The Last Widow: The latest new 2019 crime thriller from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author

by Karin Slaughter

  Sara gagged. The bodies outside the greenhouse had started to melt in the heat. Skin slipped from bone. Eyes bulged. Gaping mouths showed pools of blood and vomit that had caked into throats.

  They were young and old, men and women, dressed not in black but in white lab coats. Their faces showed the horror of their deaths.

  Fully conscious. Paralyzed. Slowly suffocating.

  Sara knew what had killed them.

  She shoved hard against the greenhouse door. A body was blocking the way. Sara pushed him with her foot. She walked into the thermal tent. The heat was almost blinding. The electricity was off. The air conditioners had gone dormant. The thermal tent and glass acted as a magnifier for the sunlight, boiling the contents inside.

  She saw exactly what she had expected to see.

  A commercial laboratory.

  Beakers and flasks, ring stands, pipettes, tongs, burners, vacuum tubes, test tubes, droppers, thermometers.

  Spray bottles filled with clear liquid were scattered along the table. A metal rack contained raw materials. Sara pushed aside bags of spoiled apples and rotting potatoes.

  Black box.

  In Sara’s long list of possibilities, this was the last thing she had expected to find at the other end of Michelle’s message. The small box of HBAT was actually white. The black box was literally a printed black rectangle around a warning mandated by the Food and Drug Administration:

  DANGER! USE EXTREME CAUTION! EQUINE SERUM REQUIRES ESCALATING DOSE CHALLENGES TO OBVIATE SENSITIVITY AND POSSIBLE MORTALITY

  Sara opened the box. The vial inside was from the US Department of Health and Human Service’s Strategic National Stockpile. The agency stored and controlled push packages of emergency antibiotics, vaccines and anti-toxins that were sent out under armed guard in case of a biological attack.

  Biological attack seemed like a muted way to describe what Dash was planning. This was why he had predicted that historians would never be able to accurately calculate the number of people murdered today. The Message was excruciating, unforgiving death. Sara was holding in her hand the only thing that could stop it in its tracks.

  HBAT was specifically designed to treat botulism, the most acutely poisonous toxin known to man.

  21

  Wednesday, August 7, 9:17 a.m.

  Faith stirred a packet of blue stuff into her black coffee. Van was still at the counter adding approximately one pound of sugar to his mocha latte. Her phone had buzzed with three shotgun-style texts from Amanda demanding an update, which meant that Amanda hadn’t been called in to see the governor yet, which meant that she was probably stomping around the Capitol like an angry lunatic, raving about how everyone was wasting her time.

  Faith texted a simple response—working on it.

  Amanda fired back immediately—work harder.

  Faith turned the phone face down on the table. She watched Van add chocolate sprinkles to his latte. She had only given him the information he had probably already gleaned from Beau Ragnersen: Will was going undercover. They knew that the IPA was planning something big today. Faith had kept in her pocket the information about Will being whisked away from the Citgo on an untraceable dirt bike. And Lyle Davenport, the Kia driver who’d met him at the gas station, invoking his right to remain silent. And the GPS tracker in Will’s holster that was apparently not tracking anything.

  In Faith’s experience, if you were going to successfully lie, you’d better have a few more truths to throw around in case you were called on your bullshit.

  Van finally sat down at the table. He sipped his coffee. Faith waited for some roundabout story, but for once, he got straight to the point. “Last September, Beau was admitted to Emory Hospital with a case of wound botulism.”

  Faith understood the individual words, but they made no sense together. “Wound botulism?”

  “Clostridium botulinum is a bacteria that naturally occurs in soil and water. Under certain circumstances, it turns into botulinum neurotoxin, or botulism.”

  All that Faith knew about botulism was that rich women used it to freeze their faces. “What circumstances?”

