Critical (48 page)
Angelo got the engine going and then turned the headlights on and off a few times.
"All right, we're out of here."
Reluctantly, Angelo pulled away from the curb. He drove slowly so that when they came abreast of the OCME, he could look through the front door into the building's interior.
"The place looks dead," Franco said. "How appropriate."
As they drove up First Avenue, Angelo broke the silence. "Maybe we'll have to check out the boyfriend's apartment if we can't get her here at the OCME."
"That's on the bottom of the list," Franco blurted with a shake of his head. He and Angelo had visited Jack's apartment ten years earlier, with disastrous results. "Those neighborhood gang friends of his are a menace to society, and they are always on alert for other gangs. We're going to stick with what we got. I mean, it's not like we've been sitting here for a week, you know what I'm saying."
Angelo nodded, but he wasn't happy. He felt like a kid promised a present but being forced to wait.
AS LAURIE CLIMBED out of the taxi in front of her house, she looked over at the lighted basketball court. It seemed like a particularly crowded evening, which always made the competition that much more fierce. As evidence, Laurie could hear that the cries of accomplishment and derision were more strident than usual. Standing on her tiptoes, Laurie scanned the spectators for Jack. As much as he enjoyed the game, she wouldn't have been surprised if she saw him, but she didn't.
A few minutes later, she found him soaking in the bathtub.
"You're early," he said. "With as much work as you looked like you had with your matrix, I didn't expect to see you until after ten at the earliest. Did you finish already?"
"No, I did not finish," Laurie admitted, as she stripped off her coat and tossed it out into the hallway. She shut the bathroom door to keep in the steamy heat. After putting down the toilet seat cover she sat and locked eyes with Jack.
"I'm soaking in antibiotic soap," Jack said, averting his gaze. Laurie's serious expression and the fact that she was willing to sit in the steamy bathroom gave him the uncomfortable feeling that she was in one of her talking moods and, considering the timing, there was only one subject. "I thought you'd like to know how responsible I'm being," he added.
"I didn't finish my matrix because I found more of those diatom-like objects."
"Really?" Jack said without a lot of enthusiasm.
"Really" Laurie repeated. She then went on to describe how she'd first found more in David Jeffries's slides, and then found them in most of the cases whose slides she was able to get.
"Were they in all cases whose slides you had?" Jack asked. Despite knowing where the discussion was going, Jack found himself interested. He'd convinced himself that the object he'd seen was an artifact of some sort.
"Not all but most. And most interesting is that I discovered with the help of my unseen matrix that the shorter the interval from the onset of symptoms until death, the greater the number of these particles were."
"So you just randomly counted the number on each slide."
"Exactly."
"Well, that's hardly scientific."
"I know," Laurie admitted. "It's just suggestive, but it was consistent, and therefore very supportive."
Jack ran a soapy hand through his hair. "This is all very interesting, but I'm not sure how to interpret it. I mean, neither one of us knows what it is."
"I didn't leave it at that. I called up Dr. Malovar, whom you had praised so highly about your liver cyst."
"How is he? He's a trip, isn't he? I admire the guy. I hope I'm still around at his age, much less still contributing."
"He's fine, but don't you want to know what he said?"
"Of course. What was his diagnosis?"
"He said he didn't know."
Jack gave a short laugh of amazement. "He didn't know at all? I'm shocked."
"He said he thought it was a parasite."
"That's more like it. Then did you get Dr. Wiley to look at it?
"Dr. Wiley unfortunately is in New Zealand at a parasitology conference."
"Well, then I guess we'll have to wait, because Wiley in his field is like Malovar in his."
"Dr. Malovar sent a digital photo, so I'm certain we'll hear when Dr. Wiley gets it."
"Of course, there's no accounting of when that may be."
"I'm afraid not."
"Okay, Laurie," Jack said, sitting up. "What's your real point here? Is this another attempt at getting me to cancel my surgery? If it is, out with it!"
"Of course it is," Laurie said with some heat. "How could it not be, I've found an unknown parasite associated with a rapidly fatal postoperative course. What seems to be happening is a synergism with MRSA, which I have agreed is in every hospital. But this unknown parasite is apparently in only three hospitals, one of which you are scheduled to enter and allow yourself to become a potential victim."
"Laurie, let me remind you that I'm going to have my operation with a surgeon who has not had one case of whatever this is, and he's been operating nonstop at the Angels Ortho Hospital. Well, that's not entirely true. He had to stop when they closed the ORs to fumigate them. But since then, he's been back with a full schedule day in, day out, with no problems whatsoever. Secondly, I do not have a parasitic disease. Maybe that's the basis of this outbreak: These people have visited the backwaters of the Amazon and picked up this parasite unbeknownst to anyone. Hey! I commend your work, and certainly keep at it. If it turns out that this unknown parasite is infectious and you've discovered some new illness, all the power to you. Hell, you might even win a Nobel Prize."
Laurie stood up abruptly. "Don't patronize me!"
"I'm not patronizing you," Jack contended. "I'm just trying to fend off your negativity and prepare myself for this operation tomorrow. You know how I feel about it. What I'd really like is some support on your side, not fearmongering."
Laurie felt a rush of emotion dominated, for the moment, by frustrated anger. Yanking open the bathroom door and slamming it behind her, she stalked down the hall to the darkened living room, where she threw herself onto the couch to brood. Jack had touched the sore spot of her ambivalence.
CARLO NOSED HIS Denali into one of the few parking places along the front of the strip mall. What that meant at nine-thirty on a Wednesday night was that the Venetian was doing a brisk business. Both Carlo and Brennan alighted. The weather had completely cleared up. Despite the garish light coming from a neon gondola on the roof, two stars could be faintly seen in the sky.
