Epidemic of the Living Dead

by John Russo

  It occurred to Dr. Traeger, with a degree of wistfulness, that if her own life had followed the pattern that used to be considered normal for any young woman, she would not have waited till she was forty-three to get married, and would not have wed a man so much older. She would likely have been in her mid-twenties when she gave birth to her first child. And if that had happened, she would have had a biological daughter who by now would have been close to Kelly Ann’s age—instead of a girl who was not biologically her own and seemed to hate her.

  Kelly Ann put her tray on the bedside table and said, “Excuse me, I have to pee.”

  Then, as she tried to get up, her left foot caught in the thin white blanket, and she almost fell back onto the bed, but Dr. Traeger caught her. For a moment, they were so close their faces were only inches apart, and Dr. Traeger couldn’t help herself—she kissed Kelly Ann lightly on her cheek. Kelly Ann pulled away, regained her footing, and stared at Dr. Traeger, who was already reproaching herself for her impulsive act.

  “I was raped by a prison guard the first time I got arrested for prostitution,” Kelly Ann said. “I don’t want that to happen again anywhere, even here. I’d much rather be dead.”

  She turned away and went into the bathroom, and Dr. Traeger crept out of the room, ashamed that she had momentarily broken the boundary between patient and scientist and that it had been mistaken for a sexual advance, rather than a motherly impulse. She reminded herself of how wicked Kelly Ann used to be and perhaps could be again, under the right circumstances. Keeping herself mindful of this would help her to rein in her feelings. She knew that she must not feel any unusual warmth for this killer or ex-killer, however one wanted to look at it, because in the end it must come to nothing.

  CHAPTER 28

  Tricia’s father was going over some of his clients’ insurance documents when she came into his office at around midnight. “What are you doing up, honey?” he asked. “Are you thirsty? Want a glass of milk to make you sleep?”

  She closed his office door and bolted it, then gave him one of her most angelic smiles. Smiling back at her, he said, “What’s up, Tricia? Why lock my door? You got a secret to tell me?”

  “I don’t want to leave Chapel Grove, Daddy. And you’re right, I have a secret reason. If you close your eyes, I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

  “But you’ll get used to a new place. You’ll learn to love Miami. Don’t you want to be closer to your grandmother?”

  “Close your eyes, Daddy, and I’ll whisper my secret.”

  He shrugged, then smiled again, closing his eyes and leaning his right ear toward her.

  She eased his pistol out from under her nightgown and placed it against his temple.

  His eyes came open when he felt the cold barrel—but before he could do anything, she pulled the trigger. It was only a little. 22 and it didn’t make a whole lot of noise. But the impact jerked him sideways and he slumped over.

  She looked around, listening, in case her mother had been jarred awake. She heard nothing, not even cries from her baby brother. Hopefully, she would be able to tend to him before she went back to bed.

  She used the edge of her nightgown to wipe her prints from her father’s pistol, then pressed it into his right hand and let it drop from his limp fingers onto the floor.

  She slid open the top middle drawer of his desk and put the insurance documents he had been examining back in there. She was proud she had thought of it. If he were intending to kill himself, he wouldn’t be looking over stuff like that, and the police would have probably tumbled to such a mistake.

  The house was still nice and quiet. Good. She had time to creep into the nursery and smother her baby brother with a pillow. If she were lucky, the police would either think that her father killed himself because of grief over finding his treasured little son dead, or that he might have killed Emilio, before shooting himself in the head.

  CHAPTER 29

  Detective Bill Curtis had to choke back tears, looking down at the lifeless little baby in his crib. Nobody should have to see a thing like that, he thought, least of all a parent. Hilda Lopez was in the living room, sobbing her heart out. Poor little Emilio. Only seven months old, and he would never get to be a toddler, a preteen, or a teenager. He was survived by his mother and his sister, but not his father. Umberto had taken his own life while his wife and daughter slept.

  Bill had to wonder, Did he do it after finding his baby boy dead? Or did he do it because he was in some way responsible for his child’s death?

