Death Rounds (41 page)

“So?” said Williams. “Your little pep talk doesn’t change the fact we don’t know how he does it. And every minute you keep us here, the greater the chance this quarantine will fall apart.”

The sides of Riley’s jaw muscles bulged against the ties of his surgical mask. “Let me tell you how cops work. Doctor,” he replied through what sounded like clenched teeth. “When we don’t know how a crook has done a job, sometimes we go to the scene and figure out a way to do the crime ourselves.”

Williams snorted, “Well that explains a lot.”

Oh
,
Jesus! I thought. “Come on, Douglas! We’re all tired and scared. We don’t need to start snarling at each other.”

“Sorry,” he said immediately, “but I have to get upstairs.” He stepped away from the table. “And I’m afraid I’ve got to bring you with me. You did a fantastic job of settling people down here tonight when I wasn’t able to, but that was just a preview. No one on the floors is going to take the news that they’ve been slapped into quarantine any better. We’re both going to have to run all over the building talking down reactions just like the one you saw here. We blow it, and there’ll be a major stampede out of the hospital.”

“No!” I started to object. “You can’t keep me from the chart search—”

“For Christ’s sake, Earl,” Williams snapped, brusquely silencing me, “get the priorities straight!” Before I could say anything in reply, he spun around and laced into Riley. “As for you. Detective, I know you’ve got to be as scared as I am about what can happen if a few hundred people charge that police line. We also both know that despite orders not to hurt them, all it takes for a disaster is one nervous rookie who unholsters a gun, or a panicky citizen who struggles too long in a choke hold. Even a worse possibility. Lord help us, is that someone does get safely through and carries the bug into the city. By the time we’d track down anyone who was a carrier, who knows how many times he or she has picked their nose, then reached out and touched someone.”

Riley put new levels of stress on the ties of his mask. “All the more reason. Doctor, to give me what I need now,” he insisted in a quiet voice, showing remarkable restraint. “Those people upstairs are going to be a whole lot easier to keep in line about the super-bug if they expect we’re about to nail this—how did they put it?— ‘maniac.’ You got a pretty good preview of that reaction as well!”

Williams crossed his arms in front of his chest, still gripping his now empty cup, and glared at Riley. From the eyes up he looked anything but happy, yet he stayed put

Riley continued. “As I was saying, solving the same problems that the crook had to solve in order to carry out his crime can put us on a similar wave length.”

Williams groaned.

Riley stepped up to within a foot of him and became even more pedantic. “Occasionally it makes us do the same as the guy we’re after—walk where he walked, touch what he touched, that kind of thing. Who knows what traces of himself he left behind—a hair, a torn fingernail, a shoe print even. The point is, when we can get that close to where our quarry’s been standing, sitting, climbing, and so on, there’s no telling what we’ll discover about how he committed his crime.” He was eye to eye with Williams. “Now let’s get to work. As you can see, you’re not the only one with things to do tonight!”

Williams let his exasperation show by heaving a huge sigh. “Your little game won’t change the fact that we don’t—”

Riley pivoted to face me. “How would
you
get the bugs?” he snapped.

“What?”

“I said, how would you get this super bacteria he’s using?”

“I couldn’t,” I answered. “It would take some kind of skill in recombinant DNA techniques.” Concentrating on what Riley wanted became difficult as Williams’s grim warning about hysteria spreading throughout the hospital began to work on me. Any fleeting optimism I had that we might get control of the situation suddenly seemed stupidly naive.

“Is there anyone here or at the university who could do that kind of work?” pressed Riley.

I turned to Williams. “Is there?”

He continued to glare at Riley. “Not that I’m aware,” he replied. While his gaze transmitted a thousand volts of fury, to my surprise he actually sounded resigned to sitting through the exercise.

It was Riley’s turn to exhale with exasperation. “Try to focus on how you’d do it with what’s at hand,” he instructed, catching us both in a stern glower that probably only cops were licensed to use. “Stick to what’s here, what’s done as a matter of routine in the hospital. This guy’s bamboozled the lot of you with these bugs for a long time and used them to commit two murders without anyone knowing. That suggests his method was simple. Most brilliant crimes are. The more complex schemes tend to fall apart.”

