Up in Smoke (23 page)

CHAPTER
35

Shortly after ten-thirty, Natasha helped Marcus set the table back on its legs. They'd been looking under it and under the chairs. And inside the sugar bowl. For bugs. Not germs, of course; Marcus kept the Nitty Gritty spotless. The other kind, which were a lot more sinister. “Sorry about this,” she told him, “but we have to be sure no one can eavesdrop on our conversation.” She wasn't prepared to share the information Guelph Veterinary College had faxed to her a few minutes ago with anyone but Hamish — and Dr. Zol, when he got his new phone working.

Marcus's eyes danced above his ginger goatee. “I never realized you guys discussed such top-secret stuff back here.” He polished the table top with the tea towel he always carried slung over his shoulder, then stopped and pretended to look serious for a moment. “You need me to swear an oath of secrecy to the health unit?”

“Just keep feeding us treats.”

He smiled again and touched her arm. “Who will be joining you, Dr. Szabo?”

“Just Dr. Wakefield.”

His hand darted away after the briefest of seconds, but his eyes didn't stop twinkling. “Should I rustle up a couple of lattes?”

Hamish was unpredictable when it came to beverages. He was as likely to order a lemonade as a latte.

“For now, just one, please.”

“How about a slice of lemon loaf?” When he saw she was hesitating, he teased, “Just took it out of the oven . . .”

She could smell the irresistible aroma from here, and she had skimped on breakfast. And now that Guelph had come through with its surprising goat-farm data, she was in a mood to celebrate. “Sure. Sounds great. Thanks.”

“Coming up.”

Had Marcus been flirting, or was he like that with all his female customers? A bit of both, she decided, then watched as he greeted Hamish at the front door with a wide grin. Hamish waved his hands dismissively and didn't smile back when Marcus took his coat. Hamish looked anxious and hyper-focussed as he strode toward her and slid into the chair opposite. As usual, he didn't bother saying hello. It would be nice if some day a little of Marcus's manners rubbed off on the brusque Dr. Wakefield.

“You checked for bugs?” he whispered. “I trust you
do
know what I mean?”

“Marcus and I made a careful sweep. And I left my phone at the office.”

“Mine's in the car. And I didn't see any vans parked nearby.”

“I think we're okay.”

Ordinarily, this cloak and dagger stuff would seem silly, embarrassing even, except that when Dr. Zol had phoned her a couple of hours ago he was majorly upset. And rightly so. It was awful not knowing whether Dennis Badger had apprehended Colleen and Max on their way to the safe house, or if they were fine and Colleen was being super cautious about their location.

“Any news about Colleen and Max?” Hamish asked, no longer whispering.

“Nothing, I'm afraid.”

“If he doesn't hear from them in the next hour or so, he'd better call the police. The longer people are missing, the less like they are to be found aliv —”

“Please, Hamish.” How could he talk like that? “I'm sure Dr. Zol will do the right thing. He always does.”

“Did he give you the number of his new cellphone?”

Natasha opened her purse, wrote the ten digits on a slip of paper, and handed it to him. “Here you are. It's not working yet.”

“Why not?”

“Apparently,
7
-Eleven has some sort of glitch that's slowed down their registration system.”

If he'd noticed her hands were trembling, he didn't show it. Heck, she could be wearing only a bikini and he wouldn't notice. He scrutinized the number, as if committing it to memory. “This new one better be bug free,” he told her, as if getting a phone from
7
-Eleven had been her idea, and a poor one at that.

Marcus arrived with her latte and slice of cake. He set them in front of her and took Hamish's order for a club soda, no ice. As Marcus headed back to the bar, he dragged a lip-sealing finger across a little smirk on his mouth. He wouldn't be smirking if he knew the dangers they were facing. There was a lot more to this job than lemon loaf and lattes, no matter what it looked like.

She turned back to Hamish. Making small talk with him was practically impossible at the best of times. Today, he was clearly preoccupied, as if he'd rather be anywhere than sitting across from her at the Nitty Gritty, waiting for a club soda. “Any news from your colleague with the mass spectrometer?” she ventured. She knew it was too soon to expect any results, but she had to say something to fill the void.

