Tainted

by Ross Pennie

  “Wait a minute,” Zol said. “You’re saying it took three factors to cause this tulip CJD?”

  “From what Natasha just said, it looks that way.”

  “Max never had meningitis. I know that for sure. And he certainly doesn’t have it now. That means he’s going to be okay? He won’t get CJD? Oh, Natasha.” Zol’s voice faltered. “I . . . I could kiss you.”

  She opened her mouth, but her tongue didn’t form any words. She caught Hamish’s mischievous smile and turned away, covering her lips with her hand.

  “Listen, I’ve gotta go,” Zol said. “I’m at a pay phone.” He lowered his voice. “And the biker guy behind me is getting impatient.”

  The speaker clicked off. Natasha felt the air in the office hang strangely quiet.

  Hamish pushed at his cuticles. His smile had faded, replaced by a spooky look of anguish. “I wish I could share Zol’s enthusiasm about Max and the absence of a third factor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do we know Max doesn’t have a mild case of aseptic meningitis right now? He could be incubating as we speak. Many cases have no symptoms whatsoever.”

  “Oh, Dr. Wakefield. Don’t tell me. I was so sure that Max . . .”

  “He must be loaded with Krooner’s prions, and he got quite a dose of Extendo-Tox.” Hamish stuffed the fax into his briefcase. “Never mind. We can do Max’s serology. If there aren’t any Coxsackie B5 antibodies in his blood, then we’ll know he never got infected.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “If it’s sent to Atlanta — a month. But maybe less if we talk to the right people.”

  “And that will be the end of it?”

  His face hung like the clouds that hadn’t let up the entire month of November. “If it’s negative.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Natasha hated loose ends. She always had. Every question deserved a proper answer based on logic and sound data. As a child, it drove her to distraction whenever her mother answered Because I said so and refused to provide details to support one arbitrary edict or another. When freckle-faced girls in the schoolyard used to taunt her with That’s for us to know and you to find out, Natasha was driven wild with frustration — well, as wild as a model student ever got.

  She stared at the headline on the front page of the Hamilton Spectator. Mad Mink Murders: Politicians Push for Public Inquiry. The loose ends of the case tormented her. She knew she could do nothing to speed up the labs in Toronto and Atlanta, which were processing Max’s Coxsackie blood test. But she could get to the bottom of how Tonya Latkovic — a strict vegetarian — had become infected with Lanny Krooner’s mink-meat prions.

  It had been Colleen who’d interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Latkovic. She’d gained their confidence and discovered that Tonya’s anti-migraine injections contained not sumatriptan but Extendo-Tox. Ordinarily, it would be up to Colleen to ferret out — that phrase would never be the same for any of them again — how Tonya had come to ingest the prions. But Colleen had gone from the emergency department to intensive care. She wasn’t on life support, but no one was saying how long it would be before she was strong enough to leave hospital. Dr. Zol was with her now.

  Natasha cupped her morning peppermint tea in her hands and let out a long sigh before taking a sip. It was clear that Dr. Zol and Colleen had become more than colleagues during the course of the CJD investigation. Dr. Zol was so distraught that he’d messed up buttoning his coat as he strode past the lunchroom on the way to Caledonian Medical Centre a few minutes ago. Natasha gazed at her university degrees, expensively framed and carefully hung on her office wall. It wouldn’t take book learning to tie up Tonya’s loose end and recapture Dr. Zol’s attentions — if only in a professional sense. Intuition and good old-fashioned epidemiological footwork were needed. Just like the E. coli–contaminated canapés at that Croatian wedding.

  She retrieved the telephone directory from the bottom drawer of her desk, found the number of Tonya’s high school on Hamilton mountain, and spoke with the secretary in the principal’s office. The woman sounded wary at first, but once Natasha established that she really was calling on official business, the woman gave her the information she needed.

