No Immunity

by Susan Dunlap

“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?

  She wouldn’t of course. “Never count on anyone” was a rule she’d mastered early. And with this case she wouldn’t have trusted Mother Teresa. As soon as she got to the airport, she’d call the health department herself.

  CHAPTER 11

  BRAD TCHERNAK STOOD ON the second-story landing outside Grady Hummacher’s door. His first search. Every time Kiernan came bursting into the duplex at home, high from penetrating some guy’s space, Tchernak felt like he’d been sidelined in a play-off game. Kiernan liked searches, but she loved breaking and entering. She was his quarterback, she kept reminding him, and he was just waiting till she was thrown out of the game. Or carried off. And when she told him in indecent detail how she’d stood stock-still in the dark beside the door listening to voices outside, footsteps on the stairs, herself ready to bolt out the door if the intruder didn’t spot her first, he remembered the time both safeties split the line and smacked his quarterback into the AstroTurf so hard, the guy was out cold for an eternity. He hated her being out there alone. With her it was a toss-up which were more of a threat—cops or crooks. Cops had some standards, but the woman had such an attitude and big mouth that she’d taunted them into locking her up more than once. “No taunting, no speeding, no defenestration!”—how many times had he told her that? Simple little aphorism that even the smallest detective could remember.

  For all the good that did. Sometimes he wondered if all it did was goad her into hitting ninety miles an hour so she could get home quicker to thumb her nose at him.

  One night, over a pitcher of margaritas, she had described the seductive allure of penetration. She’d detailed the foreplay, feeling the lock as she slipped in the celluloid strip …And now Grady Hummacher’s apartment stood in front of him, needing no foreplay at all, ready to open up like a flasher’s raincoat and expose Grady’s secrets.

  Right, just what I need: ROOKIE DETECTIVE PICKED UP WET-DREAMING ON PORCH . But Tchernak couldn’t restrain a grin as he grabbed the key Reston Adcock had given him and stuck it in the lock.

  Grady Hummacher’s place—four rooms over a double garage and storage area—was the smallest unit in this upscale suite for the upscale single moving in or out of the nation’s fastest-growing city.

  Tchernak’s first reaction to the living room was that it didn’t seem like Grady’s place. Of course it wasn’t, any more than it was Tom’s place, or Dick’s or Harry’s, or whoever else had sprawled on the off-white leather couch or eaten cereal on the pale oak table. The rumpled newspapers on the floor, now that was more Grady’s style. And the kitchen cabinet doors, none of them closed. That took some doing even for Grady. In the dorm twenty-one-year-old Grady had been a man of experience to the seventeen-year-old freshmen. Or a man of experiences. Before the first term was out, Grady had led his freshmen charges in a guerrilla war against Tasman Hall across the quad. He’d turned them on to underage bars, willing women, and a crazy car track with an amateur’s night. To the frosh he’d been a god, to the administration a disaster. His room reflected his life.

  Tchernak moved to the middle of the room and eyed the 360 degrees of beige. The place must cost a bundle, but that just showed that the furnishings of transience come in all economic levels. It would have been depressing to someone without Grady’s skill in overlooking what he didn’t want to see. In the dorm he’d ignored mail, shirts, slacks that needed a trip to the laundry room, and half-empty food wrappers that drove the guys next to him crazy, and finally the ants. Mere bland wouldn’t have fazed Grady Hummacher. He would be in and out too fast to care. His mind would be on skiing, rock climbing, women, and getting back to where the action was.

  That’s what he knew about Grady Hummacher. He had assured Adcock that his insight into Grady would make up for being a babe-in-the-woods private eye. Well, that bit of knowledge was not going to make this no-thought apartment tell him Grady’s secrets. You check the bedroom, the bathroom, the phone pad, the computer, Kiernan had once said when he’d asked about starting a search. See if you can tell when the subject was last here.

  He moved quickly into the bedroom, the thick tan carpet nearly trampolining him. It had been over ten years since he’d seen Grady for more than a quick drink when he ran into him at McCarran Airport last month, but if the guy had changed, nothing of it manifested in this room. Grady was in his mid thirties now, but the room screamed “teenager.” The bed was a whirl of sheets and blankets. It looked as if it had been made—this type of place had to have maid service—but Grady had managed to rumple and crunch the covers as much as a guy could without actually getting beneath them. Had he napped on top, stirred up the covers as he unloaded his gear, or had a lady on call as he deplaned?

  Tchernak grinned. Grady was good, but he doubted he was that good. No, more likely Adcock’s fear was right. Grady had picked up some bug in Panama and he’d grabbed a catnap before heading out to—wherever.

  The dresser drawers were closed. Tchernak grinned as he pulled one open and confirmed his suspicion. Nothing in them. Closet: empty.

  On the floor on the far side of the bed he found a backpack/suitcase half disemboweled. He could “see” Grady hunting for something on the bottom, yanking a yellow polo shirt half out, leaving it hanging like a pineapple leaf as his hand dove in again. Tchernak nodded at the garment bag, unopened on a chair, the LAS tag for
McCarran Airport still on the handle. Dated Friday, eight days ago.

  Eight days, a long time to put off unpacking, even for Grady.

  Tchernak moved into the bathroom. Towels were in a wad on the floor. So Grady’d come from the airport, taken a shower. His shaving kit was open, but his toothbrush wasn’t visible. If he had used it, it would still be on the sink. Tchernak smiled again, recalling a guy on Grady’s hall saying that Grady’s gear—suitcases, shaving kit—were like archeological digs. You didn’t need carbon dating for any one of Grady’s belongings, you just needed to see how far down it was. The toothbrush was not part of most recent civilization.

  But if he’d tossed around on the bed, dragged himself up, and taken a shower, he’d have brushed his teeth. Even Grady. And the maid would have straightened the bed. So—Logical Conclusion Number One—Grady was here since the maid was. Even if she came only once a week, that meant Grady had left here Monday night at the earliest.

  Left with what? Did the guy have another set of suit-cases standing ready for a second trip? Tchernak picked up the duffel, emptied it onto the floor, and grunted in irritation. Nothing he couldn’t have guessed. Clothes so wadded and dirty, they stank. Now he recalled the smell of Grady Hummacher’s college room. He dug around the inside of the bag, feeling for a pocket that might hold Grady’s passport. Tchernak couldn’t imagine Grady walking across the street without a passport, still …But there were no pockets, nothing left in the duffel but a folded newspaper. A Spanish newspaper. The Ciudad de Panama Something or Other. Damn, now he knew why he should have taken a foreign language in school. There was some reason Grady saved this paper. Tchernak stared at it as if force of will would translate the words. City of Panama. Panama City. Something something. November 12. November twelfth. Twelfth? Today was the fifteenth. Grady got home Friday, November seventh. What was he doing with Wednesday the twelfth’s newspaper from Panama City? Was there some Las Vegas outlet?