The next morning, Chunk and I went over the inventory of property found in the van. Most of it was routine stuff, like you'd see in a doctor's office or college chem lab. Other items were unique to field work, but still routine considering the circumstances, like one hundred and thirty seven glass vials, two laptop computers, a centrifuge machine, a gas chromatograph, extra fillers for a gas mask, extra biohazard gear, an unopened box of surgical face masks, goggles, and on and on for two typed pages.
The only item that really interested me was Emma Bradley's handwritten journal, which was found under the passenger seat.
“Anything on that list gonna help us?” Chunk asked. He meant other than the journal.
“Probably not. I want to show it to Myers though. See what he says. Plus I'd like to see what he knows about Bradley being out in the GZ before we talk to hippo woman again.”
“Why wouldn't he know she was working out there?”
“No, that's not what I mean. I mean he's probably gonna tell us more than hippo woman will.”
“Okay.” He went and checked out a car for us. I was betting that Wessler, the retired sergeant who ran the fleet division at the Scar, was cussing us for losing two of his cars in as many days, but I knew he wouldn't give Chunk a hard time about it. He was scared to death of Chunk.
When he came back Chunk jangled the keys in front of me. “Wessler's not happy,” he said, and laughed.
“You didn't scare him again, did you?”
“No, of course not.” He winked, and within ten minutes, we were on the way to see Myers again.
Chunk drove. I sat in the passenger seat and read Bradley's journal for about the twentieth time. Most of it was just a desert of math and chemical equations. But there were other parts, small notes to herself and longer sections where she recorded her observations, that gave me a sense of what a contradiction Emma Bradley must have been. Turning through page after page of numbers and tables showing the numbers of dead from the various districts all across the city, I was struck not by the gut-wrenching loss of life her journal described, but by the girly-girl handwriting in which that carnage had been recorded. She wrote in a big, loopy script, the same kind I expect to find on notes about boys in Connie's pockets when she gets to the seventh grade. I half expected to see little hearts instead of dots over her lower case letters. Maybe an “I love Kenneth Wade” in the margin.
I also found a small bundle of ten photographs, secured with a green rubber band and sandwiched between the pages. There were a few of her with other members of the WHO staff. There was one of the inside of her trailer, which was a mess in the photograph, but hadn't been when we searched it after we found out who she was. I found a picture of her sitting in Kenneth Wade's lap. She had her hands together, between her thighs, a big, drunken smile on her face. Wade had his arms around her waist.
The last picture showed her in her bra-a cute pink, lacy pushup-and a long black gypsy skirt. She was drunk in that one too, and it kind of looked like she was belly-dancing. I wondered who took the picture.
“Work hard, play hard,” Chunk said.
“I guess.”
I put the pictures up and flipped through the journal again.
“What do you think about a timeline?” he asked.
“We might be able to use some of this.” We'd been trying to map out the time up to her death from what Bradley described in her journal, and there was enough English between the numbers to get a fairly good breakdown of her last week. “Wish there was more on the last day, though.”
The standard procedure when investigating a homicide is to start with the twenty-four hour rule. You want as much information as possible about the victim's movements during the twenty-four hours prior to her death. This is your best chance to identify the killer. When you turn your attention to prosecuting the killer, you focus on the twenty-four hours after the victim's death. This shows you state of mind.
Ordinarily, we would have had to piece together that timeline through any number of interviews with family and friends. Rarely-actually, never-does a victim leave behind as detailed a picture of their last hours alive as Emma Bradley left for us in her journal. Girly-girl as she may have been, party girl as she certainly was, she was also a scientist, and her journal entries carefully laid out dates and times and locations, as well as what was done and by whom. The only trouble was her shorthand. She seemed to have had her own language when she wrote in her journal, and it made it difficult to understand what she was talking about some times.
The last day, the most important day, was loaded with shorthand. She recorded checking out the van at five-twenty, which we knew already, and entering the GZ at six o'clock. Next to the time of arrival at the GZ she wrote, “400 Iowa.” That was obviously the four hundred block of Iowa Street, which crosses at Piedmont Street, where I found the van. In the same entry she wrote, “Coll spec cages 440 Iowa. 6 li specs.” Below that, “All pos. Addt'l test for typing.”
The next time entry was eight forty-five, and what I read there gave me chills. Bradley wrote, “Unbelievable. Must get them all.” Below that, in huge letters that took up the whole bottom third of the page, she wrote, “WE ARE ALL GONERS!”
From that Chunk and I came up with what we thought was a reasonable enough translation. Bradley and Wade arrived in the GZ at about dawn and stopped at the four hundred block of Iowa. They collected six live specimens, most likely chickens, from cages at 440 Iowa, and tested them. Evidently, the results of those tests scared Bradley to death, and I couldn't help but think of Dr. Cole's theory that there may be two other strains of the flu infecting the chickens in the GZ that are even more dangerous than H2N2.
I said, “If she did confirm Cole's theory, you think she radioed back to the WHO office about it?”
“Maybe,” Chunk said.
“Something else to ask Myers about, don't you think?”
“And Hippo woman.”
“Yeah. And Hippo woman.”
We drove on in silence after that. I stared out the window, at the ragged gray sky, at the debris blown all over the street from the previous night's storm. We passed yet another long line of desperate looking people waiting their turn to cash in their coupons for meager rations, which seemed to be getting fewer, and of lower quality, everyday. The people we passed all looked so sad, so angry, like they'd been beat with a stick and not even told why.
A kid, no more than 12 or 13, threw a rock at our car and missed. His mother was standing next to him. She watched the rock fly, then looked back to her feet without bothering to scold the boy.
The city seemed to be pulling itself apart. It had only been a few months since the military sealed us up behind the containment walls, but already our institutions had started to collapse. There was a crazy something in the air, like an electrical charge, like everything was primed to explode in our faces, and it occurred to me then just how many things are held up by human will alone. Buildings, streets, the economy, the government, even our families, stay together simply because we want them to. Without that will, that desire to maintain, things fall apart.
I closed Bradley's journal with a sigh.
“You okay?”
“Mmm hmm.”
“You sure?”
“I got a lot on my mind,” I said.
“More than Bradley, you mean?”
“Yeah. More than that.”
“Like what?”
“Connie mostly.”
“How's she doing?”
“She's fine,” I said. “It's me, actually. I made her a promise last night and I'm wondering how I'm going to keep it.”
“What kind of promise?”
“The chocolate cake kind.”
He gave me a sideways glance that said, You know what that's gonna take, don't you?
But he didn't have to ask the question out loud. “I know what it means.”
He turned left and drifted down Hamilton. Massive oak trees hung over the street, making it look like a green tunnel. Patches of white sunlight danced over the hood.
“What do you need?” he asked. Just like that. No preamble, no judgment.
“Billy and I have scraped together two hundred dollars. We've also got about sixty ration coupons. Do you think that'll be enough?”
“Don't worry about it,” he said. “You guys keep the money.”
“No, Chunk. I don't want that.”
“It's all right. Besides, I owe you and Billy a debt I can't ever pay back.”
I turned and looked him. It was the first time in weeks we'd talked about his grandmother. “You don't owe us a thing for that, Chunk. You know that.”
“I know you believe that, Lily. That's why it matters to me.” He said, “Now what do you need?”
I pressed my lips together, hard.
“You're a good man, Chunk. A real good man.”
He smiled. “And I feel good about myself naked, too.”