  The workday at the health unit dragged on, but three thirty finally arrived. Natasha hurried to her car and drove to the parking lot behind the high school. She did as the secretary had directed and checked in at the office before making her way through the maze of corridors that separated the classrooms at the front of the school from the gymnasium at the rear. Twice, she came to the ends of hallways that led only to fire escapes. The halls were deserted, but she knew she was finally on the right track when she smelled the unmistakeable odour of sweaty rubber then heard the thump and squeak of running shoes hitting a hard surface. The first door she peeked through led to a gym flanked on one side by bleachers; the court raged with testosterone and resounded with boys shooting hoops in some sort of drill. She stepped back and closed the door. From across the hall, she heard higher-pitched shouting, a whistle, and more squeaky runners. She cracked open another door and found two dozen girls playing basketball in a smaller gym without bleachers.

  She pulled off her winter boots by their fashionable but noisy heels, took a step into the gym, and pressed her back against the wall. She stood absolutely still, clutching her boots and remembering how intimidated she’d been by every gym teacher she’d had. She spotted a coach, a brown-haired woman wearing a white golf shirt and navy blue sweatpants, who punctuated her commanding arm gestures and stern facial expressions with toots of the whistle clenched between her teeth. Thankfully, she didn’t look Natasha’s way even for a millisecond. Just as Natasha began to wonder how she would get the cloying smell of sweaty bodies out of her skirt, the coach whistled four times in rapid succession, and the game came to a halt.

  The coach told the girls to take a water break, then turned to Natasha and frowned as if to say No boots or skirts welcome in here. After a moment, the woman’s face softened. She smiled and approached with an outstretched hand. “You’re from the health department, eh? The office told me to expect you.”

  “You . . . you look busy, miss. I should come back another time.”

  “Now’s a good time. They said you only wanted to ask a few questions.” She turned toward the players guzzling from water bottles and kibitzing on the other side of the gym. “Girls, this is —” The coach turned to Natasha. “I didn’t catch your name.” Natasha told her, and the coach cupped a hand beside her mouth and called, “Ms. Sharma is here from the health department. She’s got a few questions to ask.”

  A blonde — a teen-pageant beauty even in her ill-fitting polyester uniform — blushed and hid her face. The girls beside her giggled and made catcalls until the coach silenced them with a snappy admonition that this had nothing to do with anyone’s private health concerns.

  “Come,” the coach said to Natasha, “I’ll introduce you to the girls who knew Tonya. Maybe they can give you the information you’re looking for.” Her face darkened. She yanked a Kleenex from her pocket and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “We’re all still feeling pretty raw.” She called four girls by name and led them and Natasha to a corner of the gym. After she’d made the introductions, she blasted three toots on her whistle and shouted instructions to the remaining girls. She turned to the small group huddled around Natasha and said, “I’ll keep the others occupied while you remember happier times with Ms. Latkovic.”

  At the sound of Tonya’s name, the girls morphed from confident ballplayers to sad youngsters who had lost someone dear. Natasha started with the customary condolences and said she knew it would be difficult for the girls to talk about Ms. Latkovic after her illness and then her accident. “Have you been reading in the newspapers about this prion business?” she asked.

  Three girls nodded. The fourth, a brunette with her hair tied back in a ponytail, covered her eyes.

  Ignoring the silent tears, Natasha said, “What I really nee
d to know is she how she got infected with the organisms — those prions — that affected her brain.”

  The girls shrugged, studied their sneakers, then gazed longingly toward the other side of the gym.

  “Prions usually come from animal products,” Natasha explained. “But I understand that Ms. Latkovic was a strict vegetarian.”

  After a long, silent moment, a girl with a large letter C sewn to her uniform rolled her eyes.

  “Perhaps not so strict?” Natasha ventured.

  Silence.

  “Girls,” Natasha pleaded, “I know you don’t want to say anything bad about Ms. Latkovic, but if she got infected from a source we don’t know about, more lives could be in danger.” A hint of interest lit the faces around her. “Yes, any of you — every one of you — could be in danger if we don’t find all the sources of those prions.”

  The ponytailed brunette clamped a hand over her mouth then turned to the captain and pleaded with her eyes.

  “For heaven’s sake, Breanne,” said the captain, glaring, “stop being so histrionic.”

  “Yeah,” said a blonde girl with a neat white scar through her upper lip. “Neither you nor Tonya had that many.”

  “That many what?” Natasha asked.

  There was a long moment of silence, then the captain shrugged, rolled her eyes, and said, “We may as well tell her about the dogs.”

