From the next cube, he heard Bill’s poor impression of a Shakespearean actor.
“To scabies, or not to scabies,” Bill said, his voice only slightly muffled by the divider. “That is the infection.”
Perry gritted his teeth and bit back an angry reply. The welts were driving him nuts, making him easily irritated by little things. Still, although Bill was his friend, sometimes the guy didn’t know when to quit.
14.
Margaret stared into the microscope’s eyepiece, trying to focus on the magnified image. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep. She couldn’t rub them, thanks to the plastic faceplate and the cumbersome biosuit. She blinked a few times to clear her vision. How long had she been working on Brewbaker? Twenty-four hours and counting, and no end in sight. She bent and stared into the microscope.
“Hmm, what have we here?” The sample’s meaning seemed rather obvious, but her fatigue and the horrid condition of the victim’s skin made her unsure. “Amos, come over here and look at this.”
He put down his chemical samples and moved toward the microscope. Like Margaret, he hadn’t slept in more than a day. Even with the lack of sleep and the awkward Racal suit, however, he moved with a smooth grace that made him look as if he floated rather than walked. He bent into the eyepiece without touching anything.
After a moment he asked, “What am I looking for?”
“I was hoping you’d see it right away.”
“I see a lot of things, Margaret,” Amos said. “Perhaps you could be a little more specific. Where is this skin sample from?”
“The area just outside the growth. See anything that would indicate moderate skin trauma?” Amos half rose to answer, but Margaret cut him off. “And don’t give me one of your smart-ass answers, please. I know damn well the whole body is ripped to shreds.”
Amos bent back to the eyepiece. He stared for a few seconds, silence filling the sterile morgue. “Yes, I see it. I see some scabbing and some damage down past the subcutaneous layer. It looks like a long groove-like a claw wound, perhaps.”
Margaret nodded. “I think I’ll take another look at those skin samples we got from under the victim’s fingernails.”
Amos stood straight and looked at her. “You don’t think he did this to himself, do you? This tear is all the way to the muscle, and it looks like repetitive damage. Do you know how much that would hurt?”
“I can take a guess.” Margaret stretched her arms high, bent to the left, then to the right. She was sick of the lab and sick of the limited sleep. She wanted a real bed, not a cot, and a real bottle of wine to go with it. As long as she was dreaming, she might as well throw in Agent Clarence Otto in a pair of silk boxers.
She sighed. Agent Otto would have to wait for another day. Right now she had other things to worry about, like what could make a man use his fingernails like claws to tear into his own body?
The computer terminal let out a long beep: information had arrived. Amos shuffled over and sat down.
“This is odd,” he said. “Most odd indeed.”
“Give me the Cliffs Notes version.”
“Results on the excised growth, for starters. They said their sample had almost completely liquefied by the time they got it. They did what they could, though. The tissue was cancerous.”
“What do they mean, it was cancerous? We saw it. It wasn’t a mass of uncontrolled cells-it had structure.”
“I agree, but look at these results-cancerous tissue. That, plus massive amounts of cellulase and trace amounts of cellulose.”
Margaret thought on that for a moment. Cellulose was the primary material in plant cells, the most abundant form of biomass on the planet. But the key word there was plants -animals didn’t make cellulose.
“The cellulose didn’t last, either,” Amos said. “Within hours of reception of material, cellulose decomposed into cellulase. They did everything they could to stop it, including attempts to freeze the material, but it didn’t freeze.”
“Just like the enzyme that’s decomposing the flesh. It’s like a…self-destruct mechanism.”
“Suicidal cancer? That’s a bit of a reach, Margaret.”
It was a reach. A big one. And yet maybe she needed to reach; reach for something that was beyond accepted science.
15.
Coming home to apartment B-203 always generated mixed feelings. The place wasn’t much, one meaningless apartment in a massive cluster of identical buildings. Windywood was the kind of complex where even flawless directions would have people guessing; there were enough buildings to necessitate a little network of roads with smarmy names like Evergreen Drive, Shady Lane and Poplar Street. After one or two wrong turns, the plain-looking, three-story, twelve-unit complexes were all you could see.
His building was only two down from the complex entrance, right across the street from the Washtenaw Party Store. Made things quite convenient. Meijer’s grocery store was only a couple of miles away; he hit that for the big grocery runs. For everything else the party store did the trick. It was a low-rent part of town, and the party store wasn’t exactly a high-class operation-there was always some welfare reject on the pay phone just outside the door, working a “deal” or having a far-too-loud argument with a significant other.
Perry didn’t have jack squat to eat at home. The party store had a great little deli, so he stopped for a ham sandwich with Texas mustard, and grabbed a six-pack of Newcastle beer. Sure enough, some chick was screaming into the phone. She held the receiver in one hand, a well-bundled baby in the other. Perry tried to ignore her as he walked in and tried to ignore her again as he walked out, but the girl was loud. He didn’t feel any sympathy for her-if he could rise above his background and upbringing, anyone could. People who lived that way wanted to live that way.
He pulled into the apartment complex and into his carport, which was less than an eighth of a mile from the entrance. The girl bothered him-if he’d made it to the NFL, he’d live in a big house somewhere, far from the rabble of Ypsilanti. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a failure. He should have more than this. The apartment was nice in its way, and he hated to feel ungrateful for the things that he had, but there was no denying the place was low-rent.
Seven years ago no one thought he’d wind up in anything less than a mansion. “Scary” Perry Dawsey, then a sophomore at the University of Michigan, had been named All-Big Ten linebacker along with senior Cory Crypewicz of Ohio State. Crypewicz went in the first round to Chicago. He pulled down $2.1 million a year, not counting the $12 million signing bonus. It was a far cry from Perry’s meager tech-support salary.
But Crypewicz hadn’t been as good as Perry, and all the country knew it. Perry had been a monster, the kind of defensive player who could dominate a game with his sheer ferocity. The press had tagged him with several nicknames, “Beast,” “Cro-Mag” and “Fang” among them. Of course, ESPN’s Chris Berman always seemed to have the last word on nicknames, and the first time he used the “Scary” tag, it stuck.
My, but how a cheap-ass cut block could change things.
The knee injury had been awful, a complete blowout damaging the ACL, the medial collateral, every frigging ligament in the area. It even caused bone damage, fracturing the fibula and chipping his patella. A year’s worth of reconstructive surgeries and rehabilitation didn’t bring him back to full speed. The fact was, he just couldn’t cut it anymore. Where he’d once raged across the football field, inflicting his savage authority on anyone foolish enough to cross his path, now he could do little better than hobble along, chasing running backs he could never catch, taking hits from blockers he could never avoid.