Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  A small town almost straddling the borders of Saint Mary’s and Charles Counties, Rivermount was seventeen miles from Cavanaugh’s new FBI office in Leonardtown. It really was a new office; until now, the Bureau hadn’t had a “Resident Agency,” its term for a satellite office, in southern Maryland. “It’s part of our expanded community presence,” his new supervisor, Jerry Dunbar, had told him. “There’s no Bureau presence at all in the southern three counties. And the Patuxent River Naval Air Station needs closer attention, which Don will take care of. You, Robert, will handle the rest of the district. You’ll be breaking new ground.”

  Which was fine for Special Agent in Charge Dunbar, who got to head the Baltimore Field Office. Things happened in Baltimore. Things did not happen in southern Maryland, at least not outside of the naval air station. Not things requiring action by Resident Agent Robert Cavanaugh. The kingpins of serious crime simply didn’t frequent salt marshes, state parks, or tobacco farms losing ground to golf courses.

  His new and inactive fiefdom was a vast peninsula, surrounded by the Patuxent and Potomac Rivers as they emptied in all their delta wideness into Chesapeake Bay. Every day Cavanaugh drove from Rivermount to Leonardtown, population l,683, the county seat of Saint Mary’s County. Here he sat in his tiny office on the second floor of a remodeled Victorian house and scanned the dailies from D.C., hoping that something was breaking that might involve him. So far, this had not happened. His biggest commitment for the upcoming week was a talk at the local junior high, as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Adopt-a-School program.

  Cavanaugh stared moodily into his backyard, invisible in the darkness. Probably the grass needed cutting again. He had never before lived in a house; when he’d been married to Marcy, they’d always lived in apartments in D.C. He had never before realized how demanding grass could be. Certainly the lawn demanded more of him than his job did.

  “Hunt that crabgrass,” he said into the river-smelling darkness. “Indict those chiggers.”

  His arm stung, and he slapped at a mosquito. Then another. The third one drove him back inside.

  “Can’t even stand on the deck, the damn bugs are so bad.”

  “It’s all the rain this year,” Judy said. “The Benadryl Itch Index is way high. But I’m—”

  “The what?” Cavanaugh asked.

  She grinned at him. “The Benadryl Itch Index. There really is such a thing.”

  “I believe it,” Cavanaugh said moodily. It fit right in. Saint Mary’s County had the most roadkill of any place he’d ever seen; it ranked second in Maryland counties’ hog production, and it paid serious attention to an itch index.

  “Anyway,” Judy persisted, “I’m glad you’re back inside because I’d like us to talk.” She put down the knitting and looked at him.

  Immediately Cavanaugh wanted to be somewhere else. He loved Judy. She was very important to him. She was intelligent, pretty, sexy, warm … She also had the acquisitive instincts of a Medici. “Mad in pursuit, and in possession so …” Cavanaugh had graduated from college as an English major, a fact he tried not to mention at the Bureau.

  Looking at Judy curled in one corner of their joint sofa, Cavanaugh wondered yet again where in that tiny body she kept all that steel. Five-two, a hundred twenty pounds tops, her red hair currently in a boyish crop, she looked about twenty-five, not thirty-six. She looked as different from his ex-wife, Marcy, as it was possible for two women to be. Not, of course, that that was a bad thing …

  “Robert,” Judy said, her hazel eyes bolted to his face, “we’ve been together for two years now—”

  “No, only about eighteen months,” he said hastily.

  “I’m counting from our first date, when you—”

  “But those first six months we hardly saw each other at all. You were in Boston and I was in D.C. and—”

  “Robert, the exact number of months isn’t the point. We’ve been living together for a year—”

  This was incontrovertible. Cavanaugh said nothing.

  “—and it’s time to think about where we go from here.”

  “Why do we have to ‘go’ anywhere?”

  “Because I love you. Because I’d like a permanent commitment to, and from, you.”