  “Technically, they weren’t dogs,” said a studious-looking girl, the shortest of the lot.

  The captain flicked her hand dismissively. “Sarah, you’re always splitting hairs.”

  “But maybe it’s important,” Sarah replied.

  Natasha felt suddenly very hot in her winter coat. Dogs? This sounded worse than the mink. “Please, what can you tell me?”

  The captain scratched at an itch near her elbow. “It’s about our breakfasts.”

  The brunette remained silent while the other three told the story of their school’s Saturday breakfast tradition. Every year, during the four weeks leading up to the basketball championships, the coach and the players indulged in an unshakable Saturday ritual that had been going on for as long as anyone could remember: a breakfast of bagels and sausages at Four Corners Fine Foods. The tradition, it seemed, had always got their school into the finals.

  “Ms. Latkovic was a really good sport about the sausages,” Sarah said, “because she didn’t want to break the spell of the gourmet hot dogs and have us miss the finals on account of her.”

  “Yeah,” admitted the captain, “but she always ordered a Viennese because the spices helped disguise the taste of the meat.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Christmas Eve found Zol steering a cart through the aisles of Four Corners Fine Foods. The proprietor had wasted no time in restoring the place to its festive glory. Crimson bows and golden baubles festooned the walls. The customers — fickle but eager — had returned in flocks on the heels of the Ministry’s pronouncement that chocolates and gelatin were officially safe, but Escarpment Pride products were to be avoided at all costs.

  In a televised announcement lasting a scant thirty seconds, the province’s chief medical officer of health had looked terribly lonely. The only person at the podium, abandoned by his consultants, his colleagues, his minister, Elliott York had the hangdog look of a man awaiting deportation to Moose’s Testicle. He conveyed only the barest of facts while waving a press release that promised further details.

  Wyatt Burr, of course, was long gone. AWOL , bolo ties and all. He’d fled the spotlight the moment Guelph confirmed they’d found the prions not in Wyatt’s gourmet sweets, but in Lanny Krooner’s tainted meats.

  Extendo-Tox, facing an armada of lawsuits, had locked its doors. The wonder drug was a pariah, its licence suspended by the Canadian Therapeutic Products Directorate; the drug was at the mercy of the American FDA. Julian Banbury had found high concentrations of Extendo-Tox in the olfactory bulbs, tucked beneath the brains of all seven victims of tulip CJD. After a little coaxing from Hamish, he posted the details on ProMed when he notified Extendo-Tox’s CEO. Through the magic of the Internet, the entire globe buzzed with Banbury’s Triad as the cause of tulip CJD: ingestion of mink prions, injection with Extendo-Tox, and infection with Coxsackie virus B5.

  Health Canada directed everyone who had ever received Extendo-Tox to undergo testing for antibodies to Coxsackie B5. Those who tested positive and might have eaten Escarpment Pride products would be watched for the first hints of CJD. But as Hamish said in that bloodless way of his, early diagnosis wouldn’t stop the relentless, untreatable mindlessness that would beset anyone marked by the triple whammy of ingestion, injection, and infection.

  Zol broke into a sweat at the sight of the deli meats. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. He pictured Lanny Krooner in jail, the charges against him so disgusting he’d been placed in protective custody. That was too good for him. The bastard had made it as far as Windsor. Two more kilometres and he would have slipped through the tunnel under the river and made it to Detroit. At Hamish’s insistence, the police had phoned the operator at Driver’s Cocoon. Contact was made just as Krooner was steering Colleen’s Mercedes into the Casino Windsor parking lot. He’d probably planned on stealing a less conspicuous car, one with U.S. plates. While Krooner was trolling for a parking spot, the engine cut out, the door locks clicked, and a woman’s voice came from a speaker in the ceiling: You are advised to relax in your seat. Don’t try to start the engine or open the doors and windows. Assistance is on the way. According to Dave Hatala, Zol’s lawyer, the police report said Krooner was still hollering when they found him three minutes later. The instant the officers told the operator to unlock the doors, Krooner leapt from the vehicle and punched a female constable in the abdomen. Her partner neutralized him, cuffed him, and tossed him into the back of the cruiser. The police told Dave Zol’s antique Parker had been among the possessions seized at the time of Krooner’s arrest. Dave was confident Zol’s treasured link with the great Dr. Osler would be safely returned in due course.

