A large, angry crowd had clustered around the front gate of the Arsenal Station Morgue. Two young patrolmen, neither of them more than 25, watched the crowd apprehensively from inside the gate.
The crowd surrounded our car and banged on the windows and the hood with their fists. The car rocked. A woman with spit clinging to her lips pressed her face against the passenger side window and screamed something at me that I couldn't understand, though the hate-filled expression in her eyes was plain enough.
One of the patrolmen swung the gate open, while the other stood to one side, clutching an AR-15 in his hands and looking green around the gills. As we drove by him, he glanced at me, and I could see the fear in his eyes.
I didn't envy him for his job.
We found Myers on the main floor of the morgue, cutting a tissue specimen from the lungs of a man about my age. We waited off to one side while he worked. When he was done, we followed him to a hallway where we could talk in private.
He'd already heard the news about Ken Wade, and I could tell he was glad Wade was dead, but also a little upset that he was wrong about him.
“You got that inventory I faxed over to you?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, very stiffly, very British. “I received it this morning.”
“Have you gone over it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about it? Anything that didn't look right?”
“Unusual? You mean the very fact that we are standing here at all isn't unusual enough for you?”
“Doctor,” I said. “Please.”
He smirked at me from behind his goggles. “Not as such, no. One or two of the items did seem to me a bit curious, but nothing I would call suspicious.”
“Like what?”
“I don't have the list in front of me at the moment,” he said. The way he said it made it sound like I was a dumbass for asking.
I handed him an extra copy I'd brought along. He took it, and gave me another look. This one hard to read, but still unpleasant.
He had to hold the list up at eye level to read it in his space suit.
“Here you list one hundred and thirty-seven glass vials, assuming you were able to count them correctly. That is a smaller number than I would expect. Our field vans normally carry about two hundred vials.”
“What would she have stored in those vials, doc?”
“They would have been used and reused several times. Of course, some of the tubes break, and some develop a film on the inside that the sterilizers can't clean. In that case, the vial would be destroyed. That's why I said it was curious. Not unusual.”
“Anything else?”
That look again. He held the paper up and ran his finger down the list.
“You don't have any specimen cages listed here. There should have been at least six on board.”
Chunk and I traded a glance, both of us thinking about Bradley's journal. They should have been in the vehicle.
“What do these cages look like, doc?” Chunk asked.
“They are simple, white plastic boxes with a perforated clear plastic gate on the front that slides up and down as needed.”
There was nothing like that in the inventory.
“What's the standard procedure for storing the cages after they've been used,” I asked.
“They are stacked in a vertical steam sterilizer near the back door of the van.”
Then they definitely weren't in the van. Somebody had to have removed them.
I said, “Dr. Myers, why don't you tell me a little more about what Dr. Bradley was doing out in the GZ.”
The way he looked at me made me think of this homosexual accountant I'd once questioned, about his relationship with the man he'd just shot in the face nine times. I kept asking the man the same question over and over, but in subtly different ways, and he'd finally blurted out, “We were lovers, all right! God damn it, is that what you want to hear?” I told him “No, I already know you're a queer. I want to know why in the world that guy would sleep around behind your back. I mean, look at you, you have a good job, you dress nice, you even smell nice. Why would somebody blow it with a good catch like you?” The man blinked at me, and then out came his confession.
It went the same way with Myers. He said, “Detective, I have already gone over this with you several times. She was doing field work on genetic mutations within the virus.”
“No, no,” I said. “I know that. What I want to know is why she didn't have you with her. I mean, everybody I've talked to says you're sharp as a tack in the laboratory. Why go out there with Wade and not you?”
He blinked at me, same as the queer accountant. Then I heard him sniffle. “I was told to remain here,” he said. “At Arsenal.”
“Told? You mean by Dr. Laurent?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“I was told Emma was working on a special project for Dr. Laurent.”
Chunk glanced over at me and I could tell he was smiling, a way-to-go-little-sister look.
“I see,” I said. I talked to him gently, like I could really appreciate how hurt he was, like I understood. “But you are a smart fellow, Dr. Myers. Surely you had some idea what she was working on?”
He nodded, a barely perceptible gesture inside his space suit.
“She was gathering specimens for part of the genetic typing study. The influenza virus is RNA based, and so it reproduces very fast and with a high degree of mutation. The longer the virus is in a given environment, the more opportunity it has to mutate. Her working hypothesis was that the specimens in the GZ would show the most mutation, because the GZ is where the virus was first identified. Origin gene populations generally show greater differentiation than cast off populations.”
“And so what advantage would those specimens be to you guys?”
“It might indicate that this outbreak is nearing the end,” he said. “You see, as the virus mutates, so does its virulence. A virus may start out as merely a nuisance, like H2N2 was last year here in San Antonio, and then suddenly mutate into a highly dangerous form. But the process is just as likely to work in reverse. More likely to work in reverse, in fact. That's what ended the 1918 influenza pandemic, and that's what we're hoping will end this outbreak.”
“So what you're saying is that virus mutation is basically a crap shoot.”
I saw a flash of disdain in his eyes. “Yes. You Americans have such lovely ways of phrasing things, but I suppose that describes the process accurately enough.”
“So, if it's just a crap shoot, isn't it possible that one, or even two, additional strains of the virus could form that are just as deadly, if not more so, than the original strain?”
It took him a second to jump through the mental hoops, but once he did, he saw plainly enough that I'd boxed him in to a discussion of Dr. Cole and his theory.
But his answer surprised me.
“I see you've been talking with John the Baptist.”
“Excuse me?”
“John the Baptist? The madman in the wilderness talking about what's to come? That's our nickname for Dr. Cole around here.”
Chunk and I trade another glance. “You know his theory then?”
“Of course I know it. He tells everybody he meets his theory.”
“And you what? You think he's nuts?”
“I didn't say that. Some of his ideas are rather far out there. Did you know he actually wants there to be a law making it a felony not to get a flu shot each year?”
“No, I didn't.”
“He does. He told me about his theory of multiple influenza strains two weeks ago.”
“And what do you think of that theory, doc?”
“I thought it was intriguing enough that I went to Dr. Laurent with it.”
“And what did-” I stopped myself before the words ‘Hippo woman’ came out. “What did Dr. Laurent say?”
His eyes smiled. “She thinks, to borrow one of your colorful American phrases, that he is full of shit.”
I nodded, but didn't answer him. Let him think he wasn't finished explaining it to me.
He looked away and sighed. Then he said, “Dr. Laurent believes that Dr. Cole's theory is unnecessarily inflammatory. There are two objectives, here. The first is to develop a vaccine to mitigate the damage of H2N2. The other is to reduce the level of fear among the populace. Dr. Cole's theory, if not properly refuted with the highest caliber of research and testing, could start a chain reaction of fear that will be unstoppable.”
I thought back to Dr. Bradley's journal, and the final entry: WE ARE ALL GONERS!
“But what if he's right, Dr. Myers?”
Myers scoffed at that. “He isn't.”
“But you will be looking through Dr. Bradley's research, won't you?”
“Of course,” he said. “Sometime later this morning either myself or another member of the staff will transfer the information from the van's computers to the computers in our lab. I assure you, it will be analyzed in exhaustive detail.”
“Will there be some kind of preliminary analysis done of that material?”
“Of course. Right after we download it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Doctor, I wonder if you would do me a favor and call me when that's done? I'd like to know what those results are.”
“Fine,” he said. Then he cocked his head inside his space suit, like a strange thought had just occurred to him. “Are those results important to your investigation?”
“Maybe,” I said, though a strong personal interest would have been a better description of my motives.
He said, “I'll call you this afternoon.”