Tainted

by Ross Pennie

  The next morning, without the energy to shave, or dress, or retrieve the Sunday Star from the front porch, Zol stared into his half-eaten bowl of cereal. He watched Max from the corner of his eye, terrified what might be lurking in the boy’s future. When the phone rang, he just sat and let it ring.

  After about a dozen rings, Max shot Zol a quizzical frown, dropped his spoon, and ran to the phone. “Dad,” he said, singsonging the word in exasperation, “it’s for you.”

  A minute later, Zol felt like soaring. Tears were stinging his eyes, and Max was giving him a look that said parents are impossible to figure out. But Zol couldn’t remember when he’d last felt this good.

  Delia Smart hadn’t eaten a single chocolate for four decades. Matheson’s call made that clear. Delia had been allergic to all forms of chocolate since childhood. It gave her headaches and palpitations. She never touched it. Not even a nibble.

  And then he remembered Natasha’s remark last evening about cracking the case without proving that every victim was linked to a single source of prions. He tossed the juice carton into the fridge and slammed the door. Natasha was wrong. And so was Hamish. All the victims had to be linked to a single source. Of course they did. There were only seven CJD victims, all sick within a tight time frame, and all living in Hamilton. Something out there had infected all of them. And that something wasn’t the chocolates. Whatever it was, they were going to find it.

  Forty-five minutes later, Zol signalled his turn into the parking lot of the Escarpment Professional Building, half a kilometre west of the health unit, at 99 Concession Street. When he checked the mirror he saw Max in the back seat, clicking away at his game gadget. The blue-and-white Four Corners logo beckoned from above Max’s favourite window. Would he sense the familiar territory before Zol turned off the ignition? Santa’s elves and reindeer were dancing around a castle built from stacked tins of Christmas pudding. Hundreds of chocolates, spilling from the top of a giant Christmas stocking, were begging to be gobbled by the handful.

  Zol took Max by the hand as they skipped across the parking lot. After a detailed examination of the window, and much speculation about the flavours in the centres of the candies, they pulled open the door of the building. On a Sunday morning the vestibule was as far as they could get. Four Corners stood locked and in darkness. The adjacent pharmacy glowed brightly but was closed until tomorrow. Three elevators sat in the lobby with their doors open and their lights off, out of bounds until Monday.

  Zol ran mentally through the histories of the CJD victims. He had reviewed them again this morning after Matheson’s call. At least five had shopped right here at Four Corners, including two whose lawyer spouses still worked in this building. Natasha had said the vitamins, remedies, and medications in Joanna Vanderven’s fancy bag had been mostly purchased here. Across the street, Hugh McEwen had operated his dental office in the same renovated house as Rita Spinelli’s dress shop.

  When he added it up, there was little doubt that this building was the centre of the epidemic. But what bound it all together? The building itself? Something trapped between its walls, soaked into its carpets, dissolved in its water supply? No. None of the victims had worked here. Anyone spending their workdays in a blighted building would have been the first to get sick.

  Zol cast his eyes up and down the building’s list of offices and businesses. The prions had to be contaminating something sold or administered right here. He copied down the names of every enterprise, all six floors of them.

  On the way home, he phoned Colleen on the cellphone. He asked her to come help him sift through what was surely a treasure chest of leads. When he offered lunch, she laughed and said he was always preparing food.

  “Well, sure,” he replied. “Cooking helps me think. It’s amazing what brilliant connections you come up with while you’re whisking egg whites.”

  An hour later he was assembling their sandwiches while Colleen looked on. “If you’ll take these in to Max and his friend Josh,” he said, “I’ll put ours on the table.” He handed her two turkey-breast sandwiches, each dressed up with a dill pickle, a handful of potato chips, and a candy cane. “Between these and the video games, the boys will be happy for an hour or two.”

  “If we’re lucky,” she said over her shoulder.

  He set to work on their plates. He spread the bread with Dijon and topped the turkey with caramelized onions and goat cheese. He added a garnish of kalamata olives but felt too shy to plunk a handful of greasy potato chips onto their plates.

