Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  “They didn’t offer it to us,” Krovetz said. “We run malaria teams through Africa and Asia all the time, you know.”

  Cavanaugh didn’t know. But it wasn’t relevant to his concerns either. Instead he said, “Look at Dr. Warfield. It’s like he’s a different person now. Confident. And I don’t think he even knows he settled your potential turf war.”

  Krovetz grinned. “He knows.”

  “He does?”

  “We were at a summer conference together once. Fred knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it.”

  So Warfield had skillfully directed events, without anyone important realizing it. The man would have made a good FBI agent.

  Although nothing Warfield had done—or anyone else at the meeting—had helped Cavanaugh. He now knew a lot about mosquito control, but no more about identifying, finding, or capturing whoever had genetically altered malaria to kill blacks.

  If anyone even had. There was no evidence. There were no leads. And, so far at least, there was no public outcry. The public didn’t even realize that one segment of the population was dying at anything more than the usual rate. But when they did …

  The CDC and USAMRIID were right. Everything depended on how the public was told and advised about P. reading. With the right handling, you had responsible health agencies doing everything they could to help people survive an inexplicable disease. With the wrong handling, you had a government sitting for two weeks on critical information while citizens died. Farlow was right to restrain Melanie and her explosive pronouncements. Farlow knew what he was doing. That’s why he was chief.

  Comfortable with this affirmation of the chain of command, Cavanaugh began his grilling of Dr. Krovetz. He took careful notes. When he got back to Leonardtown, he would have to write a report for Dunbar, about a crime that may or may not have been committed by perps who might or might not exist on a public that might or might not believe there was a transgression. It was going to have to be a hell of a report.

  Interim

  The Saint Mary’s County tour bus was always full for the nine o’clock run, the only one that featured dinner at historic Sotterley Plantation, following afternoon drinks at historic inns. Casper Hunt watched the chattering tourists climb aboard his bus. He could already pick out the ones who would be bored. The ones who would ask dumb questions. The ones who would whisper to each other, “Is that man black, Joanie, or isn’t he, hard to tell with that light brown color …” The ones who would drink too much at the King’s Arms, Farthing’s Ordinary, and Sotterley.

  Not that Casper minded that, or any of it. He’d been driving the tour bus for five years now. Before that he’d spent three decades harvesting oysters off the barrier islands of South Carolina, till the oyster beds were destroyed by the pollution from the Savannah River. The river was supposed to be cleaned up now, Casper had heard. He didn’t know for sure, and he wasn’t about to find out. Oysters had been a hard life, backbreaking and dangerous and dirt-poor. Driving a tour bus around southern Maryland was about a thousand times easier, and the tips were pretty good. Especially from the drunks.

  “Welcome aboard, ladies ’n’ gen’lemun,” Casper said in his soft North Carolina accent, which he always exaggerated when tour driving. Customers, mostly Yankees, liked that. “Today we’re goin’ to see beautiful Saint Mary’s County, including historic Saint Mary’s City, the Civil War prison at Fort Lincoln, and Sotterley Plantation. My name is Casper, and I’m you-all’s guide today. I used to harvest shellfish, so I guess I can keep track of you-all.”

  It always got a laugh. Casper started the bus. A few minutes later he swung out into heavy traffic on Route 235, nimbly dodging the semis and commercial vans.

  “Our first stop this mawnin’ will be Fort Lincoln, in Point Lookout State Park. The park occupies a one-thousand-thirty-seven-acre site at the come-together of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. The fort was built of raw earth by prisoners of …”

  Pain shot through his head.

  Casper gasped and tried to hold the wheel. The pain came again and suddenly he couldn’t see. Everythin’ go dark … oh, sweet Jesus Christ, keep me on the river … the bus swung sideways into traffic.

  Passengers screamed. Casper heard them, but only dimly. A third bolt of pain screwed through his head, riveting him to darkness. He slumped over onto the steering wheel.

  The tour bus slammed into an oncoming 18-wheeler. Both vehicles burst into flame. But by that time, Casper Hunt was already dead.

  Five

  Journalists want blood, death, and screaming people.

