by Joe McKinney
At that moment I thought of the deer I wrote about in my journal, and the rather cryptic message that death is not all there is, and I remembered what it was that I had to tell Connie.
It is not so horrible that we die. The horror is when we allow the fact that we must die to rob our lives of meaning, for they do mean something.
Even in the quietest moments, they mean something.
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* * *
Chapter 9
I got to the Scar early the next morning, but Chunk was already there. He was on the phone, muttering and grunting.
When he hung up, he wasn't happy.
“What's wrong?”
“I spoke with the sergeant in charge of security at Arsenal Station. Kenneth Wade's truck hasn't moved since yesterday when he arrived to escort Dr. Bradley.”
“Oh.” That is bad news. “What about Treanor?”
“That was him on the phone.”
“And?”
“Nothing. He hasn't heard from Wade, either.”
That really was bad news. Chunk had the same sinking feeling in his gut that I had in mine, I could tell. We'd investigated a cop once before, a 20 year veteran who got drunk and ran over his neighbor with his truck, then dumped the truck and tried to call it in stolen. Making that arrest had been one the worst assignments of our careers, almost as bad as the Scar.
“So, what do you want to do now?” I asked him.
“Let's go to Arsenal first. Then we can go into the GZ and try to find that van.”
“Okay,” I agreed. “But today, you drive.”
On the way to Arsenal Station, Chunk had to steer with one hand and wrestle with his surgical mask with the other. They never made the tie straps long enough for big guys like Chunk, and the thing was always threatening to pop off his face.
Finally, when he got it to where it was comfortable, he said, “Okay, Kenneth Wade.”
It was the opening move in an old game between us, but one that we hadn't gotten to play much since we started working at the Scar.
“Kenneth Wade and Emma Bradley are lovers,” I said. “But they have to keep it under wraps.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it's bad for her at work if their relationship gets out. Them being lovers would explain why Bradley called and requested him yesterday morning. Even after the fight.”
“Maybe. But why the fight?”
“Wade doesn't care if the others know. He's drunk. He's horny. He wants to go back to her place for some fun.”
“Why wouldn't she go? Because she's not happy with the way she looks naked?”
“Ha ha. She doesn't go because she thinks that's going to give them away.”
“So after the fight, Wade storms out.”
“Yeah. When she's had some time to think it over, Bradley calls him. Says, let's make up.”
“So they have sex?”
“Chunk, you've got a one track mind, you know that?”
He laughed. “I'm being serious, Lily. They've got to have sex. Or at least be headed in that general direction.”
“Why?”
“The dirt on the bottom of her feet, remember? How else is she gonna get dirt on the bottom of her feet unless she's naked?”
I frowned. That was a hard one.
“Maybe,” I concede. “But what's she doing naked in the middle of ground zero? She would know better than that.”
It was Chunk's turn to frown. “Danger sex?” he offered.
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, so they had sex in the WHO van they took out.”
“How? There's no room in those things.”
“Oh come on,” he said. “You're a married woman. You ought to know there's more than one way to have sex.”
I punched him in the shoulder, hard. “That still doesn't explain the dirt. Somehow, she's got to be naked outside the van.”
“Hmmm.” Chunk wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, deep in thought. It looked like a toy in his huge hands.
“Okay,” I said, sensing we'd stalled out. “Doctor John Myers.”
“Mr. Lonelyhearts?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Chunk said. “Same set up. Wade and Bradley are getting it on. Only, they don't want the rest of the WHO staff to know.”
“Why?”
“Because if hippo woman finds out, she'll throw her off the team. Or, if she doesn't throw her off the team, she'll demand that Wade be sent to another station for his duty assignment. Either way, she'll bust them up for the good of her whole staff.”
“Wait a minute, Hippo woman?”
“Yeah, you know. Dr. Laurent.”
“I know who you mean. I just can't believe you called her hippo woman. Now I'm not going to be able to get that out of my head.” It was a spot on description of her.
He laughed, but it didn't last long. We were entering the hard scrabble parts of town. We passed a long line of people waiting in line for their weekly rations of groceries. Two women started to fight. No one jumped in to break it up, and when one of the women got thrown out of line, no one bothered to listen to her pleas for help.
Chunk let out a heavy sigh, more out of frustration than tiredness, even though he was feeling the strain of the long hours same as me.
“Myers,” he said, “has some small idea that maybe something's going on between Wade and Bradley. He wants Bradley for himself, though, so he provokes Wade into a fight.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he's drunk enough he thinks he can win,” Chunk said.
“I doubt it.”
“Maybe he thinks it will earn him sympathy from Bradley when he gets his ass kicked.”
“Pathetic, but maybe. They did walk back to their trailers together.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So they get back to the trailers. He makes a move. Gets turned down.”
“Okay, that works. So the next morning he sees Wade coming to pick up Bradley?”
“And he gets pissed. He follows them out to the GZ.”
“Doesn't work,” I said. “He's got an alibi till ten thirty, eleven o'clock.”
