Whisker of Evil

by Rita Mae Brown

The gang at the lab examined a variety of Barry’s tissue samples. Given the odd circumstances of Barry’s death, a variety of tests had been ordered by the Albemarle County coroner, Tom Yancy, at Sheriff Shaw’s request.

  Georgette Renfrow, one of the best of the bunch, peered intently through the lens. She was performing a direct fluorescent antibody test, shortened to dFA. Round dots of varying size, a bright fluorescent apple-green color, jumped right out at her.

  “Jesus.” She whistled.

  In all her years at the lab, Georgette had only seen this once before, and that was in the brain tissue of a prisoner who worked the road gangs and died mysteriously. The prison physician couldn’t detect the cause of his intense suffering.

  “Jake, take a look.” She motioned for a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to look.

  He came over, bending to put the eyepiece at just the right place. “I’ve never seen that.”

  “Remember it.”

  “What is it? I suppose I should know, but I don’t think I’ve seen it and I don’t remember it from school.”

  She peered into the microscope one more time, then tapped her index finger on the smooth desktop. “Rabies.”

  13

  That’s bizzare,” Harry exclaimed when Cooper told her the report on Barry Monteith. The deputy also told her everyone who had contact with the body needed to get tested for rabies. She’d gotten Harry an appointment with Bill Langston, her family doctor, at eight the next morning.

  Harry and Fair were in Miranda’s garden when Cooper arrived, putting together a gazebo as promised. Tracy Raz, Miranda’s high-school beau, was down in Charlotte, North Carolina, on business or he would have put his shoulder to the wheel, too.

  Having chased one another to exhaustion, the animals had plopped under Miranda’s sumptuous roses, which were every color imaginable. Pewter preferred the peach, a thin red outline tracing each petal. Mrs. Murphy dozed under pure white roses, while Tucker snored under hot coral. They awoke when Cooper walked up the hand-laid brick walkway this late Friday afternoon.

  “Wouldn’t we have known? Wouldn’t he have been foaming at the mouth when Harry found him?” Miranda, shocked at the news, asked.

  “Not necessarily.” Fair knew a great deal about rabies. “Once the virus is in your nervous tissue it can take one to three months to present itself, for the victim to show clinical signs of infection,” Fair said.

  “Not in the blood?” Miranda asked.

  Cooper, who had grilled Dr. Hayden McIntire the second the report came over her computer screen, said, “No. Rabies is only in nervous tissue. It’s not going to show up in blood samples. Ideally you want brain tissue, which, of course, you can’t get from a living victim. In Barry’s case, we had samples.”

  “You suspected rabies?” Harry inquired.

  “No. But given the manner in which he was found and that the cause of death might be an attack from a wild animal, Rick and Yancy of course asked for rabies tests.”

  “So it’s not in the blood but it would show up if whatever killed him had infected him?” Harry asked.

  “Rabies.” Tucker’s ears pricked right up, as did the two kitties’ ears.

  “That depends,” Fair said, his voice reassuring just because it was so deep. “Rabies is in saliva. A human is bitten and the virus replicates fairly rapidly, but it has to travel to the brain. Actually, this disease is quite unique and terrifying, really. It’s a bullet virus. It gets into the nerve tissue, and when it finally gets to the brain, you see the typical signs of rabies. Like I said, that usually takes between one and three months.”

  “That long?” Miranda was surprised.

  “That long, but if you’re bitten and you don’t get the series of shots within a week, there’s nothing that can be done. Rabies is always fatal.”

  “Fair, how would you know—I mean, how would you know that the animal that bit you was rabid?” Cooper thought she knew the answer but wanted to hear his reply.

  “You don’t. Let me back this up a minute. Usually the first person to identify rabies is a veterinarian or a hunter. Domestic animals like dogs, cats, and horses so rarely have rabies now that it’s noteworthy if they do. The public is educated about inoculating their pets and stock. When we see rabies it’s usually raccoons; that accounts for 40.6 percent of reported cases, with skunks coming in at around 29.4 percent.”

  “How do you remember all that?” Miranda was impressed.

  He smiled genially. “It’s my profession. How do you remember all your rose varieties? But the thing about rabies is, if someone is bitten by a raccoon or a skunk they know it.”

