He was clueless, and then I remembered that he was out of the office much of today. I
explained what had happened.
'Oh my God,' he said suddenly, as fear shot through both of us. 'One came in the mail. Mom had it on the kitchen counter.'
'When?' I said in alarm.
'I don't know. A few days ago. When was that? I don't know. We' d never seen anything so fancy. Imagine, something sweet to cool your face.'
That made twelve canisters deadoc had delivered to my staff, and twelve had been his message to me. It was the number of full-time people in my central office, if I included myself. How could he know such trivia as the size of my staff, and even some of their names and where they lived, if he were far away and anonymous?
I dreaded my next question because I already thought I knew. 'Wingo, did you touch it in any way?'
'I tried it. Just to see.' His voice was shaking badly and he was choking from coughing fits. 'When it was sitting there. I picked it up one time, just to see. It smelled like roses.'
'Who else in your house has tried it?'
'I don't know.'
'I want you to make certain no one touches that canister. Do you understand?'
'Yes.' He was sobbing.
'I'm going to send some people to your house to pick it up and take care of you and your family, okay?'
He was crying too hard to answer.
When I got home, it was minutes past midnight, and I was so out of sorts and sick that I did not know what to do first. I called Marino and Wesley, and Fujitsubo. I told everybody what was happening and that Wingo and his family needed a team at their home immediately. My bad news was returned by theirs. The girl on Tangier who had gotten sick had died, and now a fisherman had the disease. Depressed and feeling like hell, I checked my e-mail, and deadoc was there in his small, mean way. I was glad. His message had been sent while Keith Pleasants was in jail.
mirror mirror on the wall where have you been
'You bastard,' I screamed at him.
The day was too much. All of it was too much, and I was achy and woozy and completely fed up. So I should not have gone into that chat room, where I waited for him as if this were the O.K. Corral. I should have left it for another time. But I made my presence known and paced in my mind as I waited for the monster to appear. He did.
DEADOC: toil and trouble SCARPETTA: What do you want? DEADOC: we are angry tonight SCARPETTA: Yes, we are.
DEADOC: why should you care about ignorant fishermen and their ignorant families and those inept people who work for you
SCARPETTA: Stop it. Tell me what you want to make this stop. DEADOC: it s too late the damage is done it was done long before this SCARPETTA: What was done to you?
But he did not answer. Oddly, he did not leave the room, but he did not respond to any further questions from me. I thought of Squad 19 and prayed they were listening and following from trunk to trunk, tracing him to his lair. Half an hour passed. I finally logged off as my telephone rang.
'You're a genius!' Lucy was so excited she was hurting my ears. 'How the hell have you managed to keep him on that long?'
'What do you mean?' I asked, amazed. 'Eleven minutes so far. You win the prize.'
'I was only on with him maybe two minutes.' I tried to cool my forehead with the back of my hand. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'
But she didn't care. 'We nailed the son of a bitch!' She was ecstatic. 'A campground in
Maryland, agents from Salisbury already en route. Janet and I gotta plane to catch.' Before I got up the next morning, the World Health Organization put out another international alert about Vita aromatic facial spray. WHO reassured people that this virus would be eliminated, that we were working on the vaccine around the clock and would have it soon. But the panic began anyway.
The virus, dubbed by the press Mutantpox, was on the cover of Newsweek and Time, and the Senate was forming a subcommittee as the White House contemplated emergency measures. Vita was distributed in New York, but the manufacturer was actually French. The obvious concern was that deadoc was making good on his threat. Although there were yet no reports of the disease in France, economic and diplomatic
relations were strained as a large plant was forced to shut down, and accusations about where the tampering was done were volleyed back and forth between countries. Watermen were trying to flee Tangier in their fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard
had called in more backups from stations as far south as Florida. I did not know all the details, but based on what I had heard, there was a standoff between law enforcement and Tangiermen in the Tangier Sound, boats anchored and going nowhere as winter winds howled.
Meanwhile, CDC had deployed an isolation team of doctors and nurses to Wingo's house, and word was out. Headlines screamed and people were evacuating a city that would be difficult, if not impossible, to quarantine. I was as distressed and sick as I'd ever been in my life, drinking hot tea in a bathrobe early Friday morning.
My fever had peaked at a hundred and two, and Robitussin DM didn't do a thing except make me vomit. Muscles in my neck and back hurt as if I had been playing football against people with clubs. But I could not go to bed. There was far too much to do. I called a bondsman and received the bad news that the only way to get Keith Pleasants out of jail was for me to drive downtown and pay in person. So I went out to my car, only to have to turn around ten minutes later because I' d left my checkbook on the table.
'God, help me please,' I muttered as I sped up.
Rubber squealed as I drove too fast through my neighborhood, and then moments later, back out, flying around corners in Windsor Farms. I wondered what had happened in Maryland during the night as I worried about Lucy, for whom every
event was an adventure. She wanted to use guns and go on foot pursuit, fly helicopters and planes. I feared such a spirit would be crushed in its prime, because I knew too much about life and how it ended. I wondered if deadoc had been caught, but believed if he had, I would have been told.
I had never needed a bondsman in my life, and this one, Vince Peeler, worked out of a shoe repair shop on Broad Street, along a strip of abandoned stores with nothing in their windows but graffiti and dust. He was a short, slight man with waxed black hair and a leather apron. Seated at an industrial-sized Singer sewing machine, he was stitching a new sole on a shoe. As I shut the door he gave me the piercing look of one accustomed to recognizing trouble.
'You Dr Scarpetta?' he asked as he sewed.
'Yes.'
I got out my checkbook and a pen, not feeling the least bit friendly as I wondered how many violent people this man had helped back out on the streets.
'That will be five hundred and thirty dollars,' he said. 'If you want to use a credit card, add three percent.'
He got up and came to his scarred counter piled with shoes and tins of Kiwi paste. I
could feel his eyes crawling over me.
'Funny, I thought you'd be a lot older,' he considered. 'You know, you read about people in the news and sometimes get flat-out wrong impressions.'
'He'll be freed today.' It was an order as I tore out the check and handed it to him.
'Oh, sure.' His eyes darted and he looked at his watch.
'When?'
'When?' he echoed rhetorically.
'Yes,' I said. 'When will he be freed?' He snapped his fingers. 'Like that.'
'Good,' I said as I blew my nose. 'I'm going to be watching for him to be freed like that.' I snapped my fingers, too. 'And if he isn't? Guess what? I'm also a lawyer and in a really, really shitty mood. And I'll come after you. Okay?'
He smiled at me and swallowed.
'What kind of lawyer?' he asked.
'The kind you don't want to know,' I said as I went out the door.
I got to the office maybe fifteen minutes later, and my pager vibrated and the phone rang as I sat behind my desk. Before I could do anything, Rose suddenly appeared and looked unusually stressed.