“He does it before they leave,” Chunk counters.
“To do that, he has to go past the security desk, get rid of the van, and then come back, on foot, to put Bradley's body onto Hernandez’ truck. And we haven't accounted for Wade's body. Did he dump it somewhere? Did he put it on another truck that somehow slipped through at the Scar? And you've still got to put dirt on Bradley's feet.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and sighed again. “What about Isaac Hernandez?”
“Opportunity, but no motive,” I pointed out.
“What about revenge?”
“For what?”
“His family. He's lost most of them to H2N2. Maybe he's out in the GZ, sees the WHO van, and loses it. He overpowers Wade and kills Bradley.”
I looked at Chunk seriously for a moment. It occurred to me that only someone who has actually lost a family member in this damn quarantine can understand the frustration that would drive somebody to commit a completely illogical crime like the one he described.
“What's wrong?” he said, looking at me curiously. It seemed to me a very long time since I'd seen his face, that bent-toothed grin of his. By that August, all you ever saw of anybody were their eyes above that damn white surgical mask.
“Nothing,” I said after an uncomfortably long pause. “Just thinking.”
I watched more angry faces staring at us from the curbs and the porches we passed, and said, “So he blames the WHO? Why?”
“A convenient scapegoat maybe. Or maybe he sees them as a symbol of the medical establishment that failed his family.”
“Maybe.”
“You like that one?”
I looked at him and smiled. My head started to clear a little, at least after I'd stopped thinking about his grandmother.
“Two problems,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”
“He kills Wade and Bradley. Why only take Bradley's body back?”
“Hmmm,” he said, thumping his thumbs on the steering wheel. “What's the second problem?”
“He kills Wade. Bradley, maybe. But Wade? I don't think so. If Wade managed to knock you on your butt, I doubt seriously an over the hill, beer-bellied slouch like Hernandez could have gotten the better of him.”
“Maybe,” Chunk said, except there was a serious, strained edge in his voice when he said it. “Still, don't ever sell a man short who's got that kind of anger in him. After all, it's not the size of the dog in the fight—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. It's the size of the fight in the dog.”
When we got to the Arsenal Station Morgue we started filling in some holes.
We checked with the security detail and found that Kenneth Wade entered the lot at five-fifteen. Under the ‘reason for access’ section of the log the gate officer had written ‘escort research personnel.’ Dr. Bradley checked out a WHO van at five-twenty. She didn't list a destination, which according to the security guys wasn't all that uncommon. The security detail checked them out of the gates at five-forty. Their destination was listed only as ‘field research.'
“Twenty minutes between the time they check out a van and the time they leave,” Chunk observed. “Not enough time to have sex.”
“That depends on who you ask?” I said.
Chunk chose to ignore that one.
“Well,” he said, “at least we know that whatever happened, happened while they were out.”
“That's true,” I agreed. “But we still have to explain how Emma Bradley got naked in the GZ and then made her way back here.”
Chunk flipped the security log forward to the next page.
“Well, it doesn't look like she came in on Hernandez’ truck. The gate officer shows him coming in with an empty truck at ten after ten. Leaving with a full truck at eleven-twenty.”
“What about his first run of the day? We had him at the Scar the first time at ten after eight.”
He flipped through the log, stopped on a page towards the front, and nodded. “In at six fifty-eight, out at seven-forty. That fits.”
“Okay,” I said. “So whatever happened to her happened between five-forty at the earliest, and eleven-twenty at the latest?”
“Right.”
“And Myers has an alibi for that time?”
“Right.”
“And it doesn't look like Hernandez could have done it?”
“Right.”
“So that leaves Wade?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head sadly. “While we're here, you want to check on the autopsy?”
“Sure,” he said.
“That's not exactly what we were expecting to hear,” I told Dr. Herrera.
He looked at us curiously. He'd thrown us a curve, and he apparently didn't understand why. A bullet hole in the chest must have seemed perfectly obvious to him.
“You said you found pieces of fabric inside the wound?” I asked.
“That's right.”
Chunk grumbled under his breath. Herrera looked confused.
“We had sort of assumed that she was naked when she was killed,” I explained.
His eyebrows arched expressively. “Why in the world would you think that?”
I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck. I was beginning to feel just as much the amateur as Lt. Treanor believed me to be.
“We thought there was a possible sexual relationship between Dr. Bradley and Officer Wade of the SAPD Research Protection Detail.”
He shrugged. “Well, that's possible, I guess. It's also possible that she was shot with his gun.”
“How's that?”
“The bullet passed cleanly between the ribs. No real deformation upon entry. I was able to identify it pretty easily as a Speer Gold Dot .40 S&W, one hundred and fifty-five grain hollow point. That's an expensive bullet. SAPD and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office are the only ones inside the wall who still have access to them.”
“Great,” said Chunk. “Thanks, Doc.”
“Sure,” said Herrera, but without a trace of irony. “No problem.”
“So somebody shot her while she was wearing her spacesuit, and then stripped her?”
