Isolation Ward

by Joshua Spanogle

  “That’s it. For now.”

  “For now? Jesus.”

  “I’ll fax the sequence to you.”

  “E-mail’s better.”

  “I only have a hard copy.”

  “Scan it.”

  “Okay, you win. Scan and e-mail,” I said.

  “Yeah, I win. I get you to do one ninetieth of the work I have to do—”

  “Ben, one more thing. . . .”

  “What?”

  “I need this started tonight.”

  “No. No way.”

  To get the best deal, I started high with Vallo.

  “I really need it, Ben.”

  “Best I can do is tomorrow morning. I’ll go in early, but that’s the best I can do. My wife is gonna kill me, as it is. Where are you?”

  “California.”

  “I’ll have your unknown sequence analyzed by the time you wake up. PCR will take until the end of the day at least.”

  “Fair enough. And one more thing.”

  “How many ‘one more things’ is it going to be tonight?”

  “I don’t want you to tell anyone about this. Not Tim or anyone.”

  “You running around on him?”

  “No. Tim won’t want to know about it yet. Trust me. If we get anything, I’ll tell him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  He banged down the phone without another word.

  Back to the library. Before I e-mailed Vallo my sequences, there was something I needed to check. Something that, if it panned out, might strengthen the connections between Baltimore and California.

  I scanned the sequence from Harriet Tobel’s lab and converted it to text, then dumped the whole thing into a Word file. From the paper on PERVs, I copied the primer sequences, which were unique to the viruses and essentially defined the bugs. Then I put the PERV sequences into the “Find what” field in Word. I wanted to see whether what I found in the lab was a PERV genome. If so, well, that was something. It meant Dr. Tobel was concerned enough about PERVs to have the entire sequence on file.

  I hit Enter on the computer. No match.

  “Damn,” I whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  I e-mailed the sequences—the thousands of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs—to Ben Vallo, then returned to my violated car. On the way back to the vehicle, I passed the Heilmann Building. Still no security. At that point, it seemed I was going to get away with my brush with crime. Perhaps I’d missed my calling.

  Anyway, I can’t say I was in the best frame of mind. I knew I was falling apart a little—I was confused, operating on a few hours’ sleep, scared. All bravado aside, I had just broken into an office. I mean, I was a goddamned doctor; I wasn’t made for this.

  So I dialed the number for the only person left on the planet who seemed to give a rat’s ass about me, or, at least, who used to give a rat’s ass about me.

  “Go away, Nate,” Brooke said.

  “They broke into the car, took everything. They took the tape.”

  I could hear her breathing. “This afternoon. When I was in the hospital.” Brooke didn’t say anything. “They took the tape, Brooke.”

  “I heard you—”

  “And my toothbrush. And all my clothes.” There was a chill silence on the phone. “I’m really sorry about this morning. Really. I’m really, really sorry. . . .”

  “Nathaniel . . .” She sighed. “I’m sorry, too. I guess we had to expect some sparks, right? Working this close after . . . well, you know.”

  “Par for the course, maybe.”

  “Probably. You were just being a prick, that’s all.” I suppose I should have hung up then, but I didn’t.

  “I know.” I felt something like relief. “And you were kind of being a bitch.”

  “I only did it in the interest of team building. Prick and Bitch. The dynamic duo.” She sighed again. “Okay, this is against my better judgment, but do you have a place to stay tonight? Do you want a place to stay?”

  “No,” I said, by which I meant yes. So I said, after a pause, “Yes.”

  “Well, come over, then. I have an extra toothbrush, and some of Jeff’s clothes are here. Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a nice little jazz place around the corner from my apartment building. Let’s meet there. OK? Nate? Are you all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. My throat was tight. “Thanks, Brooke. Really. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Toot’s was a jazz club that didn’t seem to feature much jazz—the stage had two tables on it, the piano was pushed to the wall and looked unloved and unused—but did feature cheap drinks and cheap food. So, in keeping with the mojo of the place, I ate and drank. Hamburger and gravy fries for me, salad with some sort of bean on it for Brooke. Chivas on the rocks with a beer chaser for me, six-dollar glass of chardonnay for Brooke.

