Unnatural Exposure (18 page)

My hands were shaking as Lucy helped me take off the glove. I sat down on the floor.

'Are you all right?' she asked, kindly.

'That was awful,' I said.

'Then it was good.' She returned the helmet and glove to a counter. 'You were immersed in the environment. That's what should happen.'

She handed me several tissues, and I wiped my face.

'What about the other photograph? Do you want to do that one, too?' she asked. 'The one with the hands and feet?'

'I've been in that room quite enough,' I said.

I DROVE HOME haunted. I had been going to crime scenes most of my professional life, but had never had one come to me. The sensation of being inside that photograph, of imagining I could smell and feel what was left of that body, had shaken me badly. It was almost midnight by the time I pulled into my garage, and I couldn't unlock my door fast enough. Inside my house, I turned the alarm off, then back on the instant I shut and locked the door. I looked around to make sure nothing was out of place.

Lighting a fire, I fixed a drink and missed cigarettes again. I turned on music to keep me company, then went inside my office to see what might await me there. I had various faxes and phone messages, and another communication in e-mail. This time, all deadoc had for me was to repeat, you think you re so smart. I was printing this and wondering if Squad 19 had seen it, too, when the telephone rang, startling me.

'Hi,' Wesley said. 'Just making sure you got in okay.'

'There's more mail,' I said, and I told him what it was.

'Save it and go to bed.'

'It's hard not to think about.'

'He wants you to stay up all night thinking. That's his power. That's his game.'

'Why me?' I was out of sorts and still felt queasy.

'Because you're the challenge, Kay. Even for nice people like me. Go to sleep. We'll talk tomorrow. I love you.'

But I did not get to sleep long. At several minutes past four A. M., my phone rang again. It was Dr Hoyt this time, a family practitioner in Norfolk, where he had served as a state-appointed medical examiner for the last twenty years. He was pushing seventy, but spry and as lucid as new glass. I'd never known him to be alarmed by anything, and I was instantly unnerved by his tone.

'Dr Scarpetta, I'm sorry,' he said, and he was talking very fast. 'I'm on Tangier Island.'

All I could think of, oddly, were crab cakes. 'What in the world are you doing there?'

I arranged pillows behind me, reaching for call sheets and pen.

'I got called late yesterday, been out here half the night. The Coast Guard had to bring me in one of their cutters, and I don't like boats worth a damn, beaten and whipped around worse than eggs. Plus it was cold as hell.'

I had no idea what he was talking about.

'The last time I saw anything like this was Texas, 1949,' he went on, talking fast, 'when I was doing my residency and about to get married . . .'

I had to cut him off. 'Slow down, Fred,' I said. 'Tell me what's happened.'

'A fifty-two-year-old Tangier lady. Probably been dead at least twenty-four hours in her bedroom. She's got severe skin eruptions in crops, just covered with them, including the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet. Crazy as it sounds, it looks like smallpox.'

'You're right. That's crazy,' I said as my mouth got dry. 'What about chicken pox? Any way this woman was immunosuppressed?'

'I don't know anything about her, but I've never seen chicken pox look like this. These eruptions follow the small-pox pattern. They're in crops, like I said, all about the same age, and the farther away from the center of the body, the denser they get. So they're confluent, on the face, the extremities.'

I was thinking of the torso, of the small area of eruptions that I had assumed were shingles, my heart filled with dread. I did not know where that victim had died, but I believed it was somewhere in Virginia. Tangier Island was also in Virginia, a tiny barrier island in the Chesapeake Bay where the economy was based on crabbing.

'There are a lot of strange viruses out there these days,' he was saying.

'Yes, there are,' I agreed. 'But Hanta, Ebola, HIV, dengue, et al., do not cause the symptoms you have described. That doesn't mean there isn't something else we don't know about.'

'I know smallpox. I'm old enough to have seen it with my own two eyes. But I'm not an expert in infectious diseases, Kay. And I sure as hell don't know the things that you do. But whatever it might be in this case, the fact is, the woman's dead and some type of poxvirus killed her.'