  —Dr. Pierre Rollin, epidemiologist, 1995

  * * *

  The Web site began with the usual legal disclaimer, this time in bright red capital letters:

  STROKEHELP. COM IS DESIGNED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. THIS INFORMATION IS NOT INTENDED TO SUBSTITUTE FOR INFORMED MEDICAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD NOT USE THIS INFORMATION TO DIAGNOSE OR TREAT A STROKE WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH A QUALIFIED PHYSICIAN. STROKEHELP DOES NOT ENDORSE ANY OF THE TREATMENTS, MEDICATIONS, OR PRODUCTS DISCUSSED HEREIN.

  Libby Turner, seated at her desk in the Baltimore Sun newsroom, would have snorted if she hadn’t been so upset. She’d been with the paper for seventeen years, starting as a lowly police reporter and moving steadily up. Nobody had to tell her the legal limits of the written word, whether paper or electronic.

  But she was too upset to feel superior. Her hands, with their short and unpolished nails, trembled on the keyboard. She hated that. She, Libby Turner, never trembled. But, then, she’d never before had a mother with a stroke, either.

  Brigit Ryan Turner had collapsed a week ago, alone in her apartment in the Elmcrest Senior Citizens’ Home. She hadn’t been found for three and a half hours. In that time of oxygen deprivation, her left side had become paralyzed, speech had been severely impaired, and other damage may or may not have occurred. “All we can do is wait and see,” said the doctors, which came nowhere near to satisfying Libby Turner. Libby loved her mother, even though they’d fought like pit bulls ever since Libby had been thirteen. More to the point, when Brigit Turner was finally released from the hospital, it was Libby, her only child, who would be responsible for her. Libby wanted as much information as possible on what that might mean.

  Only her fucking fingers wouldn’t stop trembling!

  She mis-hit two more keys, got a URL ERROR, and backtracked. She had to calm down, had to concentrate, had to follow the hyperlinks of information till something proved useful. …

  “You okay?” her managing editor asked, coming from behind and putting his hands on her shoulders. They were old friends.

  “Go away, Alec,” Libby said distinctly. “Go away now.”

  “I will,” Alec said. “But meanwhile, here’re a few other databases to check. Got them for you from a doctor friend.”

  Alec went. Libby knew he would get someone else to cover whatever story she couldn’t concentrate on today. He was good that way.

  Two hours later, her fingers still trembled. But she’d learned a lot about her mother’s condition, following the links from one Web site to another. Libby’s strength as a reporter had always been thoroughness. She began on the first of the two sites Alec had given her, which seemed to be a private newsgroup for health-care professionals.

  J.K. HERE. ONCE MORE I NEED TO PICK ALL THIS COLLECTIVE BRAINPOWER. CAN ANYBODY PUT ME ON TRACK OF INFORMATION ABOUT BRAIN-CHEMISTRY DIFFERENCES, POSSIBLY GENETIC, SHARED BY ASIAN INDIANS AND BLACKS BUT NOT WHITES? I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I’M LOOKING FOR YET—NEUROTRANSMITTERS, FETAL WIRING, SUBMOLECULAR STRUCTURES—SO ANYTHING MIGHT HELP. IT SHOULD BE CONNECTED TO ISCHEMIC CEREBRAL STROKES. THANKS. OF COURSE, NO ATTRIBUTION WITHOUT YOUR WRITTEN PERMISSION.

  OH, ONE THING MORE—THE VENUE IS SOUTHERN MARYLAND, SO I SUPPOSE ENVIRONMENTAL TRIGGERS FOR GENETIC DIFFERENCES COULD BE A FACTOR, TOO. THANKS AGAIN.

  JUDY—YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW THIS, AND IT’S PROBABLY OFF TARGET ANYWAY, BUT YOU DID ASK. ASIAN INDIANS, ALONG
WITH SOME MEDITERRANEAN PEOPLES, SOME GREEKS, AND MANY AFRICAN AND AFRICAN DESCENDANTS, CAN CARRY SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA. THAT CAN CAUSE STROKES IN ACUTE CRISES.—MSJ

  TO: J.K.

  RE: REQUEST FOR RACIALLY DIFFERENTIATED STROKE INFORMATION.

