Fever Dream (41 page)

They found themselves in a pleasant, although somewhat spartan, office. A man who looked more like a professor than a CEO,
with glasses, a tweed jacket, and khaki pants, was conferring with the secretary in front of a large desk. His white hair
was carefully combed, and a white brush mustache sat above lips pursed in irritation as he watched them enter.

“This is a private office!” the secretary said.

“I understand you people are police officers,” said Dalquist. “Now, if you have a warrant, I’d like to see it.”

“We don’t have a warrant,” said Hayward. “We were hoping to speak to you informally. However, if we need a warrant, we’ll
go get one.”

A hesitation. “If I knew what this was all about, that might not be necessary.”

Hayward turned to Pendergast. “Special Agent Pendergast, perhaps Mr. Dalquist is right and we should get a warrant after all.
By the book, I always say.”

“It might be advisable at that, Captain Hayward. Of course, word of the warrant might get out.”

Dalquist sighed. “Please sit down. Miss Farmer, I’ll handle it from here, thank you. Please close the door on your way out.”

The secretary left, but neither Hayward nor Pendergast sat down.

“Now, what’s this business about avian flu?” asked Dalquist, his face flushing. Hayward stared but could see no glimmer of
knowledge in his hostile blue eyes.

“We don’t work on flu here at all,” Dalquist went on, stepping back behind his desk. “We’re a small pharmaceutical research
company with a few products to treat certain collagen diseases—and that’s it.”

“About thirteen years ago,” Hayward said, “Longitude conducted an illegal research project here into avian flu.”

“Illegal? How so?”

“Safety procedures weren’t observed. A diseased bird escaped the facility, infected a local family. They all died, and Longitude
covered it up. And are still covering it up—as certain recent homicides would suggest.”

A long silence. “That’s a monstrous charge. I know nothing about it. Longitude went through a bankruptcy about a decade ago.
A complete Chapter Eleven reorganization. There’s nobody here from those days. The old management team is gone; we downsized,
and we now concentrate on a few core products.”

“Core products? Such as?”

“Treatments for dermatomyositis and polymyositis, primarily. We’re small and focused. I’ve never heard of any work being done
here on avian flu.”

“Nobody is left from a decade ago?”

“None as far as I know. We had a disastrous fire that killed the former CEO, and the entire facility was shut down for months.
When we restarted, we were essentially a different company.”

Hayward pulled an envelope from her jacket. “It’s our understanding that, at the time of your bankruptcy, Longitude closed
down research lines on several important orphan drugs and vaccines. Just like that. You were the only facility working on
those lines. It left millions of sick people in the Third World without hope.”

“We were
bankrupt
.”

“So you shut them down.”

“The new board shut them down. Personally, I wasn’t involved with the company until two years after that period. Is there
a crime in that?”

Hayward found herself breathing hard. This wasn’t good. They were getting nowhere. “Mr. Dalquist, your corporate filings indicate
you make almost eight million dollars a year in salary and benefits. Your few drugs are very profitable. What are you doing
with all that money?”

“Just what every other corporation does. Salaries, taxes, dividends, overhead, R and D.”

“Forgive my saying so, but considering those profits, your research facility looks decidedly run-down.”

“Don’t let appearances fool you. We’ve got state-of-the-art equipment here. We’re isolated, so we don’t have to run a beauty
contest.” He spread his hands. “Apparently you don’t like the way we do business. Maybe you don’t like me. You may not like
that I make eight million a year, and that we’re now quite a profitable company. Fine. But we’re innocent of these accusations.
Totally innocent. Do I look like the kind of man involved in murder?”

“Prove it.”

Dalquist came around his desk. “My first impulse is to stop you cold, make you get a warrant, fight this thing tooth and nail
in the courts, use our highly paid attorneys to delay and harass you for weeks or months. Even if you prevailed, you’d end
up with a limited search warrant and a mountain of paperwork. But you know what? I’m not going to do that. I’m going to give
you a free pass, right here and now. You can go anywhere you like, look into anything,
and have access to any documents. We’ve
got nothing to hide. Will that satisfy you?”

Hayward glanced at Pendergast. His face was unreadable, his silvery eyes hooded.

“That would certainly be a start,” she said.

He leaned over his desk and pressed a button. “Miss Farmer, please draft a letter for my signature giving these two people
complete, total, and unlimited access to the entire facilities of Longitude Pharmaceuticals, with instructions that employees
are to answer all questions fully and truthfully and provide access to even the most sensitive areas and documents.”

He punched the button and looked up. “I just hope to see you off the premises as soon as possible.”

Pendergast broke a long silence. “We shall see.”

B
Y THE TIME THEY REACHED THE FAR END
of the Longitude Pharmaceuticals compound, Hayward felt exhausted. Dalquist had kept his word: they had been granted access
to everything—labs, offices, archives. They had even been allowed to wander through the long-shuttered buildings that littered
the sprawling campus. Nobody had accompanied them, no security harassed them; they were given free rein.

And they had found absolutely nothing. Beyond a few low-level service employees, nobody at the facility remained from the
pre-bankruptcy days. The company records, which went back decades, made no reference to an avian flu project. Everything appeared
to be on the up-and-up.

Which made Hayward suspicious. In her experience, everyone—even honest people—had something to hide.

She glanced at Pendergast as they walked down the corridor of the last shuttered building. She could discern nothing about
his thoughts from his cool, alabaster face.