  “Judy, sweetheart … nothing’s permanent.” Christ, she of all people ought to know that. Her husband, an eminent microbiologist, had been murdered. Cavanaugh had met her while investigating the case, his first. “We’ve both been married before, and neither marriage worked all that well, and—”

  “But you’re not Ben and I’m not Marcy! And I’m getting a little tired of paying for Marcy’s sins!”

  Cavanaugh walked to the sideboard and poured another vodka and tonic, mostly to give himself time. He plunked ice in it from the filled bucket on the coffee table, which Judy used to replenish her iced tea. He didn’t consider that Judy was paying for Marcy’s sins. Marcy’s sin had been ambition, the slow-growing type that had only gradually realized that her glamorous competence in the corporate world could actually do much better than a fledgling FBI agent four years her junior. Marcy, as far as Robert knew, was now living with her boss, the CEO. Despite the eminence of her first husband, Judy was not ambitious in that way. Judy had her own sins.

  “Judy, I’ve told you before … I love you, but I’m happy with the way things are.”

  “But I’m not!” Judy cried. “Doesn’t that count?”

  Cavanaugh closed his eyes. He really, really didn’t want to have this conversation. Not again. Not tonight. “Judy—”

  His official cell phone rang.

  Cavanaugh yanked it from his pocket. “Saved by Graham Bell,” Judy muttered sourly. He pretended not to hear her.

  “Hello! Robert Cavanaugh speaking!”

  “Is this … Agent Cavanaugh? Of the FBI?” A female voice, young and nervous.

  “Yes, this is him.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you at night, but I called the FBI number in the phone book and a recording gave this number …”

  “Yes,” Cavanaugh said neutrally. The tape recorder was the third and final occupant of his office, unless you counted Seton’s daily debris: Dorito bags, soda cans, crumpled printer paper, 302s. It all flourisheth as the grass. “What is your name and how can I help you?”

  “My name is Rachel Pafford. I’m a nurse—a new nurse, actually, I just started—at Dellridge Community Hospital in La Plata. I’m calling because I think there’s something … well, strange going on here that nobody’s doing anything about. And I thought the FBI might be the right people to tell. I mean, I told my charge nurse, but she said it wasn’t statistically significant. But I think different!” A note of quavering defiance.

  Cavanaugh kept his face set in lines of professional concern, even though he’d already decided this was another paranoid call. They came in two varieties: the nuts who called to report UFOs landing in the salt marshes, and the easily frightened conformists who saw conspiracy to overthrow the government in every pierced nose, shaved head, or odd noise on their phone line. A smoke bomb in the high school lavatory made them expect Waco. But Judy sat across the room, purple knitting on her lap and fiery light in her eyes, and Cavanaugh was prepared to listen indefinitely to Nurse Pafford.

  “Tell me the events you’re concerned about, ma’am. From the beginning, please.”

  “Well, we kept having stroke victims come into the hospital. I mean, we always do, but not as many as this. I worked the weekend night shift. We had five strokes Saturday night and three Sunday night. And most of them were people who wouldn’t ordinarily be in the risk population—young adults, even kids. But the thing is”—her voice dropped—“they’re all black.”

  “Every one? Not even one white patient?”

  “Well, no, of course we had that, too. But only one. The blacks … there are just too many of them to be normal.”

  “Ehhrrrmmm.”

  “So I looked up the admission records. The unusual number of strokes started th
ree weeks ago, in the first part of May. I made a graph. The number has just mounted steadily. And all but two are black.” The uncertain young voice took on a sudden dignity. “I do know how this sounds, Agent Cavanaugh. But I’m not just being weird.”

  “No. I’m sure your reasons are of the highest. Look, suppose I come over to the hospital and interview you about this. Are you on duty?”

  “You mean … now? No, I’m at home in Port Tobacco; I didn’t want to call from Dellridge …”

  “Fine, give me your address please,” Cavanaugh said briskly. He wrote it down on one of the pen-and-memo pad sets Judy kept all over the house, color-coordinated with the curtains. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, thank you!”

