where a lot of watermen bring in their crabs. And a lot of Tangier folks have relatives in Crisfield. I'm real worried about that.'
'And I'm worried that the Tangiermen are not going to cooperate,' Miles said. 'A
quarantine is going to cut off their only source of income.'
'Yes, sir,' Martinez said, looking at his watch. 'And we're cutting it off even as we speak. We got boats, cutters coming in from as far away as Elizabeth City to help us circle the island.'
'So as of now, no one's leaving,' Fujitsubo said as his face continued to reign over us from the video screen.
'That's right.'
'Good.'
'What if people resist?' I asked the obvious question. 'What are you going to do with them? You can't take them into custody and risk exposure.'
Martinez hesitated. He looked up at Fujitsubo on the video screen. 'Commander, would you like to field this one, sir?' he asked.
'We've actually already discussed this at great length,' Fujitsubo said to us. 'I have spoken to the secretary of the Department of Transportation, to Vice Admiral Perry, and of course, the Secretary of Defense. Basically, this thing is speeding its way up to the White House for authorization.'
'Authorization for what?' It was Miles who asked.
'To use deadly force, if all else fails,' Martinez said to all of us.
'Christ,' Wesley muttered.
I listened in disbelief, staring up at doomsday gods.
'We have no choice,' Fujitsubo spoke calmly. 'If people panic and start fleeing the island and do not heed Coast Guard warnings, they will - not if - but will bring smallpox onto the mainland. And we're talking about a population which either has not been vaccinated in thirty years. Or an immunization done so long ago it's no
longer effective. Or a disease that has mutated to the extent that our present vaccine is not protective. There isn't a good scenario, in other words.'
I didn't know if I felt sick to my stomach because I wasn't well or because of what I'd just heard. I thought of that weather-beaten fishing village with its leaning headstones and wild, quiet people who just wanted to be left alone. They weren't the sort to obey anyone, for they answered to a higher power of God and storms.
'There must be another way,' I said. But there wasn't.
'By reputation, smallpox is a highly contagious infectious disease. This outbreak must be contained,' Fujitsubo exclaimed the obvious. 'We've got to worry about houseflies hovering around patients, and crabs headed for the mainland. How do we know we don't have to worry about the possibility of mosquito transmission, as in Tanapox, for God's sake? We don't even know what all we've got to worry about since we can't fully identify the disease yet.'
Martin looked at me. 'We've already got teams out there, nurses, doctors, bed isolators so we can keep these people out of hospitals and leave them in their homes.'
'What about dead bodies, contamination?' I asked him.
'In terms of United States law, this constitutes a Class One public health emergency.'
'I realize that,' I said, impatiently, for he was getting bureaucratic on me. 'Cut to the chase.'
'Burn all but the patient. Bodies will be cremated. The Pruitt house will be torched.' Fujitsubo tried to reassure us. 'USAMRIID's got a team heading out. We'll be talking to citizens, trying to make them understand.'
I thought of Davy Crockett and his son, of people and their panic when space-suited scientists took over their island and started burning their homes.
'And we know for a fact that the smallpox vaccine isn't going to work?' Wesley said.
'We don't know that for a fact yet.' Martin answered. 'Tests on laboratory animals will take days to weeks. And even if vaccination is protective in an animal model, this may not translate into protection for humans.'
'Since the DNA of the virus has been altered,' Fujitsubo warned, 'I am not hopeful that vaccinia virus will be effective.'
'I'm not a doctor or anything,' Martinez said, 'but I'm just wondering if you could vaccinate everyone anyway, just in case it might work.'
'Too risky,' Martin said. 'If it's not smallpox, why deliberately expose people to smallpox, thereby possibly causing some people to get the disease? And when we develop the new vaccine, we're not going to want to come back several weeks later and vaccinate people again, this time with a different pox.'
'In other words,' Fujitsubo said, 'we can't use the people of Tangier like laboratory animals. If we keep them on that island and then get a vaccine out to them as soon as possible, we should be able to contain this thing. The good news about smallpox is it's a stupid virus, kills its hosts so fast it will burn itself out if you can keep it restricted to one area.'
'Right. So an entire island gets destroyed while we sit back and watch it burn,' Miles angrily said to me. 'I can't believe this. Goddamn it.' He pounded his fist on the table.
'This can't be happening in Virginia!'