Williams leaned back against the table again, cocked his head, and said, “Okay, I’ll play your little game, since that seems to be the only way you’ll let us out of here. If I were this creep and I wanted to make a superbug without getting too fancy, I’d think about using the natural way—conjugation. Bugs lying around together in a tube of shit—now that’s pretty low tech.” He crumpled his styrofoam cup and flung it the width of the stage into a cardboard box full of refuse.

Then he gave me a sly wink and cracked, “Trouble is, I’d have to hang around a lot of assholes waiting for the product.”

Riley exploded. “Goddamn it, Williams, if you don’t start cooperating, I’ll slap an obstruction—”

“We’re wasting time!”

“I’m warning you, obstruction of justice...”

Williams’s smart remark had set off an idea. I tuned out his wrangling with Riley and quickly thought it through. After what was admittedly a brief analysis, I began to feel in my bones it was an idea that could work. “Oh my God!” I exclaimed, my excitement erupting.

Williams and Riley immediately stopped arguing and stared at me. “What?” asked Riley.

“You’re right, Douglas. Conjugation—Cam could use it!” And so could Rossit, I thought fleetingly, rushing on with my explanation. “Just plate MRSA and VRE in the same petri dish and let them grow together. Keep growing the mix over and over, until sooner or later, it happens. The two organisms exchange genetic material...” My voice trailed off. It was so simple—so sick-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach, chillingly simple.

“Jesus Christ, Garnet, that’s it,” exclaimed Williams, slamming his hand on the table and jumping up out of his slouch. “Routine screening for MRSA and VRE could have given Mackie the organisms he needed to start with.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Riley.

Williams ignored him and kept right on talking to me. “Suppose you or I were culturing someone with MRSA. What’s to stop us from keeping a swab on the side and culturing up our own private stock of the organism? We could do the same while working up a carrier with VRE. We’d have the ingredients.”

Turning my way this time, Riley insisted, “Explain, damn it!”

I was pumped. My mind raced through the next steps of how it could work. I picked up where Williams left off. “Plate the two organisms on a culture dish together. Let them grow side by side. Then add a dose of vancomycin. If any staph bacteria survived, he’ d know that his MRSA had acquired the VanA or VanB gene from the resistant enterococci and that he had the superbug. It could take a lot of tries, but sooner or later, he might find that it had happened. All that’d remain for him to do would be to plate more and more cultures of the surviving staph organism, and presto, he’d have his supply—enough superbug to infect this whole hospital.”

“Jesus!” repeated Williams. “He could do it in a couple of petri dishes slipped in among the hundreds done here daily. Or even if he had kept it off-site of the lab, he could hide a supply out of the way and wouldn’t require much more than an incubator like the ones kids use to hatch baby chicks. The whole setup’s at the level of a school science project.”

“He could move it around on a cart,” I added, thinking about my encounter in the subbasement.

“What about the
Legionella?”
Riley asked. He’d stopped trying to get explanations of the technical jargon. He must have decided he’d finally gotten Williams and me on too good a roll for him to keep interrupting us.

“Same way,” answered Williams. All his hostility toward the detective vanished. It had been replaced by the exuberance of discovery. “Screening. Water supply sites are notorious for harboring that bug; we find it even in hospitals that claim they’re clean.”

I remembered Michael’s telling me the same thing—a week ago back in my office when he’d insisted that he come here to investigate the source of the nurses’ infections. It seemed a lifetime ago.

“It wouldn’t be impossible to find a contaminated water source,” Williams continued, “confirm it by special culture, then let the organism multiply in samples of the water. As long as he kept them from being heated past seventy-seven degrees centigrade—that’s the temperature
Legionella’s
killed at—he could end up with a super-concentrated solution of the stuff by simply letting his specimens sit around, not too hot, not too cold.”

“One more question,” Riley said. “Why go to the trouble of making the superbug? Why not be content with killing people by using
Legionella?”