  “Don’t we get any chips?” she said with a look of dismay as she took her place at the kitchen table.

  “You really want some?”

  “Of course.”

  He filled a wooden salad bowl with potato chips and placed it on the table. “Help yourself. But you haven’t earned a candy cane yet.”

  He turned his ear toward the noises spilling from the computer room. The closed door kept the volume down but the proximity to the living room and kitchen meant he and Max remained connected. Separate but connected — the sort of relationship a father was supposed to have with his son. Waves of reassuring beeps and laughter squealed through the door.

  Zol took a seat and bit into his sandwich. His eyes met Colleen’s, paused, then darted away. For a minute or two, conversation was impossible as they chewed on the crusty slices of sourdough bread.

  Colleen put down her half-eaten sandwich and licked her lips. “Delicious,” she said, and plucked an olive from her plate. “I love these.” She popped the glistening orb into her mouth and sucked on it as though pondering the complexity of its flavours. “I phoned Mrs. Latkovic.”

  “And?”

  “Those chocolates did come from Four Corners.”

  “The ones on Tonya’s desk?”

  “Hey, don’t look so glum.”

  What did she expect? His son had eaten cartloads of those chocolates, and now she’d confirmed that six of the seven CJD victims shopped at Zol’s favourite grocery.

  “For goodness sake, Zol, buck up.” She picked up her sandwich, then pointed to his fountain pen. “That looks like an antique. Can I try it?”

  He didn’t like the look of all that oil on her fingers. “It’s, um, a very special keepsake. Belonged to William Osler.”

  “Look, I’m wiping the oil off my fingers. I know about Osler. And those nodes he made famous — painful lumps on the fingers. A sign of infection inside the heart.”

  This woman was full of surprises.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Surprised you, didn’t I?”

  That was one of those questions it was better for a guy not to answer.

  She looked distant for a moment. “I learned a lot typing Liam’s consultation letters.” She uncapped the Parker and wrote her name and address. “Mmm . . . Slides like velvet. But hey, it’s leaking.” She handed him the pen and wiped her ink-stained thumb with her serviette. “Enough about Osler. What about that treasure chest of leads you promised?”

  Zol showed her the list of offices and businesses from 99 Concession.

  She tugged at one of her glass-beaded earrings as she studied the list. The colours in the bauble matched the complex hazel of her eyes. “Well, there are three law firms. We knew to expect at least two.”

  Zol pointed to Delancey, Spinelli, and Munro. “Rita Spinelli’s husband must be a partner at this one. And Owen Renway’s partner works here, at Sherman & MacIntyre. And here’s a holding company.”

  “With only a number for a name. If there’s some fishy business going on there, it’s with money, not prions.” She pointed to a family practice with two doctors, and then tapped her finger on the name of a dermatologist, Dr. James Zupanzik. “Why is he familiar?”

  “His ad’s in the newspaper every day.”

  “Yes, of course. Rejuvenation something-or-other.”

  He read from the page he’d ripped from yesterday’s Spectator. “Light rejuvenation, cosmetic laser, and botulinum-toxin therapy.”

  “H
e’s into wrinkles in a big way.”

  “And he’s got the entire third floor of that building.”

  “Any prions there, do you suppose?”

  “Not in his lights or lasers,” Zol said. “But he probably injects collagen or other stuff that comes from animals.”

  “Perfect. Our first suspect.”

  Zol drew an arrow beside Zupanzik’s name, then pointed to the listings for the fourth and fifth floors. “There are a lot more outfits here worth starring — three naturopaths, three chiropractors, two massage therapists, a reflexologist, a herbalist, and an acupuncturist.”

  “Goodness,” Colleen said. “That’s a ratio of . . . eleven alternative therapy practitioners to just three medical doctors.”

  “Millions across the country have no access to a family doctor, but there’s no shortage of . . .” — he made a face and drew quotation marks in the air with his fingers — “holistic practitioners.”

  “Happy to take half your paycheque for extract of echinacea and eye of newt.”

  Francine had spent five thousand dollars in a single year on bogus immune-system boosters. Her naturopath had sprinkled a carload of potions onto the fertile ground of her already unstable personality. The junk science, the ridiculous jargon, the outright deception, and the wasted money still made Zol fume.