  “With Beau, he was muscle-popping black tar heroin that was cut with dirt. Wound botulism occurs very rarely. Maybe twenty cases are reported in the US each year. Beau presented at the ER with droopy eyelids, facial paralysis, muscle weakness, breathing complications. With the needle tracks in his arms, they assumed he’d overdosed on opiates. They shot him up with Narcan, and he got worse.”

  Faith found herself in the rare position of being unable to form a question.

  “Botulism is extremely difficult to diagnose. Unless the doctor is thinking botulism, it’s going to be the last thing that comes up. And the symptoms mimic a lot of things. Could be more people die from it than what’s reported.”

  She still had no questions. Her phone buzzed on the table. Amanda had probably been called into the governor’s office. She wanted updates, but Faith needed more from Van before that could happen.

  She said, “Keep talking.”

  “The CDC is the only agency that knows how to test for botulism and who can administer HBAT, the antitoxin that stops the progression of the poison.” He rolled the coffee cup in his hands. “You can’t just give them a shot to make it all better. The drug is derived from horse serum. Initially, from a horse named First Flight, if you’re interested. The FDA black-boxed the serum. You have to cut it down with another drug, then slow infuse it through an IV in order to make sure the treatment isn’t killing the patient. And whatever state the patient is in—if they’re on a ventilator, if their limbs are paralyzed, that’s probably not going to fully reverse. Once the neurotoxin bonds to the nerve terminals, that’s it. Beau was lucky Michelle figured it out before he had lasting damage.”

  Faith didn’t see any luck here. “So he paid Michelle back by putting her in Dash’s crosshairs?”

  “That’s not how it happened,” Van said. “Adam Humphrey Carter was Beau’s only visitor in the ICU. We know from Michelle’s chart notations the exact times she was at the hospital. When Carter showed up, he was being his usual dick self. He made Michelle very uncomfortable. She had the staff call security. Security gave him a warning and filed an internal report.”

  Now she had questions. “You didn’t think to tell me this two days ago when I asked you to cross-reference Michelle’s files with Beau Ragnersen?”

  “I didn’t know two days ago. Spivey had thousands of patient files and worked on hundreds of projects, a lot of them top secret. But Ragnersen was a name that stood out. I did some digging at Emory yesterday morning, talked to the ICU staff, checked in with security. The internal report was just that—internal. I had to manually search the filing cabinets to find the actual document.”

  Faith realized that Kate Murphy’s reticence to call Michelle Spivey’s abduction an IPA operation rather than a sex-trafficking case suddenly made sense. “So, did Carter kidnap and rape Michelle to pay her back for calling hospital security on him, or did he kidnap her for the IPA?”

  “That was our question,” Van said. “Carter hated women. He wanted to punish them for—well, for whatever. It’s not like hating women is a crazy, new idea. If you accept that Carter took Michelle because he wanted to punish her for turning him into security, then it makes a kind of sense that he’d want to keep her alive so he could continue to torture her. Open and shut case of kidnap and rape.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “The bombing. The car accident where your partner put Carter with Dash and the others. The clincher was a RISC alert I got on Sunday night. That’s—”

  “The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern.”

  “Correct. Michelle’s details were already in RISC. The network is tied to servers around the country. The updates aren’t in real-time, but we get them faster than you’d think. The RISC alert made it to my phone around six o’clock Sunday night, nine hours after the airport’s facial recognition software pinged Michel
le on that service road, on that day, in that spot, in front of that building.”

  Faith’s phone buzzed with another text. Amanda was probably climbing the Capitol’s marble walls.

  She prompted Van, “What’s that building?”

  He glanced around, then told her, “It’s a CDC Quarantine Station, part of the National Strategic Stockpile. For our purposes, think of it as an armamentarium for biological attacks. The CDC assembles what they call push packs of emergency medication that can be sent out on a moment’s notice. That includes antidotes, anti-toxins and antibiotics. All your favorite antis for the coming apocalypse.”

