Pandemic Page 20

  Arriving at the Vancouver Hospital, Monique Tremblay led them down to the morgue in the basement. Weaving through the hallways, she guided them to Dr. Jake Maguchi’s office. Maguchi jumped out of his chair to greet them. The squat Japanese-Canadian pathologist struck Haldane as a study in cultural contradiction. Wearing a ponytail and a diamond stud in his ear, he bowed by way of introduction. Then he smiled broadly. “I’ve never had such international bigwigs come to visit before.” Haldane found Maguchi’s laid-back, West Coast dialect spoken with a Japanese accent as jarring as his appearance.

  “Thanks for seeing us, Dr. Maguchi,” Gwen said as she settled into her seat. “We are impressed by how quickly you diagnosed the Gansu Flu.”

  Maguchi mopped at his sweating brow with the sleeve of his lab coat. “No thanks to me. The ER team already suspected the diagnosis in the first victim. And as soon as I cracked the chest on the second—”

  “Excuse me,” Gwen cut in. “Can you back up?”

  “No worries.” Maguchi nodded with a smile. “The first cadaver came from our own emergency room. A nineteen-year-old university student. Nicole Cadullo. She was found near dead by one of her roommates, after she had coughed up buckets of bloody sputum. The ER boys recognized how unusual her sudden presentation was. With all the news ...” He circled a finger in the air. “They put two and two together. Stuck the patient in full isolation and sent off the lab work. Couldn’t save the poor girl, though. Nineteen! The bug ate her alive.” He reached for a glass of water on his desk and took a long swallow. “By the time I finished the autopsy we had heard a preliminary report from the virology lab that it was the Gansu strain of influenza.”

  Gwen nodded. “And the second case?”

  “Get this!” Maguchi snapped his fingers. “I’ve just slipped out of my spacesuit,” he said, in reference to the biohazard suit, “and who should be my very next autopsy? The Jane Doe from the river.” He mopped his sweaty brow again. “Whew, they got the heat cranked up today.” He took another sip of water. “No mystery about cause of death with that hole in her forehead. I was just painting by the numbers, really. But when I cracked open her chest, I couldn’t believe what I saw inside. Her lungs were chock-a-block full!”

  “Wouldn’t you expect that in a drowning?” Savard asked.

  Maguchi shook his head. “Two types of drowning, wet and dry. Wet drowning occurs when people aspirate the water and fill their lungs. Dry drowning, which is more common, is when the larynx goes into spasm and chokes off the passage to the lungs before much water gets in. It’s protective for about five minutes and then you die from lack of oxygen anyway. Either way, it’s irrelevant because our Jane Doe didn’t drown. She was dead when she hit the water, so she wouldn’t have inhaled anything. Besides, it wasn’t water we found in her lungs.”

  “Pus?” Haldane guessed.

  “More than that, it was a hemorrhagic, purulent exudate. The same blood-streaked junk I saw in the lungs of the Cadullo girl. I was flabbergasted. Their lungs were interchangeable.” Maguchi rose to his feet. “Come on. You got to see this.”

  Tremblay blocked his path. “Jake, what about my photo?”

  “Oh, yeah, yeah. I got it.” Maguchi spun around and combed through the piles of paper on his desk.

  Haldane and Savard both looked to Tremblay for an explanation. “Dr. Jake is a wizard at bringing corpses—especially unidentified persons—back to life with computer-enhanced photography,” she said.

  Maguchi reddened. “Guy’s got to have a hobby.” He grabbed a manila envelope and pulled out the stack of eleven-by-eight photos. “This one couldn’t have been simpler. No fancy software required.” He passed Tremblay the first snapshot.

  Haldane and Savard leaned over either shoulder to view the photo. Despite her open eyes, the woman with the cherubic face and springy black hair still looked very dead to Haldane, even if he could ignore the dime-shaped hole less than an inch above the inner edge of her left eyebrow.

  But in the next photo Maguchi passed them, Jane Doe sprang back to life.

  “I just did some very minor touch-ups with my photo editor,” Maguchi said modestly.

