The Lethal Helix

by Don Donaldson

  OTTO CHRISTIANSON WALKED into the Lucy II and headed for the bar, where, as usual at the end of the day, every seat was taken, and Eddie Spears, the bartender, was hopping. Eddie had a glass eye, but you couldn’t tell unless you looked real close.

  “Hey Eddie. What’s the word?”

  “Beer. Want one?”

  “Maybe later. Did you work yesterday?”

  “My wife has needs. I work every day.”

  “Did you notice a pretty blonde woman with short hair in here about this time?”

  “Hard not to notice her.”

  “She talk to anybody?”

  He gestured toward one of the tables. “She sat with Flip and Dip over there for awhile.”

  “Thanks.” Otto walked over to the two men, whom he already knew. “Hello boys. How’s it going?”

  “Fits and starts, Otto,” Gene said. “Fits and starts.”

  “Like his truck,” Curtis added.

  “Understand you two talked to the blonde woman who was in here yesterday.”

  “I did most of the talking,” Gene said. “Curtis was too tongue-tied to say much. I hear that’s a sign of sexual frustration.”

  “Who’d know better than you?” Curtis replied.

  “What did you all talk about?”

  “The dairy,” Curtis said. “She seemed real interested.”

  “She say why?”

  “Don’t think she did,” Gene said.

  “And you didn’t ask.”

  “Never occurred to me,” Curtis said.

  “Me neither,” Gene added. “She a wanted woman?”

  Knowing that Curtis would never leave a line like that alone, he looked at his friend just as Curtis said, “By every guy in here.”

  The dairy and Holly remained on Otto’s mind the rest of the evening. First thing the next morning, he drove over to the dairy to see Don Lamotte. He found him in the parking lot, just arriving.

  “Hey, Don. Good morning.”

  Wearing a worried expression, Lamotte froze, his hand on his car door. “Sheriff Christianson . . . is anything wrong?”

  Otto walked over to Lamotte’s car. “No, no. I’m just keeping my finger on the pulse of the community. But I was wondering, do you know a woman named Holly Fisher, an attractive blonde with short hair?”

  “Sure don’t. Why do you ask?”

  “Haven’t got enough important things to think about, I guess. How’s the dairy business?”

  “It’s a lot of work, and milk prices aren’t what they should be, but we’re doing okay.”

  “Glad to hear that. Don, you have a nice day.” Otto walked back to his car and got in. He waved at Lamotte and headed for the entrance, wondering if it was just his imagination that made him think Lamotte did know Fisher.

  Aware that Holly had left the hospital, Otto drove to the Green and White, where he learned that late yesterday, the owner had seen her throw her bag in her car and leave fast, heading away from town.

  Figuring she was probably returning to Memphis, Otto decided he wouldn’t pursue the case. But that didn’t mean he was going to forget it.

  “STOP IT,” SANDY Moore said as her husband, Ryan, cupped her breasts from behind and rubbed his pelvis against her buttocks.

  “What’s the matter?” Ryan said, nuzzling her ear. “This is foreplay. I thought that’s what women want.”

  “Not while I’m cooking. And besides, neither of us has time for any afterplay. Unless you want us to be late for church.”

  “The later the better as far as I’m concerned,” Ryan said, backing off and leaning against the sink.

  “Be careful,” Sandy said, taking the eggs to the table. “I hear there’s no football in Hell.” She gave Ryan his usual three eggs and put two on her plate. “You want to get something hot, make the toast.” Smiling at her own wit, she went to the fridge, where she leaned in and got the orange juice.

  Suddenly, her nostrils were flooded with the smell of lemon oil and musty antique furniture: her granny’s home in Toronto. How she loved to visit her as a child—the stuffed bear head in the study, the thick carpets that practically swallowed your shoes. And Granny would make her warm rice and honey with cream for breakfast.

  Sometimes the toaster ignored the setting and burned the bread, so Ryan was keeping a close eye on it when he heard a thump and a splash behind him.

  Turning, he saw that Sandy had dropped the juice container. And her eyes . . .

  Before he could move, her legs gave way and she began to convulse in the spilled juice.

  “WHAT’S WRONG WITH her?” Ryan Moore asked, his whole body pleading for answers.

  Though he’d only had time to conduct a neurologic exam on Ryan’s wife, Richard Heflin was extremely concerned that the onset and symptoms of Sandy Moore’s illness were apparently identical to the Johannsons’. And if this was the same thing, he didn’t know how to save her. The immediate question now was what to tell her husband. Rather than lay it on the line, he hedged. “It’s too early to say. We’ve got some tests to do before we’ll know.”

  “Will she be all right?”

  “Let’s just keep a good thought about that. Now, I’ve got to make a call to get Sandy an EEG. That’s a test of how her brain is functioning.”

  “Oh God. Her brain?”

  Richard gave Ryan’s shoulder a supportive squeeze, then called the lab on the wall phone to see if the EEG tech had arrived.

