The Cobra Event (10 page)

“What do you mean, biohazard precautions?” Eunice Moran said. Her voice sounded like breaking glass.

“I’m sorry. Your daughter may have had a contagious disease.”

“What kind of disease?” Mr. Moran asked.

“We don’t know. We don’t even know if it was contagious. What I’m here to do right now—I know it’s hard—is, I need to ask you some questions about what your daughter did and where she went during the past days and perhaps weeks, while your memory is fresh. We want to try to find out if she was exposed to something.”

Mrs. Moran held her husband tighter. Finally she said, “We’ll try to help you.” She nodded at a chair. “Please sit down.”

Austen sat on the edge of the chair. “Can you think of anything Kate did lately that might have exposed her to something infective or toxic? Did she travel in a foreign country recently?”

“No,” Mrs. Moran said.

“Was she receiving chemotherapy for cancer?”

“Kate? No!”

“Was she taking any strong or potentially toxic medications?”

“No,” Mrs. Moran said.

“Did she receive any vaccinations recently?”

“No.”

“Did she eat any shellfish or unusual foods? Visit any unusual places?”

“Not that I can think of,” Mrs. Moran said.

There was silence.

“Had she been outdoors in the woods, hiking or camping, where she could have been bitten by a tick?”

“No.”

“Did Kate have a boyfriend?”

They weren’t sure. They said that Kate had been going out with someone her age, a boy named Ter Salmonson.

Austen wrote the name down in her green epi notebook and got his phone number from Mrs. Moran.

“She broke up with Ter, I think,” Kate’s mother said.

Austen asked if they could carefully review Kate’s movements over the past two weeks. The parents were vague. Kate’s life had been quiet. She had friends, but she wasn’t a heavy socializer. She was a fan of rock music, and her parents had forbidden her to go to certain music clubs, but there had been no real trouble over that.

“There’s another question. This is hard for me to ask. Do you know if Kate used drugs?”

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Moran said.

“She didn’t smoke pot or anything?”

“I don’t know—I don’t think so, no,” Eunice Moran said.

Kate took the subway to school every day. She would come home late in the afternoon. She’d go into her room, listen to music, talk with friends on the telephone, do her homework, have supper, do more homework, sometimes surf the Web and send e-mail, go to bed.

“I’ve been very busy with my work,” Jim Moran said. “We haven’t done much as a family together lately.”

“Did she go
anywhere
recently?”

“The only thing I can think of is her art project for Mr. Talides, her teacher.” Mrs. Moran answered. “It’s a construction thing or something, and Kate was going around buying her boxes and things—when?” She turned to her husband.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Moran said.

“Last weekend, I think. She was buying things in SoHo and on Broadway and at the Sixth Avenue flea market, I guess. Mr. Talides was—” Mrs. Moran’s voice cracked. “I can’t stop thinking—I’m sorry—he tried to save her.”

“Do you know, did he attempt C.P.R.?”

“He had forgotten what to do, that’s—that’s what he told me when he called. He was very upset.”

Austen made a note to herself to interview the art teacher right away. He might have been exposed. On the other hand, she was beginning to get an uncomfortable feeling that this could turn out to be a wild-goose chase, that she had been pushed into some kind of hopeless problem by Walt Mellis. An unsolved outbreak. One of those blips that never gets explained.

The telephone rang. The housekeeper, whose name was Nanette, answered. It was a priest calling about the funeral arrangements. Austen could hear Nanette saying, “There won’t be a wake, Father, no, no, the health authorities have forbidden…”

“Do you mind if I look around the house just a little?”

The parents didn’t answer.

“Sometimes looking can be helpful. Also, would you mind if I took some photographs?” She removed her electronic camera from her knapsack. “May I look in the kitchen, and in Kate’s bedroom?”

They nodded, somewhat reluctantly.

She went into the kitchen first. Nanette hurried out as soon as Austen entered, almost hiding her face from her. It was a pleasant kitchen, with gray stone counters and a huge stove. She opened the refrigerator.

