“So what you’re saying is that virus mutation is basically a crap shoot.”
I saw a flash of disdain in his eyes. “Yes. You Americans have such lovely ways of phrasing things, but I suppose that describes the process accurately enough.”
“So, if it’s just a crap shoot, isn’t it possible that one, or even two, additional strains of the virus could form that are just as deadly, if not more so, than the original strain?”
It took him a second to jump through the mental hoops, but once he did, he saw plainly enough that I’d boxed him in to a discussion of Dr. Cole and his theory.
But his answer surprised me.
“I see you’ve been talking with John the Baptist.”
“Excuse me?”
“John the Baptist? The madman in the wilderness talking about what’s to come? That’s our nickname for Dr. Cole around here.”
Chunk and I trade another glance. “You know his theory then?”
“Of course I know it. He tells everybody he meets his theory.”
“And you what? You think he’s nuts?”
“I didn’t say that. Some of his ideas are rather far out there. Did you know he actually wants there to be a law making it a felony
not
to get a flu shot each year?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He does. He told me about his theory of multiple influenza strains two weeks ago.”
“And what do you think of that theory, doc?”
“I thought it was intriguing enough that I went to Dr. Laurent with it.”
“And what did—” I stopped myself before the words ‘Hippo woman’ came out. “What did Dr. Laurent say?”
His eyes smiled. “She thinks, to borrow one of your colorful American phrases, that he is full of shit.”
I nodded, but didn’t answer him. Let him think he wasn’t finished explaining it to me.
He looked away and sighed. Then he said, “Dr. Laurent believes that Dr. Cole’s theory is unnecessarily inflammatory. There are two objectives, here. The first is to develop a vaccine to mitigate the damage of H2N2. The other is to reduce the level of fear among the populace. Dr. Cole’s theory, if not properly refuted with the highest caliber of research and testing, could start a chain reaction of fear that will be unstoppable.”
I thought back to Dr. Bradley’s journal, and the final entry:
WE
ARE
ALL
GONERS!
“But what if he’s right, Dr. Myers?”
Myers scoffed at that. “He isn’t.”
“But you will be looking through Dr. Bradley’s research, won’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “Sometime later this morning either myself or another member of the staff will transfer the information from the van’s computers to the computers in our lab. I assure you, it will be analyzed in exhaustive detail.”
“Will there be some kind of preliminary analysis done of that material?”
“Of course. Right after we download it.”
“Okay,” I said. “Doctor, I wonder if you would do me a favor and call me when that’s done? I’d like to know what those results are.”
“Fine,” he said. Then he cocked his head inside his space suit, like a strange thought had just occurred to him. “Are those results important to your investigation?”
“Maybe,” I said, though a strong personal interest would have been a better description of my motives.
He said, “I’ll call you this afternoon.”
We went through decontamination and changed into street clothes. Chunk was in a blue t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt, skin tight, looked like it was about to split open across his biceps and at the huge wads of muscle packed onto his shoulders. I was in jeans, a ratty old red blouse, and white tennis shoes. By the end of that summer, Homicide detectives had stopped dressing for success.
We waited around for Dr. Laurent. Myers told us she was in a meeting with her counterpart at the Lockhill Station Morgue and wouldn’t be back till at least eleven-thirty.
That was still an hour away.
“Okay,” Chunk said while we waited, “what about Cole?”
“Cole, eh?” I thought about him for a second. He had a lot of easy fits in our equation. “Okay,” I said, trying to get myself started, “Cole is upset because the
WHO
people won’t take him seriously.”
“Right.”
“And then he comes across Bradley in the GZ, working on the same thing he’s working on.”
“But that by itself wouldn’t make him mad enough to kill her,” Chunk pointed out. “Wouldn’t he feel vindicated they were looking into his theory?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“And wouldn’t Bradley have mentioned him in her journal if she saw him?”
“Yeah.”
Chunk drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking. “Okay, Cole comes across Bradley the morning she’s killed, which we know is some time around eight forty-five. From that bit she wrote, we know she felt like she was on to something bad. Maybe she tells Cole about it, and he gets upset because he thinks she’s going to steal his big discovery.”