  “Ray, sorry to make you work on Sunday. The case I needed you for is on her way down. Give me the usual routine. I’ll see you when you get her prepped.” He asked the nurse in attendance to take Sandy to the lab, then turned to Ryan, who looked pretty rocky himself. Of course, it might be nothing more than a normal reaction to what was happening to his wife. But thinking of the Johannsons, Richard was afraid that if Sandy was the third case, her husband might soon be the fourth.

  “Ryan, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to examine you.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to be sure you’re okay.”

  “You think I might have it too?”

  “At this point, I don’t know. But we need to consider the possibility.”

  Ryan shrugged and turned his hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “Go ahead.”

  Richard took him to an examining room and gave him a thorough going over, which produced no signs that Ryan was ill. But the course of this disease was so rapid and so strange that Richard remained concerned.

  “I’ll be in the EEG lab for about thirty minutes. Then we’ll talk again. There’s a waiting area two doors down where you can find something to read. But why don’t you take some magazines back to the nursing station and wait there. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

  Ryan knew exactly why he suggested that. “So you’re not convinced I’m okay?”

  “It’s merely a precaution.” Actually, considering how little he’d been able to do for the Johannsons, Richard knew if the same disease had hold of Sandy, a nurse wouldn’t be much use if it also claimed Ryan.

  A half hour later, as Richard accompanied Sandy back to her room, he was deeply depressed. Her EEG was like the Johannsons’ in all respects, confirming his belief that she was probably beyond help. Dreading the next few minutes, he went to the nurses’ station, where he found Ryan sitting at a desk, his forehead on his folded arms.

  “Ryan?”

  In one motion Ryan was on his feet, still apparently neurologically intact, but obviously under a lot of stress. “What did you—”

  Richard took him by the arm. “Come on. Let’s go some place quiet.”

  Richard led him to the empty waiting room and got him seated. Pulling a chair over so he could face him, Richard broke the bad news. “The EEG results were not good. Sandy’s brain d
idn’t respond at all to several kinds of stimulation, indicating that the damage is likely irreversible.”

  Surprisingly, instead of breaking down, Ryan’s jaw set in anger and his eyes blazed. “I don’t believe you. I want a second opinion.” He shot to his feet and faced the door. “I want her sent to Milwaukee . . . to a real hospital.”

  “Of course that’s your privilege.”

  His face still resolute, he turned to Richard. “Then you’ll arrange it?”

  “Yes.”

  Several hours later, a medical transport left for Milwaukee with Sandy inside. As he watched it leave, Richard sincerely hoped his prognosis was wrong. But he knew it wasn’t. Sandy Moore was going to die. He was less certain about Ryan’s fate. Skye’s brother, Dennis, was proof that Ryan had a chance, that the disease didn’t necessarily claim all members of a household. But either way, it seemed possible that Sandy Moore might not be the last victim.

  18

  “DOCTOR HEFLIN, I just wanted to thank you for what you did,” Ryan Moore said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of them cutting on her.” His eyes were red and swollen and his color was awful. But so far, he had escaped the devil that had killed his wife.

  “I didn’t really do anything,” Richard said. “The decision not to proceed was made by the medical examiner in Milwaukee.”

  The doctors in Milwaukee had been as puzzled over Sandy Moore’s illness as Richard had, so when she’d died the previous day, they referred the case to the ME’s office there, preventing her husband from claiming the body. Ryan had then called Richard and asked him to intercede. When the Milwaukee ME heard from Richard that two identical cases had already been processed by the Madison forensic office without finding any support for foul play, he released the body.

  Learning from the relevant phone conversations that the neuropathology report on the Johannsons was in, Richard had asked the Madison office to fax it to him. So far, he was still waiting. He’d been about to call them again when Ryan showed up.

  “I also want to apologize for doubting your judgment and asking for another doctor,” Ryan said.

  “You don’t owe me any apology,” Richard said. “Your reaction was a normal response to the situation. I wish I’d been wrong. I very much wish that.”

  “This is so hard,” Ryan said, running his hands through his hair. “I don’t want to go home because it reminds me of her, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t even get drunk because I always get sick first.”

  Keenly remembering his own feelings when Diane was killed, Richard said, “There are counselors who can help. If you like, I’ll find one for you.”

  “How can they do anything? They can’t change what happened.”

  “Time will be the best healer, but believe me, they can help you over the rough spots.”

  “Whatever you think.”

  Richard wondered if it would be callous to ask Ryan a few questions that might lead to the source of the illness that had so far wrecked two families. Deciding that the stakes were so high he had to do it, he said, “Ryan, this terrible thing that happened to Sandy also happened to another couple in town, Ronnie and Skye Johannson.”

  “I didn’t think about that,” Ryan said. “We knew them. Or I should say, Sandy knew Skye.”

  This connection between the two families greatly piqued Richard’s interest. “Were they good friends?”

  “Ever since high school. Four or five times a year they’d spend a Saturday together, shopping, getting their hair done. I didn’t much get along with Ronnie though. So we never did anything with them as two couples. But sometimes, when I’d go to Green Bay for the Packer games with my friend Doug, Sandy would spend the day over there. Like two months ago for the Denver game.” Then Ryan’s eyes teared up. “I never should have done that . . . you know, leave her alone just to see a football game.”

