by Joe McKinney
Some of the faces were streaked with dark rivulets of dried blood. The hemorrhaging was bad to look at, and it never got easier to look at, despite being so common. When the quarantine was still something new, and there was still room for the sick in the hospitals, you’d walk down the halls, pushing your way through crowds, stepping over the sick who dying on their backs in the hallway because there weren’t enough beds, and all you heard was hacking coughs. You’d hear people bringing stuff up, but it wasn’t phlegm. It was blood. By the time they were brought to the morgues, their clothes would be spattered with it. Blood would be coming out their noses, out their mouths. Sometimes even their ears.
You’d also see the cyanosis. That was the worst. Blue splotching all over their faces because their lungs couldn’t put any oxygen into their blood. Most of the time, the blue was just around their mouths and ears, like they’d just stuck their faces into a blueberry pie. But other times it was everywhere and they’d turn so dark blue you couldn’t tell who was white, or black, or Hispanic. They were all just blue, and dead.
We went around asking for Dr. Manuel Herrera, the guy whose signature was stamped on the autopsy tag. We found him out on the floor, a team of two assistants following him down the rows of corpses.
He’d stop at a body, pull the sheet back, if there was one, glance at the body for a few seconds, then say something over his shoulder to the assistants, who jotted it down on their clipboards. Then he’d put the sheet back and go on to the next one.
Their MOPP suits were just like ours, only theirs had Bexar County Medical Examiner stenciled on the back and not SAPD Homicide.
“Did you do an autopsy on this woman?” I said, holding up Jane Doe’s picture so he could see it.
Through the faceplate of his suit I saw him squint at the picture. His eyes blinked in recognition. Then they flew open wide.
“What - ” he said, stammering, words failing him.
“You know her?” I asked.
“That’s Dr. Emma Bradley,” he said. He blinked at me, then looked at Chunk. His face was an open-ended question mark. What the hell is going on here? “She’s one of the doctors with the World Health Organization.”
A doctor, I thought. Perfect.
“She showed up on a truck at the Scar a few hours ago,” I explained. “She was wearing a gray toe tag with your stamp on it.”
“Me?” He cocked his head to one side inside the suit, like a dog that’s just been asked to do an algebra equation. Then he caught on. “Oh.”
“I take it you didn’t do an autopsy on her?”
“No.”
“Any idea how your stamp got on her tag?”
“Detective,” he said, and I could see his shoulders slump inside his suit, “I’ve got three or four thousand of those things lying around.”
“You just leave them lying around?” Chunk asked. “Isn’t there some kind of document control policy around here?”
Chunk’s voice is like a deep bass drum, and it startled Herrera a little. Chunk had that effect on a lot of men.
“They’re in my office,” Herrera said.
“And you don’t keep track of them?”
“My staff needs access to them. They handle my paperwork for me. Supply requisitions, memos, that kind of thing.”
“So how many people on your staff?” I asked.
“Six.”
“We’ll need their names.”
“Sure,” he said.
I changed tack on him. “So how did you know Dr. Bradley?”
Some air seemed to go out of the man, like he was immensely tired but only just realizing it. “She was well-liked around here,” he said. “A bright young woman.”
Chunk and I traded glances. She worked out of here and was well-liked. Why was it, I wondered, that well-liked people always seemed to end up dead?
“That’s all you can tell us?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve kind of blindsided me with this.”
“Anything would help, Doctor.”
He shook his head inside his suit. “How did she die? Can you tell me that?” His tone wasn’t demanding. It was gentle, respectful.
“She was murdered.”
“Murdered?”
I nodded.
“But that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, who would want to hurt Emma. She was the friendliest person in this hellhole. Everybody liked her.”
“Apparently not everybody,” I said.
“What about boyfriends?” Chunk asked. “She date anybody around here?”
He shook his head again. “I wouldn’t know. I mean, I’ve seen her around at the lounge of course, drinking with the others, but...No, I’ve never seen her with anybody. She had an effervescent personality, you know? The kind of woman who makes everybody in the room smile when she walks in.” He paused for a moment, still trying to take it all. Then he said, “My God, I can’t believe somebody would want to kill her. That just doesn’t make sense.”
“You said she was with the World Health Organization? Is that who you mean when you say the others?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Their office is through that door over there,” he said, and pointed to a green metal door on the opposite side of the morgue. “You’ll have to go out the south exit and then you’ll see their trailers right up against the building.”
“We’ll come back for that list of your staff,” I said.
“I’ll be here,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders at the bodies out on the floor.
“We’ll probably have some more questions too.”
“Like I said, Detective, I’ll be here.”
Chapter 3
The World Health Organization’s office was a mobile home they’d parked about fifty feet from the rear of the morgue’s main building. A couple of used U-haul vans were parked next to it. They’d been painted white and decorated with the WHO logo on the side panels, but you could still tell they were just old battered moving vans under the paint.