He got out of his chair. 'Gentlemen. I would like to know what we should do if we start getting patients in other parts of this state. The health of Virginia, after all, is what the governor appointed me to take care of.' His face was dark red and he was sweating. 'Are we supposed to just do like the Yankees and start burning down our cities and towns?'
'Should this spread,' Fujitsubo said, 'clearly we'll have to utilize our hospitals, have wards, just as we did during earlier times. CDC and my people are already alerting local medical personnel, and will work with them closely.'
'We realize that hospital personnel are at the greatest risk,' Martin added. 'Sure would be nice if Congress would end this goddamn furlough so I don't have one hand and both legs tied behind my back.'
'Believe me, the president, Congress, knows.'
'Senator Nagle assures me it will end by tomorrow morning.'
'They're always certain, say the same thing every time.'
The swelling and itching of the revaccination site on my arm was a constant reminder that I had been inoculated with a virus probably for nothing. I complained to Wesley all the way out to the parking lot.
'I've been reexposed, and I'm sick with something, meaning I'm probably immunosuppressed, on top of it all.'
'How do you know you don't have it?' he carefully asked.
'I don't know.'
'Then you could be infectious.'
'No, I couldn't be. A rash is the first sign of that, and I check myself daily. At the slightest hint of such a thing, I would go back into isolation. I would not come within one hundred feet of you or anybody else, Benton,' I said, my anger unreasonably spiking at his suggestion that I might risk infecting anyone with even a mundane cold. He glanced over at me as he unlocked doors, and I knew that he was far more upset than he would let on. 'What do you want me to do, Kay?'
'Take me home so I can get my car,' I said.
Daylight was fading fast as I followed miles of woods thick with pines. Fields were fallow with tufts of cotton still clinging to dead stalks, and the sky was moist and cold like thawing cake. When I had gotten home from the meeting, there had been a message from Rose. At two P.M., Keith Pleasants had called from jail, desperately requesting that I come see him, and Wingo had gone home with the flu.
I had been inside the old Sussex County Courthouse many times over the years, and had grown fond of its antebellum quaintness and inconveniences. Built in 1825 by Thomas Jefferson's master brick mason, it was red with white trim and columns, and had survived the Civil War, although the Yankees had managed to destroy all its records first. I thought of cold winter days spent out on the lawn with detectives as I waited to be called to the witness stand. I remembered the cases by name that I had brought before this court.
Now such proceedings took place in the spacious new building next door, and as I drove past, heading to the back, I felt sad. Such constructions were a monument to rising crime, and I missed simpler times when I had first moved to Virginia and was awed by its old brick and its old war that would not end. I had smoked back then. I supposed I romanticized the past like most people tended to do. But I missed smoking and waiting around in miserable weather outside a courthouse that barely had heat. Change made me feel old.
The sheriff's department was the same red brick and white trim, its parking lot and jail surrounded by a fence topped with razor wire. Imprisoned within, two inmates in orange jumpsuits were wiping down an unmarked car they had just washed and waxed. They eyed me slyly as I parked in front, one of them popping the other with a shammy cloth.
'Yo. What's going,' one of them muttered to me as I walked past.
'Good afternoon.' I looked at both of them.
They turned away, not interested in someone they could not intimidate, and I pulled open the front door. Inside, the department was modest on the verge of depressing, and like virtually all other public facilities in the world, had profoundly outgrown its environment. Inside were Coke and snack machines, walls plastered with wanted posters and a portrait of an officer slain while responding to a call. I stopped at the duty post, where a young woman was shuffling through paperwork and chewing on her pen.
'Excuse me,' I said. 'I'm here to see Keith Pleasants.'
'Are you on his guest list?' Her contact lenses made her squint, and she wore pink braces on her teeth.
'He asked me to come, so I should hope I am.'
She flipped pages in a loose-leaf binder, stopping when she got to the right one.
'Your name.'
I told her as her finger moved down a page.
'Here you are.' She got up from her chair. 'Come with me.'
She came around her desk and unlocked a door with bars in the window. Inside was a cramped processing area for fingerprints and mug shots, a banged-up metal desk manned by a heavyset deputy. Beyond was another heavy door with bars, and through it I could hear the noises of the jail.
'You're gonna have to leave your bag here,' the deputy said to me. He got on his radio.
'Can you get on over here?'
'Ten-four. On my way,' a woman answered back.
I set my pocketbook on the desk and dug my hands in the pockets of my coat. I was going to be searched and I did not like it.