He frowned and studied his watch. “Give me a break, he's only had the samples for an hour.”

“Can he process them today?”

“Going to try.” His eyes met hers and darted away. “But if you knew anything about chemistry, you'd know these things do take time.”

She churned her latte with the spoon, destroying Marcus's artistic frothy swirls. “Organic chem was my minor in undergrad.”

He looked surprised, as if she'd never seemed smart enough for the intricacies of organic chemistry, then he tightened his lips and made that my-opinion-is-the-only-one-that-matters gesture with his hand. “The guy has assayed nicotine before, so Tammy's
5
-
FNN
, a close molecular cousin, should be easy for him. Unless
5
-
FNN
is unstable, of course.”

She put down her spoon. “Actually,” she told him, “the fluorine at the five position makes the molecule quite stable. The readings should be more reproducible, and the results more reliable, than would be the case if the fluorine were, say, in the three position.” She was careful not to smirk. As her mother would say, it would be unseemly.

“Whatever,” he said flatly, “let's hope he comes up with useful results by the end of the day.”

She returned the spoon to her latte and stirred slowly. Hamish had called at eight-thirty this morning and told her he had something important to discuss, but only in person. He demanded she drop everything and meet him at the Nitty Gritty. But now he was staring out of the window as if there was so much in his head he didn't know where to start. Maybe he expected her to keep breaking the ice on their conversation until he was ready to burst forth with some startling revelation. Fine. She'd kick things off by telling him how she'd solved his lip and finger outbreak. Thanks to Dr. Zol's tip from his friend the vet, and today's fax from Guelph, she had fit the pieces together. Though she was thrilled to hand Hamish the solution to the origin of the blister lesions on a platter, she had no delusions that he'd congratulate her on her handiwork.

“I got a fax from Guelph today,” she told him. “From the vet school.”

“What did they want?”

“It's the other way round. They're helping us explain the origin of those intriguing matchstick particles in our rez tobacco samples and in your lip and finger lesions.”

“I don't know why you're calling them
my
lesions. They're from my patients, not from me personally.”

She let that pass and waited for his next question. She could tell by his dilating pupils that she'd piqued his curiosity.

“What does Guelph know about hybrid viruses?” he said.

“They're experts in epidemics involving farm animals. They sent me detailed data on an outbreak of orf virus infection on three goat farms in Brant and Norfolk counties.”

“No way,” he said, aiming his frown at her. “That can't be true. We confirmed there's been no orf virus activity in Ontario anytime this year. I made calls to vets' offices, and you were supposed to make a thorough check through your sister health units. Didn't you do it?”

“I did. And indeed, there's currently no evidence of orf activity anywhere in the province. But —”

“But what?”

“There
was
a significant outbreak two years ago. Among dozens of milking-goats.”

“Why didn't you know about this until today?”

“Orf infection isn't on the list of reportable illnesses. No one is obligated to tell us when they've diagnosed a case. More to the point, it's primarily an animal pathogen. Either way, our public-health database has no record of it.”

“Sounds like a hole in the system. Were there human cases along with the goats?”

“Guelph knows about four goat handlers who developed orf lesions on their fingers during the farm outbreak. There could have been others. Guelph keeps detailed data only on animals.” She pulled the fax from her briefcase along with the annotated map she'd made of Brant and Norfolk counties. She'd highlighted all the tobacco-growing areas in blue, and the orf-infected goat farms in yellow. She hadn't used red and green because she knew that Hamish was colour-blind and couldn't distinguish crimson from chartreuse. His shirts and ties were all some shade of blue.

She spread the map on the table and watched while he examined it. “Do you see what I see?” she asked him, half afraid he was about to blow her nice little theory out of the water.