After we went through the decon showers, we stripped out of our MOPP suits and donned regular gauze facemasks.
Inside the trailer, the first thing I noticed was how packed-in everything was. They’d stuffed computers, laboratory glassware, office supplies, field gear, laptops, cameras, radios, TV screens, and machines doing God knows what into every available cubby hole and overhead bin in the place. The staff moved through the clutter like bees in a hive.
We stood there for half a minute before anybody noticed us. But finally, a skinny, dopey-looking guy about my age, maybe thirty, thirty-one, came over with a questioning, but friendly enough expression on his face. He walked like a duck, feet pointing outwards, and he had a black eye. The left one. It looked like somebody had hit him pretty hard, and recently.
His eyes were smiling at first. Then he saw our SAPD badges, and he stopped smiling.
“Yes?” he said, a noticeable chill entering his voice.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked.
“Dr. Madeline Laurent. Back there.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.
It looked like he didn’t want to get out of the way though, like maybe he wanted to challenge why we were there, or maybe just tell us to go spend some quality time with our thumbs up our butts. But it also looked like he didn’t want to get into it with Chunk.
What the hell’s wrong with this guy? I thought.
Then, suddenly, he said, “Is there something I can help you with?”
“We’ll want to speak to the entire staff,” I told him. “Later. But now we want to talk to Dr. Laurent. Do you mind?”
I looked him square in the eye, and he looked away almost immediately.
He stepped aside.
Chunk and I followed a short hallway back to Dr. Madeline Laurent’s office. She was there, her back to us, hunched over a laptop computer that was running some kind of bar graph program. The bars flickered up and down busily, and she watched them intently, like they were telling her someth
ing in plain English.
I was shocked at how fat she was. And short, too. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she probably weighed more than Chunk. She was practically ball-shaped.
Chunk whistled quietly.
“You still got that magazine?” he asked. “How to feel good about yourself naked?”
I gave him a shut up elbow to the ribs.
Dr. Laurent didn’t notice us, though we were standing right behind her. She was lost in thought. I watched her make a few keystrokes. Watched the bars flicker. Watched her shake her head. She typed some more, waited, watched, then shook her head again.
“Dr. Laurent?” I said to her back.
Her fat hand slapped onto the desk angrily. Even though her back was to us, and a mask covered her face, I could tell the kind of look she was wearing. Why the hell are you bothering me?
She turned around. Looked at both of us in turn. She saw our badges, and her eyes narrowed.
What is it with these people? I thought. What’d we do to piss them off?
“What do you want?”
Right away I heard the French accent. Very thick.
“I’m Detective Lily Harris,” I said. “This is my partner, Reginald Dempsey. We’re with the San Antonio Police Department’s Homicide Unit.”
Her eyes remained fierce little slits. She said nothing. Crossed her arms impatiently.
“Do you know this woman, doctor?” I handed her Emma Bradley’s picture, a three by five, taken postmortem. The eight by ten we’d had earlier we had to trash when we went through decon.
She snatched the picture from me. Looked at it. Her eyes went wide.
“What is going on here?” she asked. “Yes, I know this woman. Of course I know her.”
I told her about finding the body at the Scar. I saw shock, and then denial, cloud her face. Then anger.
“I suppose you have not yet caught the man who hurt her?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “We’ve only just now found out who she is.”
“Will you look for him?” The tone in her voice made it sound like she didn’t believe we would.
“Now that we know who she is, yes we will look for the person responsible,” I said to her, nice and polite. Getting into a pissing contest with her wasn’t going to solve anything. “You asked if we had caught the man who did this to her. Do you have any idea who might have wanted to hurt her?”
She gave us an indignant laugh. More of a snort. “I have an idea, yes.”
“Can you give us a name?”
“Of course I can. He’s one of your officers.”
“One of ours?” Chunk and I traded looks. No way.
She snorted again, evidently looking at a picture of the man in her mind. “His name is Kenneth Wade. He is assigned to our so called Protection Detail.”
She smirked at us both. “What is the expression you Americans use? He is like the fox watching the chicken house?”
“The hen house,” I said under my breath. I knew Kenneth Wade. He was a patrolman, a member of the VIP and Executive Protection Detail before the outbreak changed everything. The name still surprised me though.
“What makes you think Officer Wade’s got something to do with this?” Chunk asked.
Laurent glared at him. Her contempt was plain to see. Chunk used to intimidate just about everyone he met when he was on-duty, but Laurent wasn’t impressed at all.
“That’s a serious accusation, Dr. Laurent,” I said. “Can you tell me why you think he has something to do with Dr. Bradley’s murder?”
She uncrossed her arms and put her palms flat down on the desk. It was a tired gesture, the movements of a woman who has worked for far too long on a knot that just gets more intricately tied for all her efforts to untangle it.
But for all her tiredness, I couldn’t help but notice the anger. It was still there, like the molten rock under the thin black skin that hardens on lava flows.