  “Gotta go, sweetheart,” Cavanaugh said to Judy, “business at last. Up in Charles County.” He ducked into the hall that led to the house’s two bedrooms, hoping she wouldn’t follow. She didn’t. He changed from a T-shirt to a button-down, knotted on a tie, and gathered his credentials, a notebook, and his regulation Smith & Wesson. The latter made him feel ridiculous—to talk to a compulsive nurse in Port Tobacco? But he wanted Judy to see this was a legitimate Bureau call, not merely an excuse to avoid their talk.

  She sat stonily on the sofa. He kissed the top of her head in passing. “Sorry, sweetheart. I’ll try not to be late.”

  “Right,” Judy said. “You wouldn’t want to miss all the good sex we’ve been having lately.”

  Cavanaugh didn’t answer. He was careful not to bang the kitchen door on his way out.

  All right, so they hadn’t been having much sex lately, Cavanaugh thought, on the drive west. At least not compared to when he and Judy had first gotten together. Well, that was normal, wasn’t it? Sex fell off after a while together. And Judy had been busy with that big paleontology article for Science Update, when she hadn’t been creating the Perfect Rustic Dream House. And he’d been busy not being busy. So of course it was natural that they didn’t have as much sex. Wasn’t it?

  Christ, if it wasn’t the presence of sex screwing up people’s lives, it was the absence of sex. Either way, you couldn’t win.

  He parked in the large central lot of Rachel Pafford’s apartment complex, a well-kept cluster of buildings surrounded by speed bumps, playgrounds, and a duck pond. Kids swarmed all over the place. It was nine-thirty—shouldn’t they all be in bed? Wasn’t tomorrow a school day? The little kids, Cavanaugh noticed, climbed on the floodlit jungle gym and dug in the sandbox in integrated groups, impartially throwing sand at other black and white cherubs. But the older kids, with their oversized clothing and very cool, nonchalant expressions, kept mostly to their own.

  “Ms. Pafford? Special Agent Cavanaugh.”

  “Oh, come in,” she said, sounding as if he was the rescuing cavalry. Cavanaugh wasn’t surprised. Anyone who graphed stroke incidence was going to be pretty intense. A thin, wiry brunette with large glasses, she looked fifteen, although common sense told him that she must be at least twenty.

  “Would you like a Coke?” He heard the flat vowels of the Midwest.

  “Thank you. Now, why don’t you show me your graphs.”

  They were in three colors, each bar drawn with a ruler. Nervously, Rachel Pafford went over the same information she’d given Cavanaugh on the phone, with embellishment. “In a stroke case, you only have about three hours before several million brain cells disintegrate. But before we can do anything, we need to know if the stroke is ischemic, which means it’s caused by a blood clot, or hemorrhagic, which means a blood vessel burst inside the body. Because if it’s a clot, either a thrombus or an embolus, you want to administer medicine to break it up; but if it’s a hemorrhage, the same drug will only increase the bleeding.”

  She stopped and looked at him quizzically; Cavanaugh nodded to show he understood. On his notepad he doodled a large blood clot fleeing from three small bottles of medicine. He always doodled while listening; it helped him concentrate.

  “So we did CTs, and that’s how I know the clots were all the same: cerebral thromboses. Of the nine patients, seven died. One is in a coma and will probably have severe permanent brain damage, and the last one is in critical condition. Here, I’ve indicated which is which, with ages, race, and home addresses.”

  She handed him a chart to match the graph. Christ, Nurse Pafford was more organized than half the agents he’d known.

  He said, “Don’t I remember reading somewhere that African Americans are more susceptible to stroke than whites?”

  “Well, yes. That’s true. But not to this extent! Anyway, I took all this data to my supervisor. She told me it wasn’t important, I was too young and ignorant to know that cases came in unpredictable clumps, and maybe next month it’ll be a bunch of heart attacks or car crashes.”

  Rachel Pafford bit her lip. Cavanaugh guessed that the supervisor’s disdain had wounded her. But not to the point of giving up.

  “I went next to the director of the hospital. She said the same thing, only in nicer words. When my supervisor found out I’d seen her, she was a real bitch to me!”