  “You found the most expensive thing in the bar,” I said to her.

  “I’m sipping.”

  “Come on. Don’t make me drink alone.”

  “What’s this?” She pointed at the glass of urine-colored liquid in front of her.

  “You know what I mean.”

  I brought Brooke up to speed on the PERV situation.

  “I don’t know how much that tells us, Nate. Of course they would be concerned about PERVs.”

  “But if it’s related to the rape. If it jumped species and got to Baltimore . . .”

  “Then it probably wouldn’t look like a hemorrhagic fever. It would be more . . . subtle.”

  “I know. But we could have a porcine-human chimera, right? The PERV picks up some genetic material from a human virus and goes wild.”

  “It doesn’t make sense, biologically. And how does it get to Baltimore?” she argued. “I know you want to draw parallels here, but you can’t force it. You’re going to start seeing what you want to see, instead of what’s really out there—”

  “I’m not an idiot, Brooke. I’ve been trained in this.”

  She bit back. “Oh well, then, if you’ve been trained.”

  The snide remark notwithstanding, Brooke had a point. One of the pitfalls of any investigation, whether it be in the lab or in the community, is that you start to home in on something and strap on the blinders. You acknowledge that which supports your hypothesis and ignore that which doesn’t. It was, goddamn it, a flaw of mine. I’d done it in Jurgen’s lab a decade ago, and I might have done it again now.

  “It’s still a possibility,” I said. “The PERV mutant. But we need to keep our minds open.”

  “Are you saying I’m right?”

  “I’m saying your criticism may be valid.”

  “That’s quite a concession, Nathaniel. Wow.”

  “Just part of my boyish charm.”

  “Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.” She smiled.

  Before long, it was obvious our gig at Toot’s wouldn’t last. I was fighting the spins by my third round. I was also fighting melancholy about Dr. Tobel’s death and self-loathing about being so irresponsible as to get drunk when I had work to do, about fuzzy logic that was making me jump to conclusions. I was still pissed and unnerved about the car. Oh, and there was that little thing with Alaine.

  “All my underwear, gone. I got this great blue tie and it’s gone. They even got this Buddha eye I brought back from Nepal like ten years ago. You know, those necklaces with the bead? I never wore it, but still, I carried it in my luggage.”

  Brooke looked at me, nodding slightly; she’d finished her first glass of wine but hadn’t really touched the second.

  I continued, “I mean, who the hell would do that? Who’d break into a car in a med school in fucking richy-rich California in the middle of the day? Into a big American car, no less? I mean, that’s weird, right?”

  Brooke nodded.

  “And they took the tape, Brooke. Why would they want that tape?”

  “They took everything.”

  “Right. But they only took all
that other stuff so they could take the tape.”

  “How did they know you had the tape?”

  “Alaine told them.”

  “I see,” she said. “Who’s them, Nathaniel?”

  “I don’t know. Them. Whoever doesn’t want us to know about this rape in the bowels of a prestigious hospital.”

  “And who would that be?”

  I leaned forward on the table. “The people who run this study. Otto Falk, Alaine, the people at Chimeragen—”

  “Nathaniel—”

  “The same them who killed Gladys Thomas, who came over to Harriet Tobel’s house the night she died. The same people who came over later that night and buzzed off before I could get their license—”

  “Nathaniel!”

  “What?”

  “You’re doing it now.”

  “What?”

  “This loose-association flight-of-fancy thing.”

  “I’m just brainstorming.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “True. But, Brooke, there’s a bug killing people back east. Harriet Tobel is dead. . . .”

  I realized I was babbling a little. I gripped my drink and took a slug.

