Body Search (7 page)

“Because I knew you’d hang up on me,” said an unfamiliar voice from the doorway.

Tansy whirled. An older man stood at the threshold, clutching a wool cap in his hands. Blond and blue-eyed, he could’ve passed as Dale’s father.

Or his uncle.

“Get him out of here.” Dale’s voice was as cold
as she’d ever heard it. “Now.” But there was an echo of something else. Something young and wistful.

Trask backed up a pace. His eyes flicked to Hazel, then slid away. He clenched his jaw. “I’ll go. But I wanted to say—”

“I don’t care what you wanted to say,” Dale interrupted. One of his hands carefully bagged the small child, keeping him alive while Hazel adjusted the respirator. Dale’s other hand stabbed toward the door. “Get out.”

“I want to apologize, boy. You could at least hear what I have to say.” Trask’s voice roughened and he twisted the cap in his hands.

Tansy expected Dale to shut the other man out, as he’d shut her out so many times before. End the conversation. Walk away. In Dale’s world, silence was easier than sharing.

But as Hazel took over the bag and transferred Eddie to the mechanical respirator, Dale stayed put and swallowed, hard. “Apologize for which part? Are you sorry you blamed me for Aunt Sue’s death? Sorry you hated me? Or are you sorry that I stayed as long as I did?”

A muscle pulsed in Trask’s jaw and his faded blue eyes narrowed. “Watch your mouth, boy. I did my duty by you.” When Dale snorted, Trask took a step forward, then stopped himself and cursed. “Never mind. It’s history. If you don’t want to hear it, that’s your choice, but I’ll say it anyway. I think you were right.”

Dale went still. “Right about what?”

Trask glanced over his shoulder at the crowd outside, stepped inside the motel room and shut the door. “I didn’t listen fifteen years ago because I couldn’t think of anything but Suzie. But things have been happening, Dale. Strange things.”

“What things?” Dale swallowed with an audible click. “What are you saying?”

Trask took a deep breath, glanced at the child on the bed and said, “I think you were right. I think Suzie and your parents may have been murdered.”

Chapter Four

Murdered.
Though a shock, the word clicked in Dale’s head, unlocking a hurricane of jumbled suspicions, fears and resentments. But not grief, not really. The grief had been washed out of him years ago. Or else he’d pushed it so far down he couldn’t even find it anymore.

But
murder?

He turned away on the pretext of checking Eddie’s pulse. It was steady. Saxitoxin, the main poison of PSP, didn’t usually stop the heart. The rare death came from system failure. The first symptoms of shellfish poisoning were a faint tingling of the mouth and fingertips, sometimes with a stomachache, and—

And he was hiding behind the job. Funny, he usually left that to Tansy.

“He’s breathing.” Hazel’s competent hands gestured Dale away from the patient. “All we can do now is wait until his body clears the toxin.”
Or he dies,
was the unspoken end to her sentence. “You’ll want
to see the other patients, and my notes. But it can wait if you’d like a moment with your uncle.”

First Mickey. Then Walter Churchill. Now Trask. Dale didn’t think he could handle another reunion. Even if he could, the last person he’d pick for a welcome home party was the uncle who’d crawled into a bottle the night the
Curly Sue
had gone down with all hands aboard.

Seventeen-year-old Dale had needed Trask’s compassion, if not his love. Thirty-two-year-old Dr. Metcalf wanted nothing to do with either. He turned away. “No need. Let’s see the other patients.”

“Dale…” Hazel touched his sleeve. “Maybe if you just listened—”

“No.” He glared over his shoulder, trying not to see how drained his uncle looked. How much deeper the lines beside his mouth cut, how his hair had bleached to an old man’s white. “I don’t need to listen. Churchill showed me where the flotsam from the
Curly Sue
came ashore. And Trask assured me—with his fists, when necessary—that it was nothing more than an accident. Well, guess what? I’m a believer. Lobstering’s a tough business, and boats go down. Isn’t that what you told me, Trask? Aunt Sue and my parents sank. Period. End of story.” Dale pointed to the door. “I’d like you to leave now so my colleagues and I can save this boy’s life.”

He felt a twist of guilt for using little Eddie as leverage, but the pressure building in his chest needed an outlet. If Trask didn’t leave, it was going to be
him. And though Dale owed the old man for a black eye and a sore jaw, he liked to think he was better than that. He was better than Trask.

