I recognized the couple from the funeral.
I walked to the living room and to the opened front door.
“Hi,” I said, standing behind the yellow tape. The couple practically jumped out of their skins. “Bill, right? Paul’s brother?”
“Who are you?” he asked warily.
Just your friendly neighborhood home invader, I thought. I said, “Nate McCormick. I’m a friend of Paul’s. We didn’t meet at the funeral, but I saw you there.”
The couple looked at each other. “Why are you here?” Bill seemed to relax a bit into his mesomorph frame. His wife stepped behind him slightly, eyes narrowing at me.
“Paul gave me a key,” I said, pointedly not answering the question. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I recognize you. This is Tina.” His resemblance to Murph was striking. Both were big, both had those oversized hands, the stubborn jaw. Bill, however, was a little more stick-in-the-mud than his brother. Razor-cut hair parted to the side, glasses, a trimmed beard. He wore pleated khakis and a blue oxford shirt under a sweater vest.
“Honey,” Tina said urgently, “the police should know.”
Bitch.
Bill Murphy took a second, then said, “Mr. McCormick, I’m going to have to call the police.”
The gun in my back was killing me. If I’d been a bloodthirsty lunatic, I could have used it to waste the couple. Couldn’t they see I was a good guy?
“Fine,” I agreed. “Please do.”
And you know what? The bastard did. He spoke softly into the phone.
I tried to crawl between the police tape, got tangled up in it. “Damn it,” I said, ripping plastic.
“Whoa, whoa,” Bill Murphy warned. “Just stay there.”
“I’m just going to sit here on the porch. You don’t want me running around inside, right?”
He looked dumbfounded for a second, which I took to mean he didn’t mind if I sat. I tore through the rest of the tape.
As I took my seat on the flagstone steps, the gun’s cylinder shifted and dug out a couple pounds of flesh from my back.
After too many minutes waiting for the cavalry to arrive, I decided to try to break the ice. “Where are you from?” I asked. Tina was in the car by that time; I could hear the local NPR station pumping from the speakers.
“Wisconsin,” Bill Murphy said. “How do you know Paul?”
“We went to school together.”
“College?”
“Grad school.” That seemed to satisfy him a little.
Birds twittered in the background.
“Sorry about calling the police.” He shrugged. “But, you know…With everything that happened…”
“No problem,” I said as I pictured what life would be like sleeping in a urine-drenched holding tank, trying to keep some doped-up hulk from taking my virginity.
“Why’d you come here?” Bill asked.
“I was the one who found Paul and the family that night.”
“Oh, right. That’s you.” He turned that over for a second. “So why are you here now?”
“Paul left something for me.”
“What?”
I didn’t see any reason not to tell him; I was in deep enough shit as it was. “I’ll show you.”
I stood. “I’ll come up there,” he said hastily. He walked toward the porch, placing his body between me and the woman in the car.
I reached into my pants and pulled out the envelope, held up the photos. Let Bill see the freak show.
“Holy Lord Jesus,” he said, eyes on the photographs, and crossed himself. Was this guy for real? “What is this?”
“I was hoping you might know.”
“Of course I don’t! Why’d he want you to have this?”
“He wanted me to help out with something. He was worried about it. Murph—Paul—ever say anything to you?”
“No. He never—”
At that moment, a car raced into the driveway, dashboard light flashing, and screeched to a dramatic stop. A woman sprang from the driver’s side. Detective Bonita Sanchez. Wonderful.
“Well, hello. Hel-lo, Dr. McCormick. What on God’s green earth are you doing here?”
“Hunting for chanterelles. This is the season—”
“It’s not the season,” Bonita Sanchez snapped. “You are damned lucky Mr. Murphy called me and not 911. And you’re damned lucky I was coming here to meet him. Your lily ass would have been in jail, Doctor, quicker than you can say ‘chanterelle.’”
Bill Murphy looked horrified. “You know each other?” he asked.
