Tampered (25 page)

Zol followed Hamish through the wide automatic doors and into Caledonian University Medical Centre's emergency department waiting room.

“You stay here,” Hamish told him. “No sense both of us traipsing all over the department. It's a wild place and Jeff Suszek could be anywhere. I'll find him and the three of us can talk.”

The ten minutes it took Hamish to resurface felt like a week. The longer Zol stood in the alcove beside the chips-and-candy vending machine — doing his best to shield himself from the coughing, the retching, and the bleeding — the more he convinced himself that Travis was dead, or worse. Zol had never met the boy's mother. An older sister always dropped him off at soccer, and no one ever came to the door when Zol drove Travis home. Two women huddled in the far corner of the waiting room, sobbing on the scuzzy vinyl couch. They could be Travis's mother and a much older sister for all Zol knew, but he knew it wasn't Jessica who drove the boy to soccer. He wanted to introduce himself, try to comfort them in some way, but couldn't bring himself to risk an awkward moment with the wrong people.

A skinny young man in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, who'd been marched in between two large-bellied police officers, vomited a stomach full of blood on the floor beside the reception window. Zol covered his nose against the stench and looked away. Public health dumped him in political shit often enough, but rarely brought him face to face with body fluids.

Then Hamish came out through the door marked
Authorized Personnel
. With him was a taller man, early forties, wearing blue scrubs. He had a boyish round face. Both men were rubbing alcohol sanitizer into their hands. Hamish introduced Dr. Jeff Suszek, who scanned the waiting room, smiled apologetically at Zol as if personally responsible for the semi-organized chaos, then led the way to a quiet corridor where they could talk in private.

“How's Travis?” Zol asked.

“Meningitis, all right,” Hamish said. “Fever, stiff neck, cloudy spinal fluid. The full monty.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Be a stretch to call it consciousness,” Hamish said. He looked at Jeff for corroboration. “He's responding to painful stimuli with moans and groans. His mother is in there with him, but he's not awake enough to talk. ”

“Is he going to make it?” Zol asked.

“They'll be taking him upstairs shortly. ICU,” Hamish said. “He'll make it. But whether or not with his brain intact is another matter. Time will tell.” There it was again, the bloodless manner that came over Hamish whenever he was concentrating on a difficult case.

“Does it look like listeria?” Zol asked.

“Don't know yet,” Jeff said. He checked his watch. “The lab should be sending over the results any minute.”

“And the two soldiers?” Zol said. “How are they?”

Jeff scratched the back of his neck. “That's the interesting wrinkle I was telling Hamish about.”

Zol felt himself bracing. A wrinkle could be the tidbit of information that led to the listeria's source, or a complication that made his job almost impossible. “Hit me. What is it?”

Hamish looked at Zol and arched his eyebrows like a dog trainer dangling a bone. On the drive to the hospital, Hamish had been troubled that two robust young men had contracted invasive listeria. It didn't make sense. Men strong enough for active military service didn't get infected with listeria. The germ hurt only newborns, the frail, and the elderly.

“Afghanistan,” said Jeff. “Both men served there together. A six-month tour, I believe. They're with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, based here in Hamilton.”

Zol had done a stint in a travel-health clinic as a resident. He'd learned that tropical viruses, parasites, and bacteria had predictable incubation periods, some short, others surprisingly long. Knowing a patient's overseas return date was critical to making an accurate tropical diagnosis. These guys could be infected with something in addition to listeria, something they'd picked up on their travels, a microbe that made them unusually vulnerable to listeria. Or had they been exposed to a chemical weapon or an experimental vaccine that had wiped out their immune systems? If that was the case, the Canadian Forces wouldn't divulge any details without a fight. “Tell me, when did they get back?”

“Um . . . don't know exactly, but the families can give you the details. They're in the waiting room.” Jeff grinned. “Let me know what you think. And Hamish —”

“I know. You owe me. Big time.”

Jeff Suszek let out a chuckle and strode back into the fray. He seemed to thrive on it.

Zol and Hamish returned to the waiting room. Hamish grabbed at his pager, suddenly alive on his belt. He squinted at the display. “It's the micro lab. With the results of Travis's Gram stain, I hope.” He surveyed the waiting room and mimed a phone with his hand. The only one visible was a pay phone on the other side of the glass entrance doors. He shrugged and told Zol not to move, then strode to the inner sanctum and called over his shoulder, “Back in a sec.”

When he returned two minutes later, Hamish's face was grave. Moments before, his eyes had been bright, full of the excitement of the hunt, the clinician-detective in full steam. Now he looked furious. And frightened.

“What's wrong?” Zol said.

The dark clouds deepened in Hamish's eyes. “Not here,” he said. He rattled a bottle of pills clutched in his fist, clearly distressed by its contents. “Down the hall. To the cafeteria. It's closed on Sundays, except for the vending machines. We can talk there.”

They slid onto a bench in the dimly lit cafeteria, an instant haven away from the noise and stench of the waiting room.

Hamish plunked the pill bottle onto the Formica tabletop. “Look at this, will you?” His face was still full of thunder.

Zol read the label. “It's made out to Travis Andersen. Gabapentin. That's an anticonvulsant.”

“One of the nurses gave them to me. His mother forgot them in Emerg.”

“I had no idea the boy had epilepsy. His family should have told me.”

Zol was beginning to realize Travis's birthmark and epilepsy were probably caused by the proliferation of tiny arteries on his face and in his brain, a congenital condition called Sturge-Weber syndrome. Max and Travis had spent hours alone together in Zol's computer room. The boy could have had a seizure there any time. Or at any of the soccer matches Travis's parents never attended. It was one thing not to mollycoddle the child, but reckless not to have warned Zol about Travis's epilepsy before Zol took the boy for a full day at the zoo on the other side of Toronto.