  NEW RESEARCH HAS EMERGED IN THIS AREA RE MALARIA, SPECIFICALLY THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF VARIOUS GENOMES TO P. VIVAX, P. FALCIPARUM, AND P. MALARIAE, ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO CHLOROQUINE AND CYCLOSPORINE RESISTANCE. SEE MY ARTICLE IN LAST ISSUE OF MALARIA AND TROPICAL DISEASE WEEKLY. RICHARD KAPPEL, M.D., NIH

  TO JK—YOU MENTIONED SOUTHERN MARYLAND. IS THIS CONNECTED TO THE RUMORS I HEARD ABOUT RACIALLY CONNECTED STROKE RATES AT DELLRIDGE HOSPITAL IN LA PLATA? SUPPOSEDLY, THE CDC IS THERE INVESTIGATING. HAS ANYBODY ELSE HEARD RUMORS? WOULD APPRECIATE FURTHER INFORMATION.

  —K. MAHONEY, RICHMOND, VA

  Libby’s fingers stopped trembling.

  Not because anything she’d read applied to her mother, a white Irish harridan who did not have sickle-cell trait. Libby’s fingers steadied because she was looking at a story.

  So that was what she needed. A big story. A flashy dangerous important story: FEDS INVESTIGATE POORER STROKE CARE FOR BLACKS AT MARYLAND HOSPITAL. Work. To steady herself, both for her own sake and her mother’s. And this was—or could be—a story about something that already consumed her. She always did her best, most thorough work when she really cared about the topic. It was as if this story was meant for her.

  Libby Turner strode toward the Baltimore Sun elevator that would take her to the parking garage, and southern Maryland.

  “I’m sorry, Robert. I’m not about to commit manpower to a crime that a bunch of scientists can’t even agree is happening. The CDC is on the medical aspects of the malaria, and that’s all that actually exists at this point. What would our agents do? Question the next-of-kin about where these stroke victims have been that mosquitoes might also have been? The CDC is already doing that. I think we need to wait and see.”

  Cavanaugh said, “But—”

  “Look,” Jerry Dunbar said, “we’ve been discussing this for fifteen minutes. I don’t have fifteen more today.”

  They sat in Dunbar’s Baltimore office, Dunbar behind his desk and Cavanaugh in a black, metal-armed chair that looked like a reject from the waiting room. Cavanaugh felt a stab of nostalgia for his previous boss, the toe-tapping, arm-twitching ex-cop, Marty Felders. Felders had been easy to argue with. Felders had flourished on argument, sucking it into his wiry frame like water into a quivering aspen. Dunbar, the Book Man, treated argument as if it were just one step away from insubordination. He made Cavanaugh feel as if there were a bulletproof shield between them.

  Nonetheless, he couldn’t let it go that easily. “Jerry, if this is a sophisticated terrorist weapon, the sooner we start investigating before they know we’re doing it, the fresher the leads will be. We don’t want to find ourselves in the position of having some subversive group suddenly claim credit for this and we haven’t even looked seriously at them. I could—”

  “You could do exactly what you’re supposed to be doing anyway,” Dunbar said harshly, “which is to keep tabs on the hate groups in your jurisdiction. You don’t—or shouldn’t—need additional manpower to do that.”

  “No,” Cavanaugh said, “not ordinarily. But in this case, I think we should at least inform Headquarters that—”

  Dunbar got up and walked out of the room.

  Cavanaugh, left sitting there, got a grip on his own temper. All right, he had said the same thing over and over—how many times? At least six. Dunbar had heard him out five of those times. But Felders wouldn’t have cut short debate like that. Felders would have … but Cavanaugh didn’t work for Felders anymore.

  Maybe Dunbar would come back in and let Cavanaugh say it all again.

  While he waited, he took out his notepad and doodled. He drew a bunch of upright, hair-on-end people standing close together on a long paddle and labeled it “GODZILLA’S TOOTHBRUSH.” He drew a flowering tree with branches connected by sections of L-shaped pipes: “A NORTH AMERICAN PLUMBER PLANT IN BLOOM.” Dunbar did not reappear.

  Eventually his secretary stuck her head in the door. “Agent Cavanaugh? You have a call on line 3.”

  Cavanaugh picked up the phone. Who knew he was here? Only Seton. Unless Judy had tracked him down, or Jim Farlow.

  “Robert? This is Marcy.”

  His ex-wife. He hadn’t seen her since the final divorce proceeding over a year ago. She’d already been living with her boss, the wunderkind CEO, and had barely glanced at him.

  “Robert? Are you there?”

  “How did you know where to find me?” he asked, because he had to say something.