'We got a little room here where they meet with their lawyers,' the deputy said, jabbing his thumb as if he were hitching a ride. 'But some a these critters listen to ever word, and if that's a problem, go upstairs. We got an area up there.'
'I think upstairs might be better,' I said as a female deputy, hefty with short frosted hair, came around the corner with her hand-held metal detector.
'Arms out,' she said to me. 'Got anything metal in your pockets?'
'No,' I said as the detector snarled like a mechanical cat.
She tried it up and down one side and the other. It kept going off.
'Let's get rid of your coat.'
I draped it on the desk as she tried again. The detector continued to make its startling sound as she frowned and kept trying.
'What about jewelry,' she said.
I shook my head as I suddenly remembered I was wearing an underwire bra that I had no intention of announcing. She put down the detector and began to pat me down while the other deputy sat at his desk and watched slack-jawed, as if he were gawking at a dirty movie.
'Okay,' she said, satisfied that I was harmless. 'Follow me.'
To get upstairs, we had to walk through the women's side of the jail. Keys jangled as she unlocked a heavy metal door that loudly banged shut behind us. Inmates were young and hard in institutional denim, their cells scarcely big enough for an animal, with a white toilet, bed and sink. Women played solitaire, and leaned against their cages. They had hung their clothes from bars, and trash barrels were close and crammed with what they hadn't wanted for dinner. The smell of old food made my stomach flop.
'Hey mama.'
'What we got here?'
'A fine lady. Umm-umm-umm.'
'Hubba-hubba-hubba!'
Hands came through bars, trying to touch me as I went past, and someone was making kissing sounds while other women emitted harsh, wounded outbursts that were supposed to be laughs.
'Leave her in here. Just fifteen minutes. Ooohhh come to mama!'
'I need cigarettes.'
'Shut up, Wanda. You always needin' something.'
'Y'all quiet on down,' the deputy said in a bored singsong as she unlocked another door.
I followed her upstairs and realized I was trembling. The room she put me in was cluttered and disorganized, as if it might have had a function in an earlier time. Cork boards were propped against a wall, a hand cart parked in a corner, and some sort of pamphlets and bulletins were scattered everywhere. I sat in a folding chair at a wooden table scarred with names and crude messages in ballpoint pen.
'Just make yourself at home and he'll be up,' she said, leaving me alone.
I realized that cough drops and tissues were in my pocketbook and coat, neither of which I had with me now. Sniffing, I shut my eyes until I heard heavy feet. When the male deputy escorted Keith Pleasants in, I almost did not recognize him. He was pale and drawn, thin in baggy denims, his hands cuffed awkwardly in front of him. His eyes filled with tears when he looked at me, and his lips quivered when he tried to smile.
'You sit down and stay down,' the deputy ordered him. 'Don't you let me hear no problem up here. Got it? Or I'm back and the visit's history.'
Pleasants grabbed a chair, almost falling.
'Does he really need to be cuffed?' I said to the deputy. 'He's here for a traffic violation.'
'Ma'am, he's out of the secure area. That's why he's cuffed. Be back in twenty minutes,' he said as he left.
'I've never been through anything like this before. You mind if I smoke?' Pleasants laughed with a nervousness that bordered on hysteria as he sat.
'Help yourself.'
His hands were shaking so badly, I had to light it for him.
'Doesn't look like they got an ashtray. Maybe you're not supposed to smoke up here.' He worried, eyes darting around. 'They got me in this cell with this guy who's a drug dealer? He's got all these tattoos and won't leave me alone? Picking on me, calling me sissy names?' He inhaled a lot of smoke and briefly shut his eyes. 'I wasn't eluding anybody.' He looked at me.
I spotted a Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor and retrieved it for him to use as an ashtray.
'Thanks,' he said.
'Keith, tell me what happened.'
'I was just driving home like I always do, from the landfill, and all of a sudden there's this unmarked car behind me with sirens and lights on. So I pulled over right away. It was that asshole investigator who's been driving me crazy.'
'Ring.' My fury began to pound.
Pleasants nodded. 'Said he'd been following me for more than a mile and I wouldn't heed to his lights. Well I'm telling you, that's just a flat-out lie.' His eyes were bright.
'He's got me so jumpy these days there's no way in hell I wouldn't know if he was behind my car.'
'Did he say anything else to you when he pulled you?' I asked.
'Yes, ma'am, he did. He said my troubles had just begun. His exact words.'
'Why did you want to see me?' I thought I knew, but I wanted to hear what he would say.
