The woman was in obvious pain, and despite excellent cosmetic surgery, her true age was evident. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Phil said, “but I saw what happened and got a look at the man who kicked you.”
She stared up at him blankly. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I understand,” she said with a deep southern drawl.
“The man, dressed all in black. About six-five. I saw him kick your shoe.” Now Phil was confused.
The woman looked at the baker, who returned her quizzical look. Then both looked back at Phil with a mixture of suspicion and confusion. “I think you are mistaken,” she said. “It was my shoe. I probably shouldn’t have worn it in all this snow, but I can assure you no one struck me.”
“She tripped, that’s all,” said the baker, all his confusion gone. “I was right there. She lost her balance and fell. No one kicked her.” His tone suggested that Phil should leave, now.
Phil’s face flushed. He muttered an apology, clumsily left the bakery, and returned to the office.
“Anything I can do, Dr. Rucker?” Ortega asked, sincerely hoping the answer would be no. He didn’t mind helping, but Dr. Rucker scared him a little. Hell, he scared everybody a little; he was strange and creepy. More than once, Jose had taken the stairs just to avoid riding alone with him in the elevator. It was well known, at least in Jose’s circle, that Dr. Rucker talked more to himself than anyone else, and only crazy people did that.
“No,” Phil said darkly. He was angry with himself. He knew better than to involve himself in situations not of his making. Chasing the man up the street had been a reasonable and appropriate response, a moral obligation, and he had to meet moral obligations. But what had possibly compelled him to follow the woman into the bakery?
He walked up the short corridor to his office.
Phillip Rucker, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner, Colorado Springs, Colorado, was stenciled across the frosted glass.
I wonder for how much longer, the small voice whispered into Phil’s brain, and he had to agree. No one had seen an impossibly deformed tall dark man, because he didn’t exist outside of Phil’s increasingly unstable mind.
Chapter 3
Nathan Martin stared at the blinking words: Amanda has signed off.
He could have handled that better; he should have handled that better. Amanda Flynn was important. He thought of her often and remembered the entire Honduran affair clearly. Everything about it made him anxious. There had been other cases in his nine-year tenure as director of special pathogens that he and his group hadn’t fully resolved, but none of them bothered him as much as the Honduran affair, as he had come to call it. So many unanswered questions.
He looked for the file on his cluttered desk. It had long ago been digitized and added to the CDC database, but Martin had kept the paper file for himself. About twice a year, he thumbed through it hoping to find something they had missed, or perhaps some new insight. He knew he had taken it out yesterday, after hearing from the long-lost Amanda, but now he couldn’t find it.
“Martha, are you in yet?” he called out. His obsessive-compulsive secretary had a knack for taking the very thing he needed most and “putting it away.”
“No, I’m not,” Martha Hays yelled back through the open door.
“Did you take the EDH1 file?”
“No, it’s on your back desk. I saw you put it there last night.” She appeared in his doorway, feigning frustration.
“Right, I’ve got it. Don’t take it again.”
His secretary flipped him off, making him laugh.
“I could fire you for that!”
“Fat chance. I’m a civil servant. I could set you on fire, and the most I’d get would be a reprimand.”
Martin opened the file, and his handwritten notes spilled out. He picked up the nearest one. Origin? was written across the top. Where did this virus come from? It had always bothered him that nothing like EDH1 had ever been described before. He knew that the majority of viruses in the world had yet to be seen, much less described, but he had never come across one so radically different from everything else. There was no structural analogue or one that killed so efficiently; not even Ebola was this evil, and nowhere near as complex. They had been given a very limited sample to work with, barely enough to culture, but the virus mutated into unstable forms so rapidly that Martin couldn’t trust his own findings.
He shuffled through the notes and found the one labeled Bodies. If he could have examined one of the victims, he would know so much more. But all the U.S, military had been allowed to retrieve were tissue samples. The official story was that the Honduran military had orders to sterilize the entire area, including the corpses. A U.S. colonel had tried to convince a Honduran general that with minimal precautions the bodies posed no substantial risk, but he was overruled and sent packing with samples and the single survivor. Martin supposed it was understandable considering the situation; the general’s nation had just been devastated by a hurricane, and nineteen of his soldiers had died of a mysterious illness. He could hardly fault him for not wanting to risk more lives recovering bodies for scientific reasons.
Then Martin came to his notes labeled Survivor. These were the most detailed. More than three hundred people had died in this outbreak, including the thirty-one at the Red Cross camp. Only Amanda Flynn had survived. How? Why? Even after holding her for thirteen weeks, he couldn’t answer either of these questions. He had lied to her in his e-mail. When she had arrived in Oklahoma, she was dehydrated, in shock, and suffering the effects of exposure, but her life had never really been in danger. He had held her as long as the military would allow, but never got close to any answers. She had no signs of infection, either acute or remote. They couldn’t culture the virus from her blood or even her tissues, but the tissue samples from those that had died grew the virus readily. Martin finally concluded that Amanda had some type of immunity to EDH1. He toyed with the idea of purposefully exposing her to the virus to confirm it. Okay, he thought, maybe I did a little more than toy with the idea. This inexcusably breach of medical ethics and morality had finally caused Martin to realize that he had lost all perspective. Amanda had become a personal obsession.
In the solitude of his office seven years later, Martin was embarrassed by his actions and ashamed of his motivations. How could a man in his position, someone who had accomplished so much still be motivated by petty jealousies and childhood insecurities? He had convinced himself, and told others that they needed to know what made her so special for medical/scientific reasons. It was a reasonable argument, but his personal motivation was much darker. All his life he had known people like Amanda: the popular, the pretty, and the privileged. Why had God selected her above the other three hundred people? When she first arrived at Tellis her past was a mystery, but with her looks and with the way she carried herself, his imagination was able to create one. She was the cheerleader surrounded by friends, floating down the high school hallway on the arm of the football captain; which made Martin the slightly built Jewish kid from the shadows who both loved and hated her. Only later, after she had disappeared and everything had gone to hell, did he find out just how wrong he had been. She wasn’t the stereotype he needed her to be, far from it. Which made his offense all the more difficult to forget, or forgive.
Martin gathered the file and turned back to his computer. He scrolled up to Amanda’s first message and reread it. He’d often thought that the last chapter on EDH1 had yet to be written, but there was nothing to link this virus, or any virus, with what was happening in Colorado, no matter how strange it was. He closed his e-mail file and opened a pathology file. The Colorado Springs medical examiner had asked for help identifying a potential viral encephalitis case two weeks before Amanda had contacted him. It was a routine request, no different from the dozen other requests his office received weekly, but he had never believed in coincidences. He reviewed the report and found nothing suspicious. Both the local pathologist and Martin’s own section found all the requisite abnormalities associated with a viral infection of the brain: heavy lymphocytic infiltration of the gray matter, inflammatory cells around the blood vessels, and macrophages along the linings of the brain’s ventricles. Nothing very interesting. Viral encephalitis was usually caused by an arbovirus, which was carried by mosquitoes. Probably not a lot of mosquitoes in Colorado this time of year, but the victim could have been bitten elsewhere. Electron microscopy had confirmed inclusion bodies consistent with an arbovirus, so that pretty much closed the book.