No Immunity (6 page)

“What did the mortician say?”

“Didn’t know anything about it.”

“And you believe him?”

“Yeah. He’s too old to be involved in much more than getting out of bed in the morning.”

Crime or no, it seemed like a slapdash system. “What was the deceased wearing?”

“Over there.”

The pile was small. Navy blue walking shorts, white cotton cap-sleeved blouse embroidered with flowers, white cotton panties, runner’s bra, white socks, and running shoes. “Jeez, what were you thinking? If she’s an illegal immigrant, she’s assimilated real quick.”

“The blouse—”

“Sure, it’s one you associate with Mexico, or with
vacations
in Mexico, or with import stores. But nylon hip-hugger underpants and a sports bra? And running shoes? This is a couple hundred dollars’ of clothes. What’s going on here?” She did a quick sweep of the body, her gaze coming to rest on the woman’s feet. The leg was still stiff and she had to bend to see the heel. “This is not a woman used to walking barefoot, or probably even in sandals. Look at her heel; it’s almost smooth. That’s a heel that’s been protected and cared for. And her toenails. See the pale peach nail polish? What you have here is a woman who cared about her appearance and had the time to—”

“What about her fingernails, though? They’re a mess.”

“Hmm. Same color polish, heavily chipped; encrusted with dirt or maybe blood. Chances are she had a bad couple of days.”

“But the toes—”

“Jeff, if a woman wears shoes and stockings, toenail polish lasts forever. If nails were soldiers, toes would be the generals sipping bourbon in the Pentagon, and fingers the draftees in the trenches.”

“Strange.” He was looking at the corpse, but his focus was blurry.

Kiernan wished she had known him well enough to guess what was behind those eyes. Was he truly baffled or was he mixing her observation with data he had no intention of sharing? “So what brought this unknown woman in here dead?”

His mask had begun to fog, too, and Kiernan couldn’t make out his expression as he said, “Maybe my past. Or because I’m the only one who would take a stand.”

“But you didn’t take a stand, did you?”

“I got you here.”

K
IERNAN STARED DOWN AT
the dead woman’s grotesquely swollen face. Blood had seeped through her pores, out over her eyes. The neck was still stiff, and Kiernan had to bend to peer through the magnifying glass into the ears. “Looks like petechia there too.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Was rigor set when you examined her? Could you still get her mouth open?”

“Oh, yes.” It was a moment before Tremaine continued, his voice shaky. “Throat’s almost closed. You remember in Africa talking about raw hamburger, how the Africans were so fascinated by the picture of cellophaned package after package on the open freezer shelf that they lost the point?”

“The point that the patient’s throat looked like hamburger? Are you saying this woman’s throat’s that bad?”

“All esophageal definition is gone.”

Kiernan tilted her head so that she could see into the nose. “Oh, God, poor woman. The edema in the sides of the nose is so extreme, her nose is swollen shut.” It all fit with hemorrhagic fever. If that conclusion held, beneath the skin every organ would be a wreck, jammed with platelets, fluids, dead cells, droplets of fat. Her heart would be clogged with platelets that the body had produced in one last desperate effort against the overwhelming forces of the virus. Platelets would be backed up into the arteries and veins. Lungs would be so jammed with fluid, death could have been from asphyxia. Liver, spleen, kidneys would look like plum aspic. “It’s got all the markers of hemorrhagic fever. But the nose! I’ve never seen anything that bad. It’s not a condition Lassa patients present.”

“So, you think this is not Lassa?”

“I don’t know what it is. It could be Lassa with a new symptom. Or, and here’s the really frightening possibility, that the nasal sensitivity could be connected to airborne transmission.”

Jeff swayed back against the cabinet, his buttocks coming to rest on the edge. He was staring at the dead woman, but Kiernan could tell his attention was within himself, asking the same questions she had after the needle prick in Africa: Am I coming down with this woman’s fever or is it just hot in here? Or is it nerves? And that itch in my throat, is it the first indicator of my throat closing? By tomorrow will my eyes be bleeding and my face swollen beyond recognition? When I die—“Jeff, you treated hundreds of cases of Lassa and other fevers in Africa and you’re still alive. In all your time there you must have let down your guard, been too tired to wash up properly, too rushed to bother with a mask, right? You may be one of the nonsusceptibles. Whatever, you don’t look sick to me.”

“I’m not!” Which could be translated as “Leave me alone.”

