Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  The cop looked up at mention of the name and handed back our IDs. “Can’t do that.”

  “This is part of a public health investigation, Officer,” Brooke said.

  The cop crossed his arms and looked at Brooke, then at me. “You can’t talk to her because she’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 39

  I couldn’t put together a thought. Nor, evidently, could Brooke. Eventually, I managed to ask, stupidly, “When?”

  “Last night or this morning.”

  I tried to push past the officer. “Hold on there,” he said, easily blocking the way. “You can’t go back there. It’s a crime scene.”

  “I’m a doctor. We’re both doctors.”

  “Unless you’re the coroner, she don’t need you anymore.”

  “Look,” I said desperately. “We need to talk to someone—”

  “You are.”

  “Jesus Christ—”

  We stood there for a moment, facing off. Two servants of the public involved in a little turf war. Perhaps the warmth enjoyed between cops and public health was an East Coast thing. I looked over at Brooke. She was pulling out a pad and a pen.

  I said, “Officer, we’re concerned that Ms. Thomas may have had some information concerning a public health emergency.”

  “Like I said, Ms. Thomas is not going to be able to help you.”

  “Who’s investigating the case?” I asked.

  “The San Jose Police Department. What are you doing?” the cop asked Brooke.

  “Taking down your badge number. I’m with the Santa Clara Public Health Department, Officer”—she looked pointedly at the name badge and wrote down the name—“Sutter, and I think they might be interested—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I don’t give a rat’s ass. The lady is dead. She’s not going to be able to tell you anything.”

  We moved inside. He called after us, “They’re in the back, in the garage. The detective’s name is Walker.”

  Out of earshot of the cop, I said to Brooke, “You really charmed him.”

  “The sensitivity training paid off,” she said flatly.

  As we walked into the hallway, past the small office, I apologized silently to John Myers for doubting his motives. The events of the last week were getting to me, and my paranoia was revved up. Not a bad thing, on balance, as long as I kept it in check.

  Voices drifted down the hallway. To our left, in the living room, there was a gaggle of eight or so women, huddled on couches. Two staff members there: one talking to the group, the other—Rosalinda—trying to console a seemingly inconsolable woman. She glowered at me as I walked by.

  The hallway ended in a swinging door. I pushed through it to a modest kitchen backed by a paned-glass door. Through the glass, I could see an outbuilding, a garage perhaps, and a person standing in an open doorway. Brooke and I walked outside and down the wooden steps to a small yard. The person in the door—a tall black woman, tightly braided hair—had her back toward us, looking into the garage. She was taking notes.

  I said, “Detective Walker?”

  She turned. “Yes?” She eyed us, chewing on a piece of gum. “Who are you?”

  We pulled out our IDs.

  Walker looked at them briefly. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Gladys Thomas was part of an investigation we’re working on.” I explained the outbreak in Baltimore and Gladys Thomas’s possible connection to an infected individual. Walker took in the information silently and made a couple of notes in her notebook. After I finished my spiel, I asked Walker what had happened.

  “Cut-and-dry,” she said, grinding away at the gum. “At least for the time being it is. We got a call this morning around seven. Seems Ms. Thomas went out last evening. Nobody knew she was gone except for her roommate, but . . .”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The roommate. A piece of work. Anyway, this morning the roommate finally decided to raise the alarm. Staff gets involved and looks all over the house. They called the local ERs and got nothing. Eventually, someone thought to check the garage.” She motioned for us to follow her. “Just inside the doorway, please. This scene has been contaminated enough.”

  Brooke shuffled into the garage in front of me and stopped abruptly. I heard her gasp.

  CHAPTER 40

  I squeezed past Brooke into the building.

  The scene before us was surreal, like the set for a performance-art piece. There were no cars in the garage, and the floor space was clear except for a few lawn chairs, boxes, a barbecue set that had been pushed to the wall. Clear but for those things and a single chair that lay on its side in the middle of the room, underneath Gladys Thomas’s hanging body. A short rope ran around her neck to one of the broad crossbeams that supported the building’s roof. The beam was only seven feet off the ground, and Gladys’s feet nearly brushed the concrete floor.