  “Yes,” she said, “the ‘It must be good, it’s natural’ spiel used to drive Liam crazy.”

  “Bring your credit card to the desk but leave your common sense at the door.”

  Colleen chuckled and tossed her braid. “But realistically,” she said, crinkling her brow, “what could they be dispensing that causes CJD? Don’t they just use herbal stuff?”

  “Except for the rhinoceros horns, the antler fuzz, and the tiger oil. Holistic medicines are unregulated, you know. The government ignores them because it doesn’t classify them as drugs. At the health unit, we can confiscate herbal remedies, or clear them from the shelves, only if we can tie them directly to an outbreak. Like the Salmonella they traced to the black-bear gallbladders a herbalist was dispensing in Toronto.”

  She shook her head. “Good grief.” She took another olive and chewed it slowly, then pulled its pit from her lips and set it on her plate. “But what makes you think our cases patronized any of these practitioners?”

  “Look how many associations we’ve discovered between our cases and this building.” He turned to a fresh sheet on his notepad and started a new list. “Six out of seven shopped at Four Corners. Most of Joanna Vanderven’s prescriptions were purchased at the pharmacy on the ground floor. Two spouses worked at law firms in the building. We know that Delia Smart was getting Extendo-Tox injections, and Joanna made frequent visits to a dermatologist. Maybe both of them were patients of Dr. Zupanzik.”

  “We can find out from their husbands,” Colleen said.

  “But how about all those alternative outfits? We can’t go skulking around their offices without some strong suspicions.”

  “Why not? You’re the health unit, for heaven’s sake — public safety and all that.”

  “The law is specific. Our job is to hunt down and interview the contacts of people known to have contagious infections. And we’re supposed to delve into situations where there’s danger to the public — like epidemic diarrhea in a daycare. But if we don’t have a compelling reason, we can’t force private practitioners to give us unrestricted access to their medical records.”

  Colleen frowned and spread her palms to show she’d never heard of anything so ridiculous. “Six cases of CJD linked to that building isn’t compelling enough?”

  “But we’d have to explain exactly what we were looking for.”

  She took a deep breath and looked ready to speak, but closed her mouth. After a moment her eyes flashed. “I get it. If we told them we suspected prions in their potions, the shit would hit the fan.”

  “Exactly. We’d have the press on our backs in a second, not to mention Trinnock. And the mayor. And every other politico who expects us to hand them a solution the instant there’s a whiff of a problem.”

  She pursed her lips. “So,” she said with a sidelong glance, “we have to be creative.”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t break into offices.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He could feel himself blushing. He’d already asked Hamish to more or less lie, and now he was thinking of asking Colleen to do the same. Good God. This was going to end up as a terrible mess, with a pink slip slapped into his hand as a souvenir.

  “You could call the offices one by one and play a little loose with the truth,” he said, unable to look Colleen directly in the eye. “Tell them you’re from the Ministry of Health. In Toronto.”

  “What am I calling about?”

  He thought for a moment. Shalom Acres glared from a headline on the page he’d ripped from the Spectator. “You’re investigating the flesh-eating epidemic at Shalom Acres.”

  “And what’s that got to do with these alternative practitioners?”

  “You’re concerned about the safety of their staff and their clients.”

  “And?”

  “Um . . . You need to know if any of the people on your list — our seven victims — ever visited their offices.”

  “I suppose,” she said, her voice a little brighter. “And if it looks like I’ve scored a connection, the receptionist might be so frightened about flesh-eating disease she’ll tell me everything we want to know.”

  “And if none of the names rings a bell, she’ll soon forget you called.” Zol scooped a handful of chips from the bowl and let them soften in his mouth. He could feel his face tighten. He chewed and swallowed, then asked, “What if a receptionist panics at the mention of flesh-eating disease? What if she calls the families? I can see it now: Rita Spinelli’s lawyer husband fuming to my boss about government intrusion. Trinnock will know it was me who ordered the calls.”