  Not only was her forehead unblemished but now her cheeks and lips had filled with natural color. Maguchi had imbued the photo with another quality that Haldane couldn’t put his finger on, which invigorated the woman’s face to the point where it looked as if she had actually posed for the camera. She was not pretty, but she had a pleasant young face. It was full of hope and promise, not the face of the indiscriminate killer she turned out to be.

  “You’re a genius, Jake!” Tremblay said and then took the photo and tucked it back in the envelope with the others.

  Maguchi grabbed a CD off his desk and passed it to Tremblay. “The electronic copies are on this.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” Gwen pointed at the envelope.

  “Circulate them.” Tremblay shrugged. “TV, newspapers, Internet... everywhere I can.”

  “Then everyone will know that somebody is intentionally spreading this thing,” Savard said.

  “Don’t they deserve to?” Tremblay stiffened. “Besides, how else will we track down her identity and find her killer.” She shook the envelope in her hand. “This photo is the key.”

  Haldane nodded. “Sergeant Tremblay is right, Gwen. The wider the circulation the better. This is what they didn’t count on. It could lead us to the source.”

  Savard nodded.

  Tremblay passed Savard and Haldane each a card. “I will catch up with you later, but if you have any questions or concerns, I am always reachable by cell phone.”

  Maguchi reached for his glass of water. He took another big swallow and choked on it, which sent him into a long coughing fit. “Sorry, I have a bit of a drinking problem.” He gasped a laugh at his own tired joke once he finally had caught his breath.

  Maguchi led Savard and Haldane to the dissecting suites. They stopped in front of a series of doors. One door had a large plastic biohazard sign hanging from the double doors. Maguchi pointed at it and then indicated the table beside it with gowns, masks, plastic face shields, and gloves. “No doubt the virus is long dead, but we can’t afford to take chances,” he said as he slipped on his gown and adjusted his face mask.

  Once garbed, Maguchi thrust open the double doors and walked into the room with the others in tow. Aside from a sink, garbage can, and dissecting tray the only other furnishing in the white tiled room was the heavy metal gurney in the center.

  Naked, the woman from the photos lay on her back with eyes fixed on the ceiling. Short and slightly overweight, she had olive colored skin and thick pubic hair consistent with her presumed Semitic origins. Her long hair fell back on the gurney, exposing the edges of the cut at the base of her hairline made by the skull saw in order to extract her brain. She had a deep Y-shaped incision that started above her breasts and then ran down between them and along the midline past her belly button. The skin folded together at the edges of the incision, threatening to peel back any moment like an unzipped jacket in the wind.

  More than the surgically induced mutilation, her tender age disturbed Haldane. He doubted she was far past her teens or old enough to appreciate the repercussions of her ruinous and self-destructive killing spree. What a goddamn waste! he thought.

  Standing at the head of the table, Maguchi grabbed a blunt metal probe from the dissecting tray. He brought it up to the bullet hole above the cadaver’s left eyebrow. “If you look close, you can see the black stippling around the entry wound.”

  Haldane leaned forward and saw the speckles, which looked like fleas caught scurrying from the wound.

  “Powder residue,” Maguchi said. “Means the gun was fired from no more than two feet away from the girl’s head.” He put his gloved hand behind her head and lifted it off the table. Then he stuck the probe through the hole in her forehead and directed it toward the exit wound so that the probe was sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle from the skin. �
��See the angle of the bullet entry?”

  “Somebody was standing above her?” Savard suggested.

  “Exactly.” Maguchi nodded. “Unless the killer was standing on a chair, she was kneeling when she was shot.”

  “Praying?”

  Maguchi chuckled. “Can’t tell that from an autopsy, but I do know that she must have known what was coming.”

  Maguchi pulled out the probe and dropped it back on the tray. “Now, let’s have a look at her chest.” He pivoted and tripped, falling against the side of the gurney.

  Haldane reached over and steadied his arm. “You okay?”