  A photographer circled the body, his camera clicking and strobing.

  I stood for a moment, taking it in. Eventually I said, “May I?” and pointed to the body.

  Walker sighed. “Just don’t touch anything.”

  I nodded and walked to the center of the room. Brooke followed.

  Gladys Thomas’s eyes bulged and her swollen tongue protruded from the mouth. The previously pretty face was puffed and contorted. She’d bitten deep into her tongue, and dried blood cracked on her lips and over her chin. Even in the dim light, I could make out the small hemorrhages in the thin skin around her eyes, a sign of strangulation. The bruises and contusions around her neck were broad and dark. Though we’d have to wait for the pathologist’s report, it didn’t look as if Gladys had died quickly, from a broken neck. She’d had a messy, painful death.

  “Too bad,” Walker said to herself. “A real shame.”

  “The officer outside said this was a suicide,” I said, looking closely at the distorted face.

  “That’s what we’re calling it,” Walker replied.

  “‘We’?”

  “I’m ruling a suicide. It’ll be checked out by the medical examiner, but . . . I’ve seen a lot of these. It’s a suicide.”

  “Was there a note?” Brooke asked.

  “There’s never a note.”

  I pulled out the small pad from my jacket and began jotting observations. I moved around the back of the body. At Gladys’s buttocks, a wide, faint stain spread across her light-blue cotton pants. For a minute at least, I focused on the stain.

  “Did you see this?” I asked Walker. She came over and looked at the discolored fabric.

  “Urine,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “They always void—”

  “I know. But look at the pattern. It’s spread out along her buttocks. I’m not a detective, but if she died hanging like this, you would think the urine would run down her legs, right?”

  Walker looked as if she was about to say something, then stopped herself. She glanced at the photographer. “Get this,” she said frostily.

  “I already did,” he replied.

  Walker nodded and began writing in her notebook. “You like that CSI show, hunh, Doctor?”

  I looked at her. “No, I just—”

  “Get out.”

  The words came from behind us, from the doorway to the garage. I turned. It was Rosalinda. “Get the hell out of here,” she yelled.

  Everyone—Walker, the photographer, Brooke, me—looked back at the figure in the doorway. “They killed her.” Rosalinda pointed at me.

  “What?” I asked. Walker’s head had swiveled toward me.

  “They pushed her to this. She was fine until yesterday when they made her so upset—”

  “Ma’am?” Walker said, moving closer.

  “They killed her!”

  “Ma’am—”

  “She would have been fine if they never came!”

  “Ma’am, why don’t we step outside?” Walker placed a hand on Rosalinda’s shoulder.

  Rosalinda jerked her arm back and screamed: �
��Don’t touch me!”

  Walker turned to Brooke and me and snapped, “Stay here.” Then, gently, she took Rosalinda’s elbow and led her outside to the small yard. I looked back to the body.

  “You about done?” the photographer asked. He made a big deal of checking his watch. No, I wasn’t done, but without touching the body, I couldn’t do much more there. I didn’t want to give in that easily, so I turned to Brooke and asked, “Do you have anything else?”

  “Not right now,” she replied.

  I stepped back from the body, and the skinny man began to shoot again, flashing a couple close-ups at the urine stain on the pants. Contrary to what he said to the detective, it looked like he hadn’t really gotten it on the first pass.

  Outside, I could hear Walker’s and Rosalinda’s voices. I didn’t want to walk into the hornets’ nest, so I hung out in the garage for a few more minutes. Eventually, the voices stopped and Detective Walker walked into the building.

  “She’s upset,” Walker said.

  “I could tell.”

  “With you two. She thinks you—”

  “We heard her.”

  Walker flipped to a clean page of her notebook. “What happened yesterday?”