  Brooke’s face softened. “I know.” She touched my hand. “Look, we don’t have enough information, right? It’s all very weird; you’re right. It’s odd that Dr. Tobel had this tape in the first place, that she didn’t come forward with it earlier. She is—she was—highly involved in this project. Why didn’t she come forward earlier if she knew?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know.”

  “And why wouldn’t the investigators report the rape? It wouldn’t have scuttled the entire experiment. The rapist would have gone to jail, and the investigators would have been able to come out of this pretty clean.”

  “You think the other families would have wanted their vegetative loved ones involved in an experiment where the overseers couldn’t even prevent a rape?”

  That stumped her, and she changed tack. “Maybe Harriet Tobel is the only one of the bosses who knew about it.”

  “And maybe you’re totally full of shit.”

  “And maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this,” she shot back. “Come on, you and I both know how the FDA works on this. Everything would be documented. If there’s anything fishy, especially a big conspiracy, they would know. I’ll call them tomorrow, get you out of the loop here. They’ll know about the death of this woman.”

  “They’re not going to tell you anything. Everyone involved in the project signed a nondisclosure.”

  “I have friends at the FDA,” she said.

  “You really believe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, Brooke?”

  “Let’s go,” she said abruptly. “We’ll piece this together tomorrow. I don’t want to think about it now.”

  Dejected, nauseous, way too drunk, I followed Brooke to the car. Rape, Harriet Tobel, Chimeragen, Gladys Thomas, Bethany Reginald. All a big conspiracy. Right, Nathaniel. Right.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?” I asked, trying to nuzzle Brooke’s neck.

  “Not like this. Not when you’re drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Nate. Stop.”

  I pushed away from Brooke, slid to the far end of the couch.

  “It’s been a long day,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t want anything to start like this.”

  “Do you want anything to start at all?”

  Brooke didn’t answer. Instead, she stood and walked to the door to her room. Then she stopped.

  I must have been a mess. I was wearing khakis that I’d had on for three days. My blue shirt and blue blazer had seen everything from Gladys Thomas’s body to Harriet Tobel’s body to Alaine Chen’s tears.

  All I wanted at that moment was for Brooke to be next to me. All I wanted was to put my head in her lap, just for a few moments. Screw disease and sick people and dead mentors. Screw Alaine and her damn ambition. Screw Alaine for wanting a shoulder to cry on and nothing else. And fuck me for letting these thoughts run amok. I was pathetic.

  Brooke said, “Good night, Nathaniel,” and closed the door to her room.

  Somewhere in the middle of feeling sorry for myself—so sorry for myself I wound up stroking the cat—I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 66

  I woke early the next morning, sinuses swollen and draining, eyes feeling like they’d just been rubbed with poison ivy. Then there was the hangover, the splitting headache, the mouth that tasted like the cat had used it for a litter box.

  There were blankets over me. Brooke.

  I stumbled to the sink and gulped down a glass of water, rummaged in the cupboards for a multivitamin, something with B complex, something that might have a snowball’s chance in hell to lift the pain. I found the vitamins and aspirin and swallowed a handful of pills. With a paper towel, I blew my nose hard, popping my ears, trying to core the mucus from my sinuses.

  The dogs plodded around the room. I called them to the couch and they hopped up. The HIV files I’d taken from Dr. Tobel’s office were on the coffee table in front of me. I cracked one open, trying to read.

  From the bedroom, I heard Brooke’s muffled voice. For a while, I sat on the couch, reading over the same paragraph on HIV resistance, not absorbing anything. My wheels spun like that for maybe fifteen minutes, until my cell rang.

  “You sound like shit,” Ben Vallo said.

  “Thanks, man. You always know how to make me feel great.”

  “Then this will make you feel even better: I got no match on the big sequence you gave me.”

  “Not surprising, I guess,” I said.