I paused before I answered, adding it up in my head. “Okay.”
“And then he kills her.”
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t work. She was shot with Wade’s gun, remember? Cole carries that twenty-two.”
“So he kills Wade first, then Bradley.”
“That’s the trouble, though. Wade was beat to death. How’s a seventy year old man going to beat a thirty year old cop to death? A cop who nearly tore you up. And on top of that, why would Bradley talk to Cole about what she’d found in the first place? From everything Myers told us, it doesn’t sound like anybody at
WHO
thinks very highly of him.”
Chunk’s mouth worked under his mask. He looked like he was chewing on a big wad of gum, though I knew he was thinking about that fight with Wade all those years ago. Chunk doesn’t let stuff like that go easily.
“I don’t know,” Chunk said. “But let’s say he does somehow. The rest of it fits, doesn’t it?”
Most of it does fit. Though it doesn’t make sense.
I said, “Let me see. There’s a fight between Cole and Bradley. Wade jumps in. Cole kills Wade. Then Cole takes Wade’s gun and shoots Bradley.”
“Right.”
“And then Cole does what?”
“He hides the van, strips Bradley naked, and dumps her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck at the morgue while he’s there to pick up more specimen samples from Myers.”
I mulled that over, not liking it.
“Why not?” Chunk asked.
“Why does he only strip Bradley? Why take only her back to the morgue? If he wanted to dispose of the bodies, why risk bringing even one of them onto the loading docks at Arsenal where any number of people could have seen him? An old man carrying a naked pretty girl is going to cause some eyebrows to go up, even in this place.”
Chunk frowned under his mask. “I don’t know.”
“And how does he get her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck without Hernandez knowing it?”
“Well, Hernandez is sleeping, right? So he doesn’t notice.”
“Maybe.”
Chunk checked his watch. Still forty minutes till Laurent’s due back.
“What about this one?” I asked. “Wade and Bradley are jumped by those looters in the GZ.”
“Maybe,” he said. I could tell he liked that one. A light switch turned on behind his eyes.
“A small group of them surprise Wade, and he shoots them,” I said. “Or at least two of them.”
“The two you found next to the garage?”
“Right.”
“And then there are more of them? Enough to beat up Wade and take his gun?”
“Right,” I said.
“Then they kill Bradley?”
“That would explain why she’s naked.”
He frowned, doesn’t get it. He looked at me.
What are you talking about?
I said, “When they were chasing me they knew I was a woman. They said things. What they wanted to do when they caught me.”
“Oh,” he said. And then, as it hit him, “Oh. Lily, I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t happen, Chunk. Thanks to you.”
“Yeah, but…”
“Of course the ME told us there was no sign of forced sexual activity, post-mortem or otherwise. And remember, she was shot while she was wearing her space suit. I think that kind of clouds up the looter theory.”
“True,” he said.
“And that still doesn’t explain how Bradley’s body ended up at the morgue. Those looters wouldn’t have brought her here.”
“True.” Chunk leaned back in the seat and crossed his arms. I could see the muscles shifting beneath his shirt. “So where does that leave us?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Stuck, I guess.”
A few minutes later, Chunk’s cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the caller ID, and frowned.
“Treanor,” he said to me, and accepted the call.
Chunk didn’t get to do a lot of talking. Most of what he said was “Yes, sir. Twenty minutes, maybe. Ten? Okay, well we’re … Yes, sir. Ten minutes. Yes, sir.”
He hung up and dropped the car in gear.
“What’s up?” I asked as he wheeled us toward the gates, mashing down on the gas hard enough to throw me back in the seat.
“The shit’s hit the fan,” he said.
News of the shortage spread fast.
By the time Chunk and I made it to the Bandera Road Food Distribution Center, a large, anxious crowd had already gathered in the parking lot outside the center, and more were pouring in every minute. I saw a thousand desperate faces, maybe more, and I imagined rumors and misinformation spreading through the crowd like a lit torch dragged over dry grass.
Treanor was there. He ordered us into riot gear.
“What happened?” I asked him. “Is it true the drop didn’t come?”