Better than Lobster Island.

Finally, he heard rubber boots creak on the cheap carpet. The door closed behind Trask, and Dale let out a breath, felt the tension ease slightly.

“Dale,” Hazel said in a quiet, censorious tone, “you should talk to him.”

Aware of Tansy standing beside the bed, eyes shadowed with questions mixed together with worry for the boy, Dale clenched his jaw. She shouldn’t have to learn about his past like this. He’d been wrong all along.

He should have told her before they’d come to the island. No matter that she hadn’t returned his calls the night before they left, he should have pounded on her door until she let him in. He should have told her, made her understand how little she knew him.

How little she would like the man he really was.

“Sorry, Hazel.” He shook his head and avoided Tansy’s eyes. “I’m here to investigate an outbreak, not have a tearful homecoming in a place that ceased being home fifteen years ago. I’m not here to make peace with a bastard like Trask, and I’m certainly not here to ask questions about a boat that went down when I was a teenager. That’s all ancient history.” He glanced down at the bed. “My life started the moment I hit the mainland, and it won’t continue until I’m back where I belong. So let’s get on with this, okay?”

Without another word, Hazel nodded and led the way out into the parking lot. Dale gestured for Tansy to precede him through the door, but she stayed where she was and narrowed her eyes.

In her face he saw the one thing he’d feared all along.

Disappointment.

And though he’d always known it would come to this—that she’d hate where he’d come from, what he’d been— Dale couldn’t stop the quick slice of pain. He covered it with a scowl. “Come on. We have work to do.”

Hazel was waiting for them at the door to Unit 3. With a shimmer of surprise, Dale realized she looked old, too. And smaller than he remembered, though he’d not thought of her in a long, long time. Hazel had returned to the island not long before his parents’ deaths, bringing her brand new medical degree to replace Doc Hawley when his boat had capsized off the point.

Doc’s body had been recovered, Dale remembered with a twinge of resentment. His kin hadn’t been forced to bury an empty box.

“What can you tell us, Dr. Dodd?” Tansy’s professional question jerked Dale back to the present. That’s where he belonged. In the present, not the past.

“Just Hazel’s fine, dear.” The island’s doctor, who could’ve gone somewhere else with her Ivy League degree but had insisted on returning to this godforsaken place, pushed open the door and waved the others through. “We’ve had nine cases so far. Gerald Cohen came to my office last Friday, complain
ing of a tingling, burning feeling in his fingers and lips. And you know these lobstermen…for him to come see me, it had to have gotten bad. They’ll ignore anything short of a severed digit or arterial spurts.”

“Is this Mr. Cohen?” Tansy asked as they entered the room.

“No.” Hazel’s mouth drooped and Dale again noticed how worn she looked. She had to be in her late forties, but she looked a decade past that. She’d been beautiful once. Now she was tired. “Gerry died that night. He went into respiratory arrest around five o’clock and I put him on a ventilator, but it was no good. His heart quit.”

Tingling. Burning. Respiratory failure. Cardiac arrest. The symptoms were consistent with PSP, but only a small percentage of shellfish poisonings went into respiratory arrest. Here, it seemed like they all did. It made no sense.

Dale felt the first stirrings of interest. In his anger over Tansy, Trask and the enforced return to Lobster Island, he’d lost sight of their immediate purpose. An outbreak. Gratefully, he let his mind click over to analytical mode. In medicine, as in any investigation, there was little room for emotion. That was one of the reasons the job suited him so perfectly.

“Tell us about this patient,” he requested, moving to stand near the bed and gaze down at the young woman lying motionless in it.

“Miranda Davis. Sixteen years old. Her boyfriend,
Curtis, brought her in this morning. She’s been on the respirator since noon today.”

“So she should be coming out of paralysis in the next few hours,” Dale commented. Saxitoxin and the other shellfish poisons usually wore off in half a day.

But Hazel shook her head. “No. I’ve had patients stay in arrest for twenty-four, even thirty-six hours, and counting. So far, only Traub Daniels has come out of it, and he’s breathing on his own but still unconscious. The others died.” Hazel took the teen’s hand and ran a thumb across a single broken nail. “One patient passed away just an hour ago. Mary Darling. Her baby is only four months old.”

