Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  Verlach pulled out his cell phone. “I’m going to get the police down here.” He put the phone up to his ear and pointed at Mizursky with his other hand. “You, lawyer shithead, are going to have to explain to your client why his front doors have been ripped off their hinges. And explain to a district judge why you obstructed an outbreak investigation—”

  “And you and the city are going to be liable for any damages both to the property and the reputation of—” Mizursky looked as tense as Verlach.

  And they went on like that while I banged away at the door. I thought Verlach was going to pull out some of his basic training moves and break the attorney’s neck. Instead, he turned away and said something to the police functionary on the other end of the line. I continued to beat the hell out of the door. Bang, bang, bang.

  Verlach said, “This really is the most fucked-up political mess—”

  Just then, the knob on the door turned, and it swung open a crack.

  “Close the door!” Dunnigan yelled from the bottom of the steps. He ran toward us. Too late. I had my foot in the door and was pushing hard to open it. Inside, a woman screamed, “Close the door! Close the goddamned door!”

  A slack-jawed man in dirty sweatpants and a T-shirt stumbled back into the hallway when I pushed the door open. The counselor/receptionist—whatever she was—beelined toward us.

  “Get back to the rec room!” the woman screamed at the man in the sweatpants, who seemed dazed by the sudden explosion of activity. As she passed him, she gripped his shirt and tried to pull him out of her way. He cowered and made little whimpering sounds. “Get back to the fucking rec room!” she snarled, and slapped him, and he skittered down the hall. To us, she said, “You can’t come in here.”

  I looked at Verlach, who had the court order out and was already walking past the woman toward the stairs. I followed. As I moved past the woman, I said, “If you touch him again . . .” I let the sentence hang, gave her two seconds of hard-assed staring, and trotted after Verlach.

  Douglas Buchanan’s door was locked.

  “It doesn’t end, does it?” Verlach asked, and knocked on the door. “Mr. Buchanan? It’s Doctors McCormick and Verlach. We need to talk to you.”

  Not necessarily the way to get someone to open the door, Herb, I thought. But, as I said, Verlach was on a mission. In fact, I liked him better this way. It made me think that if it had been Verlach in that basement the day before, he’d have done the same thing I did, pushing his way through Jefferson and Dunnigan. I liked that.

  Meanwhile, I had my PalmPilot out, scrolling through the address book for the Miller Nursing Homes. I found the number, got my phone, and dialed. Dunnigan, Mizursky, and the receptionist stood in a phalanx behind us. Two dead-eyed men popped their heads out of their rooms.

  “Call the police,” Mizursky told the receptionist. “Tell them we have some men trying to break into a private room here. Tell them they are threatening to assault the residents and staff.”

  I couldn’t believe this. I mean, I was getting really furious; I wasn’t thinking clearly. “Tell them there’s going to be a lawyer with a broken neck.”

  The receptionist took off down the hall. Mizursky called after her, “Threats of imminent harm.”

  Verlach began to pound on the door again. Miller’s secretary finally picked up the phone. I said, “It’s Nathaniel McCormick of CDC again. Is Dan Miller there?”

  He was in a meeting, the secretary said.

  “Hold on,” I said to Verlach; he stopped banging. Into the phone, I said, “It doesn’t matter. Can you just check if Douglas Buchanan showed up to work today?”

  There was silence on the phone and silence in the hallway. Mizursky pulled out his telephone and dialed. “Bill,” he said, “we have that goddamned injunction yet?”

  The secretary came back on the line. “He hasn’t shown up yet.”

  “What time does he usually arrive?” I asked.

  “The shift starts at eight,” the secretary said. It was nearly four o’clock. I thanked her and clicked off.

  “He’s not at work,” I said, and Verlach began banging again. I joined in. “Douglas,” I called, “please open the door. We need to talk to you. We can help you.”

  I had a vision of Douglas Buchanan lying in his bed, safe behind that good Yale dead bolt, listening to the banging on his door. Maybe a pair of headphones snaking from his little stereo to his head, doing his damnedest to shut out the racket at his door. Doing his best to crawl into his shell and forget the world.