“Dr. McCormick was first on the scene.” Sanchez pointed at the open door. “You see that sign, Doctor? You see all that tape? You go in there?”
“I did.”
“Well, it is not a goddamned welcome mat.” Bill Murphy winced, probably at the profanity; she ignored him. “This is still a crime scene. You broke the law.”
“I know,” I said. If she frisked me, I was sure I’d find out how severe were the firearms violations Dale Connolly had warned about.
“I’m going to have to take you in, Doctor. I’m going to have to take you down to the station and—What’s that?” She gestured at the pictures in my hand.
“From inside,” I said.
She swore softly, then turned. “Mr. Murphy, would you give me a minute alone with Dr. McCormick?”
“Sure.” He sounded relieved that he was about to escape the blasphemy and any attendant lightning bolts that would surely follow. He walked back to his car, his wife, his NPR.
“Dr. McCormick. You screwed up here.”
“I know.”
“I should take you to jail.”
“Uh, I don’t know about that.”
Her eyes shot toward me, then to the pictures. She pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, snapped them on, then took the glossies from me.
“Mother. Of. God. What are these? Where did you find them?”
The gun dug painfully into my back. I grabbed my belt and hoisted it. Repositioning helped the cylinder slip down a few centimeters. The grip snagged on my belt. I pushed out my gut to tighten everything.
“Inside. In the master bedroom.”
“We processed that room.”
“Not well enough, I guess.”
“Try not to be a pain in the ass, just for once, okay? How did you know about these?”
“Paul told me.”
“And I suppose you have a real good reason why you didn’t tell us about them?”
I didn’t, so I kept quiet.
“We’re the police, Dr. McCormick. We conduct investigations. We collect what’s called evidence. These are evidence. You are not police. You have no business breaking and entering. You have no business getting your greasy-ass fingerprints all over our evidence.”
“I was careful.”
She batted me on the chest with the back of her hand.
“Police brutality,” I said.
“I’ll show you brutality. I will show you brutality, Doctor. Ugh. These are disgusting.” She shuddered.
27
IN THE COROLLA, THE FIRST thing I did was to pull the gun out of my ass and stick it under the seat. The second thing I did was to freak out.
Ten people, their faces blasted with what looked like tumors.
Please don’t let this be big, I prayed. Not here, not now. Two years at CDC had taught me to dread the early signals: the reports of a few suspicious deaths in Angola, the word that a few women in Baltimore were coughing blood, the sketchy information that portends death and misery or portends nothing. Dread. The perfect word for it.
The subjects had all been older, forties through sixties. All were Asian, and all were in street clothes, not hospital gowns. There were no identifiers anywhere on the images.
No idea who these people were, where they were, what was destroying their faces. Ten of these people scattered across the world was not a big deal. Ten of these people in the Bay Area would be. The former was a collection of case reports,
rare cancers or infections, the one-in-ten-million type things. The latter was an outbreak, a cluster, a real problem.
Damn it, I thought. Damn. It.
I followed Bonita Sanchez’s car to the forensics lab for San Mateo County, where she had agreed to make copies of the pictures for me. I told her to contact San Mateo Public Health immediately about the images. As to what I was going to do with them, I left that undefined, vaguely referencing my deep contacts with local and state departments of health.
An outbreak on top of Murph’s murder? Things just kept getting worse and worse, didn’t they?
I put my eyes on Sanchez’s blue sedan, then, to calm myself down, I began to flex the old diagnostic muscles. What did we have so far? Pictures of ten different people with what looked like tumors all over their faces. It didn’t look infectious—no frank pus, no large swaths of red, inflamed skin.
Not infectious, not an outbreak. A cluster perhaps, but not an outbreak. Good so far.
What could have caused this? Could be a genetic problem, say, something like neurofibromatosis. Possible. But these people were older; a genetic problem would have shown up much earlier in their lives. So why, then, no pictures of children? Could be autoimmune, but which one? Discoid lupus? No. Polyarteritis nodosum? No. I tabbed through the autoimmune problems I knew but could not think of a match. I couldn’t think of any autoimmune problem that would produce what I’d seen.