  She asked, “Is HBAT stored there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was Michelle there to steal the anti-toxin or to destroy it?” Faith put together the answer before Van could tell her. “Dash already had two pipe bombs wired up and ready to go when they broke Michelle out of Emory. You don’t just drive around with explosives in your trunk. He had to be planning on using the bombs to blow up the quarantine station, but then Michelle got sick and shit hit the fan, so he decided to use them on the parking deck instead.”

  “I like that you think like a terrorist.”

  “Couldn’t Dash stick the bombs to the outside of the building?” Again, she answered her own question. “The building is reinforced, right? All that security, the steel door. Michelle was their only way inside. They needed her biometrics to open the door.”

  Van shrugged. “Did they?”

  “Aren’t there other quarantine stations?”

  “Yes, but—” He didn’t provide the but.

  Atlanta was within a two-hour flight time of 80 percent of the US population. It made sense that the bulk of the warehousing would take place at the busiest airport in the world.

  Faith asked, “How long does it take for someone to die from botulism poisoning?”

  “Depends on the level of toxin. In its purest form, we’re talking seconds. Something less refined, like a naturally occurring food contaminant, could be a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. Without treatment, you’re pretty much a goner.” He explained, “The neurotoxin slowly paralyzes everything. Your eyelids, your facial muscles, even the eyeballs in your head. Usually, you’re awake, but you can’t speak, and your brain is desperately sending out signals to move your muscles, but your muscles aren’t responding. Eventually, all the mechanisms that you need to breathe are paralyzed, and you suffocate.”

  Faith felt her lips part in horror.

  “Animals can get it. Mostly fish or things that eat fish. There are five types of strains that infect humans. Botulism can be food-borne, inhaled through spores, injected, but thankfully not transmitted person-to-person. The toxicity has something to do with temperature and oxygen level. There’s a type of infant botulism babies get in their guts.”

  Faith’s own gut clenched.

  Van said, “This is a nasty, nasty bug we’re talking about, Mitchell. All it would take is one kilogram to kill the entire human population.”

  Faith remembered the cardboard boxes Will had traded out at the warehouse. Two dozen thirty-by-thirty containers, two strong young men to lift each box. One kilo was a little over two pounds.

  “Okay,” Faith had to talk this out. “Carter visited Beau in the hospital. He heard about the wound botulism. He knew how deadly it was. Did he know what Beau went through before he was finally diagnosed?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, Carter probably told Dash about the botulism, right? And instead of being freaked out, Dash got the idea to weaponize it.”

  “That’s the assumption.”

  She dreaded hearing the answer, but she had to ask, “Could Michelle make enough botulism for a large-scale attack?”

  “The short answer is yes.”

  “Give me the long answer.”

  “We are hoping, in that scenario, Michelle managed to fake the science.”

  “Hoping?”

  “The IPA has been holding Michelle for over a month. She’s been raped and abused. We assume by her appearance that she’s being starved. She probably has sepsis from her appendix rupturing. She went berserk on Carter at the motel. We know that Carter was threatening her daughter.” He leaned his elbows on the table. “Look, I’m gonna lay it out for you. Michelle Spivey is a strong, brilliant woman, but our profilers and our psychiatrist aren’t sure that she’d be able to hold up under that kind of relentless physical and psychological torture.”

  Faith doubted anyone could. “Do you think Michelle is desperate enough to make the real thing?”

  “I think that Dash would force her to keep trying until he was one hundred percent certain that every drop she produced was the real thing.”

  Faith spotted a problem. “You said that the CDC is the only agency that knows how to test for it. Michelle could fudge the test.”

  “There’s another way to test for botulism.” Van shrugged when she didn’t try to guess. “Give it to a bunch of people and see if they die.”

  22

  Wednesday, August 7, 9:23 a.m.

  Sara opened the box of HBAT. She unfolded the dosing directions.

  20 mL diluted with 0.9 percent sodium chloride in a 1:10 ratio infused in a volumetric pump for slow administration 0.5 mL/min for the initial 30 minutes …

  She looked up at the ceiling. Sara had thought it impossible to cry more tears after Will had left, but now, she was coming undone.