  He realized how lucky he and Lauren were that their own child had made it through the perils of infancy. He remembered how they had so many times stood lovingly arm in arm over Jodie in her crib, after they brought her home from the hospital.

  Choking back sobs, Hilda Lopez followed Bill from the nursery across the hall into Umberto’s little home office. It contained a desk, a chair, a computer, some bookshelves, and not much else. Umberto had been Bill’s insurance agent, a one-man operation. Bill and Lauren had bought auto and homeowner’s insurance through him because he had been a member of Bill’s American Legion post and had made a sales pitch at one of the monthly meetings.

  Umberto was slumped in the chair behind his small desk, his right arm dangling down, a gun lying on the dark brown carpet, almost directly under his fingertips. There was a small bloody hole in his right temple. Bill felt his neck for a pulse, not expecting to find one, and was surprised when he did. It was so faint that he had to check two or three times—but for sure he felt it, it was not his imagination. “He’s alive!” he urgently told Hilda.

  She said, “Thank God!”

  “Wait in the kitchen. This office is too small for the ambulance guys to do their job.”

  She reached out and touched Umberto on his forehead, where there was a sheen of sweat, then she backed out of the room. Bill radioed for an ambulance. Then he took latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on so he could pick the gun up and examine it. Just as he stooped down, Pete Danko peeked in. “He’s clinging to life, still breathing,” Bill said. “It looks like he may have found the baby dead, and couldn’t take it.”

  “Be careful not to disturb anything.”

  “I know how to handle a death scene, Pete.”

  Pete shot Bill a sharp look, and Bill figured a scolding might come later, back at the station.

  “You stay in the living room and wait for the EMS and the coroner,” Pete ordered. “I’ll question Mrs. Lopez.”

  “Should I collect the gun and bag it?”

  “No, I’ll do it. Leave me alone with Mrs. Lopez, in the kitchen. Who else is in the house?”

  “She said her daughter Tricia is in her bedroom. She must’ve slept through it all.”

  “Well, get her up. I’ll talk to her after I finish with her mother.”

  As usual, he was taking charge as if he had to or Bill might screw it up. Bill resented being treated like a rookie. He resolved to have a talk with Pete at the station as soon as he could. He was tired putting up with his crap.

  There was a room with the door closed down the hall from the nursery, which he assumed to be Tricia’s bedroom, so he tapped lightly on the door. Nobody answered, so he tapped again. Then he heard a young girl’s voice, muffled by sleepiness. “Mom, leave me alone, I don’t want any breakfast.”

  “I’m not your mom,” Bill said through the door. “I’m a policeman. You have to get up.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” she blurted.

  Another snotty teenager. Bill was getting pretty tired of what seemed to be an epidemic of adolescent churlishness. He said, “Something bad has happened, and we need to talk with you about it.”

  “Oh, all right,” she mumbled.

  She came out of her room tugging a blue robe around her flannel pajamas. She didn’t look as sleepy as she had sounded. She had a pretty face, but her hair was spiky and dyed purple, and there was a barbed-wire tattoo on her neck.

  “Have a seat in the living room,�
� Bill told her. “I’ll stay with you while Captain Danko is talking with your mother.”

  She sat on the couch and Bill sat on an armchair. She seemed to be wide awake now, but laid her head back and closed her eyes as if doing some hard thinking. She didn’t ask Bill what he was doing there or what was going on. Did she already know? Or did she simply not care?

  He said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your baby brother has died. And your father is badly hurt. It looks like he tried to kill himself.”

  She sat up. Her eyes flickered, and she bit her lip. “Tried? How? Is he still alive?”

  Bill thought, or maybe imagined, that he sensed something insincere about her. As with Brenda Kallen.

  He said, “Apparently, he shot himself. But he’s still breathing. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “Did he shoot himself with his own gun?”

  So far she hadn’t asked any questions about poor little Emilio.

  “I suppose it’s his own gun,” Bill told her. “Do you know where he kept it?”

  “In his file cabinet. Locked up. He showed it to me once. It’s a little pistol. A .22 revolver.”