If I hadn’t seen the blue municipal signs, I would have thought we’d arrived at the headquarters of a tech company rather than the San Mateo forensics labs. The low steel exoskeleton of the building supported a carapace of solar cells on the roof. The architects had made sure the lab integrated well into the rolling hills and amber grass. The complex didn’t sit on the environment as much as sprouted from it. The interior looked as if it had been plucked from a catalog.
“We need to process these.” Detective Sanchez flicked a finger at the pictures, now encased in an amnion of plastic. “And we need to get one thing straight.”
“Sure.”
“This ain’t no two-way street anymore, Doc. I give you these, you tell me whatever you and your public health buddies find. It’s one-way from now on: you to me. Understood?”
That didn’t sound fair, but I nodded anyway. Sanchez gave me a hard look, then left me sitting in a single chair pushed against the receptionist’s desk.
I waited for two hours while the forensics folks took digitals of the pictures to give to me. The wait gave me time to feel guilty about the jump drive I’d dropped into my pocket—and which I’d failed to mention to Detective Sanchez. But my “greasy-ass prints” were all over it now, and I didn’t think the geniuses here would pull anything useful from its surface. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
I forced myself to think about the subjects of the photos.
Not an autoimmune disease. Definitely not. More likely tumors. Neoplasms. Could be a collection of cases of naturally occurring cancer, and not actually a cluster. Histiofibrosarcoma. Dermatomyofibrosarcoma. Extensive basal cell carcinoma. But why would Murph have collected the photos of a bunch of folks with cancer? He was working on cancer, sure, but why pictures of something so rare I’d never seen anything like it?
There was only one thing I was sure of at that point: the images had to be part of Murph’s “really bad stuff.”
Which meant what was on the jump drive had to be part of it, too.
A good citizen would have handed the drive over to Sanchez and been done with it. But breaking into the house of a dead man and stealing evidence did not a good citizen make. Or so I was rationalizing when a middle-aged guy with a Van Dyke goatee shuffled into the reception area. “You Dr. McCormick?” He carried a large envelope.
I told him I was.
“These are for you.”
I took the envelope and thanked him.
“What’s wrong with those people?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. But one thing I did know: I’d finally found myself a job.
28
BACK IN THE COROLLA, I groped under the seat to make sure the gun was there, that it hadn’t gotten up and walked off. The gadget was a weird introduction into my life, both empowering and disturbing. Like taking on a mistress, I suppose.
I turned on the cell phone, which chirped merrily to let me know some messages were waiting. It irritated me, and I thought about using my new gadget to blast the old gadget to pieces.
From the back of the car, I got my laptop, popped in Murphy’s jump drive. After the computer scanned for viruses, a folder appeared on the desktop. Surprisingly, it was called “NateMcCormick.” I double-clicked it and revealed another folder: “DorothyZhang.”
In the second folder, I found ten image files. They were labeled “Pt 1,” “Pt 2,” etc. I opened “Pt 1.” A picture of a disfigured woman. I selected and opened the nine other images. All disfigured individuals. All different. All familiar.
I pulled the copies given to me by the forensic tech from their envelope. The pictures in my hands matched the pictures on the screen perfectly.
So, Murph was worried about this disease, whatever it was, which is why he wanted to contact someone in public health. Not someone. Me. And I was now connected to someone named Dorothy Zhang. Whether or not she was one of the women in the pictures, I didn’t know.
After copying the images from the jump drive to my computer, I dropped it into the manila envelope. I found a piece of scrap paper and wrote From Paul Murphy. Forgot to give to you—and dropped that inside.
Back in the building, I handed the envelope to the receptionist, feeling dirty for keeping the drive from Sanchez but elated that now, finally, I had a name.
But that name meant nothing to me. Who the hell was Dorothy Zhang?