Austen did not think this was a food-borne illness, but she could not be sure, and there was, too, the issue of whether Kate had consumed a poison. She moved a few things around in the refrigerator. She photographed as much of the food as she could. Milk, some fish in paper. She opened the paper. It was salmon; it smelled fresh. Red-tipped lettuce. A bottle of French white wine, half finished. She sniffed at the wine. It seemed okay.

Then she went into a hallway. Down the hall was a door standing half open. It led to Kate’s bedroom.

It was a beautiful room, with bare brick walls, illuminated by a skylight. It was cluttered with a teenager’s life. There was an unmade bed, a poster for Phish on the wall—the drummer Jon Fishman strutting onstage wearing a dress. There was a poster of a Vermeer painting: a young woman playing the clavichord. In the closet she found baggy jeans, tight silk tops, little strap dresses, a short leather jacket. Kate must have been sensitive and hip, somewhat arty. There was an old bureau. A maple box containing odd bits of junky jewelry. There was a desk with a computer, and a table piled with bric-a-brac. There were joke dolls, a row of flutes and pennywhistles lined up next to each other, made of wood, plastic, reed, and steel. In the center of the table stood a dollhouse. This had to be Kate’s art table. There were small antique boxes, large new metal boxes. Small metal cans and tubes. A can that said, “Twinings Earl Grey Tea.” Plastic containers of all shapes and colors. Delicate boxes made of wood. Everything was well organized and ordered.

Austen had been wondering about the issue of drugs. She opened the drawers in the desk and opened some of the boxes, looking for drug paraphernalia. There was nothing like that to be found. She began to rule out Dr. Dudley’s hypothesis that Kate might have been a drug user. This was not the bedroom of a druggie.

Kate had had quirky taste and an unusual sense of color and shape. Austen switched on her electronic camera and began to take photographs of the room. The light from the skylight gave everything a cool radiance. Momentarily she felt as if Kate were standing in the room with her; it could not be so, but she felt the existence of a world next to ours. That world was real, in a sense, for Kate was present in the arrangement of the objects, which had not been moved or touched since her death.

Austen opened up a box. Inside it was a mechanical toy beetle. It stared at her with sad green jeweled eyes. She put it down in the spot where she had found it, reluctant to move Kate’s arrangements. In another box was a miniature cast-metal car. The camera focused automatically. She began shooting everything. There was a box full of bird feathers: from blue jays, a cardinal, a crow, and a banded feather that she thought might have come from a red-tailed hawk, but she wasn’t sure. There was a box made of wood with a polygon painted on it. She tried to open it but it had a puzzle catch she couldn’t figure out, so she took a picture of it. She photographed a sharp-looking jagged metal spring. She photographed a chunk of green malachite. An old skeleton key in a padlock. The skull of some small bird, maybe a sparrow. An amethyst geode. Then there was the dollhouse. Kate seemed to be taking it apart. She stepped back and took a picture of the dollhouse. She took a picture of the whole room. She wondered if she would ever look at these pictures again. They might hold information. Or maybe not. She jotted a few notes in her green epi notebook.

Tracking

AUSTEN FOLLOWED
the same route to school that Kate had taken every morning: she walked to Union Square and then took the subway to the Upper East Side, trying to get a feel for Kate’s world. The Mater School was situated in a quiet, wealthy neighborhood, among town houses. Austen arrived there at three o’clock in the afternoon. The headmistress, Sister Anne Threader, had ordered a morning assembly and chapel, and then had canceled classes but had kept the students in school for a day of reflection and prayer. She had dismissed school shortly before Austen arrived, but some of the students had elected to stay, and Sister Threader had seen no way to argue with that. She was a tiny woman in late middle age, with straight white hair and piercing eyes. She wore a pale blue dress rather than a nun’s habit. “Kate was a much loved person here,” she said to Austen. She led her to the art room. Three students were there, sitting around, doing nothing. They were subdued, in shock, and had been crying.

“Where is Mr. Talides?” Sister Anne asked them.

“He went home,” one of the students said. “He was feeling really bad.”

“I’m so
angry
, Anne,” another young woman said to the headmistress. It was Jennifer Ramosa. She had been crying with rage about that which she could not change.

“God understands your feelings,” Sister Anne said. “He loves Kate as you love her, and he understands your being angry.”