  “Did you ever fire it?”

  “No, he wouldn’t let me touch it, even when he showed it to me. Aren’t you Jodie Curtis’s father?”

  “Yes.”

  “I like her a lot. We eat lunch together, in the cafeteria.”

  “That’s nice. She didn’t used to have many friends. Don’t you want to know about the baby?”

  “You already said he’s dead. Did my father kill him?”

  “It seems to be a crib death. Natural causes. But we’ll have to do an autopsy.”

  “Will that tell us for sure?”

  She seemed to hang on Bill’s answer. Or, again, was that his imagination?

  He said, “Sometimes a crib death is hard to diagnose. Even for doctors. They don’t know all the causes.”

  “I hope my daddy recovers,” she said.

  But he didn’t feel much emotion behind her words.

  Pete Danko brought Hilda Lopez into the living room and asked Tricia to come with him into the kitchen.

  “What about GSR?” Bill asked, figuring that neither mother nor daughter would know he was talking about gunshot residue testing.

  Pete mulled it over. They both knew that proper procedure would be to swab the hands of everyone in the house, except for the baby.

  Bill said to Pete, coaxingly, “We can do it quickly. I have my kit in the car.”

  Then they heard doors slamming outside and footsteps headed for the front porch.

  “Yeah, let’s do it,” Pete said. “Hurry up and swab Umberto, too, before they put him in the ambulance.”

  When Bill turned around, Tricia wasn’t there. She had gone into the kitchen already. And he could hear water running in the sink. It was too late to stop her from washing her hands.

  CHAPTER 30

  When Pete Danko came to the institute to tell Dr. Traeger about the crib death and the attempted suicide at the Lopez home, she was thrown into a quandary. What could have gone amiss? Was it possible that something was seriously wrong with the children, something that modern methods could not detect? She had to allow for that, because science presently had its inadequacies, or else the plague would already be cured.

  Pete said, “Gunshot residue tests were performed on all three, the mother, the daughter, and the father. His hands were swabbed before he was taken to the hospital. All three tests were negative.”

  “Are those kinds of forensic tests completely reliable?” Dr. Traeger asked.

  “Not one hundred percent, but close to it. GSR seems to indicate that Umberto Lopez did not shoot himself. That leaves Hilda or Tricia as potential suspects.”

  “Tricia was one of our special children!”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Do you think she tried to kill her father?”

  “Maybe. It’s quite possible that she killed the baby, too, by suffocation. The ME has listed the cause of death as undetermined. That’s a common ruling in crib deaths. Hilda says she found Emilio lying face down.”

  “That’s how SIDS babies usually die,” said Dr. Traeger. “They have trouble breathing unless they’re lying on their sides or on their backs. Whether they died by intent or by accident often can’t be medically proven. It can be almost a perfect crime. It doesn’t sound like you’re ready to charge anybody.”

  “Not unless I can get Hilda or Tricia to confess or rat each other out. They could be in collusion. There’s a $250,000 insurance policy that Umberto Lopez’s company provides to all its agents, and unlike most policies it pays out in the event of death by suicide.”

  “Is it likely that Hilda or Tricia would’ve known that?”

  “Probably Hilda. And maybe Tricia, if she’s devious enough.”

  “I hate to tell you, but I think my own daughter, Kathy, could be that devious. And she and Tricia are close friends. Almost too close. They’re more secretive than normal teenagers.”

  “Maybe if I put pressure on Tricia I could squeeze the truth out of her,” Danko said. “But maybe the truth is exactly what it looks like on the surface. Umberto found the baby dead and was so traumatized by it that he tried to take his own life. Hilda said he doted on having a son. Tricia was even a little jealous about it.”

  “And jealousy is a powerful motive.”

  “Yes. But if I find out she’s guilty and arrest her, and she goes to trial, the public outcry will be tremendous. I’ll have reporters all over me. Things could go from bad to worse. If it comes to light that Tricia was adopted and that the names of the birth parents are fictitious, then everything we’re doing here could come unglued. What the Homeland Security Department is engaged in could be exposed.”