  “What about fox or coyote?” Harry asked.

  “Negligible. Only 5.4 percent of reported cases are foxes and coyotes. And the numbers are going downward. Oddly enough, we’ve seen a spike upward in sheep and cattle. Not enough to be alarming, and it may just be that farmers and ranchers out west are becoming better at reporting symptoms. Also, I think in many ways people are becoming more environmentally responsible. In the old days if a fellow had a sick cow he’d shoot it. If it was found dead he’d not get an autopsy. Today he might call the vet. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to slow this disease and to just about stamp it out in pets.”

  “If Barry was bitten by a raccoon or a skunk, wouldn’t he notice? Wouldn’t he go to the doctor?” Harry’s mind was whirring along.

  “Who said he knew he was bitten? It could have been a bat, too, and those bites are so tiny you don’t see them most times and you don’t feel them, although a numbness at the site of infection is often a signal.” Fair laid down his hammer on the floor of the gazebo. “Bats get a bad rap about carrying rabies, but the percent of humans bitten by rabid bats is tiny.” Cooper started to speak, but Harry jumped in.

  “If the rabies was in Barry’s brain tissue, then he had it for at least thirty days, right?” Harry jammed her hands in her jeans pocket.

  “That’s a safe assumption. He displayed no symptoms yet. Or did he?” Fair looked at Cooper.

  “Everyone we’ve questioned said he behaved normally. So he—I think the word is presented—he presented no symptoms.”

  “What are they? All I know is foaming at the mouth.” Miranda was worried.

  “That’s the stereotype, but the progress for humans is that they feel flu-y, headachy. That might last for a couple of days. They run a fever, and this provokes anxiety, agitation, and confusion. By now, if you know the person, you know something is not right. They aren’t acting normal. Finally they become delirious, completely abnormal. Some become enraged and others sink into a torpor. And some people and some animals do foam at the mouth, but that’s because the virus leads to dehydration, and almost every animal foams at the mouth when it’s hot and thirsty. That’s why that’s such a misleading concept.”

  “And it’s always fatal?” Miranda said.

  “Always. Once the symptoms appear, it kills you within two to ten days, and it’s a hideous death. At least today we can somewhat comfort the person, knock them out with drugs. But,” he blinked, “it’s an ugly, ugly way to die.”

  “No one has ever survived. Really?” Cooper wondered.

  “There are five reported cases, and in four of those the people had had the vaccine shots but not the treatments after exposure. Every veterinarian has the preventive vaccines but we all know, if we’re bitten, we still need the shots. You might survive rabies infection if you’ve had the prophylactic series of shots. You’re taking a chance, but you might survive.”

  “What about the other survivor?” Cooper sat on a gazebo step.

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was early in the twentieth century, someone in Brazil. Which reminds me, rabies is epidemic in parts of Latin America and Asia. They don’t vaccinate pets like we do and they also don’t neuter like we do. If you’re going to any places like that and you’ll be outdoors a lot or on a farm, you should get the prophylactic shots.”

  “How many people died in the United St
ates from rabies last year?” Harry liked facts.

  “None.” He smiled. “Thirty-two people were exposed, got the treatments, and were saved. It’s been years since a human died of rabies from a bite in our country.”

  “Maybe.” Harry was skeptical.

  “What do you mean?” Cooper squinted into the sun.

  “It’s possible that someone died of it and was asymptomatic. Who would know?” Harry continued. “When an autopsy is performed, sending brain tissue for a rabies test isn’t a regular occurrence.”

  “Could be. But even so, wouldn’t be but one or two.” Fair conceded her point.

  “Maybe Barry was asymptomatic,” Miranda said.

  “I doubt it, Miranda.” Fair felt sorry for the deceased man. “There was a case where a man was bitten and the presentation of symptoms did not occur for five years. But like I said, one to three months is the norm. He just hadn’t had enough time.”

  “No bite marks on the body other than his throat?” Harry remembered only too well how he looked.

  “No.” Cooper shook her head. “And here’s the scary part.” They collectively held their breaths for a moment while she told them. “His throat was ripped out by short tongs or a jagged-edge knife. It wasn’t a wild animal.”