Though he’d taught himself to internalize human tragedy and use it to fuel his efforts, Dale couldn’t seem to rise above the sight of the teenage girl in the motel bed. Her chest rose and fell in a relentless, unnatural rhythm. He felt Tansy at his side and almost reached for her.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t.

The pressure on his chest increased and he was grateful that Tansy asked the next question. “You said her boyfriend brought her in. Can we speak with him?”

Isolate the patients. Chart the course of the disease. Identify it. Find the source. Neutralize it. Their job was simple.

And not simple at all.

Hazel shook her head, the lines pulling tighter beside her mouth. “Curtis Flink. He collapsed a half
hour after he brought Miranda in. He’s in Unit 5. His kidneys are failing.”

“This is awful.” Tansy pressed her fingertips to her eyes to stop a headache, or perhaps tears.

He’d bet on the headache. The cut on her temple had scabbed over, but he couldn’t forget the sight of her lying limply in the pilot’s seat, unconscious. He should have left her in Boston. Should have driven her away. She wasn’t safe here.

Where the hell had that last thought come from? She was certainly safer in Maine than she’d been in Tehru, and he hadn’t been intent on sending her home then.

Focus, Metcalf.
Think about the outbreak, not the island. Not Mickey or Trask. Not Churchill. And especially not Tansy.
Do your damn job.

He turned away from the bed, away from the sight of the girl’s chest rising and falling. He brushed past Tansy, ignoring the questions in her eyes, and opened the door. “Come on. Let’s go see the boyfriend next.”

LET ME INSIDE,
TANSY wanted to scream as she followed Dale across the dirt parking lot to Unit 5.
What’s going on here? Who are you?
But she knew it would be futile because he had no intention of lowering the walls around his heart.

Stepping inside yet another motel room, Dale asked, “Did he say anything before he collapsed? Did he mention the two of them eating any shellfish? Anything that might have contained lobster, clams, anything?”

The blend of poisons created by red tide blooms accumulated harmlessly in the tissue of shellfish, yet was poisonous to humans. Worse, it wasn’t disabled by cooking, a common misconception that was the source of many cases of PSP.

Standing beside the bed of a dark-haired young man hooked to a ventilator and a dialysis machine, Hazel shook her head. “He was pretty altered when he came in, kept mumbling about lightning bolts indoors and Ali Baba. Maybe he was flashing back on a cartoon? I’m not sure. But I’m sorry. He didn’t say anything useful.”

Numbness. Tingling. Respiratory arrest. Kidney failure. More than twelve hours to recover. The list of symptoms buzzed inside Tansy’s head, almost, but not quite, sounding like PSP.

“What equipment did we rescue?” Dale’s voice broke into her thoughts. “And do you think any of it will work?”

Identify the disease. It looked like PSP, but was it really? Though she still jumped a little at the sound of his voice, and the way it seemed to caress the back of her neck with memory and regret, Tansy latched onto the familiar thought patterns of her work as she answered. “We pulled out the portable chromatograph. Is it broken?” She shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out.”

Though PSP came from a blend of many different poisons, a cocktail specific to each red tide, there were a few core toxins they could screen for using
the chromatograph. At least then they could be sure they were dealing with PSP. Then they could make a plan. Find the source.

But just then, a woman’s voice yelled from outside. “Dr. Hazel? Dr. Hazel!”

There was a sudden flurry of noise. Wheels sliding on dirt. Agitated shouts. Tansy’s stomach dropped and she hoped to hell they had more respirators when the voice shouted, “We’ve got four more out here, and another two on the way. Dr. Hazel, can you hear me?”

The three doctors looked out into the parking lot and saw chaos. Bodies sprawled in a pickup truck. A woman retching into a plastic garbage can. A small boy climbed out of the cab of the truck, staggered, and fell to his knees, crying.

“God,” Tansy breathed, and unconsciously leaned into Dale when she felt him at her shoulder. “This is awful.”

“Yeah.” He gave her a quick, one-armed hug. “Come on, Tans. We have work to do.”

BY THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, nearly twenty-four hours later, the flood of new patients had slowed to a trickle. The good news was that they hadn’t contracted PSP, merely standard-issue food poisoning that the doctors quickly traced to cans of old tuna used at the island’s single diner. Already, the strictures against fishing and lobstering in the waters off the island were pinching into the inhabitants’ meager tinned resources.