  “Surely HSD could stop any reporters from gaining access to the adoption certificate,” Dr. Traeger said.

  “I suppose they could. In fact I know they could. But not for long. There’s such a thing as the Freedom of Information Act.”

  Dr. Traeger said, “Sometimes freedom of the press is a curse more than a blessing. We need secrecy sometimes in order to preserve democracy, and the rabble rousers don’t want to realize that.”

  “I think I’m just going to do my best to let the ME’s ruling stand,” Pete said. “Cause of death will remain undetermined for the Lopez baby. If Umberto comes out of his coma, maybe he’ll tell us who shot him, whether it was himself or someone else. Until then, his condition can help me stall. I’ll just maintain that we don’t have enough evidence to go forward.”

  “Any chance of him regaining consciousness anytime soon? What do his doctors say?”

  “They say it could happen. He has a small-caliber bullet in his brain, but it didn’t fragment very much. Some people have lived a long time like that. The brain heals itself and they’re able to go on, apparently without any adverse effects.”

  “But if he dies, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to table the investigation?”

  “Yeah. Detective Curtis doesn’t feel that way. He says Tricia hustled into the kitchen and scrubbed her hands as soon as she heard us mention a GSR test. He’s probably right. But he has to take orders from me, whether he likes it or not.”

  “He puts me on edge,” Dr. Traeger said. “He’s too nosy, too inquisitive, and frankly too damned smart. I hope you can continue to keep a tight rein on him.”

  Pete eyed her sharply, then said, “Now back to another subject. Your daughter, Kathy. Did she ever bite anybody?”

  “When she was little?”

  “Yes. Did she ever bite Amy Haley, for instance?”

  “I don’t think so. But I don’t know for sure. I do know that Darius Hornsby bit Jodie Curtis when they were both around six years old.”

  Pete said, “I wish you would have done the autopsy on Amy Haley, instead of the Chapel Grove medical examiner. We should have had her bodily fluids and organs tested and kept the results under our control, and now it�
��s too late unless we find her missing body.”

  “As far as I know, Kathy has never had a biting habit.”

  “Well, there was a bite mark on Amy Haley, and the ME noted it in his autopsy report.”

  “I don’t have any idea who did it,” Dr. Traeger told him. “I wish I did. I’ll try to tactfully ask Kathy about it. But she doesn’t confide in me. Not one bit, if she can help it.”

  “Just like Tricia Lopez,” Pete said. “Bill said he couldn’t get anything much out of her, and he’s a pretty good interrogator. Not as good as me, though. I know how to shake people up. Maybe I should try with Kathy.”

  “Teenagers typically don’t trust adults,” Dr. Traeger said, “and our special children are even worse in that regard. Yet thus far they all test normal in every way, and that gives me comfort. I’m constantly monitoring them. If anything changes, I’ll let you know ASAP, and I’ll expedite a report to HSD.”

  “I’ll let Kathy slide for now,” said Pete. “If I came out and asked her if she ever bit anybody, she’d just look at me like I’m crazy and clam up.” With a sly smirk, he said, “If she weren’t your daughter, I’d torture her.” Then he waited for Dr. Traeger’s reaction, which came at him immediately, almost before his words were out of his mouth.

  “Don’t you dare! I’d kill you or die trying!”

  “I wouldn’t expect any less of you,” he said. “But I was only jerking your chain. Let’s keep as tight a watch on her as we can. Maybe she’ll slip up, if she’s doing anything wrong, and we’ll learn something.”

  “This is exactly why I wanted funding for the Foster Project to continue,” Dr. Traeger complained. “But Colonel Spence said that nothing really unusual had been discovered about the special children, therefore a further investment of substantial funds would be wasteful. I thought it was very shortsighted on their part, but HSD wouldn’t budge. They said it made sense to close out the project because nothing has shown them that the kids are anything but normal.”

  “Well, maybe the powers that be were right for a change,” Danko said. “Regular kids sometimes commit murders, even patricide and matricide, so in a way it’s as normal as anything else in this crazy fucked-up world.”