'Obviously, she lived alone.'

'Yes.'

'And she was last seen alive when?'

'The chief's working on that.'

'What chief?' I said.

'The Tangier police department has one officer. He's the chief. I'm in his trailer now, using the phone.'

'He's not overhearing this.'

'No, no. He's out talking to neighbors. I did my best to get information, without a whole lot of luck. You ever been out here?'

'No, I haven't.'

'Let's just say they don't exactly rotate their crops. There are maybe three family names on the whole island. Most folks grow up here, never leave. It's mighty hard to understand a word they're saying. Now that's a dialect you won't hear in any other corner of the world.'

'Nobody touches her until I have a better idea what we're dealing with,' I said, unbuttoning my pajamas.

'What do you want me to do?' he asked.

'Get the police chief to guard the house. No one goes in or near it until I say. Go home. I'll call you later in the day.'

The labs had not completed microbiology on the torso, and now I could not wait. I dressed in a hurry, fumbling with everything I touched, as if my motor skills had completely left me. I sped downtown on streets that were deserted, and at close to five was parking in my space behind the morgue. As I let myself into the bay, I startled the night security guard and he startled me.

'Lord have mercy, Dr Scarpetta,' said Evans, who had watched over the building for as long as I had been here.

'Sorry,' I said, my heart thudding. 'I didn't mean to frighten you.'

'Just making my rounds. Is everything all right?'

'I sure hope so.' I went past him.

'Is something coming in?'

He followed me up the ramp. I opened the door leading inside, and looked at him.

'Nothing I know of,' I replied.

Now he was completely confused, for he did not understand why I was here at this hour if no case was coming in. He started shaking his head as he headed back toward the door leading out into the parking lot. From there, he would go next door to the lobby of the Consolidated Labs, where he would sit watching a small, flickering TV until it was time to make his rounds again. Evans would not step foot into the morgue. He did not understand how anyone could, and I knew he was scared of me.

'I won't be down here long,' I told him. 'Then I'll be upstairs.'

'Yes, ma'am,' he said, still shaking his head. 'You know where I'll be.'

Midway along the corridor in the autopsy suite was a room not often entered, and I stopped there first, unlocking the door. Inside were three freezers unlike any normally seen. They were stainless steel and oversized, with temperatures digitally displayed on doors. On each was a list of case numbers, indicating the unidentified people inside.

I opened a door and thick fog rolled out as frigid air bit my face. She was in a pouch, and on a tray, and I put on gown, gloves, face shield, every layer of protection we had. I knew I might already be in trouble, and the thought of Wingo and his vulnerable condition thrilled me with fear as I slid out the pouch and lifted it onto a stainless steel table in the middle of the room. Unzipping black vinyl, I exposed the torso to ambient air, and I went out and unlocked the autopsy suite.

Collecting a scalpel and clean glass slides, I pulled the surgical mask back down over my nose and mouth, and returned to the freezer room, shutting the door. The torso's outer layer of skin was moist as thawing began, and I used warm, wet towels to speed that along before unroofing vesicles, or the eruptions clustered over her hip and at the ragged margins of the amputations.

With the scalpel, I scraped vesicular beds, and made smears on the slides. I zipped up the pouch, marking it with blaze orange biological hazard tags, almost could not lift the body back up to its frigid shelf, my arms trembling under the strain. There was no one to call for help but Evans, so I managed on my own, and placed more warnings on the door.

I headed upstairs to the third floor, and unlocked a small lab that would have looked like most were it not for various instruments used only in the microscopic study of tissue, or histology. On a counter was a tissue processor, which fixed and dehydrated samples such as liver, kidney, spleen, and then infiltrated them with paraffin. From there the blocks went to the embedding center, and on to the microtome where they were shaved into thin ribbons. The end product was what kept me bent over my microscope downstairs.