  Cavanaugh was glad he wasn’t in the middle of this behind-the-scenes hospital drama. Nurse Pafford, for all her youth and nervousness, looked tenacious. In fact, she suddenly reminded him of Judy.

  “So what will you do with the information, Agent Cavanaugh?”

  “Well,” he said, inventing fast, “as you yourself must know, the data sample is small, only nine cases—”

  “Yes, of course, we need more. I’ll photocopy this week’s records when I go in on Friday!”

  “I don’t—”

  “And, of course, if this is happening at Dellridge, it’s probably happening at other places in the area, although this is the only real hospital in southern Maryland—but you’ll check with private physicians, of course. And the county medical examiner. She’ll have to do autopsies on anything suspicious-looking. Then you’ll have enough data to run T-tests for significance … my training included basic statistics, you know. Will you let me know what you uncover?”

  Cavanaugh felt dizzy. She had it all planned out. But “it” was probably just what the supervising nurse had said: a normal variation in the various ways human beings could die. “CIVILIZATION PURSUES NATURE” Cavanaugh scribbled under his racing medicine bottles, closed his notebook, and stood.

  “If I uncover anything notable, Ms. Pafford, I’ll contact you again. If you don’t hear from me, you can assume I found nothing significant.”

  “But—”

  “The Federal Bureau of Investigation thanks you for your patriotic concern as a citizen,” Cavanaugh said. This useful formula, the invention of his former supervisor Martin Felders, invariably shut people up. It sounded so final, so official. Rachel Pafford was no exception. She followed him unhappily to the door, but she didn’t thrust on him any more graphs or lists.

  In his car, Cavanaugh considered. If he drove home, he’d get there by ten-thirty. Judy would still be up. She’d want to continue talking about marriage. He just wasn’t up to it.

  He drove instead to the main street of Port Tobacco and found a bar. A sign in the gravel parking lot said CUSTOMER PARKING ONLY—NO AUTO REPAIRS. Cavanaugh was lucky. Not only did his car not need repairs, but the bar was actually open. The only other restaurant he’d found open this late in Saint Mary’s County was the International House of Pancakes.

  Inside, the bar was cool and dim. By nursing two beers and then driving very slowly back across the peninsula, he arrived in Rivermount at fifteen minutes to midnight. The lights were all out in the house on the river bluff.

  Before he tiptoed into the house, Cavanaugh used his cell phone to call his office answering machine. Two messages. Nurse Pafford, asking him not to mention her name when he talked to any other medical people, and the principal at the junior high, reminding him that on Thursday, forty-two eighth graders were signed up to hear him talk about all the exciting career opportunities in the FBI.

  Two
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  In medicine, sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission venial.

  —Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, 1929

  * * *

  On Wednesday mornings every second week, Cavanaugh reported in to the field office in Baltimore for a staff meeting. He was the southern Maryland representative, mostly so Donald Seton, special agent in charge, didn’t have to be bothered.

  “Going up to Baltimore?” Seton asked. He was a career agent, close to retirement, and as far as Cavanaugh could find out, a dead weight on the Bureau for twenty-three years. Overweight in the way of a once-handsome man gone to lazy fat, Seton still dressed like a member of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI: dark suit, narrow dark tie, white shirt now straining at the buttons. Every morning he puttered around the office. Every afternoon he either went to the Patuxent River Naval Air Station on unexplained “investigations” or spent the time in a bar “developing informants.” Seton filed more 302s, the form the Bureau used for case and informant reports, than any agent Cavanaugh had ever seen. He suspected that Seton’s informant files were mostly bogus, but so far he hadn’t had the heart to check this out, which he wasn’t supposed to do anyway. Seton was his boss.

  Cavanaugh said neutrally, “Staff meeting. Anything to give Dunbar?”

  “Of course,” Seton smirked. He always had papers to give Dunbar. Informant reports, on-going investigation reports, travel reports, report reports—on paper, Seton looked like the most productive agent on the East Coast. “This folder here.”

  “A lot going on at Pax River?”