“Surely you’ve thought where the dead woman might have come from—”

“Of course,” he snapped. “My guess—it’s not going to do any good—there’s a woman, up in the hills. She runs a safe house. Mostly for prostitutes on the run. They get stranded in brothels—trailers—in the middle of nowhere, and they’re no more than slaves. Word is she takes gamblers, too, in over their heads. Guys on the run from the law or the mob. This close to Vegas she could do a booming business. Vegas is built on dreams, and there are plenty of nightmares to go around.”

“So you think she was protecting this woman and dropped her off when she got too sick?”

“Yeah, I think. But, makes no difference. I’ve got no idea where that safe house is. No one does. She’s been running it for twenty years. She wouldn’t have lasted one minute if she let out word how to find her.”

“How do the ones who need her find her, then?”

“Grapevine of need.” Tremaine shrugged.

She straightened up. “Jeff, this is a waste of time. Without lab work we’re not going to know whether this is Lassa, Junin, or some new virus, or something else.”

“I don’t want—”

“You’re a doctor, you have to report this. You don’t have a choice.”

“I didn’t have a choice with Hope. There was no choice left.”

Kiernan’s breath caught. She’d heard it before, but the words still cut through her mask, the protective clinical setting, her skin.

“I sat with her, Kiernan, every day as her fever soared, as her throat closed. I was there when her fever spiked, and no amount of ice made any difference. I dabbed a local on her throat, trying not to touch her flesh because it was so painful, trying to anesthetize her throat enough to let her swallow water. I held her hands when she couldn’t stop the shaking. She was a doctor, Kiernan. She’d watched her people bleed out and die. She knew what was coming.” He swallowed hard, but it didn’t clear his thick voice. “I lied to her then, but I’m such a lousy liar. She wanted to believe me, but she couldn’t.” He swallowed again harder and turned directly toward Kiernan. “Do you know the last thing she said? She could barely get the words out. Each one was agony. I was so afraid I wouldn’t understand, her voice was so thick. She said, ‘Jeff, when I’m dead, don’t kiss me.’”

She glanced around the makeshift morgue, through the window that led to nothing but an air shaft between buildings, at the door—looking anywhere but at Jeff Tremaine. She couldn’t believe that sharp, lively Hope Mkema could have been involved with … him. On the plane ride back to India with her, he must have hinted at it; all those hours he had talked of nothing but Hope. But she’d never imagined them as lovers. What could Hope Mkema, whom she’d liked so much, have seen in Jeff Tremaine?

Or had Jeff dreamed the whole thing? She could imagine him settling into this drab life sparked only by hidden mourning for a dead love from the other side of the world.

Now, five years later, did the truth make any difference? To his wife, it would. “Does your wife know about Hope?”

“No. I never mentioned Hope to her at all. There was no point. I loved Hope so.” The words gushed out. “Every moment with her was exciting. Everything was bright, fresh, alive, important, possible. She was a miracle that comes once in a lifetime. She came and was gone. It sounds trite to say, but when I was with her, I was alive in a way so different that it was like I had been dead before. And after.” A shiver electrified his body. “What kind of jerk would come back and tell that to his wife? Since I left you in Bombay, I have never spoken Hope Mkema’s name.”

She reached toward him to put a comforting hand on his arm but caught herself before she touched him with her gloves. Jeff gave no indication of noticing.

“I’ve ‘seen’ her every day. I’ve thought about what we might have had so often, it’s as if that life exists.” He snapped his head to the side. “It’s a self-obsessed, maudlin, stupid indulgence. Easier out here where the highway is narrow and the side roads few, as they say. But that’s no excuse. I’m sorry, really sorry, Kiernan.”

Kiernan let a moment pass and then pulled open the freezer door and signaled Jeff to push the gurney in.

“Hey, what are you doing?” His hands were on the gurney, but he wasn’t moving it. He was leaning on it, his eyes unfocused, mouth half opened but not speaking.

“Jeff, pull yourself together. What we’ve got here is possibly the beginning of an epidemic worse than anything either of us has seen. We won’t know for sure till there are lab tests. This woman could be the index case of a hemorrhagic fever that could wipe out half of Nevada.”

“Take her to Vegas. You could leave her at the coroner’s department there, and catch your flight. Kiernan, please.”