29
THE MESSAGES ON THE CELL phone—three of them—were from Brooke. No matter that we weren’t really that involved anymore, we were still, well, involved. Anyway, all of the messages were short and their tone progressed something like this: First, worried. Second, worried and annoyed. Third, royally PO’d.
Because I am an honorable man and because I cared for her, I called Brooke.
“I’m sorry I turned off the phone.”
Silence.
“I was in the middle of something and…well, I couldn’t talk.”
Silence.
“Brooke, come on. Say something.”
She said nothing.
I continued, “I was at Paul Murphy’s house…I found some pictures. Eight women, two men. Horrible pictures, actually.” I waited for any flicker of curiosity from her, got none. “Have you guys had any reports of disfigurement at the Department of Health? It looks like basal cell carcinoma, but it’s everywhere over the face. Maybe like a really bad case of neurofibromatosis. Best guess is that it’s a neoplasm. Brooke?”
Again, I waited, but she said nothing.
“Tumors. Faces.”
Silence.
“They could be isolated cases, and all of the individuals are Asian, so maybe it’s something that cropped up over there. But I think they have to be connected somehow, or Murph wouldn’t have gathered them together…
“God, this is wonderful,” I prattled on. “Just like talking to a shrink…You know, when I was eleven, my cousin and I went out to the barn. She made me show my stuff, then she showed me her stuff. I think it scarred me for life…Sometimes I think I’m secretly a woman trapped in a goat’s body trapped in a man’s body.”
If that didn’t get her, nothing would.
It didn’t get her. She broke the connection.
30
I CALLED DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE AND got the number and address for a gun shop in Redwood City. There, I bought a shoulder holster from a guy who must have purchased his clothes and his politics from the same place as Dale Connolly, up at Mid-Peninsula.
“You have any trouble getting your concealed license?” he asked.
“Not a bit,” I assured him.
&
nbsp; “Good. Sometimes the police can be Nazis about these things,” he said, and I tried not to let myself start stereotyping gun shop owners. I also tried not to get freaked about the growing list of firearms laws I was violating. Concealed weapons license? Who knew?
Back at the university, I slid the Corolla into an open parking spot near the library and cracked the windows. It wasn’t boiling hot, but I didn’t know the flashpoint of .357 shells. I didn’t want to come back and find a gaggle of wounded, bleeding undergraduates encircling the car.
In the library, first thing I did was to grab a dermatology text and compare the pictures from Murph’s with the images in the book. I double-checked basal cell carcinoma and neurofibromatosis to make sure my recollection of those two diseases was in line with what I told Brooke. Well, I was in the ballpark. The pictures of basal cell carcinoma, or BCC, showed a few small tumors and a few monsters. The biggest ones—invading the eye socket, gnawing on the skull—had morphed into what the dermies called “rodent ulcers.” As the cancer grows and outstrips its blood supply, the tissue dies and the tumor ulcerates. Someone thought it looked like a rodent had been chewing through the flesh. The name stuck.
Neurofibromatosis is a condition of tumors of the nerve sheath. Some of the more severe cases looked like what I’d seen in Murph’s pictures—bumps everywhere. No ulcerations, though. What I saw was like a hybrid: basal cell carcinomaneurofibromatosis. There was no entry for that in the textbook’s index.
I leafed through page after page of revolting imagery—mycosis fungoides, toxic epidermal necrosis, dermoid cysts, and any number of carbuncles and furuncles. After having my fill of pus, seepage, and scale, I closed the book and went back to pictures from Murph’s place. I stared at this misery, one image after the other, hoping that something would pop.
And it did.
It was the site distribution of the lesions. Most of the folks seemed to have higher concentrations of lesions in certain areas: along the nasolabial fold, at the corners of the eyes, between the eyes. Conversely, some areas seemed spared: the neck, the ears. But the pattern didn’t hold for all of them. And I didn’t have full-body shots to know if the lesions were distributed elsewhere.
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