She shook her head angrily. “Baby . . .” she said. For some reason, the “J” in Joshua hurt her jaw and head to say. She said it anyway. “Joshua . . . not dead.”
O'Rourke squeezed her hand.
Kate did not squeeze back. “Not dead,” she said again, whispering in case any of the men in black were beyond the curtain or outside the door. “Joshua . . .” The pain made her head swim, made the undertow stronger. “Joshua is not dead.”
O'Rourke listened.
“Have to help,” she whispered. “Promise.”
“I promise,” said the priest.
Ken Mauberly came on Sunday morning when Kate was alone. Despite the pain, she could concentrate and speak. But the pain was still very bad.
She knew it would soon be worse as soon as she saw the administrator's face.
Despite the condolences, Mauberly was all optimism and quiet cheeriness. “Thank God you were spared, Kate,” he said, adjusting his glasses and fiddling with the flowers he had brought. He set them in a vase and fluffed at them. “Thank God you were spared.”
Kate set her hand on the mass of bandages that was her right temple. It seemed to steady things a bit when she spoke. “Ken,” she said, surprised to note that her voice belonged to her again, “what is it?”
He froze with his hands still on the flowers.
“What is it, Ken? It's something else. Tell me. Please.”
Mauberly sagged. He pulled a chair over and collapsed into it. There were tears behind his glasses when he spoke. “Kate, someone broke into the lab on the same night that . . . on the same night. They started fires in the biolab section, smashed seals, burned papers, trashed the computers, stole the floppy disks . . .”
Kate waited. He would never cry over vandalism.
“Chandra . . .” he began.
“They killed her,” said Kate. It was not a question.
Mauberly nodded and removed his glasses. “The FBI . . . oh, God, Kate, I'm sorry. The doctor and the staff psychologist said it was way too early to tell you and“
“Who else?” demanded Kate. Her hand was on his forearm.
Mauberly took a breath. “Charlie Tate. He and Susan were working late when the intruders got in past security.”
“Jvirus cultures?” asked Kate, wincing at the extra pain the “J” caused her. “Joshua's blood samples?”
“Destroyed,” said Mauberly. “The FBI thinks that they were flushed down the disposal sink before the fire began.”
“Cloned copies?” said Kate. Her eyes were closed and she could see Susan McKay Chandra bent over an electron microscope eyepiece, Charlie Tate saying something with a laugh behind her. “Did they get the cloned copies in the ClassVI lab?”
“They're all gone,” said Mauberly. “No one thought of sending cultures out of the building at this stage. If I'd only . . .” His voice caught on a high note of anguish. He touched Kate's good arm with his soft fingers. “Kate, I'm sorry. You've been through hell and this is only making it worse. Concentrate on getting better. The FBI will find these people . . . whoever did this, the FBI will find them . . .” a
“No,” whispered Kate.
“What was that?” Mauberly scooted closer with a screech of chair legs on tile. “What, Kate?”
But she had closed her eyes and pretended to be gone.
The FBI had come and gone, the two doctors and half a dozen friends and another halfdozen coworkers had arrived and been shooed out by the redhaired nurse, and only Father O'Rourke was there when the last bands of lateSeptember light painted the east wall orange. Kate opened her eyes and looked out the window past the silhouette of the priest. He seemed lost in thought as he leaned on the radiator at the window. The sunset was sending low bands of light directly down Sunshine Canyon into the west wing of the hospital. It was not, quite seven P.m. and the hospital had a Sunday evening quiet to it.
“O'Rourke?”
The priest turned away from the window and came to the chair by her bedside.
“Will you, do something for me?” she whispered.
“Yes.
“Help me find the people who killed Tom and Julie. . .”
Blackened corpses, flesh scaled like the ashes of a log. Their bodies smaller, shrunken by flame. Brittle arms raised in a boxer's stance. The gleam of teeth in a lipless smile.
“Yes,” said O'Rourke.
“More,” whispered Kate, grasping his large hand with her good right hand and the cast of her left hand. “Help me find Joshua.”
She felt his hesitation.
“No,” she said, her voice rising above a whisper but still in control, not hysterical. “The burned baby corpse wasn't Josh's . . . too big. Believe me. Will you help me find him?”
The priest hesitated only another few seconds before squeezing her. hand again. “Yes,” he said. And then, after a minute when the sunlight faded from the east wall and the view outside the window, grew suddenly darker, “Yes, I'll help.”
Kate fell asleep holding his hand.
Chapter Twenty
Kate, left the hospital on Monday, September 30, although her head still ached abominably, her left arm was in a temporary cast, and the doctors wanted her to stay at least another twenty-four hours. She did not feel that she had another twenty-four hours to spend in bed.
Because the part of the house that had not burned had been damaged by smoke and water, and because she would not have returned to that house under any circumstances, Kate took a room at the Harvest House hotel, not far from CDC. O'Rourke and other friends had retrieved some of her clothes from the undamaged bedroom of the house and Kate's secretary, Arleen, had bought some new things for her. Kate wore the new things.
Julie Strickland's remains, after an autopsy and positive identification through dental records, had been flown home for burial in Milwaukee. Kate had talked to Julie's parents by telephone on Monday evening and had lain in the darkness of the hotel room for an hour afterward, wanting to cry, needing to cry, but unable to cry.,
Tom's body was cremated on Tuesday, October 1. He'd once told friends that he wanted his ashes tossed to the winds along the Continental Divide in the center of the state, and after the packed memorial ceremony at a Boulder mortuary, a caravan of almost forty vehicles, most of them fourwheel drive, left for Buena Vista to carry out his wishes. Kate was not feeling well enough to go along. Father O'Rourke drove her back to the hotel. The FBI continued to file through the hotel lobby to question her over and over about details. As though believing her story about men in black, probably Romanians trying to kidnap the Romanian orphan for reasons unknown, they promised her that all U.S. passport control stations had been alerted. They could not tell her for whom they had been alerted.
Kate talked to Ken Mauberly on Tuesday night and learned that Chandra's body had been returned to her husband and family in Atlanta. He also told her the details of virology researcher Charlie Tate's funeral in Denver.
“It turns out that Charlie was a passionate amateur astronomer,” said Mauberly, his voice soft over the phone line. “I went to his memorial service Sunday evening in the planetarium down at the Denver Historical Museum. The whole serviceshort eulogies by friends, a brief talk by his Unitarian ministerwas held in the star chamber with only the constellations overhead for illumination. When the eulogies were finished, a star suddenly brightened in the sky. Charlie's widowyou remember Donna, don't you, Kate?well, Donna stood up and explained that the light from that star was forty-two lightyears from Earth and had begun its journey in the year that Charlie had been born in 1949 . . . perhaps even the day of his birth . . . only to arrive this week. Anyway, the star grew brighter and brighter until the dome was this bright, milky color . . . sort of like just before sunrise . . . and we all filed out under this magnificent light. And the headstone that they're having carved . . . well, the epitaph is very touching.” Mauberly paused.