“Of course. I'm not blind. Well, maybe colour-blind, but . . .” His face flushed a deep scarlet. She wondered how he'd interpret the colour of his cheeks if he looked in a mirror at this moment. He buried his nose in the map for a good minute before he said, “Gotta admit it. This
is
pretty cool. And the timing is perfect.” He was on the verge of smiling, and even looked intrigued by her efforts. Now, it was her cheeks that were blushing. “Look,” he said, his voice rising as he ran his fingers over her map, “every orf-infected goat farm is surrounded by tobacco fields.”

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“A set-up for microbiological high drama?” he said. “Highly improbable, but . . .”

She pictured orf virus from Dr. Eddy Pakozdi's goats colliding with tobacco mosaic virus escaped from Dr. Tammy Holt's experimentally infected tobacco plants. Something similar had happened in Mongolia. Why not in Ontario? “Do you suppose an orf-infected goat handler did some moonlighting on a
TMV
-infected tobacco farm at harvest time?”

“And transferred orf virus from the blisters on his hands to the tobacco he was picking? It's a long shot.”

“The literature says that orf virus is very hardy. Remains alive and infectious in the environment for prolonged periods.”

“True enough,” he admitted. “And of course that does increase the likelihood that the two viruses could combine to form the matchstick hybrid Wilf Dickinson's electron microscope keeps turning up.”

Hamish stared at the map again. He shook his head, his face full of disappointment. “But we're still a long way from explaining the liver failures. Blisters, maybe, but liver failures, no.”

He was right, of course. There was no indication that the matchstick hybrid virus caused anything more serious than blisters on the lips and skin of people who smoked the tobacco it contaminated. Her clever bit of epidemiological sleuthing had revealed something academically fascinating, but not the breakthrough the case demanded. “So it's back to the drawing board?” she said.

“Forget the goats, it's the demographics of the liver cases that's bothering me.”

The geographic distribution of the people suffering liver failure had been puzzling her too, especially after the fax from Winnipeg had reported matchstick-positive blister cases from three cities in Saskatchewan. It was now obvious that all across the country people were smoking Dennis Badger's contaminated cigarettes and contracting Hamish's lip and finger eruption. But, as Dr. Zol said this morning, no one outside Norfolk County had been stricken with liver failure. There had to be a rational explanation of why Dennis Badger's tobacco was poisoning the livers of local students and firefighters and leaving everyone else's liver untouched.

Hamish removed the lime wedge, which Marcus had balanced on the rim of his club soda, and made a face as he discarded the thing on a napkin as if it were a cockroach. He wiped his fingers thoroughly, his way of saying he knew all about the bacterial contamination of limes in bars and restaurants. Then he ventured a sip. Thirst clearly trumped
OCD
. “Something in addition to rez tobacco is linking Erie Collegiate with Norfolk Fire and Rescue,” he told her. “There's a cofactor out there somewhere in Norfolk County, and it's activating Tammy's tobacco toxin. Once we find that cofactor, we can take the pressure off Dennis Badger.”

“He's a creature and a half. Why would we want to ease the pressure off him?”

“So he'll leave Zol alone.”

“Sorry?” she said.

“Look, if we find the cofactor that's making Erie Collegiate students and Norfolk first responders susceptible to the toxic effects of Tammy Holt's drug, Zol can put out a health-unit alert warning the public to avoid the cofactor.”

“We're not positive Tammy's
5
-
FNN
is actually in Dennis's tobacco,” she reminded him.

He made that dismissive flick with his hand again. “We will be soon.”

“But why would we want to help Dennis Badger stay in business?”

“We can't stop him. He's going to carry on, regardless of what anyone says or does. There's no way he can be prevented from selling his cigarettes across the country and around the world.”

“Is there not something we can do?”

“Take control of the cofactor. Whatever it is, it's bound to be easier to contain than Dennis Badger and his Native tobacco racket.”

“Surely the lip and finger lesions are bad for his business. I can't imagine that his biggest customer, the German Army, would find it acceptable to have its soldiers infected with some sort of mutant virus.”

“Come on, Natasha. Everyone knows cigarettes cause emphysema, heart disease, impotence, lung cancer, and other bad things. What's a few blisters that look like cold sores taking longer than usual to heal?”