  This, too, was ground Richard had trod when Diane was killed. But where Ryan was letting grief twist a reasonable absence into a crime, Richard was sure that his slavish devotion to his Boston practice to the exclusion of his family was truly culpable.

  “You did nothing wrong,” Richard said. “It’s only the circumstances that are making you feel that way.”

  “I don’t know how to feel about anything now. It’s all upside down.”

  “Was that game the last time Sandy visited Skye?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry, but I can’t answer any more questions now.”

  “I understand. I’ll get the number of that counselor and call you.”

  Ryan nodded and got out of his chair. Richard escorted him from the office to the waiting room. At a loss for a parting sentiment, Richard repeated himself. “I’ll get that number and call you.”

  “He’s feeling pretty low, isn’t he?” Connie Persky observed when Ryan was gone.

  “Losing your wife can have that effect on you.”

  Richard returned to his office, where he thought briefly about the first time he and Diane made love . . . The rain and then the crickets. There was probably no one in the world who appreciated the sound of crickets chirping like he did.

  Then his mind returned to what Ryan had said about Sandy spending the day at the Johannsons’ two months before her illness. This suggested that the cause of the deaths was in the Johannsons’ home, and that the incubation period was around sixty days. But what was it? The plates the health department had put out at the Johannsons’ hadn’t grown anything unusual.

  Connie stuck her head into the office. “Something’s coming in by fax from the Madison forensic office,” she said, waving the cover sheet from the message.

  Richard jumped up from his desk and followed her to the fax machine, which was chugging out the neuropathology report he’d been waiting for.

  Sandy Moore’s illness had taken the same course as the Johannsons’, so that she too died within 48 hours of her first symptoms. And Richard still had no idea what had done it. Hoping that the answer would be in the report, he guided it from the machine and read it fast.

  Neuronal changes in both brains consistent with recent ischemic damage in the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and cerebellum. Mild patchy neuronal loss and gliosis present in the above locations as well as basal ganglia and thalamus. Etiology: Unknown.

  “Great,” Richard said.

  “What’s wrong?” Connie asked.

  “I don’t know any more now than I did before. When’s my next appointment?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  Richard went to his desk, drew the phone close, and punched in the number at the top of the report, hoping that Maurice Hamblin, the Madison office’s neuropathology consultant, had some impressions about what he’d seen that he hadn’t put in writing.

  “Doctor Heflin calling Doctor Hamblin . . . Yes, I’ll wait.”

  After a few bars of Mozart’s Violin Concerto #5, Hamblin came on the line.

  Richard explained who he was and said, “I just received your report on Ronnie and Skye Johannson and frankly, I’m disappointed. Not at your work, of course, but that we’re still in the dark about what killed them. I’m calling to ask if you had any feelings about these cases you might be willing to discuss, but didn’t want to put on paper.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Doctor Hamblin?”

  “Yes, I’m here. I did have one thought. The lack of inflammation coupled with neuron loss and gliosis made me think it might be some kind of prion disease.”

  Richard stiffened in his chair. The prion diseases were among the most bizarre illnesses known, causing among other syndromes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a usually fatal illness that kills its victims after taking their mind and wrecking their ability to move and speak. The bizarre part was that the infectious particles are unique, consis
ting of only protein and containing no DNA or RNA, a proposition so scientifically heretical that the study of these particles and the diseases they produce had already generated Nobel Prizes for medicine in two different years.

  “I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned that,” Hamblin continued. “The amount of neuron loss was so small and the reactive gliosis so limited—”

  “Your report didn’t mention any amyloid,” Richard said, referring to the plaques that are present to varying degrees in prion diseases.

  “There wasn’t any. Of course, I’ve seen cases of CJD that didn’t look much different than what I saw in those brains.”

  “I’ve never heard of any prion disease in which the time between first symptoms and death is so rapid. Usually, it’s measured in months.”

  “You’ll have to admit that we don’t know if the victims had some minor symptoms they ignored for a few months before they went into crisis. But yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t fit. I only mentioned it because you asked.”

  At this point, Richard wondered if they should look at Sandy Moore’s brain. “Any chance another case would shed some light on the cause?”

  “There was another one?”

  “She died yesterday.”

  “I wouldn’t think there’s anything more to be learned from her brain. But if you want me to look, and someone will pick up the tab, I will. I’m really swamped with work, though, so if you need a quick turnaround, you might want to send it to someone else. Boy, three cases in two weeks. Makes you wonder.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  Richard hung up and sat with his hand on the phone.

  A prion disease. Could Hamblin be right? And this association of Sandy Moore with the two index cases . . . If it was a prion disease, or even if it wasn’t, she may have become exposed through her friendship with the Johannsons.

  But prion diseases aren’t contagious in the usual sense of the word. In fact, it’s thought to be highly unlikely that an infected person could pass it to someone else through any kind of contact. Then he began to think about sexual transmission. He’d never read a word about that for prions. It would explain both Ronnie and Skye being ill, but not Sandy, unless she and Ronnie, or she and Skye . . . But if that’s right, why is Ryan okay?