  Zol bypassed the meats, picked up two loaves of focaccia and a frosted yule log, then headed to the chocolate aisle for treats to stuff into Max’s stocking. In half an hour, Zol and Max would be setting off for a condo overlooking the ski slopes of Blue Mountain. They’d spend their Christmas break three hours’ drive north and a world away from Hamilton. And what a wonderful break it would be. This morning’s fax from Atlanta had burned its image forever into Zol’s retinas: Maxwell Szabo, age seven, Coxsackie B virus IgM and IgG non-reactive. Thank you, God. It would take the best part of a year for the Extendo-Tox to wear off, but the prions would be out of Max’s system by the spring. Coxsackie infections were seasonal, and hardly ever occurred in the winter. Max was never going to suffer the devastating triple whammy that caused tulip CJD. Zol wiped his eyes and picked up a box of Lorreaux Chocolate Fruit Explosions. He stared at the little bird. Was there more to the CJD story than the honeycreeper was letting on? He cursed himself for his superstitions and tossed the chocolates into his shopping cart.

  Hamish and Ken were spending Christmas in Florida at a clothing- optional resort for gay men. Zol couldn’t imagine Hamish doffing his swimsuit in public, but maybe Ken could help him loosen up. Before he left, Hamish had gone through Joanna Vanderven’s expensive bag. He found ginseng, bee pollen, and echinacea, as well as two heavy-duty narcotics, two types of sleeping pills, a diuretic, and a nearly full bottle of erythromycin dated the day before her death. Her autopsy had shown no signs of serious infection; maybe she’d had just a cold or smoker’s bronchitis. Hamish had found two more medications at the bottom of the bag, both for heartburn: cisapride, sold by prescription, and cimetidine, packaged for purchase over the counter. The cimetidine had been the final nail in her coffin. There’d been warnings in the journals and in the press: the combination of cimetidine, cisapride, and erythromycin could produce a deadly cardiac cocktail. Joanna’s cocktail would have been made all the more potent by the diuretic. The original
pathologist had been correct in his autopsy report: Joanna had suffered a cardiac arrhythmia. The electrical system controlling her heartbeat had short-circuited. Her heart had stopped as suddenly as if someone had pulled a plug. Joanna Vanderven had not been murdered.

  A mechanical Santa, ankle-deep in the cottony snow of the Four Corners window, waved at the shoppers from a chocolate-laden sleigh. Zol pictured another wintry scene: Max whizzing down Blue Mountain, both hands waving ski poles high in the air. Max had really taken to Colleen. She’d insisted on being discharged after five days in hospital; Zol had insisted she come to his place every night for dinner until she regained her strength. It had been a delight to see her with Max these past couple of weeks. The music in her accent made her a natural at bedtime stories. One night, she settled Max with a baby-elephant snuggle and explained that while hippos could be dangerous, their hugging unpredictable, elephants never forgot how much they loved you. Zol was certain the wistful look in her eyes said she’d always wanted to be a mother.

  Zol inhaled deeply and imagined the scent of blossoms wafting from the flawless groove above Colleen’s collarbone, from the cleft between her breasts. He flipped open his cellphone and scrolled to her number. Maybe he could convince her to join them at Blue Mountain for the week. And bring her jasmine. He’d supply the bergamot.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I may have inherited some writing genes, but turning me into an author took the unstinting encouragement of my parents, Archie and Barbara, and my siblings, Sheena and Tim. My talented writing buddies, John Hewson and Mark Walma, helped mould this work into something approaching a novel, ready for the insights of my trusted readers, Ross Blundell, Birgit Elston, Martha Fulford, Larry Kramer, Bob Nosal, and Anne Westaway. I’m very grateful to Jack David, Crissy Boylan, Simon Ware, and all the others at ECW Press who placed their faith in me as a novelist, and to Edna Barker for buffing my manuscript with her professional eyes and hands. But most of all, I wish to thank my darling Lorna, without whose love, patience, and shared joy in reading I would never have completed this book.