  At times, I felt that way. Hell, I felt that way now. To be in my bed, disengaged from—

  “Fuck this,” Verlach said.

  Far off, I could hear the wail of a siren.

  I turned around. Mizursky was still on the phone, presumably trying to get the goddamned injunction. Verlach pushed by him and the others, making his way down the hall to wait for the cops. The dreary residents of the place retreated into their rooms.

  Wait for the cops. Why the hell should we wait for the cops? We were the good guys, and the stupid bastards in the hallway behind me were trying to tangle us in injunctions and phone calls and outright harassment. I mean, this was not a complex issue.

  There was eight feet between the door and me, no one between. The door was cheap laminate. And we had a court order, which might not be valid after we’d had a little discussion with the police downstairs, with Ben Mizursky confusing the situation the best he could.

  Fuck them. And, frankly, fuck Herb Verlach if he needed the police to back him up.

  “Douglas, stand away from the door!” And I ran. My shoulder bit into the flimsy laminate, which bowed and cracked around the dead bolt.

  “Stop—” Mizursky shouted. I think he said something about breaking and entering. I stepped back about five feet, glanced toward them. Verlach cracked a smile. Dunnigan came at me, fast.

  I ran at the door again.

  This time I tore the dead bolt through the cheap wood, cracking the door open an inch. Dunnigan slammed into me, and the two of us fell through the broken door and stumbled into the room together.

  The first thing I saw was the mess—there were clothes and belongings strewn about, drawers overturned on the floor, the small closet’s contents lying in a heap. But something was definitely missing.

  There was no Douglas Buchanan lying on his bed. There was no Douglas Buchanan cowering in a corner, or waiting for me with fists raised. Douglas, it seemed, had disappeared.

  The two representatives of Baltimore’s finest—hats off to them—were measured, thoughtful, and definitely on our side in the little dispute. Since September 2001, law enforcement and public health had generally fallen into bed with each other and were pretty comfortable there. Protecting the public safety, that’s what we did.

  So there we were, Verlach and I and Mizursky and the two cops. Dunnigan had left, presumably to torture cats or whatever he did for fun.

  Mizursky was busily taking down badge numbers and making threats about disciplinary action. One of the cops was trying halfheartedly to placate him.

  “What about that?” The other cop, a black man in his thirties whose badge said C. Blakely, pointed to the broken door.

  “I thought I heard someone in distress,” I said. “I guess I was wrong.”

  The officer noted this in a small pad. “Understandable.”

  Verlach and I finished off the initial report and then asked permission to search the room, looking for, well, whatever we could get. Mouse shit, used condoms. Anything. But this had become a police matter now; we were instructed to wait for the detective and the forensics tech.

  Mizursky, mercifully, had better billing waiting for him at the office. He left. But by that time, Dunnigan, unfortunately, had returned.

  “I want to press charges for assault,” he informed Officer Blakely. “Dr. McCormick attacked me with a rat.”

  Blakely said, “You mean he came at you with the lawyer who just left?” Ah, well, we all had a goo
d laugh over that. One of the perks of being a physician is that you’re not a lawyer. I prayed the jokes would never die; they gave me constant affirmation about my career choice.

  “You see that address there?” Blakely handed Dunnigan a card. “That’s the address of the Baltimore City Police Department. I’m sure if you went downtown, the caring officers there would be happy to take your complaint.”

  Dunnigan proved himself to be smart for a Cro-Magnon, taking the hint that his help wasn’t needed at that time. He turned and moved down the hallway, knuckles dragging along the floorboards.

  Usually, missing-persons cases don’t elicit a lot of get-up-and-go in any police department, but Verlach and I put the fear of God and mass contagion into Officer Blakely, and he passed that on through the ranks. Within a half hour, we had our detective and our tech.

  So, all four of us—the guys from the BPD, Verlach, and I—pulled on our rubber gloves. When the tech, who was doing the grunt work, came across anything she thought was interesting, she’d let us know, and either Verlach or I would take a swab or a sample and bag it. In the first twenty minutes, she called us over for every hair or odd fiber she found. Eventually, Verlach told her we were interested only in animal crap and wet things: semen, mucus, blood. She got the picture.