“Look again at the bottle,” Hamish said. “You missed something.”

Zol scanned the label. This time he saw the bold letters at the top:
Steeltown Apothecary, Mohawk Road, Hamilton, Ontario
. “I can't believe it. Our friend Vik.”

“Care to guess what the micro tech just found in Travis's spinal fluid?”

Zol had never liked being pumped by his professors and was glad he was past those humiliating days as a trainee, when relentless questions demanded picky answers. The answer to Hamish's question was written all over his face. “Gram-positive bacilli,” Zol said. “Exhibiting tumbling motility.”

Hamish didn't answer. He didn't need to. The fury in his eyes said it all.

At a moment of crisis, your life was supposed to pass before your eyes. But what Zol saw flashing was a headline:
Meningitis Stumps Health Unit's Szabo, Head Rolls
.

“My God, Hamish. We're not in Camelot anymore.”

Zol hung back as Hamish flicked on the light in the windowless classroom across the hall from the cafeteria and ushered in the families of the two soldiers with meningitis. Hamish directed everyone to take a seat and beckoned Zol to join him at the front.

“I'm Dr. Wakefield,” he began, “and this is my colleague Dr. Szabo from the public health department. Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed together. We hope you'll be able to help us put our finger on how Peter and Gavin got sick.”

Zol put on his government-issue smile, the one that was supposed to convey compassion, dignity, and confidence without overdoing it. You lost your audience if they thought you were smug and armed with a load of bull. He could see this was going to be a tough crowd — tired, worried, and hungry. An explosive mixture.

“What's this about a goddamn interview?” a forty-something man called from the back. “We're looking for answers, Doc. Not more hot air.” His sour face, heavy winter boots, and oil-stained ski jacket suggested he'd been dragged off the snowmobile trails against his will on one of the final days of the season. “We've been here all friggin' day and no one's told us a goddamn thing.”

“Take it easy, Bob,” said the blonde woman sitting in front of him. “These are the first doctors we've talked to all day. Give them a chance.”

Ski-Doo Bob unzipped his coat, put his feet up on a chair, and leaned back with his hands clasped over his beer gut. The look on his face said
She made me shut up for now, but I'm watching you.

“We do have some answers for you,” said Hamish. “But first I'd like to get a sense of who you all are.”

With the practised hand of a tutor leading a seminar, Hamish got each of them to introduce themselves and state their relationship to Captain Gavin Scarfe and Major Peter Legault. There were ten relatives in the room, including the two wives, Peter's teenage son, Gavin's identical-twin daughters, and an assortment of adult siblings and in-laws.

“Let's start with what we know for sure,” Hamish said. “Gavin and Peter both have meningitis. That's an infection of the membranes covering the brain.”

A murmuring went through the room. “Meningitis?” said Loreen Scarfe. “That's contagious, eh?” Her huge hoop earrings flashed beneath curly red hair as she flicked her head to the left. “Oh my God, we're all gonna get it.”

“This is not the highly contagious form of meningitis,” Hamish said, waving his hands, trying his best to smooth the waters. “We don't expect any of you are going to get it.”

Well put, thought Zol. Fair and reasonably factual, with just the right spin. But a bit of a stretch in light of all the unexplained cases of listeria in the past few weeks, and the fact that the epidemic — yes, it really was an epidemic, not just a curious little cluster in an old-folks' home — was accelerating. Until the source got pinpointed, anyone in the room could be the next victim.

Hamish pressed on, explaining that the exact identity of the germ responsible for the infection would be known tomorrow, and in the meantime the men were getting excellent treatment and should be showing signs of improvement over the next day or two.

“I want to know where they got it from,” said Shirley Legault, a compact woman with prematurely silver hair and an intelligent face. She unzipped her pink fleece vest and fanned herself. “Pete's never been sick a day in his life.”

“Yeah, same for my Gavin,” said Loreen, her head flicking to the left every fifteen seconds like clockwork. “They musta picked it up in Afghanistan. Gavin said the conditions over there were, like, so filthy I wouldn't be able to stand it for one minute.”

The twin teenage girls looked at each other and rolled their eyes as if sharing the knowledge that their mother was a neat freak with an embarrassing head-flicking tic and should be ignored at all cost. Poor girls, they resembled their mother far more closely than they'd like to believe — same hair and freckled skin, but without the tic.

Zol fingered the loonie in his pocket and nodded toward Shirley Legault, the silver-haired wife with the intelligent face. “We're as anxious as you to find out how your husbands got this infection. That's why we need your help.”

Hamish pulled a pen and notepad from his lab coat. “Let's start with their travel history. When were they in Afghanistan?”

Bit by bit the history came out, peppered with a few false starts and moments of confusion. The five women in the room competed with each other over the accuracy of the details while the men watched from the back, grim and silent. They knew better than to contradict their women. Loreen had the loudest voice and the poorest head for dates and facts. Her twins and her sister-in-law corrected her repeatedly. It eventually got settled that Major Peter Legault and Captain Gavin Scarfe had served together with the Argylls for the past twelve years. They'd spent two terms in Afghanistan, the most recent a six-month deployment ending four months ago. They'd never been injured or required admission to either the base hospital in Kandahar or the NATO facility in Germany. It was clear they hadn't picked up their listeria in an army medical centre.

“Have they served anywhere else overseas?” Zol asked.

“Pete was seconded to the UN in Haiti,” said Shirley Legault. “Logistical support for the Mounties.”