She nodded, but before he could lift the receiver, it rang. Margaret answered it, and he saw immediately that something was wrong. The colour drained from her face leaving it chalk white, and her eyes were a pale, bloodless blue.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and hung up. He could see her hand trembling. She looked at him and he saw the cold, gold sunset reflected in her moist eyes. ‘Looks like I’ll be on that flight with you,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘That was a pathologist from AFIP. Steve’s virus has gone active.’
III
The Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner sat up off the freeway in a low, anonymous brick building opposite a Best Western Hotel. It was surrounded by neatly trimmed lawns, and clusters of shrubs and trees circled by carefully tended flower beds. The pathologists there still called it the Gillette building, even though it was some years since Gillette had been forced by animal rights protesters to abandon it. The laboratories where the company had tested its products had been perfect for the purposes of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, and the smoked, plexiglass windows and sophisticated electronic entry system had made it ideally secure.
It was dark when Margaret arrived. One of the pathologists from the team which had carried out the autopsies at Ellington Field led her up stairs to the second level and along anonymous hushed corridors to Steve’s office. Overhead fluorescents flickered on and threw a man’s life into sharp relief. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ the pathologist said. ‘Anything you need, holler. I’m just down the hall.’
Margaret stood blinking in the harsh light, depressed and alone. This was Steve’s space, where he spent so much of his life, and he was in every corner of it. But his physical absence was haunting.
Water sprinkled across a tiny arrangement of rocks on a desk pushed against the far wall, a soothing, peaceful sound in the stillness. Good feng shui, Margaret thought. Beside it, a favourite microscope, and a twelve-inch plastic model of the human body, torso and head, with removable internal organs brightly coloured. There were miniature cardboard drawers built one on the other, each carefully labelled. Tiny glass sample slides and piles of transparencies. On a shelf above, all his plaques and medals and framed certificates, a lemonade bottle with a DNA label on it. On the wall there was a painting of the astronauts who had achieved the first successful moon landing, smiling out stoically from their bulky NASA space suits. A bed pan in use as a flower pot made her smile. There were, she saw, a number of pot plants around the office, breathing fresh oxygen into the still air.
Above a cluttered bookshelf, a large sheet pinned to the wall was mounted with half a dozen photographs of Plasticine heads that Steve had moulded from the skulls of Jane and John Does in an attempt to identify them. A hobby, he had told her. Pinned to the drawer of a metal filing cabinet were photographs of his little girl, Danni, taken on a beach somewhere. Just three years old. Plump and smiling in her little red bathing costume, she was grinning at the camera and splashing the cold sea water. Margaret could almost hear her screams of delight. And then, in the corner, Steve’s computer, Danni’s smile saving his screen from burnout. Her soft, brown hair was tied up in a ribbon and her mouth half-open in a smile breaking into laughter. Margaret reached out and touched the face, but felt only the cold glass of the screen. Tears formed in her eyes and she blinked furiously to stop them. And through the blur, she hunted around in the drawers of his desk until she found his personal stereo and headset, and looked up to see the rows of audio tapes on the bookshelf above.
There were around two dozen of them, and she had no idea which ones to take. As she fumbled through them, reading the labels which he had so clearly marked in blue felt tip pen, she was almost overcome by a sense of desperation and failure. He should have had these two days ago, and now she wasn’t sure if he would ever hear them again. Although they were before his time, he appeared to have all The Beatles albums. There were tapes of opera arias, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Eric Clapton’s Pilgrim, The Eagles, Handel’s Water Music, Christina Aguilera. Like Steve himself, impossible to categorise. He was unique, and fleetingly she wondered if they might have had some kind of future together had they met some other time, some other place.
She decided to take all the tapes, and emptied a plastic carrier bag she found in one of the cupboards and swept the cassettes into it off the shelf.
She found the picture of Danni, in its little silver frame, tucked in beside the computer monitor where he could look at it any time he chose when he was working at the keyboard. It wasn’t really silver. It was soft, polished pewter, with art nouveau patterns worked into the border. Danni looked out from it with her trademark smile.
‘You’re a little late, aren’t you?’ Margaret swung around, startled, to find Dr. Ward standing in the doorway, his lips pinched and white, dark eyes filled with hostility. ‘I was expecting you two days ago.’
She shook her head and found it hard to defend herself. ‘I was called back to Houston.’
‘And did it not occur to you to make other arrangements?’
There hadn’t been time. She should have made time. She didn’t know what to say.
‘I’m going up there now.’
‘Don’t you want to know how he is?’
‘I’ll find out for myself.’ But her defiance wavered with uncertainly. It was more than three hours since she had received the phone call. She hesitated. ‘How is he?’
He said, ‘From the onset of first symptoms — sore throat, swollen glands, rising temperature — they’ve been pumping him full of antibiotics and rimantadine.’ Margaret had read about rimantadine, one of a new generation of antiviral drugs, reputed to be up to 70 percent effective in inhibiting secondary infection in cases of influenza A virus. ‘So far he seems to have responded well. But the prognosis is uncertain.’
Margaret lifted the bag of cassettes and slipped the pewter frame into her purse. ‘I’d better go, then.’
As she pushed past Ward in the doorway he said, ‘For the first twenty-four hours he was asking for you all the time. But he hasn’t mentioned you once today.’
Margaret stopped and looked into his face. Why did he want to hurt her? Because she knew about his human frailties, had touched his imperfection? Was it guilt, or anger, or just plain bigotry? ‘I guess he must have other things on his mind right now,’ she said, and hurried out.
Margaret pushed her rental car up to eighty on the freeway. It was a big car with soft suspension that rolled gently but too much on every bend in the road. She had passed Gaithersburg about twenty minutes earlier, and as she crested a rise, she could see the lights of Frederick spread out below her. Traffic was light, and another fifteen minutes took her onto the Seventh Street exit, to skirt the northwestern edge of the town to Fort Detrick.