"There's a car waiting for you out front," the woman said. Then she led Stacy out of the room.
They walked down the hall and out into the darkening afternoon. It was after four. She estimated she had been there for over six hours.
The car was a brown military sedan with a uniformed woman driver. Stacy got in the back seat and the car took her out the same way she had come. It passed through the front gate and parked at the curb outside on Military Avenue. Then the female Corporal behind the wheel handed Stacy an envelope and, once Stacy was out of the sedan, drove back inside the Fort.
Stacy stood on the curb with the flapping flags of Fort Detrick behind her. She opened the sealed envelope.
The message was typed on plain paper. "Be very careful," it said. "The distance between courage and stupidity is exactly nine millimeters."
The note was unsigned.
Chapter 5
They took Exit 56 from Maryland I-70 East. It was ten the next morning and Stacy was driving a Mitsubishi from Budget Rent-A-Car. Joanne was slumped in the seat beside her. They pulled up to the Information Center at the Spring Ridge housing development, which was just inside a massive brick wall, with the name of the tract in foot-high brass letters. The guard at the gate had the key ready. He handed an envelope to Stacy and told her how to get to the house that Max had rented.
They drove through the beautiful development that Max had described to Stacy on the phone after he had rented the house from an Army Major who had been transferred.
The house was at the top of Kettler Road, a two-story with Colonial pillars, a brick front, and slate-gray roof. There were trimmed lawns and flowerbeds. A fresh coat of black paint glistened on the front door. Stacy opened the envelope and took out the key, then she and Joanne moved up the driveway to the house. She wasn't sure what she was looking for, but was somehow being drawn to the place where Max had died. She also wanted to try to find a way to say good-bye, but was having trouble getting closure and now wished she had taken Max's ashes from the shitbird ColonelAt least she'd have an urn to look at and hold.
Joanne had stopped crying and was now in some kind of zombie-like trance. She had been frantic when Stacy had been two hours overdue. She had called Wendell and faxed him the autopsy. They had just about decided to call the Frederick police when Stacy walked into the room at the Holiday Inn. The next morning, they'd rented a car at the desk, thrown their bags in the trunk, and, after a call to the Spring Ridge development, headed up there.
Stacy unlocked the large wooden door, which groaned loudly on cold hinges as it swung open to beckon them in and, at the same time, warn them away.
They entered a large, sunny entry hall lit from above by a skylight. Stacy looked at the mail on the front table. Most were flyers or bills for the long-gone Major. Then she moved slowly through the house.
She went into the bedroom and looked at Max's clothes. His suitcases were on the top shelf of the closet, but she couldn't bring herself to do the mundane task of packing his things. What would she do with them, anyway? Should she keep his old clothes to remember him? She decided to put off the decision.
She checked the bathroom. She saw his toothbrush, his razor, and his pillbox of vitamins. She looked at all of Max's orphaned objects and fought the tears.
Then Stacy moved into the den. There, on his desk, was his computer. She wondered what he had been working on when he died, so she sat down and booted up, staring at the glowing screen. Instead of displaying a dialog box for Max's password, the words "preparing to run Windows 98 for the first time" were eerily crawling across the bottom of the screen. "The bastards swept his computer," she said to Joanne, who was now standing beside her, looking down at the screen.
"We'd better get going," Joanne said dully. "The plane takes off in an hour and forty minutes."
Stacy was staring at the computer. "Max, where did you put it?" she said, softly.
"Put what?"
"He always backed up everything. He was fanatical about it. There's gotta be a back-up disk somewhere with all his important documents and research on it."
"Oh," Joanne said, without interest.
She tried all of the obvious places: the shelf, the briefcases, the desk. Stacy opened a drawer and brushed several CD jewel boxes with her hand. One was a restoration CD, used to restore a system to its original state. Stacy's eyes narrowed… This is how they erased all the documents on Max's computer! Still, there would be a back-up. Maybe under the drawers, taped there, she thought. She pulled out all the drawers and felt under them, feeling goofy as she did, like a spy in a James Bond movie. She checked the bedroom, the kitchen, and the den. Nothing.
Stacy finally stood in the middle of the living room with her hands on her hips, looking around in frustration.
"We've gotta go," Joanne repeated.
"Okay," Stacy agreed, then she moved toward the back deck, opened the sliding glass door, and walked out into the backyard.
"What're you doing?" Joanne asked, trailing along behind her.
"I don't know. I… I just…" She was moving in circles, looking down, trying to see where it had happened. Finally, she saw a spot where the grass looked darker. Stacy moved to it, squatted down, and put her palm on the ground. The grass was stiff and hard with Max's dried blood.
"Oh Christ," she said, as a sob caught in her throat. "Why did they do it? Why… Oh Max, why?" She held her hand on his dried blood as if touching that spot could somehow bring her closer to him. She was reaching out to him through the patch of blood-dried ground, desperately trying to touch him one more time, but only feeling the stiff grass against her palm. The tears would not stop. She cried until the water blurred her vision.
Finally, Joanne pulled her up. "I know, baby," her sister-in-law said. "I know… I know…" Joanne held Stacy's head against her shoulder. "Let's go home."
"We've gotta do something," Stacy murmured. "We've gotta. We've just gotta!"
They barely made the Delta flight. Four and a half hours later they landed at LAX. Wendell Kinney met the plane, and they moved with their carry-on luggage out to the parking lot and his four-year-old green Ford station wagon. Once they had cleared the airport and were on the Harbor Freeway, heading back toward USC, Wendell looked over at Stacy. "I think you really shook 'em with that autopsy," he said.
"They killed him."
"Maybe," Wendell said, running a hand through his thick gray hair. "What you're suggesting certainly fits the findings of the autopsy, but there could be other reasons for the aspirated blood, so let's not jump to conclusions."
"What other reasons?"
"He could have gotten into a fight in a bar or someplace. Maybe a car accident where he cut his mouth, aspirated the blood, and then an hour later, in a fit of depression or something, killed himself."
"Bullshit. I talked to him at one A. M. the night it happened. He was not in a fit of depression. He didn't wreck his car. Stop saying that!"
"Well, I'm just saying…"
"Bullshit," she repeated. "Lemme tell you something else. His computer was erased. It was right back to the way it was the day it came out of the box. I bet somebody downloaded all the data files and erased them off his hard drive. There isn't even any of his personal wallpaper left, and I know he kept photos of me and his family on there."
"Not a good sign," Wendell said, nodding.
"Those guys at Fort Detrick are up to something, something really terrible. Max became a problem, so they fixed it."
"Something terrible? Like what? It's one of the leading medical facilities on the East Coast."
"Prions," she said, spitting the word out. "You know what they're all about? Proteins. Not viruses, or chemicals. They're the perfect bio-weapon, because they're not alive. You can't kill them with fire or cold. They don't die like Ebola or AIDS, and they adapt themselves to body chemistry, so your immune system doesn't even know they're there, doesn't even fight them. Max said they were the deadliest, most terrifying killer agents on the planet. He told me on the phone about two weeks ago that he thought Dexter DeMille might be developing the first Prion bio-weapon."