  By that time, I was standing outside the room, taking questions from a detective called John Myers. Myers seemed to be the old-school type of detective, by which I mean his style hadn’t changed from the late seventies, when I assumed he’d joined the force. He wore an Ultrasuede blazer with a narrow tie. A sparse salt-and-pepper mustache sprouted from his lip. At about five six, one forty, he looked like an intense Chihuahua.

  Myers looked to Douglas’s room, then back to me. “You said he was agitated the last time you saw him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You know why?”

  “Sure. I was making him agitated. I was questioning him.”

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “Ones regarding his sexual habits.”

  “Do you feel he had any reason to run away?”

  I looked down the hall. One of the sad souls who lived there watched us. Myers followed my gaze. I said, “You mean besides the obvious reasons?”

  I told Detective Myers, “There is some suspicion that Douglas may have been a sexual predator.”

  “That might have been a compelling reason for him to leave.”

  “But I don’t know if he knew we knew. I don’t even know if he knew there was anything wrong with what he was doing. All things considered.”

  “Who told you about Mr. Buchanan’s, ah, proclivities?”

  “Tabitha Kinard. She’s a nurse over at the other homes.”

  Myers took another look through the shattered door to the room, caught sight of the 49ers and Giants posters, and said, “We don’t have enough good teams in this city for him? We won the goddamned Super Bowl, for Chrissake. He from San Francisco?”

  “Said he’d never been there. Could have been lying, I suppose.”

  “I’ve been to Frisco before,” he said, using that annoying appellation. “Nice city. They got the gays, though. Question: This guy go for that? Was he a predator for men? Did he predate ass?”

  Probably not, I thought, nor did he hack nouns into incorrect verbs. “I don’t know. He said he’d never had sex with men.”

  “Okay.” Myers closed his notebook. “Guess we’re finished for now. I’m going to talk to the other guys up here . . . try to talk to them, if they can get me any info through the drool.” Unfortunately, Myers seemed to be loosening up, making jokes. I gave him my best blank stare. “Anyhow, is there anything else you can think of that struck you as odd about Mr. Buchanan, Doctor?”

  Where to start? “This room is a hell of a lot nicer than the others.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the detective. Ask Dr. Jefferson why Douglas Buchanan got special treatment.”

  “I am the detective, and I’ll ask what I think is relational.”

  Relational? It seemed I was getting under Detective Myers’s skin, too. I didn’t need that. “Sorry, Detective. It’s been a long day.”

  “It’s always a long day, Doc. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Douglas had a cell phone.”

  “So?”

  “Residents here aren’t allowed to have phones.”

  “Okay, then. You have the number?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll get in touch with the phone company, get the calls to and from the phone if we need.”

  “Could you let me know when you do? I’m interested in who he talked to. It would be easiest and fastest if you just contact me directly. Avoid the bureaucratic logjam.” I handed him a card and let him chew over that for a moment; he nodded. “We want to talk to everyone he’s had contact with. They could be at risk.”

  “For what?”

  “That, Detective, is what we’re trying to find out.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Boy Wonder had his arms crossed, his skinny ass on the edge of the desk. The two of us were in a tiny office at the Department of Health. For the time being, it was to be CDC’s Baltimore headquarters.

  Tim Lancaster let the silence drag out, taking me in through his geek-chic glasses. The man looked like a bird, a crane, maybe—those specs, the beaky hooked nose, the high forehead, the six-four frame. He perched there for a good half minute before he said, “Four times, Nate.”

  “Five,” I said, “if you count the cell phone call.”

  More silence.

  “You can’t do this,” Herr Lancaster said. “You can’t ignore my pages.”

  “I was sort of in hot pursuit, Tim.”

  “You can’t do this, because if I had known you were in hot pursuit to the place where this assault with the rat—”

  “Alleged assault.”

  “Whatever. I would have told you to back off.”

