I grabbed a coffee and found a seat on a new but drink-dappled Scandinavian couch.
Wall hangings, a nice lamp or two. The biggest and most irritating change, though, was that they changed the name from Coffee House to CoHo. What had been affectionate slang for the place was now its official name, which made it très uncool. Kind of like when your parents start trying to speak your language, when they tell you to calm down and stop being so “hyphe.” No quicker way to get you to stop using the word “hyphe” than for Dad to start dropping it into conversation around the dinner table.
Anyway, the place was still dank, thank God, still smelled of stale beer. You can give the girl a face-lift, pump Botox into her brow, but you can’t change the bones. And the CoHo’s bones were still there, underneath the new paint job and the art student scribblings on the walls. I was glad about it. But I wasn’t glad about the painful memories it dredged up. And I definitely wasn’t glad about the band, a foursome calling themselves “Organic Whine.”
God, I am old, I thought, as the drummer began pounding out a cardiac rhythm. Best I could figure it, these guys were into acid jazz and tribal grooves.
Fifteen minutes later, my foot was tapping away to the music. So, maybe not that old, then, but did they have to be so loud?
An hour passed, and I shifted from coffee to beer. A bevy of young women sat at a table in front of me, in jeans so tight I worried for their circulation. One, a cute brunette in a revealing halter top, shot me a look, and I wondered if it wasn’t too late to do a little more undergraduate work.
Organic Whine took a set break to suck beer; the pretty brunette split to go study, or pole dance, or whatever it is undergrads do these days. I’d been there nearly two hours. Brooke wasn’t coming.
I’d decided to leave, go try to find the brunette and help her with her anatomy homework, when I saw a tall blonde walk into the joint. Conversation stopped, men gawked, and the band started to play “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Actually, the conversation was in full swing, and the band was getting shit-faced in the corner. A few guys did look, though.
“Going back to your roots?” Brooke asked.
“Reliving my glory days.”
“Isn’t this where you punched that guy? Didn’t you get thrown out of school for that?”
“Like I said, glory days. Beer?”
“I’m okay.” She took a seat on the couch next to me.
“I’m happy to see you still speak.”
“And I’m happy to see you still make incredibly insightful observations.”
That was funny—so funny, in fact, I took a sip of the beer for clarity and courage. “We’re not getting off on the right foot here.”
“We’re not getting off on any foot, are we? Why on earth did you want to meet here? There’s a band, for God’s sake.”
I sighed.
Brooke said, “You know, I can’t help but see this as just another indication that part of you stopped developing around age nineteen. So, where are the pictures?”
The change to all-business-Brooke was disconcerting. I expected the anger; I didn’t expect her to want to get down to brass tacks right away.
“You don’t want to talk first?” I asked.
“Do you, Nate?” she challenged.
I took her in for a moment, then said, “You know what? I don’t think now’s the right time.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
In silence, I pulled the laptop from my bag, roused it from sleep, and opened the image files. I handed it to Brooke. The screen illuminated her face a pale blue. A little twist of her lip was all the reaction she showed, the only thing that indicated she wasn’t just looking at e-mail.
I reminded myself that this woman had been through all the courses and had seen all the slides that I had. She knew disease and morbidity and mortality. I reminded myself, too, that she despised me right now, and she was taking it out on me by being totally and irritatingly professional.
“You found these at Paul Murphy’s?” she asked.
“Yes. They were in a file marked with my name. Dorothy Zhang’s name was there, too.”
“And you don’t know where he got these or where these people are?”
“No. That’s the problem.”
“And you don’t know what it is, either.”
“That’s the other problem.”
“You have a lot of problems, Nate.”
“Yes, I do.” I took the computer back from her. “Ravi Singh knows about this. He’s helping out.”
“You just pull everybody in on the adventure, don’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She didn’t even look up at me, just produced a folder from her shoulder bag. She began leafing through the pages inside it. “I pulled some cases we had matching anything like what you described over the phone. Some basal cell carcinoma, neurofibromatosis, other things. This is not BCC or NF, Nate.”
I let the jab at my diagnostic abilities slide.
“None of those match, except—” She flipped through a few more pages, then stopped. She took out a sheaf of three pages, stapled together, and handed it to me. On each page was a color printout of the same woman’s face—one a frontal view, the other two in profile. Nodules, ulcerations. A battlescape across her flesh.
“This is it,” I said. I held Brooke’s pictures up to the computer screen and toggled through the images. Though I couldn’t be sure, one seemed to fit.
“We have a match, I think,” I said. “Who is this? Dorothy Zhang?”
“It’s not her.”
“Then who is it?” Brooke didn’t answer and didn’t meet my eyes. “Where is she, Brooke?”
“I work in Santa Clara. That should tell you something.”
“Where exactly is she?”
Brooke looked back to me, then shook her head. “HIPAA.”
I was incredulous. HIPAA was the privacy law governing health care information. Generally, it made life hell for doctors trying to find out anything about any patient. HIPAA was supposed to give patients control over their medical information, but it’s become so burdensome, it’s begun to affect care. Good intentions paving the road to hell and all that. But HIPAA didn’t apply to public health investigations. Problem was, I wasn’t public health anymore.