  “Just a little clumsy.” Maguchi chuckled. “It’s why I got kicked out of the neurosurgery program.” He pushed himself upright. He stepped over to the corpse’s midsection. With both hands, he folded back the skin of the incision, opening it like a tent. Her intestines had been removed, and her chest cavity was so empty it displayed the ridges of her vertebrae poking through from the back. He pointed to a smooth shiny surface, separating the chest from the abdomen. “Look at her diaphragm and chest wall.” Gobs of blood and yellow-green pus still clung to the diaphragm and along the inside of the chest, more so on the left than the right side, looking like the skin on top of a left-open paint can.

  “She had a big empyema, meaning the pus was trapped between her drenched lungs and the chest wall,” Maguchi said. “When I made the first cut into the chest, the stuff sprayed out and hit me in the gown like a garden hose. There must have been four or five liters’ worth in her chest, which trust me is a huge amount.”

  Haldane could picture it in his mind. He had experienced the same phenomenon putting chest tubes in live patients, but he viewed Maguchi questioningly. “Empyema? That’s unusual for a viral pneumonia.”

  “I know,” Maguchi said. “But the previous cadaver had the same.”

  “Dr. Maguchi,” Gwen said, “can you tell how long she had been submersed?”

  “Not long,” Maguchi answered. He ran a finger over the arms and legs. “See her limbs? No skin sloughing at all, which at these temperatures would occur after twelve to twenty-four hours. And she’s got none of the log scrapes or nibbles that we tend to see after twenty-four hours.”

  “Nibbles?” Gwen shrugged.

  “Fish bites,” Maguchi said nonchalantly.

  Savard showed no sign of reaction. “So she was found at dawn yesterday,” she said. “Means it was likely that she was shot and dumped in the river either early that morning or late in the previous evening.”

  “Yup. I’ve put time of death between midnight and 2:00 A.M.” He turned away from the cadaver and started for the door. “Come on. I want to show you her lungs. I have them in the room next door.”

  Maguchi stumbled as he headed for the door. He made it within a few feet of the wall when his legs buckled. He dropped to his knees. He grabbed for the sink on the wall in front of him, but his arm span wasn’t long enough to reach. He flopped forward and hit his head on the floor with a loud thud.

  Noah lunged forward but reached Maguchi a moment too late to stop his head from making contact with the floor. Haldane rolled Maguchi from facedown onto his side. A cut had opened above the pathologist’s left eye and blood started to leak out from under his face shield and drip on to the floor.

  When Haldane put a hand to Maguchi’s forehead, the skin was burning hot. “Jake, are you okay?”

  Maguchi stared back at him, bleary-eyed. “It couldn’t be. I took precautions.”

  “What’s wrong?” Savard said, crouching on the other side from Haldane and leaning over Maguchi.

  “Hot and cold,” Maguchi said. “And the aching. So stupid! I never put it together. I have the bug, don’t I?”

  “Do you know where you are?” Haldane asked.

  “In big trouble is where,” Maguchi said with a weak laugh.

  “Your breathing okay?” Haldane asked.

  “No problem. A tickle in my throat.” He gawked at Haldane, fear creeping into his eyes. “I took all the precautions.”

  Haldane shook his head slowly. “When you started the autopsy on the Jane Doe, what were you wearing?”

  “Gown, mask, gloves, and all that,” Maguchi said.

  “But no eye shield, right?” Haldane said. “You didn’t know she had the Gansu Flu.”

  “Yeah, but still—”

  “The empyema, Jake. Remember?” Haldane said. “You told us it sprayed into your chest. The splash probably got up by your eyes and face. Droplets could have snuck under your mask. Or maybe you rubbed your eyes later with the virus still on them?”

  Maguchi nodded. Then he glanced urgently from Haldane to Savard. “Get away from me! I could spread it to you two.”

  “It’s okay, Jake,” Haldane said calmly. “We’re wearing universal precautions.”

  “But back in my office you weren’t!” Maguchi pointed out anxiously.

  “You weren’t coughing then,” Haldane said with a confident nod.

  But when Noah looked up and caught Gwen’s concerned eyes, a cold rush ripped through him as he remembered Maguchi’s drinking water-induced coughing spasm.