She stared at him. “You want me to put a highly contagious corpse in a rental car with me and drive her through the desert for three hours? Should I strap her in the passenger’s seat so the microbes don’t have too far to travel to me?” Had Jeff Tremaine lost it entirely over this case? He had had spurts of irrationality in Africa, but this was way beyond that. “Jeff, don’t dig yourself in any deeper than you already are. Nothing you can do about this anonymous woman is going to bring Hope Mkema back from the dead. And I’ll tell you what you ought to know already: Nobody’s going to thank you for finding this case.

“I’m taking off my gloves, then I’m calling the health department. They’ve got to get this woman in a Level Four room and—”

He turned back to the gurney and stood as he had been before she spoke, hands braced on the rim. She couldn’t tell from his blank gaze if he was staring at the corpse, the picture of Hope Mkema framed inside his head, or the awful possibilities in the near future. Finally he nodded toward the freezer door, waited for her to open it, and slid the gurney inside. “Of course you’re right, Kiernan. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve got a buddy in the health department—Wilson Brede, you know him? I’ll call him.”

“I’ll use the bathroom while you call.”

“Last door on the left.”

She forced herself to wash with scrupulous care, begrudging each moment it kept her in the tiny gray room. The rental car, which had seemed tiny and slow, dull and awkward, compared with her Jeep Cherokee in her driveway and her TR-3 in the garage, now beckoned like a Maserati on the fast road to freedom.

“Did you get him?” she asked as she walked back into the morgue.

“Yeah. He’s on his way.” Tremaine rolled the gurney back into the freezer. “Kiernan, listen, I really appreciate your coming. I know this sent me over the edge, and I asked a lot of you. But listen, I did not mention your name to Wilson. No need for you to be held up.”

Kiernan nodded. “Thanks. I have a five o’clock plane.” She didn’t offer her hand to shake, and Tremaine made no move toward her.

The rental car coughed. She should have warmed the engine. She let it cough its way to the highway. Better to call AAA from the side of the road than spend another minute in Gattozzi.

She tried her cell phone, but it was out of range. Radio stations grew and faded, and it wasn’t till she’d been on the road an hour that she got a news magazine on a station out of Las Vegas, reporting on Las Vegas. She’d had enough of Las Vegas and its surroundings. She put the radio on Scan, but nothing else came in. There was a time for the comfort of silence, but this wasn’t it. Her consciousness was flooding with visions of people dying from symptoms worse than Lassa, more violently than from Ebola, and she needed the sounds of normality just so she could keep focusing on the road. She listened to the reports of phenomenal growth on the Las Vegas Strip, of large casino hotels being demolished to be replaced by even larger ones, of gaudy facades giving way to mini theme parks. The Hacienda’s eleven hundred rooms had bitten the dust—literally—to be replaced by Circus Circus Enterprises’s four thousand. The MGM Grand, Harrah’s, and Circus Circus were metamorphosing into dreamscapes more unescapable. Thirty thousand rooms in all had been added. And more were planned. A whole new gambling city on a man-made lake was in the works. “Success here builds on itself. As long as the excitement keeps up, the city’ll keep booming, and construction will keep constructing. Over seven billion dollars have been spent already. So, folks, keep those quarters dropping in the slots. The city’s counting on you.”

Kiernan pressed down on the accelerator. If Tchernak was here, she thought, he’d be seeing highway patrol cars behind every hillock, cocking his neck to check for traffic spotters in the sky. She smiled. And she’d be saying, “Do you really think the Nevada Highway Patrol is going to pull me over when I’m heading
to
Las Vegas? I don’t think so. They’re not going to settle for a fifty-or sixty-buck ticket and keep me from an hour’s fleecing at the craps table.”

Rounding a curve, she came into a wide plateau. Maybe the emptiness would save them here in Nevada. Maybe the dead woman had not been in contact with anyone, except the person who brought her to Jeff Tremaine. Maybe that person … Maybe. Maybe. Maybe whatever she had was not contagious at all. Maybe a hundred other Nevadans were just beginning to feel feverish. Maybe one of them was driving to Las Vegas, heading for a plane to L.A. or Chicago.

In the midst of awful possibilities she felt a rush of pity for Jeff Tremaine. He had loved Hope Mkema and she had died, and now this. The dead woman in Gattozzi could be the index case of an epidemic, and Jeff Tremaine would be the index doctor. Once the woman’s body was dumped on Jeff Tremaine, he might as well have climbed onto the gurney with her. She knew that, and once he thought about it, Jeff would realize it too. Could she count on Jeff reporting the body?