  “What?” Fair couldn’t believe it.

  “Someone bites him and he doesn’t fight back?” Harry was flat-out amazed. “That’s not going to happen. Not with Barry Monteith.”

  “He was drugged. We asked Yancy to go over his corpse with a fine-tooth comb when we brought him in, and there were no marks, needle marks. He ingested Quaaludes. Whether he did this willingly or was purposefully drugged, we don’t know. He would have been a limp noodle. Whoever wanted him dead wanted to make us think it was a wild animal.”

  “We’ve lost all this time and he’s gotten away.” Harry almost wailed. “The killer just dusted us!”

  “Good God, who would even think of something like that?” Fair mopped his forehead with a red kerchief.

  Harry collected herself. “It would be someone who didn’t want to run away. I was wrong. He hasn’t dusted us.”

  “He’s sure gotten us all confused.” Miranda noticed the three animals emerging from underneath her prized roses. “Do you have your rabies tags?”

  “Mine’s on my collar, as you well know,” Tucker answered.

  “We’ve had our shots. Mom has the paperwork and so does Dr. Shulman,” Mrs. Murphy, very disturbed at this report, informed Miranda.

  “They’ve had every shot and pill possible. Their medical records are better than mine.” Harry smiled as Pewter rubbed against her leg.

  “How do you know that Barry wasn’t bitten by a bat?” Miranda asked Cooper.

  “He was. The various strains of rabies can be identified. The strain identified was from a bat,” Cooper simply stated. “They look in those microscopes, get gene sequences, and tell you if it’s bat, a dog from Asia, or one from Latin America. They can tell just like they can tell different strains of influenza. I started to tell you that when Fair mentioned bats, but I got sidetracked.” Cooper smiled, as she didn’t want to say Harry more or less cut her off.

  “So Barry would have died—no matter what. What a sad, sad thought.” Miranda quoted scripture, First Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verse 22, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” She paused. “He’s with the Lord. I know we should rejoice, but such a young man. It’s hard to see him go.”

  “Yes, it is.” Cooper agreed. “And knowing that he was murdered doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “Okay, he was murdered.” Harry reached for her nail gun. “It doesn’t make a bit more sense than when I found him. No tracks. And Fair and Susan and I walked along Potlicker Creek for two and a half, maybe three miles, heading upstream. If there’d been footprints or tire prints we’d have seen them.”

  “You didn’t tell me.” Cooper narrowed her eyes, for Harry loved to stick her nose in a mystery.

  “Oh, we’re kind of looking around because of Mary Pat’s ring. Big Mim said if it was in the creek, Mary Pat might have been upstream, you know.”

  “She could have lost that ring foxhunting, Harry, not when she went missing.” Miranda thought of the number of ways that ring might have slipped off Mary Pat’s finger.

  “No. Mim says that if she’d lost this ring everyone would have known. She would have looked for it. She would have had the town looking for it, according to Mim. But we didn’t find a thing,” Harry said.

  “Susan’s bottles,” Fair laconically added.

  “Jeez, we carried out all these old bottles that Susan had to have”—Harry stopped a moment, then frowned—“but, Cooper, we didn’t find a blessed thing.”

  “He really did come down the creek.” Tucker wondered why someone wanted Barry Monteith dead.

  “Yes, baby.” Harry stooped down to pat her glossy head.

  “I’d guess the killer came down the creek,” Fair said.

  “He understood.” Pewter’s whiskers swept forward.

  “Lucky guess,” Tucker replied.

  “Not so lucky. It’s obvious.” Mrs. Murphy flicked the end of her tail up and down, a sign that she was thinking.

  What wasn’t obvious was what Tucker hadn’t voiced: Why would anyone want to kill Barry Monteith, a cute guy who mucked out Mary Pat’s wonderful old stables, who many hoped would succeed in the horse business?

  14

  The second Wednesday in June, Mim threw a supper party for her friends. Her late-blooming wisteria, in lavender as well as white, draped over the back porch of the beautiful white Georgian house. The southeast side of the barn was covered in lavender wisteria, and the old pump house, a massive stone building, was smothered in white wisteria, contrasting with the dark gray fieldstone.