“Looks that way,” Chunk said.
“Why?”
“Who knows,” he said. “Doc didn't find any bruising around the vagina. And there was no semen in her, so I guess we can rule out any freaky postmortem stuff.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah.”
Chunk drove us across the Arsenal Station parking lot and through the security desk. Two baby-faced patrolmen with machine guns waved us through.
“But why strip her? Why bring her back here? Why not just dispose of the body out in the field somewhere?”
“I don't know,” Chunk said. “Maybe it's somebody who works out of Arsenal and can't be away too long, somebody whose absence would be noticed. They stripped her so that she could blend in with all the other bodies coming out of there.”
“That would make sense,” I agreed. “After all, the killer would have to have access to toe tags, and only authorized people are allowed on the floor.”
“True,” he said. “It narrows the field at least.”
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* * *
Chapter 10
Ground zero, the GZ.
All the homes in the GZ were vacant and scrawled with graffiti. The yards were overgrown with barnyard grass and sunflowers. Hardly a window anywhere was left unbroken. Morning sunlight lanced through the oak trees. Startled pigeons erupted from a hole in a nearby roof.
Those streets felt haunted. Death seemed to leer out at us from the shadows.
Chunk and I felt like infidels, drifting through the quiet streets where some terrible, flesh-consuming religion was born.
The Metropolitan Health District required all personnel entering the GZ to wear protective clothing. Chunk and I wore gray hooded plastic jumpsuits that crinkled when we walked and trapped heat close to our bodies. Even before we stepped out of the car, sweat soaked through our clothes. Our breathing sounded labored and difficult through the gas masks, even though it really wasn't. I learned to get used to the gas mask early on.
Outside the car, the MHD had posted orange warning handbills on every light pole and abandoned car in sight, many of the bills so sun-bleached they appeared almost white.
We had no plan other than to systematically explore every street in the five square miles around the Produce Terminal.
It turned out to be a more difficult task than we'd thought. Long ago, perhaps in the twenties or thirties, judging by some of the houses we saw, the area around the Produce Terminal had been quite nice. We saw quite a few large, two story Queen Anne-style homes that had fallen into tragic disrepair and had since been carved up into multiple apartments, and an equal number of one story bungalow and Craftsman-style homes. And in between those—stuffed in, really—were an unbelievably large number of leaning shacks and add on sheds that made the place look like a hive. Overgrown alleys crisscrossed every street, and in some places the vegetation was so thick you could barely tell there were homes hiding behind it.
We went slowly, and wound through street after street, looking for anything unusual.
“Look at that,” Chunk said, and pointed at a street sign swaying gently in the breeze from an overhead stop light cable.
The fifteen hundred block of Matamoras Street, I read, and a knot formed in my throat.
That was the real GZ, the very street upon which H2N2 found its first victims. Somewhere down that street was the home of Mrs. Villarreal, whose chickens were San Antonio's equivalent of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
Chunk slowed the car to a crawl and we turned down Matamoras, both of us tense, alert, and more than a little frightened.
Suddenly Chunk stopped the c
ar—harder than he needed to. I almost went into the windshield.
I lurched forward, my hand on the dashboard to stop my momentum.
“You see that?” he asked.
Ahead of us, parked in the grass in the shade of two large oak trees, was an old EMS wagon. The Fire Department's decals had been peeled off, though their outline remained. Converted, by the looks of it.
“Do you think it might have been left here?” I asked him. It wouldn't be the only costly piece of City equipment abandoned by the roadside in the early days of the war against H2N2.
“I don't think so,” he said. “Let's go take a look.”
We parked and approached the ambulance on foot. Chunk checked the cab while I checked the side and back doors.
“Locked,” he said.
“Yeah. Back here, too.”
“Can you see in the windows?”
I tried to look through the vent windows in the back door, but my gas mask made it hard for me to get a good angle.
Chunk was trying to look through the side windows. I turned around to tell him I couldn't see anything, when I saw a man walking towards us from between two houses. He was dressed in the same kind of suit and mask we wore, though his fit better. He carried two dead chickens in his left hand, holding the dead birds by the feet. There was a pistol in a clamshell holster on his right hip.
“Chunk.”
Chunk turned to me, saw me looking somewhere else, and followed my gaze to the man.
Neither of us had our weapons. They were secured in the trunk.
The man saw us and stopped. We looked at each other for a moment before he held up the chickens and motioned for us to step away from the ambulance.
We both stepped back toward our car.
When we were far enough back, the man went to the ambulance, removed two red biohazard bags from a side compartment, and dropped a dead chicken into each bag. Once they were secured, he unlocked the side door, stepped inside, and disappeared for a moment.
Chunk and I glanced at each other. What in the hell's he doing?
Chunk shrugged.
The man was inside the ambulance for almost a minute. When he finally came out, he rinsed his gloved hands in blue disinfectant liquid he poured from a cooler on the side of the ambulance, shook off the excess, and then approached us.