“What’s this about, Brooke?”
“I am not your sidekick here. Not this time.”
“I’m not asking you to be my sidekick.”
“Right. ‘Find out if there are any cases, find out what you know about Dorothy Zhang,’” she was mimicking me. “I found you a case, Nate. She’s not Dorothy Zhang. But you’ll have to go through the proper channels to get more information on her.” What Brooke left unsaid was that there would be no proper channels open to me. Not to a guy without a job. Not to a guy with a hunch and a mission and little else.
“Just tell me where she is, Brooke. I need to make sure we’re not dealing with a cluster here.”
“Don’t lie to me. It’s because you think it might help you find out what happened to Paul.”
The band was staggering over to the stage, the drummer crawling behind his trap set with a pint glass in hand. I was silent.
Brooke leaned forward. Two feet between us, but she might as well have been shouting across a canyon. “I fell in love with you, Nate. I fell hard. I fell in love with the guy who I’d see two weekends a month, who I could talk for hours with on the telephone. The guy who I cried for hours over when he went to Angola. The guy who used to be fun, who used to be in love with me—”
“There’s more to it now. These people.”
“And what does that mean? So maybe we know where one of these people is, that’s it. And maybe she’s sick. That doesn’t make a cluster, Nate. It doesn’t make it anything more than normal, tragic life. A weird cancer that popped up in one case in California. Paul Murphy somehow found this person. We found her.”
I looked at the pages, looked back to Brooke. “Wh
ere is she?”
“This is not a cluster. Be realistic.” Brooke put her hand on my knee. “Something like this would rise to the surface if it was anything more than a sporadic case.”
“It’s not a reportable condition.” Some infectious diseases—meningitis, TB, rabies, syphilis, AIDS—must, by law, be reported to health departments. Facial tumors is not one of them.
“But it’s dramatic, Nate. Public health would know about something so dramatic. Your friend probably collected cases from all over the world. It was his pet proj—”
“Brooke, where is she?”
She leaned back abruptly, her hand sliding limply off my leg. The drummer had started to beat the skins. A bass guitar joined a few bars later.
“You’re making a choice, you know that.” I could hardly hear her over the music. “If you ask for this again, I’ll tell you. But after that, I will not help you, Nate. And I don’t want to see you again or hear from you. I’ll store your things if you want. But until this is resolved, I want you out of my life.”
Her hands came quickly to the side of my head, pulled it close to hers. Her words were urgent. “Nate, I’m asking you to let the police deal with this. Let public health deal with it. Ravi knows now, let him do it. Please. For me.” The music was picking up steam now. The guitar chimed in, broken chords from a musician too drunk to find his groove.
My hands went to Brooke’s; I laced my fingers in hers, held them. Then, gently, I asked, “Where is she?”
35
THE NEXT MORNING STARTED WITH the electric shriek of a cheap digital clock sitting on a cheap nightstand in the cheap motel in which I’d found refuge. Clouds hung low in the sky above the South Bay town of Milpitas. They would burn off by afternoon, the weather in this part of California in September being about as variable as the Earth rotating on its axis. What I wouldn’t give for a surprise hailstorm once in a while.
Then again, I guess I’d been hit by one last night in the coffee shop. Be careful what you wish for.
Brooke had given me the address of the house before which I now stood: a three-or four-bedroom with a stone skirt and beige vinyl siding. Sprinklers tittered over the tidy lawn and wet the fender of an older-model Mercedes sedan in the drive.
It was six-thirty a.m. Not wanting to lose any advantage, I hadn’t called ahead. I unsheathed my laptop, stuck it under my arm with the photos Brooke had given me, and walked to the house.
The curtains were drawn. I paused before ringing the bell, tried to set my priorities straight. This is important, I told myself. A possible health nightmare. A key to a family’s murder. Brooke is wrong. This is important.
My finger went to the bell. The door opened within seconds.
The crack between door and jamb revealed a girl, sixteen maybe. Her hair was wet and hung in long, dark tendrils.
I introduced myself. I asked, “This is the Yang residence, correct?”
Quietly, she said, “Yes.”
“Could I speak with Cynthia Yang? Is she your mother?”
A man shouted in the background, his voice loud and angry. The girl studied me for a moment, then slammed the door in my face.
Stunned, I stood there for a moment. I rang the bell again. And again.
The door opened a crack. An Asian man, no taller than the girl, now stood behind the door. His left hand rested on the jamb; I could not see his right.
“What do you want?”
I leaned back to show I meant no threat. “I’m Dr. Nathaniel McCormick. I work with the health department in Santa Clara.” I was doing my best not to lie, to avoid the phrase “work for.” “I need to speak to Cynthia Yang,” I said.
If he was surprised to see me, his face didn’t show it. “You can’t speak to her.”
“Are you her husband?”
“Yes.”
“I need to speak with her.”
“You cannot speak to her. Please now. Thank you.”
The door started to close. I put my free hand on the wood to stop it. Fear lanced across his face.