  Dalmally, the name of Big Mim’s estate, was one of the gems of central Virginia. Fortunately, Mim inherited enough money to keep the place up. So many grand Virginia estates fell to rack and ruin after April 9, 1865. The ones that survived had been snapped up by Yankee carpetbaggers. A few survived because their original owners were both flexible and intelligent, and this certainly applied to the Urquharts, Mim’s maiden name.

  Aunt Tally Urquhart also lived on an historic estate, Rose Hill, but hers was much simpler: a white clapboard house of graceful proportions that lacked the conscious grandeur of Dalmally.

  Aunt Tally sat at her niece’s right hand, where she proceeded to direct people and events. Mim gave up reining her in and let her go, which pleased the elderly lady.

  The other guests had been selected for conversation or for their equine connections, since Mim was preparing yearlings for the big Saratoga sale in August.

  Her husband, Jim, sat at the head of the table. On his right sat Tavener Heyward and on his left was Miranda Hogendobber, whom Jim adored. The other guests—Fair Haristeen, Harry Haristeen, Tazio Chappars, Dr. Bill Langston, BoomBoom Craycroft, Little Mim, Blair Bainbridge, and Rev. Herb Jones—rounded out the party billed as “impromptu.” Of course, nothing Big Mim did was impromptu, but the fiction was preserved, especially since the guests’ various house pets played outside with Mim’s English springer spaniels, two liver-and-white beauties.

  Ever the Cupid, Mim thought that Bill Langston might find Tazio Chappars attractive. As she was brilliant and lovely, he did, but he found BoomBoom Craycroft even more attractive, although, being a gentleman, this was not apparent.

  Few men could resist BoomBoom, the result being she toyed with them.

  “. . . Tom Fool blood.” Tavener Heyward was holding forth about thoroughbred bloodlines.

  “One can never study pedigrees to one’s satisfaction,” Herb said. “The Bible is full of pedigrees, starting with the sons of Adam and Eve, and everyone lived eight or nine hundred years.”

  “Doesn’t really count until Noah’s sons.” Tavener, a keen reader, smiled. “Shem, Ham, and Japheth. They all lived to a ripe ole age, too. Noah made it to nine hundre
d and fifty.”

  “I don’t know if my knees would hold out,” Jim remarked, as the others laughed.

  They talked about the computer programs to study thoroughbred bloodlines, then eased into Mim’s plans for a new stable.

  “I love walking through stables. You know, at Red Mile”—she mentioned a harness-racing track in Lexington, Kentucky—“there’s a round barn, and it makes wonderful sense.”

  “There’s a kind of round barn right up the road in Orange.” Fair mentioned a town northeast of them by about thirty miles, give or take.

  “A lot of Washington money moving into Orange,” Herb said.

  “And Madison and Greene counties. They come on down here and we’re glad to see the bump up in the tax revenues, but they don’t all ease into country life as we would like.” Jim stated the problem succinctly.

  “By the end of this century, we’ll be lucky if anyone remembers country life,” Harry predicted.

  “Oh, Harry, don’t say that. They can learn.” Little Mim kept a positive attitude.

  “Well, I hope so,” Harry said. She was in a good mood since her tests had come back negative for exposure to rabies.

  “I’m not a born country person but I’m trying,” Blair said, his warm hazel eyes solemn.

  “No fair.” Fair laughed at his little play on his name. “You live next to Harry, and you’re being well trained by Little Mim. You’re doing just fine.”

  “A thorn between two roses.” Blair laughed.

  “Or a rose between two thorns.” Big Mim smiled.

  “Tazio, you were raised in St. Louis; what do you think?” Bill politely asked the architect.

  She blushed slightly. “It’s like learning a new language. And I thank Brinkley for helping me.” She named her yellow Lab. “He always knows where the deer are or the hawks. I find the quieter I am, the more I learn.”

  “Isn’t that the truth!” Aunt Tally, who liked the young woman, said. “To live in the country you have to use all your senses. Can’t just depend on one. So if you smoke,” she cleared her throat and stared at Little Mim a moment, since her great-niece was known to puff sometimes, “you’ve already lost one sense. And speaking of senses—taste—Mim, dear, this has been the most delicious supper, and I am longing for dessert.”