'I'm in a world of trouble, Dr Scarpetta.' He teared up again. 'My mama's old and got no one to care for her but me, and there are people thinking I'm a murderer! I never killed anything in my life! Not even birds! People don't want to be around me at work anymore.'
'Is your mother bedridden?' I asked.
'No, ma'am. But she's almost seventy and has emphysema. From doing these things.' He sucked on the cigarette again. 'She doesn't drive anymore.'
'Who's looking after her now?'
He shook his head and wiped his eyes. His legs were crossed, one foot jumping like it was about to take off.
'She has no one to bring her food?' I said.
'Just me.' He choked on the words.
I looked around again, this time for something to write with, and found a purple crayon and a brown paper towel.
'Give me her address and phone number,' I said. 'And I promise someone will check in with her to make sure she's all right.'
He was vastly relieved as he gave me the information and I scribbled it down.
'I called you because I didn't know where else to go,' he started talking again. 'Can't somebody do something to get me out of here?'
'I understand your bond has been set at five thousand dollars.'
'That's just it! Like ten times what it usually is for this, according to the guy in my cell. I don't have any money or any way to get it. Means I got to stay here until court, and that could be weeks. Months.' Tears welled in his eyes again, and he was terrified.
'Keith, do you use the Internet?' I said.
'The what?'
'Computers.'
'At the landfill I do. Remember, I was telling you about our satellite system.'
'Then you do use the Internet.'
He did not seem to know what that was.
'E-mail,' I tried again.
'We use GPS.' He looked confused. 'And you know the truck that dumped the body? I'm pretty sure now it was definitely Cole's, and the Dumpster may have come from a construction site. They pick up at a bunch of construction sites on South Side in Richmond. That would be a good place to get rid of something, on a construction site. Just pull up your car after hours and who's to see?'
'Did you tell Investigator Ring this?' I asked.
Hate passed over his face. 'I don't tell him anything. Not anymore. Everything he's been doing is just to set me up.'
'Why do you think he would want to set you up?'
'He's got to arrest someone for this. He wants to be the hero.' He was suddenly evasive.
'Says everybody else doesn't know what they're doing.' He hesitated. 'Including you.'
'What else has he said?' I felt myself turning to cold, hard stone, the way I did when I
had moved from anger to determined rage.
'See, when I was showing him around the house and all, he would talk. He really likes to talk.'
He took his cigarette butt and clumsily set it end-up on the table, so it would go out without burning Styrofoam. I helped him light another one.
'He told me you have this niece,' Pleasants went on. 'And that she's a real fox but has no more business in the FBI than you have being a chief medical examiner. Because. Well.'
'Go on,' I said in a controlled voice.
'Because she's not into men. I guess he thinks you aren't, either.'
'That's interesting.'
'He was laughing about it, said he knew from personal experience that neither of you dated because he'd been around both of you. And that I should just sit back and watch what happens to perverts. Because the same thing was about to happen to me.'
'Wait one minute.' I stopped him. 'Did Ring actually threaten you because you're gay or he thinks you are?'
'My mama doesn't know.' He hung his head. 'But some people do. I've been in bars. In fact, I know Wingo.'
I hoped not intimately.
'I'm worried about Mama.' He teared up again. 'She's upset about what's happening to me, and that's not good for her condition.'
'I tell you what. I'm going to check on her myself, on my way home,' I said, coughing again.
A tear slid down his cheek and he roughly wiped it with the backs of cuffed hands.
'One other thing I'm going to do,' I said as footsteps sounded on the stairs again. 'I'm going to see what I can do about you. I don't believe you killed anyone, Keith. And I'm going to post your bond and make sure you have a lawyer.'
His lips parted in disbelief as the deputies loudly entered the room.
'You really are?' Pleasants asked as he almost staggered to his feet, his eyes wide on mine.
'If you swear you're telling the truth.'
'Oh yes, ma'am!'
'Yeah, yeah,' a deputy said. 'You and all the rest of 'em.'
'It will have to be tomorrow,' I said to Pleasants. 'I'm afraid the magistrate's gone home for the night.'
'Come on. Downstairs.' A deputy grabbed his arm.
Pleasants said one last thing to me. 'Mama likes chocolate milk with Hershey's syrup. Not much else she keeps down anymore.'
Then he was gone, and I was led back downstairs and through the women's section of the jail again. Inmates were sullen this time, as if I no longer were fun. It occurred to me someone had told them who I was, when they turned their backs on me and someone spat.