“There was an incident last night.”
“What kind of incident?”
“There was a fight. Here in the staff lounge. Officer Wade and several members of my staff were at a party last night. There was much drinking. Your Officer Wade, he became very intoxicated.”
“Did Officer Wade and Dr. Bradley see each other off-duty?” I asked.
“I do not understand your question.”
“Were they an item? Romantically involved?”
“I should say not,” Laurent said. “I do not make it a point to intrude upon the personal affairs of my staff, but I do not believe that Dr. Emma Bradley would become romantically involved with a man such as Officer Wade. The idea is, well...” She waved her hand in the air like she meant to chase the image out of her head, like it was a fly buzzing her food.
“What started the fight?” Chunk asked.
Again the glare. Okay, I thought, rude to me, but hateful to him. Maybe she just doesn’t like men. Or maybe it’s just male police officers. Or maybe it’s giant male black police officers.
Chunk picked up on it at the same time I did and backed off. I had always respected him for the professional detachment that allowed him to do that. As a woman trying to do what most people considered to be a man’s job, I had some idea how he felt, how hard it was to hold one’s tongue when somebody bad mouthed you for how you looked before they even bothered to decide if you knew what you were talking about.
“Your Officer Wade apparently thinks himself quite the lady’s man,” Laurent said derisively. “I was not present last night, but I have heard that he has what my mother used to refer to as Roman hands. I can only imagine that he tried to impose himself upon her and Dr. Bradley objected to the behavior. Another doctor stepped in and asked Officer Wade to leave and Officer Wade brutalized him.”
Dopey guy, I thought. The one with the black eye.
“This doctor,” I asked her, “he’s up front?”
She nodded. “Dr. John Myers. A fine researcher.”
“The one with the black eye?”
She nodded again.
“We’d like to speak with him, too.”
“Of course.”
“Did you tell Officer Wade’s supervisor about the incident?” I asked. “About the fight?”
Her eyes looked like polished obsidian, hard and black and intense. There was a hatred there that went beyond the bad news we’d brought her and the resentment she clearly felt for Officer Wade.
She fixed her hard gaze on me and said, “I called Lt. Treanor and voiced my displeasure. He promised to address the situation.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I am not. He sent the man to us again this morning. When Officer Wade arrived here, he offered no apologies. He simply marched in here, helped Dr. Bradley carry her field gear to one of the vans, and then drove her out to collect specimens. That was the last I saw of either of them. Now you come, telling me this, and you ask me who I think would want to hurt her.”
Chunk and I traded glances. Doesn’t sound like Dr. Bradley was too pissed about his Roman hands if she went out alone with him.
“She went out with Officer Wade this morning? After the fight last night?”
Laurent leaned back in her chair and it creaked painfully under her weight. She regarded me for a moment before she answered.
“As I say, detective. I do not intrude upon the personal affairs of my staff. I look only at their abilities in the field and in the laboratory. Dr. Bradley has been on my staff since she graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School. She has helped me research the influenza virus in Rwanda and Thailand and China, and I have come to rely upon her as a competent professional in the field and a careful researcher. I have voiced to her in the past my concerns about her extracurricular activities, but she is young and pretty. Men like her, and I think she likes the attention. But as I say, it never interferes with her work.”
The present tense, I noticed. It still doesn’t seem real for her that Bradley’s dead.
“Whe
n did you see them last?” I asked. “What time this morning?”
“Perhaps six o’clock. Sometime around dawn. Perhaps a few minutes after that.”
“Where were they going?”
“She did not say exactly. Though she has been doing much research around the Produce Terminal area east of here.”
Not good, I thought. The five square miles that made up the Produce Terminal area were considered a no-fly zone by both the SAPD and the Metropolitan Health District. The outbreak started there, and from what I knew at the time, they still hadn’t removed all the corpses from the street. In the language of the plague city, the Produce Terminal area was ground zero, or the GZ.
“What was she doing in the GZ?” I asked.
“Our work is on genetic typing. We are trying to identify the most virulent genes in the H2N2 virus, modify them, and hopefully develop a live virus vaccine. Dr. Bradley’s work is part of that effort.”
“You said she took one of your vans this morning?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you have any idea where that van is now? Are they equipped with GPS trackers maybe?”
Laurent shook her head no. “It is not here. That’s all I know.”
Okay, I told myself, dead girl, missing van, and a cop is my best suspect. What a miserable day this is turning out to be.
“I think we ought to speak to Dr. Myers next,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call him back.”
Chapter 4
Dr. John Myers was so shocked at the news of Emma Bradley’s death that I was worried he was going to have an asthma attack.
We had taken him into a little office just barely big enough for the three of us to sit down. It was hot, and the little window-mounted AC unit made a lot of noise without giving off much in the way of cool air.
He had demanded to know what we wanted and refused to sit down, but after we told him about Emma Bradley, he started to sway on his feet, like the heat was already too much for him.