  I saw no reason to hold back. So, I told Walker about the lies, the relationship with dead Douglas/Casey. I told her about Gladys Thomas’s shock and despair when she found out her beau was dead.

  I noticed the photographer had stopped taking pictures. “She’s sick?” he asked anxiously.

  “She’s dead,” I said. “You’ll be fine. Just glove before you touch her. Wash your hands. Use a mask if you’re going to be moving her around a lot. Treat her as if she has AIDS.”

  “We treat everyone as if they have AIDS,” Walker said.

  “Good.” The photographer was staring at the body. “You’ll be fine,” I told him again.

  “How upset did she seem?” the detective asked.

  “Extremely so.”

  “Upset enough to kill herself?”

  It was a simple question, but a vexing one. Kill herself. Was Gladys Thomas upset enough to kill herself? Until that day, I had never met someone who’d killed herself. Sure, I’d seen the aftershock of successful and unsuccessful suicide attempts in my rotation through the emergency room and through the path labs. But I’d never spoken to someone hours before she pulled the proverbial trigger. On the surface, it made sense: an upset woman, distraught over the loss of her lover, kills herself. Neat, tidy, even romantic. But there were too many things wrong with it.

  “Doctor?” Walker insisted. “Was she upset enough that she would have killed herself?”

  Brooke answered, “We’re not psychiatrists. We don’t know.”

  “Maybe Dr. McCormick does.”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” I said.

  Walker seemed perturbed by the answer; it was obvious we were getting off on the wrong foot. But I—and I sensed Brooke, too—was irked. The police seemed to be doing a slipshod job here. Retarded lady kills herself. Not a major deal by big-city-police standards.

  Walker said, “I may have more questions for you. So, your information, please.”

  “I’m only in the area for another day.”

  “Your contact information.”

  I gave her my cell phone number and my office number at CDC. Brooke coughed up her digits. Walker turned away from us toward the body, which I assumed to be our dismissal. But I wasn’t done. “Have you questioned Ms. Lopez?”

  Walker turned around. “What business is that of yours?”

  “I told you. We’re investigating an outbreak.” I really did not want to get into some interjurisdictional spitting match; I softened my tone. “Detective Walker, anything you can tell me would be greatly appreciated.”

  “I questioned her earlier. What do you want to know?”

  “Did she say anything about a boyfriend? About the Casey we mentioned?”

  “No.”

  I pulled the black-and-white picture from my folder and showed it to her. “This is the murdered boyfriend. The best we can figure it is that he called himself Douglas Buchanan on the East Coast, and Casey—we don’t have a last name—out here. Like I said, Douglas Buchanan was an assumed name, from a person who died years ago.”

  “This is being investigated—?”

  “By the Baltimore PD and Carroll County Sheriff’s office. Maryland State Police are involved as well. I’ll make a copy of the photo and fax it to your office.”

  “Thanks,” Walker said. “But I’m still going to treat this as a suicide, subject to change depending on what the ME says. The investigation of this”—she pointed at the picture—“Casey isn’t our problem.”

  “No,” I agreed. “Not yet it’s not.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Walker and the photographer stayed with the body as Brooke and I stepped into the backyard. Under a large oak, there was a picnic table. We sat down and waited quietly for the guys from the ME’s office to arrive. I was thinking about a cigarette. Brooke wasn’t. “I think I’m worried about all of this,” she said.

  “I am, too.”

  “No, I mean worried. I’m frightened. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m worried it might be an attack.”

  It was, in fact, something I’d always been worried about. But I wanted to hear what she was thinking. “So tell me,” I said.

  “Think about it. You have some man who’s carrying a disease. For argument’s sake, let’s say it’s a virulent strain of HIV. So this guy, he’s a suicide bioterrorist, and he’s copulating his way through a vulnerable population.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You said his room in the home in Baltimore was nice, right? Well, he’s keeping himself in style; he’s got his own little room in a sleazy home for the retarded, because he’s taking this enormous chance. He’s got a cell phone, stereo, all the stuff that no one else in the home has. After he’s done his dirty work, his handlers knock him off to keep it quiet.”