While slides air-dried, I rooted around shelves, moving aside stains of bright orange, blue and pink in coplin jars, pulling out Gram's iodine for bacteria. Oil Red for fat in liver, silver nitrate, Biebrach Scarlet and Acridine Orange, as I thought about Tangier Island, where I'd never had a case before. Nor was there much crime, so I had been told, only drunkenness, which was common with men alone at sea. I thought of blue crab again, and irrationally wished Bev had sold me rock fish or tuna.

Finding the bottle of Nicolaou stain, I dipped in an eye dropper and carefully dripped a tiny amount of the red fluid on each slide, then finished with cover slips. These I secured in a sturdy cardboard folder, and I headed downstairs to my floor. By now, people were beginning to arrive for work, and they gave me odd looks as I came down the hall and boarded the elevator in scrubs, mask and gloves. In my office, Rose was collecting dirty coffee mugs off my desk. She froze at the sight of me.

'Dr Scarpetta?' she said. 'What in the world is going on?'

'I'm not sure, but I hope nothing,' I replied as I sat at my desk and took the cover off my microscope.

She stood in the doorway, watching as I placed a slide on the stage. She knew by my mood, if by nothing else, that something was very wrong.

'What can I do to help,' she said in a grim, quiet way.

The smear on the slide came into focus, magnified four hundred and fifty times, and then I applied a drop of oil. I stared at waves of bright red eosinophilic inclusions within infected epithelial cells, or the cytoplasmic Guarnieri bodies indicative of a pox-type virus. I fitted a Polaroid MicroCam to the microscope, and took instant high-resolution color photographs of what I suspected would have cruelly killed the old woman anyway. Death had given her no humane choice, but had it been me, I would have chosen a gun or a blade.

'Check MCV, see if Phyllis has gotten in,' I said to Rose. 'Tell her the sample I sent on Saturday can't wait.'

Within the hour, Rose had dropped me off at Eleventh and Marshall Streets, at the Medical College of Virginia, or MCV, where I had done my forensic pathology residency when I wasn't much older than the students I now advised and presented gross conferences to throughout the year. Sanger Hall was sixties architecture, with a facade of garish bright blue tiles that could be spotted for miles. I got on an elevator packed with other doctors I knew, and students who feared them.

'Good morning.'

'You, too. Teaching a class?'

I shook my head, surrounded by lab coats. 'Need to borrow your TEM.'

'You hear about the autopsy we had downstairs the other day?' a pulmonary specialist said to me as doors parted. 'Mineral dust pneumoconiosis. Berylliosis, specifically. How often you ever see that around here?'

On the fifth floor, I walked quickly to the Pathology Electron Microscopy Lab, which housed the only transmission electron microscope, or TEM, in the city. Typically, carts and countertops had not an inch of room to spare, crowded with photo and light microscopes, and other esoteric instruments for analyzing cell sizes, and coating specimens with carbon for X-ray microanalysis.

As a rule, TEM was reserved for the living, most often used in renal biopsies and specific tumors, and viruses rarely, and autopsy specimens almost never. In terms of my ongoing needs and patients already dead, it was difficult to get scientists and physicians very excited when hospital beds were filled with people awaiting word that might grant them a reprieve from a tragic end. So I never prodded microbiologist Dr Phyllis Crowder into instant action on the occasions I had needed her in the past. She knew this was different.

From the hall, I recognized her British accent as she talked on the phone.

'I know. I understand that,' she was saying as I knocked on the open door. 'But you're either going to have to reschedule or go on without me. Something else has come up.' She smiled, motioning me in.

I had known her during my residency days, and had always believed that kind words from faculty like her had everything to do with why I had come to mind when the chief's position had opened in Virginia. She was close to my age and had never married, her short hair the same dark gray as her eyes, and she always wore the same gold cross necklace that looked antique. Her parents were American, but she had been born in England, which was where she had trained and worked in her first lab.