“I saw her die,” Jennifer said. Her voice trembled.

Sister Anne took Jennifer’s hands. “Life is a mystery, and death is a mystery when it occurs. When you are reunited with Kate you will have answers, but for now what we need to be asking is what Kate would want us to do.”

Austen felt the question herself. What would Kate want of her?

“Kate never got a chance,” Jennifer said.

“We don’t know that,” Sister Anne said. She suggested that they all pray.

Finally the headmistress said, “This is Dr. Alice Austen. She is here to try to find out what happened to Kate.”

“I’m a doctor working with the City of New York,” Austen said.

“Kates was one of my best friends,” Jennifer Ramosa said. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“I think she would want us to find out what happened,” Austen said. Then she said, “May I look around the room?”

She poked around the art room while the girls watched her, and Sister Anne spoke quietly with them. Nothing seemed unusual. There were coffee cans gobbed with paints. Tubes of gesso, canvas on stretchers. Kate’s project area had been a table in the corner. On it stood more of Kate’s things and a very large construction that looked like a house, sort of a dollhouse, but larger and more complicated.

Austen turned and faced the students. “Did the art teacher, Mr. Talides, get close to Kate when she was ill?”

Two of the girls nodded.

She turned to the headmistress. “Do you have his home telephone number?”

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON
on Thursday now, still the first day of Austen’s investigation, and rush hour was beginning. It was about thirty hours since Kate Moran had died, thirty hours since Peter Talides had been in close proximity to Kate during the agonal phase of her illness. If Talides had been infected with something, he would probably still be in the incubation period, and he might well be asymptomatic, showing no signs of illness. Austen did not think that an infectious agent would cause any but the most subtle sign of illness during thirty hours or so. But she wanted to get in touch with Talides, have a look at him, and to keep track of him.

She got on the N train headed for Queens. Twenty minutes later she stepped off the train at the elevated station at Grand Avenue. A set of dilapidated iron stairs debouched into a bustling neighborhood of small markets, dry-cleaning shops, hair parlors, a Greek restaurant, a gas station. She tried to figure out where to go. She walked a few blocks into a quieter neighborhood and found herself in a small park. There were some Doric columns and a bronze statue of a man in a robe. Curious, she went over to the statue. It was Socrates—him all right, with his misshapen face and bushy beard. Under him were engraved the words “Know thy self.” The name Talides—she realized that this must be a Greek neighborhood. It began to dawn on her just how exquisitely local are the neighborhoods of New York City. She was looking at a biological system of bewildering complexity.

She kept going, turning up a side street. Peter Talides lived in half of a small duplex house made of brown brick. She rang the front doorbell.

Talides opened the door immediately. He was a pudgy man, with a kindly, sad face. His living room was also his studio. There were canvases stretched on frames, coffee cans holding paint and water, paintings piled up against the wall. The colors were bold and vibrant.

“I apologize for the mess,” he said. “Please sit down.”

She sat in a threadbare easy chair. He sat on a swiveling stool. He sighed a deep sigh. He seemed on the edge of tears.

“I’m very sorry about what happened,” she said.

Peter Talides thanked her for her concern. “My life is the school and my painting. I live alone. I have no illusions about my talent. But—” He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his nose. “I try to make a small difference with the kids.”

“Can you describe what you did to try to save Kate?”

“I—” He sighed. Long pause. “I tried to remember how to give rescue breaths. I couldn’t remember…how…I had the lessons, but I couldn’t remember—I’m sorry, this is very difficult for me.”

“Did you put your mouth to her mouth?”

“Very briefly, yes.”

“Was there blood?”

“She had a—bloody nose.”

“Did any of the blood get on you?”

His voice trembled. “I had to throw away my shirt.”

“Could I look at your face more closely?”

He sat on the stool, uncomfortable and embarrassed. She looked at him carefully.

“Do you have a cold?” she asked.

“Yes. Runny nose. Stopped-up sinuses.”

Austen took a deep breath. “Have your eyes been bothering you?”

“Yes. They bother me when I have a cold or allergies. I have frequent allergies.”

“Can you describe the sensation in your eyes?”

“It’s nothing. Just itchy, runny. Like an allergy.”