  Colleen fingered an olive pit and looked up. “No, he won’t. I’ll say I’m just checking a list of contacts generated by the Ministry’s computer, and we always follow up these things no matter how innocuous they are. We at head office know it’s better to be safe than sorry.” She nodded. “And I’ll thank them on behalf of the Ministry for the valuable holistic service they contribute to their community.”

  He started to smile, but his worries still outweighed his confidence. “What if they look at phone records and trace the calls back to you?”

  “They won’t.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  “I’ll drive to Toronto. Sherway Gardens. They have a bank of pay phones in a quiet spot at one end of the mall.”

  His shoulders relaxed as he told himself that Colleen had done this before.

  She was brilliant.

  The plan sounded brilliant.

  But would it work?

  CHAPTER 15

  That evening, Hamish’s stomach launched a rebellious rumble that echoed in the stillness of his laboratory. He gave his abdomen a perfunctory rub and lifted his eyes from the bench, suddenly aware of the piercing glare of the fluorescent lights. The clock said nine twenty. He hadn’t eaten since noon; little wonder he felt shaky and light-headed. And he’d quaffed so many cups of green tea he must have downed quite a hefty dose of caffeine.

  It had been a frustrating Sunday, tinkering with the test for species-specific mitochondrial DNA. If he were going to use it to find diarrhea-causing C. difficile bacteria in food samples, he needed to see how the test reacted to traces of unexpected DNA and to chemical food additives.

  The test had worked perfectly last week when he’d spiked samples of pork sausage with the thigh muscles of two euthanized mice and a cat, all no longer required by research colleagues down the hall. The kits had identified the pork and the cat tissue, and ignored the mouse they’d not been designed to detect. But today, when he’d added commercial b
arbecue sauce — to see how the test performed in the presence of the chemicals added to everyday foods — he’d been given no reading whatsoever. One or more of the nineteen flavourings, dyes, and stabilizers in the sauce must have interfered with the reaction. If the process could be disrupted so easily by a household condiment, then maybe the test wasn’t the silver bullet he was looking for.

  He rubbed at the kink in his neck and squinted against the light. He would try one last run tonight. He opened the fridge and found he’d used up all the meat he’d bought at Kelly’s SuperMart, but he spotted the packet of Escarpment Pride Viennese sausages from Ned Krooner’s moody brother. He set it on the counter and chuckled at the satisfaction of knowing, within the hour, whether Krooner’s meat was one hundred percent pork. It would be a comfort to know it was free of prions from mad cows before he took it home for dinner.

  If he were going to get the test to work, he’d have to dissolve away the inhibitory chemicals in the barbecue sauce. Ethyl ether might do the trick. He decided to run Krooner’s sausages in duplicate before calling it a day: one sample plain, the other spiked with barbecue sauce and treated with ether. He still had some cat muscle left; it had worked well before. He would use it as a control.

  He set up his samples, taking care to wash his hands between each one, and loaded them into the DNA amplifier. He patted his pocket to be sure he had his wallet and keys. The machine would cycle automatically for the next fifty-five minutes. In the meantime, he might as well go downstairs to the vending machines.

  On the ground floor, he inserted coins into slots and pulled out a flaccid turkey sandwich and a can of cranberry juice. He dropped into one of the hard plastic chairs at the rear of the deserted, dimly lit cafeteria and stared at the pallid Sunday dinner balanced on his knees.

  Growing up, he’d never had Sunday dinners. Not any that he could remember. Until he’d left home for university, he had to sing at church every Sunday. For the entire day. Nine o’clock matins, eleven o’clock Eucharist, five thirty evensong. As he recalled the weekly gropings of the choir director at remedial practice after evensong, his temples pounded with fury. At age fourteen he’d kicked the horrible man in the shins with his first pair of brogues. That had stopped the fondling, but not the revulsion, nor the penetrating images that could still disturb his sleep. The man had been a criminal, not “just affectionate,” as his mother had insisted. When Hamish had summoned the courage to tell her as many of the details he reckoned she could handle, she set her jaw, narrowed her eyes, and refused to believe a word. That was when the trust poured out of their relationship.