Brennan stretched with a few noisy grunts and groans as they walked down the sidewalk toward the restaurant's entrance and passed the open DVD rental store in the process. Brennan's whole body was stiff after sitting in the SUV since five o'clock.
Inside, they had to search the crowd for Louie. Carlo finally found him at a four-top table near the bar. "Wait here!" he said to Brennan and struck off, weaving in and out among the tables. Carlo thought it ironic that the restaurant was doing as well as it was, considering it was in reality a cover for the Vaccarro family's real work. Carlo attributed it to Louie's influence. Louie loved good food and red wine, as was suggested by his body's profile.
When Louie caught sight of Carlo, he excused himself from his buddies, heaved himself to his feet, and took Carlo off to the side. Despite the crowd, it was easy to talk, thanks to the assemblage of black-velvet paintings that crowded every wall and the acoustic ceiling tiles.
"What's up?" Louie asked. "You're early."
"They closed up shop," Carlo explained. "All four of them went back to the Neapolitan, parked the vans, and went inside. We waited a good hour and a half, and when none of them reappeared, we came here to let you know what was up."
"I'm listening."
"Well, nothing, actually. From the moment Arthur and Ted hooked up with Angelo and Franco mid-morning, they've been staking out the medical examiner's office. Except for the one-sided scuffle between Angelo and some unknown guy nothing's happened. They've just sat in their vans, and us in my Denali."
"Any idea why they sat in two vans?"
"No idea whatsoever."
"None of this makes sense," Louie complained. "It's one hell of an effort on their part, but why?"
Carlo shrugged. He had no idea, either, despite the fact that he and Brennan spent part of the afternoon batting around ideas.
"Yet because it doesn't make sense, my intuition tells me it's important," Louie said, and then paused for a minute. "I want you guys to keep up the surveillance, that's for certain. I want to know where Angelo and Franco are and what they are doing. And have Arthur and Ted start early, like at six. I think the reason they didn't hook up with them until the middle of the morning was they went out too late."
"I'll tell them. Anything else?"
"What about the tracking device."
"We got it, and we've got it on the boat. How it works, you'll have to ask Brennan."
"I don't care how it works. I just want to know when the boat goes out and where it goes, so tell Brennan to stay on top of it."
22
APRIL 5, 2007 3:15 A.M.
Trying not to wake Jack, Laurie rolled over and looked at the clock. She'd been awake for almost an hour, and she was now convinced that more sleep was not an option. She didn't know if it was depression, frustration, or dread, or a mixture of all three, but she couldn't stay in bed a moment longer. Her mind was constantly going over the same issues, with the same results.
Being as quiet as she could, she slipped from under the covers, gathered up the clothes she had set out for the day by feel, since the only light came from the clock face, and slowly inched toward the open bathroom door. Once she was in the bathroom, she leaned back into the bedroom to listen to the sound of Jack's breathing. It hadn't changed, which pleased her.
Waking up as early as she had and wanting something to occupy her overly busy mind, Laurie had suddenly thought of heading into work early. She thought she could at least finish her matrix, and whether it would have any effect on Jack's thinking was not the point. As the discussion the previous evening had proved, he was not about to be deterred, and besides, it was clearly too late. His surgery was only four hours and fifteen minutes away.
Laurie showered quickly and put on her usual small amount of makeup. As she did so, she thought about the evening before. It had gone badly at first, with both of them irritated at the other. But that had soon changed, and once again they'd agreed to disagree. Although Laurie said she didn't want to have anything to do with the operation itself, such as going with him to the hospital in the morning, she promised she'd be there in the afternoon to support him one hundred percent in his rehabilitation. He had been warned by Dr. Anderson that his mobility postsurgery would be restricted because he would be waking up with a device that would be constantly flexing and extending his knee, and that he would be attached to it for at least twenty-four hours.
Laurie dressed quickly While she had a quick bite to eat in the kitchen, she wrote a note for Jack, telling him she'd gone to work early and why, and asked him to have Dr. Anderson call her at the OCME when the procedure was done. She signed the note by telling him she loved him and that she'd see him around noon.
Unsure of where to put the note to be certain he saw it, Laurie took some tape from the kitchen and returned to the bathroom, using the door from the hall. They had designed the bathroom with two doors, one from the bedroom and one from the hall, for exactly this kind of situation when one of them was up before the other. With a piece of tape, she adhered the note to the center of the mirror such that there was no way he could argue he'd not seen it.
Getting her coat, key, the tray of slides, and her bag, Laurie opened the hallway door and was about to close it behind her when she remembered her cell phone was charging at her bedside table. For a moment, she debated whether she wanted to risk waking Jack. Believing Jack should get as much sleep as possible and that she would not need her cell, since she would be spending the first half of the day at her OCME desk and the second half in Jack's hospital room, she decided to forgo its convenience.
Outside, it was still dark with only a hint of dawn in the eastern sky, and the street was completely deserted in both directions. Thinking it would have been wiser to have called a radio cab, Laurie hesitated on the front stoop. But not wanting to take the time now that she was already down, she ran toward Columbus Avenue. In her experience, it was a lot easier getting a taxi there than on Central Park West, and she was proved to be correct as one pulled to the curb the moment she extended her hand.
As the cab zipped downtown in the nearly empty streets, Laurie admitted to herself that April 5, 2007, was not going to be a day she would ever want to relive. The level of general anxiety she was experiencing was as high as she'd ever felt, evidenced by the abdominal distress she'd suffered after eating her skimpy breakfast, which was now being made worse by the jolting and rocking of the taxi. At one point she sensed she was about to vomit, but it passed. It was with definite relief that the taxi finally reached the OCME. Laurie directed the driver to the side of the building and down the ramp to the receiving dock. Still queasy, Laurie quickly paid the fare and climbed out.