“Mr. Yang, I’m worried your wife may be very sick.”
“You go now.” He was almost pleading, pushing the door against my resistance. I stuck my foot at its base and fumbled through my jacket pocket, doing my best not to drop the damned computer.
“I’m with the Centers for Disease Control. The federal government.” I got hold of my old plastic badge and flashed it. “I’m a doctor. I work with the health department here.” I stood there, the invalid CDC ID dangling.
A year before, when I’d lost all my identification in the mayhem surrounding that Chimeragen thing, I was issued new papers, a new ID. When the old ones were discovered and returned to me, after the investigation, I had two sets. When I left CDC, I returned only the reissues. Lucky for me. Now I could commit a crime by impersonating a federal official.
“Mr. Yang, I really need to talk to your wife.”
I felt the pressure on the door ease. “She dead. My wife dead,” Yang said softly.
I lowered the badge. “I’m sorry.”
The door opened a bit further. Behind him, I could see the girl, standing stiff in the hallway. Her arms were crossed protectively over the chest of a younger boy who pressed against her. Their father looked back at them. Then he stepped outside.
In his right hand was a large kitchen knife.
“When did she die?” I asked. The two of us stood on the stoop, looking out over the waking neighborhood.
“Month ago.”
I handed him the pages from Brooke, the ones showing the disfigured Cynthia Yang. “This is her? Your wife?”
Yang stared at the printouts. “Yes.”
I opened the laptop, which came to life with the face of one of the women from Murph’s jump drive. Yang looked at the screen, nodded. “We try to get pictures back, but Dr. Wu he say they already with the government.”
I closed the laptop and took the pages back from Yang. “Dr. Wu was your primary care physician?”
“Yes.”
“He did the right thing. Why did you want the pictures back?”
Mr. Yang looked at the knife still in his hand. He said nothing.
“Did you ever see him again?” I asked.
“We use Chinese medicine, not Dr. Wu.”
“What were you told was wrong with her?”
Yang looked at me, not understanding.
“What was her sickness?”
“Cancer.”
“How was it diagnosed? Did anyone take tissue? Cut out a little piece of Cynthia’s skin?”
Yang shook his head.
“Where were the tumors located? On her face only? Or were they elsewhere on her body?”
“Face only.”
“Do you know if your wife had any exposure—did she touch or come in contact with—any chemicals?”
Yang didn’t answer.
“Did she have contact with anyone who was sick?”
He stared at me.
“When did her cancer start?”
“She in much pain, Doctor. She in so much pain.”
He bent his head, and I knew the interview was over. I’d gotten what I would get. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, then stepped to the sidewalk.
After a few paces, I turned back. One last question I needed to ask, but the words never got out of my throat. I could see the curtains drawn back slightly from a first-floor window, the teenage girl and her younger brother watching, their eyes wide with fear.
36
“YUCK! YUCK, YUCK, YUCK.”
Ravinder Singh’s voice nearly split the speaker on the cell. I braked hard to avoid smashing into a car in front of me and becoming another reason for delay in the San Jose morning rush.
“You got the files,” I said.
“You are a sick, sick man, McCormick. You didn’t get my e-mail?”
“Ravi, everything from you goes into the junk folder.”
“Don’t tell me I’m in there with the penis-enlargement
spam…”
“Penis enlargement doesn’t go in my junk folder.” Enough of the small talk. “You got the pics…”
“Disgusting, man. I’ve showered four times in the last thirty minutes.”
“Maybe that will help with the smell.” Oh, boy, will the fun never end? “How’s it going with diagnosis?”
“I put Monica on it. She loves skin.”
“My kind of girl.”
“My kind, too. Thirty-two, single, absolutely no interest in me. Anyway, we’ve narrowed it to a sarcoma or carcinoma.”
“Cancer. Wow. I figured that out by myself.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers. Get me some tissue, I’ll get you a diagnosis.”
Tissue would be stellar, I thought. “Did you notice the distribution? Along the NLF, around the eyes?”
“No, but I’ll put Monica on it. Anyway,” Ravi said, “we got nothing on cases here. If the local health departments saw anything like this, they haven’t punted it up to state. There’s a chance they’re just sitting on something, shelving it. Monica and I are going to call around, see if anything surfaces. But I got to tell you, man, this doesn’t look like a communicable disease. The chances of it being reported to us are slim.”
Ravi had hit on one of the problems here. Investigative public health is most concerned about infection—from HIV to TB to hepatitis to salmonella. What we were dealing with here really didn’t look infectious. It was entirely possible that a dozen cases could have popped up over the Bay Area, and unless they came to the same hospital, the same service, the same doctor, it probably wouldn’t cause alarm. Rare, one-off cancers find their way into journals as case reports; they don’t find their way to public health.
“Ravi,” I said slowly, “it’s here. One case at least.”
“You serious?”
“Milpitas, just north of San Jose. Died a month ago.”
Ravi was quiet, thinking. “So we got one here. Doesn’t mean it’s a cluster.”
“No. I got a feeling, though.”
Flawless Page 12