It was a good question, but I was able to answer it without hesitation because once having climbed inside the Phantom’s way of thinking, it
was
possible to see things from his point of view.
“Legionella
offers a chance to be treated,” I said with unseemly excitement. “The superbug is a sentence to certain death. If the purpose, besides killing, is to increase the terror of the victims, what’s more horrifying than knowing that you’re going to die within days, and that-you’ll die choking? If your purpose is to panic an entire hospital, hell, the choice is obvious.
Legionella’s
scary. The superbug’s the stuff of nightmares.”

I caught Williams staring at me and nodding in agreement. His eyes conveyed incredulity as he admitted, “I’m amazed we managed to figure out so much!” He even apologized to Riley. ‘That’s a hell of a neat trick you have there, getting people to know what they think they don’t know,” he said in a very sincere tone, then couldn’t appreciate why Riley and I were laughing at him.

But not even Riley had tricks enough that we could solve how the Phantom managed to infect people with these bugs.

* * * *

The three of us were headed upstairs. We were hurrying along the corridor leading away from the auditorium when I asked the detective what he figured were the chances of picking up Cam in short order.

“If he’s alive, not bad.”

“What?”

None of us broke stride, but Williams matched his step to Riley’s and mine, placing the detective between us. “Explain,” he said curtly.

Riley answered. “Right after you and I first talked, we sent a patrol car over to his apartment. He’s not there of course, but his bank books and passport are. He lives alone, yet seems to be friends with a lot of his neighbors, so we had a nice-sized group, including his landlady, telling the officers that they hadn’t seen him tonight. As I said, he’s also nowhere to be found in the hospital. If your theory’s right and he is the killer, then he’s hiding out somewhere not too far away, probably getting ready to pounce. That’s still
our
number one theory as well—we’ve issued a warrant to bring him in for questioning—but it will take more than theories before we can convince a judge to let us do a real search of his rooms, his office records, his car—”

“Then why did you say he might be dead?” I asked.

“Dr. Garnet, you should listen to your wife. She knows how to look at all the possibilities, not just one or two. After we talked awhile, she began to wonder if he hadn’t been framed.”

“What?” I felt the snakes in my stomach spring to life and start coiling into knots.

“Consider it,” Riley said. “Mackie, if he’s innocent, may have found something, just as he claimed, which revealed not only that there was a phantom at work but also who it was. His sudden disappearance could have been engineered to keep him quiet.”

“Jesus Christ!” The notion demolished every thought I’d had about the man. I was speechless. The possibility of
his
being set up had never occurred to me. I looked across at Williams. His frown was headed into the front half of his scalp. I guessed he hadn’t included the idea in his differential either.

We were entering the main foyer. Our shoes clacked on the marble, startling the two security guards at the desk. I could see a uniformed police officer standing at ease outside the glass doors.

Riley went on talking. “Your wife also remains convinced that until tonight Mackie was steadfast in his conviction that the infections couldn’t be deliberate, so, like Popovitch before him, he must have found something that changed his mind. Dr. Graceton had an interesting suggestion, too, about why he might have been so defensive about the Phantom—besides his fear that you’d resurrect the previous rumors. What if back then he dropped his investigation into those events simply to let those same rumors die out as quickly as possible? Wouldn’t he feel guilty about doing so? The point she’s making is that the man could be entirely innocent of being the Phantom, and you would still have struck a nerve in him when you started to poke about in the archives.”

“You and Janet seem to have had quite a talk,” I said.

He ignored my comment as we hurried along. “The one thing your wife and I are in complete disagreement on is whether the murders are connected to the amalgamation of your two hospitals.”

My surprise at her telling him that theory must have shown in my eyes.

“Oh yes, she told me your suspicions, all right. Except she’s pretty skeptical about them. But I have to side with your idea; half a billion budget is a lot of motivation for anybody to do anything. Don’t you worry, we’ll look into this character Rossit, and of course Hurst; I remember
him
from when we were investigating the murder of your former CEO. As far as all those captains of industry on your board, well, I can tell you for a fact that taking care of business in this town can get pretty rough.”