  “I was with Herb Verlach, who’s my boss here. He didn’t tell me to back off.”

  “I’m your boss. I’m the trump card boss, okay? I page you four times, you sure as heck better get back to me. End of discussion.” He scratched at his neck. The scratching thing is one of Tim’s tics. Stress-induced pruritis. “Besides, these guys haven’t been through this before. They don’t know how easy BS can screw everything up.”

  “They’re not a bunch of rubes. I think we’re doing a pretty good job.”

  “Okay, but somehow somebody’s taking a leak in somebody else’s pool, and somebody’s really ticked about it. It’s not just the rat thing. Those guys—this Jefferson guy—shouldn’t have been hassling you in the first place. So we have to assume something’s going on here. You can see that.”

  “Sure.” And it was true. For whatever reason, someone—and it seemed like that someone was Dr. Randall Jefferson—was trying his best to impede our investigation.

  Tim pushed himself off the desk and circled around to a chair. He sat. “All right. You need to respond to my pages. Are we clear on this?”

  “Crystal.”

  “So, give me the situation. A to Z.”

  And I did, beginning with Helen Jones’s arrival at St. Raphe’s ED and ending with Tim’s and my disagreement. Tim alternated between scratching notes and scratching his chest.

  “All right,” he said.

  “I’m not quite done yet. Then you said, ‘I’m the trump card boss. If I page you, you have to get—’”

  “Why do I put up with this?”

  “Because without me you’d have no one to page a hundred times.”

  “Right.” Tim looked back over the pages of notes he’d taken. “Though it pains me to say it, you’ve done a very nice job here. Despite the obvious F-ups. It’s not easy. As you probably know, state is sending a few more people. You’re more familiar with this thing than anyone else. So, I’m gonna ask you: you think I should counsel that local or state take the lead on this?”

  “Let it be local. They know
it the best. Verlach’s a good man.”

  “Right. Former military, family doc, trustworthy.” I could almost hear his political brain chugging away. “Maybe we should counsel that he talk to the press.”

  “For the details, sure. But Dr. Timmons will want—”

  “Timmons’s too slick. A politician. We need a real doctor up there.”

  “Tell Verlach what to say,” I suggested. “Prep him. He’ll be fine.” Apropos of nothing more than my sour grapes, I added, “You know we aren’t always so good at dealing with the media.”

  “At least we have experience. Hopefully we can avoid some of the F-ups of Boca.”

  October 2001 was an excellent, if brutal, education for public-health officials. The anthrax attacks at the Boca Raton offices of American Media, in which a sixty-three-year-old photo editor died, were handled expertly in some respects, foolishly in others. The major mistakes were not made in the investigation itself—the response was, in fact, thought to be a success in that respect—but in the handling of information. Physicians and epidemiologists and others with scientific training aren’t the most forthcoming bunch in the best of times. The culture tries to be one based on fact, not supposition; on data, not guesses. Fact and data take a long time to collect and analyze. As people got sick, a panicked public wanted to know what to do now.

  This culture clash played out under the glare of TV lights. The docs and public officials didn’t answer the media’s questions. “We don’t have enough information.” “We don’t know.” “No comment.” These phrases became the mantra of the poor bastards in Florida. Meanwhile, the employees of AMI continued to work for four days, until health officials shut the place down. That the authorities let people work in such a hot zone was, according to the employees and to many observers, a betrayal bordering on criminal negligence.

  Tim said, “The FBI wants to send some people up from Quantico.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “We don’t even know if it’s an attack. It doesn’t look like an attack, it doesn’t walk like an attack—”

  “We don’t know what these attacks look like.”

  “The hell we don’t, Tim. I’ve been talking to these people. We have no boxes or mailings. Nothing saying ‘Death to the Great Satan’ or ‘Death to Big Brother.’ Nobody’s claiming responsibility here. And we’re talking the retarded as a target here. Not Tom Brokaw. If you want to sow fear into the population, you hit powerful people. Or at least people others can identify with. This is like AIDS and homosexuals. It’s too easy just to say ‘That’s their problem.’”