  CHAPTER 24

  POLICE HEADQUARTERS, CAIRO, EGYPT

  The meek face stared harmlessly up at Sergeant Achmed Eleish from his computer monitor, but he knew that in the last few hours of her life the woman had been anything but harmless. He reread the cautiously worded description on the Interpol Web site. It characterized the woman as a “person of interest” in connection with the outbreak of the Gansu Flu virus, which had infected thirty-two people so far in Vancouver. Eleish had seen enough Interpol bulletins to know that “person of interest” always meant the prime suspect. And though the caption implied otherwise, he suspected she was already dead.

  He studied the woman’s features. No doubt she was an Arab, quite possibly Egyptian. And as always, young; as young as his two daughters who, thankfully for their proud father, had opted for careers in education rather than the Islamist lifestyle that had enjoyed such a dramatic surge in popularity among Egyptian youth of all classes.

  Eleish patted around his desk until he found the pack of cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep soothing drag, trying to quell the indignation. Every time a plane crashed, a bridge collapsed, or a building detonated unexpectedly, Islam was suspect. Enough prejudice and ignorance existed to wrongfully incriminate his beloved religion for every wanton act of violence without help from the extremists. Now the lunatics wanted to forever associate Islam’s holy name with the taint of bioterrorism. “Damn them,” he grumbled to himself.

  Hazzir Kabaal. Eleish couldn’t shake the suspicion.

  Was this why Kabaal had suddenly disappeared—to spread his viral menace across the globe? Eleish knew of only one way to find out.

  Later in the morning, when the captain left for a meeting, Eleish broke the old man’s dictum and slipped into his office because it boasted the only decent color printer in the building. He printed off two copies of the picture and tucked them into his jacket pocket. Then he headed out to his car.

  Eleish abandoned his search for a shaded parking spot on the dusty street and settled for the partial shade of one of the many identical concrete apartment blocks lining the opposite side of the street, because it provided a discreet view of the Al-Futuh Mosque’s entrance. It was a scorching hot day even by Cairo standards, and Eleish thought he might melt to the front seat of his rusted brown Mercedes if he had to wait long.

  Fortunately for him, the Dhuhr, or noon prayer, ended on time. As soon as he saw people stream out of the mosque, he stepped out of his car and walked into the grocery a block down the street. He pretended to browse the newspaper rack while he kept an eye on the robed men who passed by the window of the store.

  Eleish wasn’t interested in the men. If the woman whose photo he carried in his pocket was a member of the mosque, theoretically, only two men—her father and her husband—could recognize her. No other men should have seen her without her h
ijab, or veil, which cloaks an orthodox Muslim woman’s face from all other men’s view.

  When the last of the men had passed, Eleish sauntered out of the store and turned back toward the car. A group of three female stragglers, dressed identically in black floor-length robes and hijabs, approached walking away from the mosque.

  As per custom, they stopped talking and lowered their gaze to the street as Eleish neared. But when they were within arm’s length, he stopped. “Dear ladies.” He addressed them with a slight bow.

  Alarm registered in the three pairs of eyes as they glanced from one to another at Eleish’s shocking breach of etiquette.

  “Please, do not be alarmed.” He showed them his official badge in his wallet, but that had little effect on their distress. “I am an officer with the Cairo Police.”

  The tallest woman in the middle spoke up without making eye contact. “Our husbands are only a little ahead of us. Please, you should speak with them.”

  “No, dear ladies, I need the help of a woman.”

  His comment only seemed to agitate them more. They took a step back in unison and huddled closer together. He pulled the photo out of his jacket pocket and held it in front of the women. “Do any of you know this girl?” he asked.

  He had to hold the picture up to eye level, before any of the women would even glimpse it. Eleish thought he saw a glimmer of recognition in the eyes of the shortest one on his right, but she said nothing as she lowered her gaze back to the sidewalk.

  “Please. It is most important.”

  None replied.

  “Look. Her parents contacted us,” he lied. “She disappeared almost two weeks ago. No one has seen her since. Her parents are desperately worried.”

  The shorter one mumbled something that Eleish could not make out. The tall woman shot an icy glance at her friend and then turned back to Eleish. “Please, Officer, I beseech you to raise this matter with the men of the mosque.”