  “I didn’t,” she said. He’d forgotten how low-pitched her voice was, a husky contralto. “I called your old office, and they said you’d moved to southern Maryland, and when I called that number your partner said you were here.”

  “He’s not my partner,” Robert said.

  “Whatever. Robert … I’m calling to ask a favor.”

  That was very Marcy. Leave him, divorce him, have no communication for a year, then call out of the blue to ask for something, without even a “please.” Cavanaugh was about to hang up, just as soon as he found the perfect cutting retort.

  “Please,” Marcy said, in a different tone.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you on the phone; I have to show you. Could you come over sometime today?”

  To the expensive Georgetown townhouse she shared with the successful CEO? Not a chance in hell.

  “I’ve moved,” Marcy said quickly. “To a smaller place east of Washington. In Hyattsville. It’s on your way home, I think. And I’m in a little trouble.”

  “All right,” Robert said. If she was really in trouble … did she know that would be the one thing he wouldn’t refuse? Of course she did. “I’ll come by about six-thirty. What’s the address?”

  The apartment might be Marcy’s idea of “a smaller place,” but it wasn’t Robert’s. Washington’s toniest suburbs lay north of the city. However, Marcy had managed to find the most expensive housing of a nonexpensive area. Marble foyer, carved wooden double doors leading to the living room, a mix of their old Federalist furniture and some new, Oriental-looking stuff. Thick velvet curtains blocked traffic sounds.

  “Hello, Marcy.”

  “Robert. Thank you so much for coming.” She gave him her hand.

  She looked sensational. She always had, but now there was an additional gloss on it. Slimmer, her hair pulled back into a chignon … Robert didn’t know how women achieved these things. He only knew she had gone from a beautiful woman to a beautiful woman with a polish that suggested depth. Not unlike the lacquer on the new Chinese furniture.

  “Do you want a drink? Vodka and tonic?”

  She remembered what he drank. Alarm bells went off in Cavanaugh’s head.

  “Just coffee.”

  “I’ll just be a minute. Make yourself comfortable.”

  She disappeared into the vast recesses of her smaller place, and Cavanaugh wandered around the living room, looking for clues to what was going on. He didn’t find any.

  “Is the coffee okay?”

  “The coffee is wonderful,” Cavanaugh said, although the truth was that all coffee tasted pretty much the same to him.

  So why had he complimented it? He put down the Wedgewood cup.

  “Marcy, you said on the phone that you were in trouble.”

  “Yes, I am. It’s Abigail.”

  “Abigail? Your dog?”

  “Yes. Since I’ve moved, she’s been a real problem. She howls all day while I’m gone at work, and the neighbors are complaining.”

  Her dog. She had called him out here to foist her dog off on him.

  “Before you say no, just listen, Robert. You always liked dogs. Remember how you used to throw a tennis ball for her for hours at a time? And you’re home more than I am—you don’t have to travel as much for your
job. And you live out in the country; your office gave me your new address and I looked it up on the map.”

  “No. I can’t believe you told me you were in trouble and it’s about discarding your dog!”

  To his surprise, her eyes filled with tears. Marcy. Who never cried, never lost her glossy poise. …

  “I don’t know where else to turn, Robert. If I take her to the pound, they’ll just kill her. She’s not a cute little puppy somebody else will adopt. My job does require more and more travel—in fact, I have a nine-thirty flight to Dallas tonight. Abigail mopes and howls at the boarding kennel. And since Hal left me, I’m … I’m having trouble holding it all together.”

  “Since Hal left me.” Cavanaugh peered more closely at Marcy. The tears had vanished, a momentary weakness. But even that was more weakness than he’d ever seen from her during the four years of their marriage.

  He said, “I’m living with someone, Marcy.” If she looked stricken, he was going to leave. None of that rebound-to-a-former-point-of-security danger.

  But Marcy only smiled. “Well, does she like dogs?”

  Did Judy like dogs? Cavanaugh realized he didn’t know, which just proved how little he and Judy really knew each other. How could she want to marry him, for Chrissake, when they didn’t even know who liked what pets? It was irrational on her part. Premature, presumptuous …

  He was working this into a mild resentment when Abigail, an aging English setter, trotted into the room. At the threshold she stopped dead, then bounded joyfully toward Cavanaugh, tail wagging. She licked his face, she barked in his ear, she all but clambered onto his lap.

  “See, she remembers you,” Marcy said.