  There was nothing she could do for Grace or Joy or anyone else.

  She clutched the useless vial of serum as she walked out of the greenhouse. The white confetti in the clearing brought more tears to her eyes. She went to Grace. The girl had already stopped breathing. She found Joy in the bunkhouse. She was alive, but her raspy gasps told Sara that she had only a few minutes more.

  Sara sat with her, silently crying, until she was gone.

  Black box.

  An FDA warning. A death sentence. A coffin.

  She looked at the vial of antitoxin that she still gripped in her hand. The metal ring around the seal had been broken. A single needle hole was in the rubber stopper.

  Had Sara been infected, too? Her first day at the Camp, she was too upset to eat. Then Dash had changed Sara to vegetarian meals. Was Dash planning all along to make Sara his Witness?

  Death was her testimony. Death was the Message.

  So many will be dead that I doubt historians will be able to tally a final number.

  Not all of the people in the Camp had been poisoned last night. Their deteriorating bodies told the story. They had been infected in groups of five or ten. That was the horrible beauty of botulism: every person reacted differently to the toxin. Even in a hospital setting, it was difficult to make a diagnosis. The symptoms were diverse, mimicking other ailments. One person might die in a few hours, another person might die in a few weeks, another person might walk away. Dash had experimented on his own people. He had known that he was slowly murdering his followers even as he had eaten with them, preached at them, railed against mongrels, and watched them all slowly succumb to the literal poison he was feeding them.

  If Sara had to guess, she would say that Benjamin had been patient zero. Lance’s droopy eyelids and slurred speech indicated that he’d been given a slower-acting version. Joy’s early abdominal pain pointed to her poisoning coming in a third or fourth wave. Michelle would have had the knowledge to control the potency. The other children had been fine last night, so they must have been injected with a faster-acting form of the toxin before they went to bed.

  Sara put her head in her hands. She could not understand how Dash could murder his own children. Acting the part of the good father came too naturally to him.

  She felt her head start to shake. Dash would not have dirtied his hands with the job. Gwen would’ve injected the girls. Or maybe she had hidden the poison inside of the ice cream. She was in charge of the Camp. She was Dash’s partner in everything.

  His Dark Angel.

  His Lady M
acbeth.

  Sara compelled herself to move. Murdering the people inside the Camp was only part one of the plan. Part two was spreading the toxin to the unsuspecting people Dash called the enablers and the mongrels. Sara wanted to believe that Will would be able to stop him, but he was surrounded by armed men who were ready to lay down their lives for the IPA.

  She had to find a way to warn Faith and Amanda. Dash had been communicating with the world somehow. Sara’s first morning at the Camp, she had asked him a question about the number of victims at Emory. He had readily provided the answer. There had to be a phone or a tablet or a computer somewhere.

  Sara left the bunkhouse. She walked up the hill. She wanted to run, but she was in a daze, her body shocked by all of the senseless, devastating violence. The sweet little girls. The spinning tops in their white wedding dresses. The way Grace had laughed so hard at Will’s joke that she had almost toppled over.

  Sara wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The skin was raw from the salt in her tears.

  The Structure loomed into view. Sara thought about the men training for so many hours. Two teams infiltrating in two different waves. The bullets Will had told her about were not coated with pork brine. They had been coated with botulism. Dash wasn’t content to just kill. He wanted to make sure any survivors suffered the same agonizing death as his brothers and sisters at the Camp.

  Sara started to cry again as she thought about the sweet, innocent children. Was she mis-remembering the smile on Gwen’s face when she’d handed Esther and Grace each a cup of ice cream? Sara could clearly remember Gwen offering her a serving. There had definitely been a smirk on her lips, but it was hard to tell whether Gwen was smiling because she was offering Sara poison or because she had known what Sara would find when she left her cabin this morning.

  Sara heard a car engine revving.

  Her heart jumped into her throat.