“It came,” he growled. “It’s just short. That’s all. There’s not enough for these people.”
I said, “What are we supposed to tell them? Is there another drop coming?”
“Get in your riot gear, Harris. They ask you anything, you tell them to get back to their homes. They don’t like it, give them the stick if you have to.”
“Nice,” I said, the sarcasm in my voice obvious.
“You have a problem with that, Harris?”
“No, sir.”
He stared at me. “You need to watch your tone with me, Harris. You’re pretty damn close to being insubordinate.”
“I’m not being insubordinate, Lieutenant. I just don’t think you have anything to say worth listening to.”
His eyes went wide inside his black riot helmet, then narrowed to little slits.
“Get into your riot gear right now.” His voice was amazingly subdued considering he probably would have liked nothing better than to rip the windpipe out of my throat with his bare hands. “Do it now and report to me in five minutes.”
With that he stormed off, barking orders at anybody unlucky enough to cross his path.
There goes a major asshole.
“Why you gotta do that?” Chunk said.
“The man’s an asshole.”
“I know that. Why do you have to throw it back in his face like that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, though only for making things hard on Chunk and not for what I said to Treanor.
“Yeah, well, if he gives us a crappy post because you can’t keep your smart assed remarks to—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Riot gear.
We changed into black BDUs with reinforced knees and elbows, black jackboots, black padded gloves, and a black riot helmet made to fit over a gas mask, plus a clear plastic shield that the manufacturer guaranteed was bulletproof and a thirty-six inch black riot baton made of hickory wood.
With practice, it takes about three minutes to get dressed.
While I was putting myself together, I heard Sergeant Jennifer Langley talking to a patrol officer I didn’t recognize. Langley’s duty assignment was the food distribution network, so I figured she knew what she was talking about.
“We only got six boxes on the last drop,” Langley said, referring to the intermodal containers that the city’s food stocks came in.
The containers are basically railroad boxcars flown in by helicopters that never land inside the walls, and once they’re unloaded, they’re placed on the backs of trucks or on trains and hauled off to someplace.
Six boxes was a pretty light shipment. My own food distribution center, which served a much smaller area than the Bandera Road Center, got thirty-five boxes each week. The usual drop for a station Bandera’s size should have been something like sixty boxes per week.
I was lacing up my boots when the other officer asked, “What are they going to do? Are they bringing in more?”
“I don’t know,” Langley said. “We’ve been emailing them all morning and haven’t gotten a response yet.”
“Jesus,” the officer said. I was thinking the same thing.
Langley said, “We can’t even bring in stuff from other centers. Everybody got shorted.”
That sent a chill through me. I went outside and made my way to the front of the center. There I saw the mass confusion of an angry crowd of at least fifteen hundred people. Streams of people were coming into the lot from the street. Chants were starting up here and there. They were feeding off each other’s anger, bearing down on our position at the gates to the Food Distribution Center. The noise was deafening.
The Bandera Road Center was in the shell of an abandoned
HEB
, San Antonio’s dominate grocery store chain before the quarantine. Most of the HEBs were gutted by looters in the first few weeks of the quarantine, and this one, with its boarded up windows and ring of concrete barriers around the front doors, looked nothing like the proud red and white store it had once been.
The parking lot was huge, though it didn’t seem so right then with all those people crowding it. And more were coming in from every side even as I stood there. I shook my head in disbelief.
Earlier, when Chunk and I drove into the lot, most of those people were still in line, though that system quickly broke down, the crowd pressing inward on the half circle of concrete barriers that separated us from them.
“Chunk,” I said.
“Stay close,” he said.
A dozen
SWAT
officers stepped up to the concrete barriers, the rest of us in a line behind them, shoulder to shoulder with our batons in both hands. The
SWAT
guys were armed with a tommy gun-looking contraption called a pepper ball gun. The pepper balls looked like gumballs, only each one was loaded with oleocapsicum resin—pepper spray. Mean stuff. Police departments all over the world used it to disperse large crowds like this one. But the only time I had ever seen it used first hand was on gang fights. I couldn’t believe they were about to use it on regular civilians.