They exited the far door, a fire exit crash door that groaned as they opened it. It gave out onto a broken cement stoop and
patchy lawn. To the right lay a narrow muddy lake, a stranded bayou, surrounded by bald cypress trees hung with Spanish moss.
Straight
ahead, through a tangle of vegetation, Hayward could see the remains of a brick wall covered with vines, and behind
it a jutting, burned-out ruin tucked away at the far edge of the campus, surrounded on three sides by the dark fastness of
Black Brake swamp. Beyond the ruin, an old pier, burned and ruined, hardly more than a series of pilings, fell away into the
dark waters of the swamp.

A fine rain had begun to fall, bedewing the grass, and ominous clouds rolled low in the sky.

“I forgot my umbrella,” Hayward said, looking into the wet, dismal trees.

Pendergast, who had been staring off in the direction of the pier and the swamp, reached into his suit.
Oh, no
, she thought,
don’t tell me he’s got an umbrella in there
. But instead he removed a small packet containing clear plastic rain covers, one for her and another for himself.

In a few minutes, they were squishing across the lawn toward the tangled remains of an old chain-link security fence, topped
with concertina wire. A gate lay on the ground, sprawled and broken, and they entered through a narrow gap. Beyond lay the
remains of the burned building. It was of yellow brick like the rest, but the roof had collapsed, great charred beams sticking
into the sky, the windows and door frames black holes with scorched streaks above. Massive carpets of kudzu crept up the walls
and lay in heavy mats over everything.

Hayward followed Pendergast through a shattered doorway. The detective paused to examine the door lying on the ground and
the frame itself, and then he knelt and began fiddling with the door lock with some lock-picking tools.

“Curious,” he said, rising.

The entryway was strewn with charred pieces of wood, and the ceiling above had partially caved in, allowing a dim light to
penetrate the interior. A flock of swallows burst out of the darkness and flew away, wheeling and crying at the disturbance.
The odor of dampness clung faintly to everything. Water dripped from the black timbers, making pools on the once-tiled floor.

Pendergast slipped a penlight out of his pocket and shone it around. They moved into the interior, stepping over debris, the
thin beam of Pendergast’s light playing this way and that. Passing through a broken archway, they walked down an old corridor,
burned-out
rooms on either side. In places melted glass and aluminum had puddled on the floor, along with scorched plastic
and the wire skeletons of furniture.

Hayward watched as Pendergast silently flitted through the dark rooms, probing and peering. At one point, he stopped at the
remains of a filing cabinet and poked among a sodden mass of burned papers in the bottom of a drawer, pushing them apart.
The very center remained unburned, and he plucked out a few pieces, examining them.
“ ‘Delivery completed to Nova G.,’ ”
he read aloud from one of the papers. “This is just a bunch of old shipping manifests.”

“Anything of interest?”

More poking. “Unlikely.” Removing several charred fragments, he slipped them into a ziplock bag, which in turn disappeared
into his suit jacket.

They arrived in a large central room where the fire appeared to have been fiercest. The ceiling was gone and mats of kudzu
had risen over the debris, leaving humps and nodding growths. Pendergast glanced around, then walked over to one and reached
into it, grabbing the vine and yanking it aside, exposing the skeleton of an old machine thick with wires and gears whose
purpose Hayward couldn’t begin to guess. He moved through the room, pulling aside more vines, exposing more melted, skeletal
instrumentation.

“Any idea what this stuff was?” Hayward asked.

“An autoclave—incubators—and I would guess
that
was once a centrifuge.” He flashed the light toward a large half-melted mass. “And here we have the remains of a laminar
flow cabinet. This was once a first-class microbiology lab.”

He kicked aside some debris, bent down, picked something up. It glinted dully in the light, and he slipped it into his pocket.

“The report of Slade’s death,” said Hayward, “indicated that his body was found in a laboratory. That must be this room.”

“Yes.” Pendergast’s light flashed over a row of heavy, melted cabinets under a hood. “And there is where the fire started.
Chemical storage.”

“You think it was deliberately set?”

“Certainly. The fire was necessary to destroy the evidence.”

“How do you know?”

Pendergast reached into his pocket and showed the thing he
had picked up to Hayward. It was a strip of aluminum, about three-quarters
of an inch long, that had evidently escaped the fire. A number was stamped into it.

“What is it?”

“An unused bird leg-band.” He examined it closely, then handed it to Hayward. “And no ordinary leg-band, either.” He pointed
to its inner edge, where a band of silicon could be clearly seen. “Take a look. It’s been chipped with what is no doubt a
homing transmitter. Now we know how Helen tracked the parrot. I was wondering how she was able to locate the Doanes before
they presented any symptoms of avian flu.”

Hayward handed it back. “If you don’t mind me asking, what makes you think the fire was deliberately set? The reports were
pretty clear that they found no evidence of accelerants or foul play.”

“The person who started this fire was a top-notch chemist who knew what he was doing. It is asking far too much of coincidence
to believe this building burned accidentally, right after the avian flu project was shut down.”

“So who burned it?”

“I would direct your attention to the high security, the once-formidable perimeter fence, the special, almost unpickable locks
on the doors, the windows that were once barred and covered with frosted glass. The building was set apart from the others
as well, almost into the swamp, protected on all sides. This fire was surely set by someone on the inside. Someone with high-level
access.”

“Slade?”

“The arsonist burned up in his own fire is not an uncommon phenomenon.”

“On the other hand,” said Hayward, “the fire might have been murder. Slade, as head of the project, knew too much.”

Pendergast’s pale eyes turned on her slowly. “My thoughts exactly, Captain.”

They stood in silence, the rain dripping through the ruins.

“Seems like we’re at a dead end,” said Hayward.

Silently, Pendergast removed the ziplock bag with the charred paper and handed it to Hayward. She examined it. One of the
fragments was a requisition for a shipment of petri dishes, with a handwritten note at the bottom upping the number “as per
the direction of CJS.” And it was signed with a single initial,
J
.