  Vallo seemed to expect I would fill the pause with something, but I had nothing to say, so he spoke. “I made the primers for the PERVs. We should know if it’s hiding out in the Fillmore and Reginald tissue later tonight. If it’s there, we should have a screaming signal.”

  “Great.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “Yes. That’s it. Thanks, Ben.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Thanks for your help.”

  “You’re telling me all you wanted me to do was run this against a database? Do the PCR?”

  “That’s all.”

  “You going to call me back in half an hour and ask me to analyze the five hundred samples you just FedExed to me?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, quit twisting my arm. Look, I’m going to run a Southern blot for the PERVs. The sensitivity won’t be as good as PCR, but it’ll be faster by a few hours. If there’s enough there, we’ll ID it, and I’ll give you a call.”

  “Thanks.”

  Vallo, for all his bitching, loved the challenge of his work. And he loved to work. What I’d handed him the night before—running PCR on a few samples, bouncing Dr. Tobel’s genetic code against our database of known pathogens—wasn’t a challenge and it wasn’t much work. “Tell me what the big sequence is,” he said.

  “I can’t tell you. Sorry.”

  “Jesus, McCormick. You want to know about partial matches?”

  “Okay, sure. Ben, did you get any partial matches?”

  “It’s a little weird. It looks like we have env and pol genes that are something like HIV. Not exactly, mind you, but something like it.” Env genes coded for the protein envelope of a virus; pol genes, for the polymerase enzyme that enabled the viruses to replicate. “But we have a bunch of junk that I haven’t seen. I got a partial hit for the env sequence of Junin, but I had to reduce the sensitivity a whole bunch. It’s not like anything we have.”

  What Ben Vallo was telling me was that what we had looked like a mix of different bugs. This wasn’t surprising, really. Nature is conservative, and when something works—a gene that codes for an effective protein coat, for example—she tends to riff on it. It’s why humans share ninety-eight percent of their genome with chimpanzees. The old saw “If it ain’t br
oke, don’t fix it” is hard at work in biology. And what goes for people and chimps goes for viruses as well. That’s why he got partial hits on a lot of the code. It crossed my mind that someone could have just cut and pasted genetic pieces from other bugs, though why Dr. Tobel would have such a sequence, I couldn’t fathom.

  “So, it looks like it’s a virus?” I asked Ben.

  “It looks like it might possibly be a virus.”

  “Way to be definitive.”

  “Hey, you want definitive, talk to God.”

  “He’s next on my list. Anyway, thanks again, Ben.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what this is about?”

  “Maybe sometime over a beer. Not now.”

  “You’re really working your way onto my good side,” he said, and ended the call.

  I looked up and saw Brooke leaning against the door jamb of her bedroom, that Penn sweatshirt brushing the tops of her thighs. “What was that, Nate?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Dead lead.”

  “I talked to some people at the FDA. They wouldn’t give me details—they wouldn’t give me anything at first—but I pressed. They said everything with the Chimeragen trials was aboveboard.”

  “How hard did you press?”

  “I’ve been on the phone for the last two hours, Nate. I talked to a friend, then a friend of a friend, then a friend again. She told me it was all okay.”

  “Crap.” I slouched deep into the couch, threw my feet up on the coffee table.

  “Poor Nathaniel. You hungover?”

  “Exquisitely.”

  “Three drinks, by my count.”

  “They poured heavy.” I eased further into the couch. “What can I say? I’m a cheap date. I ought to take myself out more often.”

  She laughed. “You look sort of cute in a roguish way.”

  I looked at her in that sweatshirt. “You look sort of hot in a porn star, college girl way.”

  She shook her head and smiled. “Just look roguish and don’t speak, Nate. You’re ruining the image.”

  “You have a cigarette?”

  “Okay, the image is totally ruined.”

  She turned back to her bedroom.

  “Don’t tell me I just blew my chance,” I said.

  She made an exaggerated shrug, closed the door. I fantasized about her throwing open her bedroom door and standing there, stark naked. I heard the water run in her shower. Damn.