“I read your name in the sports pages. I’m glad you’ve done so well.”
He closed the door, window down. “It’s a good thing the horses are running and not me. I wouldn’t make it to the first pole.” He laughed, cut on the motor, and drove off.
“We can go now,” Sissi grumbled.
Rose Marie slid behind the wheel. “You can be so impatient.”
Marshall switched on his cell phone, dialing Big Mim’s barn number. Big Mim had a good breeding program, good but small. He wouldn’t mind seeing what she had before the sales. The barn recording came on. He disconnected and headed out toward I-64. Tavener could tell him what Mim had on the ground. Maybe it was just as well no one was around. He’d get pulled into long conversations, and he needed to get back to Maryland.
Too much going on in the horse world right now.
12
A sample of Barry Monteith’s brain tissues rested under the fluorescence microscope.
The gang at the lab examined a variety of Barry’s tissue samples. Given the odd circumstances of Barry’s death, a variety of tests had been ordered by the Albemarle County coroner, Tom Yancy, at Sheriff Shaw’s request.
Georgette Renfrow, one of the best of the bunch, peered intently through the lens. She was performing a direct fluorescent antibody test, shortened to dFA. Round dots of varying size, a bright fluorescent apple-green color, jumped right out at her.
“Jesus.” She whistled.
In all her years at the lab, Georgette had only seen this once before, and that was in the brain tissue of a prisoner who worked the road gangs and died mysteriously. The prison physician couldn’t detect the cause of his intense suffering.
“Jake, take a look.” She motioned for a twenty-seven-year-old assistant to look.
He came over, bending to put the eyepiece at just the right place. “I’ve never seen that.”
“Remember it.”
“What is it? I suppose I should know, but I don’t think I’ve seen it and I don’t remember it from school.”
She peered into the microscope one more time, then tapped her index finger on the smooth desktop. “Rabies.”
13
That’s bizzare,” Harry exclaimed when Cooper told her the report on Barry Monteith. The deputy also told her everyone who had contact with the body needed to get tested for rabies. She’d gotten Harry an appointment with Bill Langston, her family doctor, at eight the next morning.
Harry and Fair were in Miranda’s garden when Cooper arrived, putting together a gazebo as promised. Tracy Raz, Miranda’s high-school beau, was down in Charlotte, North Carolina, on business or he would have put his shoulder to the wheel, too.
Having chased one another to exhaustion, the animals had plopped under Miranda’s sumptuous roses, which were every color imaginable. Pewter preferred the peach, a thin red outline tracing each petal. Mrs. Murphy dozed under pure white roses, while Tucker snored under hot coral. They awoke when Cooper walked up the hand-laid brick walkway this late Friday afternoon.
“Wouldn’t we have known? Wouldn’t he have been foaming at the mouth when Harry found him?” Miranda, shocked at the news, asked.
“Not necessarily.” Fair knew a great deal about rabies. “Once the virus is in your nervous tissue it can take one to three months to present itself, for the victim to show clinical signs of infection,” Fair said.
“Not in the blood?” Miranda asked.
Cooper, who had grilled Dr. Hayden McIntire the second the report came over her computer screen, said, “No. Rabies is only in nervous tissue. It’s not going to show up in blood samples. Ideally you want brain tissue, which, of course, you can’t get from a living victim. In Barry’s case, we had samples.”
“You suspected rabies?” Harry inquired.
“No. But given the manner in which he was found and that the cause of death might be an attack from a wild animal, Rick and Yancy of course asked for rabies tests.”
“So it’s not in the blood but it would show up if whatever killed him had infected him?” Harry asked.
“Rabies.” Tucker’s ears pricked right up, as did the two kitties’ ears.
“That depends,” Fair said, his voice reassuring just because it was so deep. “Rabies is in saliva. A human is bitten and the virus replicates fairly rapidly, but it has to travel to the brain. Actually, this disease is quite unique and terrifying, really. It’s a bullet virus. It gets into the nerve tissue, and when it finally gets to the brain, you see the typical signs of rabies. Like I said, that usually takes between one and three months.”
“That long?” Miranda was surprised.
“That long, but if you’re bitten and you don’t get the series of shots within a week, there’s nothing that can be done. Rabies is always fatal.”
“Fair, how would you know—I mean, how would you know that the animal that bit you was rabid?” Cooper thought she knew the answer but wanted to hear his reply.
“You don’t. Let me back this up a minute. Usually the first person to identify rabies is a veterinarian or a hunter. Domestic animals like dogs, cats, and horses so rarely have rabies now that it’s noteworthy if they do. The public is educated about inoculating their pets and stock. When we see rabies it’s usually raccoons; that accounts for 40.6 percent of reported cases, with skunks coming in at around 29.4 percent.”
“How do you remember all that?” Miranda was impressed.
He smiled genially. “It’s my profession. How do you remember all your rose varieties? But the thing about rabies is, if someone is bitten by a raccoon or a skunk they know it.”
“What about fox or coyote?” Harry asked.
“Negligible. Only 5.4 percent of reported cases are foxes and coyotes. And the numbers are going downward. Oddly enough, we’ve seen a spike upward in sheep and cattle. Not enough to be alarming, and it may just be that farmers and ranchers out west are becoming better at reporting symptoms. Also, I think in many ways people are becoming more environmentally responsible. In the old days if a fellow had a sick cow he’d shoot it. If it was found dead he’d not get an autopsy. Today he might call the vet. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to slow this disease and to just about stamp it out in pets.”
“If Barry was bitten by a raccoon or a skunk, wouldn’t he notice? Wouldn’t he go to the doctor?” Harry’s mind was whirring along.
“Who said he knew he was bitten? It could have been a bat, too, and those bites are so tiny you don’t see them most times and you don’t feel them, although a numbness at the site of infection is often a signal.” Fair laid down his hammer on the floor of the gazebo. “Bats get a bad rap about carrying rabies, but the percent of humans bitten by rabid bats is tiny.” Cooper started to speak, but Harry jumped in.
“If the rabies was in Barry’s brain tissue, then he had it for at least thirty days, right?” Harry jammed her hands in her jeans pocket.
“That’s a safe assumption. He displayed no symptoms yet. Or did he?” Fair looked at Cooper.
“Everyone we’ve questioned said he behaved normally. So he—I think the word is presented—he presented no symptoms.”
“What are they? All I know is foaming at the mouth.” Miranda was worried.
“That’s the stereotype, but the progress for humans is that they feel flu-y, headachy. That might last for a couple of days. They run a fever, and this provokes anxiety, agitation, and confusion. By now, if you know the person, you know something is not right. They aren’t acting normal. Finally they become delirious, completely abnormal. Some become enraged and others sink into a torpor. And some people and some animals do foam at the mouth, but that’s because the virus leads to dehydration, and almost every animal foams at the mouth when it’s hot and thirsty. That’s why that’s such a misleading concept.”