  “Why do his handlers knock him off? I thought he was a suicide—I don’t know—a suicide fucker—”

  “I’m serious, Nathaniel.”

  “So am I.”

  She looked away from me. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t a suicide deal. Maybe he thought he would be cured. Maybe that’s what his handlers told him. He probably thought he’d do his work in Baltimore, come back here, get cured, then go on and marry Gladys Thomas.”

  “It doesn’t add up, Brooke.”

  “I’m just thinking here, okay? I’m just thinking.”

  “All right, sorry. Let’s just think. What’s the agenda?”

  “What agenda?”

  “If it’s a terrorist attack, where are the letters, the demands? The claims of responsibility?”

  “Maybe they’re waiting for it to get really bad, for it to blow up in the press. Think about it, Nate. Think about how terrifying it is. No mail, no crop dusters, no aerosol cans. This guy himself is the bomb. Think about that.”

  I did. It still didn’t add up.

  “And Gladys Thomas is a loose end, right? Maybe—”

  “Brooke—”

  “Maybe they found out about her when Casey died. Maybe they killed her because they were worried—”

  “Brooke—”

  “What?” she said, too loud. “Don’t yell at me,” she said softly.

  “I didn’t yell at you.”

  “You did.”

  “Well, you were getting carried away.”

  “Somebody has to. You should. It’s your job.”

  “Look,” I said. “I got carried away. That’s why they kicked me out of Baltimore.”

  “Oh, I see. Since when did Nathaniel McCormick start caring so much what other people thought?”

  “Since he heard the swishing sound of his career going down the toilet. Brooke, this sky-is-falling scenario is good thinking. It’s the kind of thinking we should be doing—”

  “It’s what I am
doing—”

  “—but we need to keep it in context. Right now this thing is just a disease. With some weird elements, that’s true. I’m out here to follow up on one of those elements.” There was some commotion from inside the house. “The medical examiner’s guys are here,” I said, standing. “And I need to head up to the university and visit an old friend.”

  “An old friend.”

  “An old professor. And unless you want to drive me up there and risk seeing, uh . . .”

  “Jeff.”

  “Unless you want to see Jeff again, I need to get back to your place and get my car.”

  She pushed herself up. “I don’t want to see Jeff.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked into the house and introduced ourselves to the two techs from the ME’s office, made sure they knew the safety precautions they were to take. One of the guys, a thick white guy with a shaved head, tried to pump us for information. I told him the bug didn’t look airborne, but that he should be careful and not worry. Way to go for paradoxical directions; I felt like a spokesman from Homeland Security, telling everyone to be vigilant but to live a normal life.

  As we got to the main hallway, I could hear weeping from the living room. I said to Brooke, “We should talk to the other residents and staff. See if they recognized Douglas, see if any of them had contact with him.”

  “Have a little compassion, Nathaniel. Wait until tomorrow.”

  “My plane leaves tomorrow.”

  “Do a rash thing,” she snapped as she beelined toward the front door. “Change the flight.”

  CHAPTER 42

  At Brooke’s place, I faxed Douglas Buchanan’s photo to Detective Walker, then drove north to a rendezvous with my old mentor, my old university, and, probably, a swarm of unpleasant memories. Truthfully, though I’d played my return to the place over and over in my head—usually a high-octane fantasy in which I was coming back to deliver a commencement speech or accept an honorary degree—I had no idea what I’d feel.

  I left the highway at University Avenue, which cut straight through a town that had come to be synonymous with the dot-com excesses of the 1990s. Though the boom times were over, this particular hamlet seemed not to have noticed. I waited in a line of traffic that moved at a slug’s pace and was composed almost entirely of German and Japanese luxury vehicles and SUVs. Ken Kesey, back in the liquid sky days, used to live in this area. I wondered what he’d think about the glistening train of BMWs that snaked through the boutiques and restaurants hawking eighteen-dollar salads. He’d probably think it was a bad trip.