Massachusetts General Hospital has released to the media. Dawn Kincaid has botulism. She remains on life support, and her brain is no longer viable. Benton has asked point-blank if fifteen-cent postage stamps featuring a beach umbrella might have turned up inside her cell at Butler.
“She got hold of the toxin somehow,” he pushes. “Poisoned, in other words, unless she got it from Butler’s food, which I seriously doubt. Anybody else at Butler with botulism? … Exactly. The glue on the stamps could be the source of the exposure.”
“That was pretty good, but no offense to Benton, he should stay out of the kitchen.” Marino pushes away his bowl of unfinished Bolognese sauce without pasta, which turned out gummy. “The Botox Diet. All you got to do is think about botulism. That will make you lose weight. Doris used to do her own canning,” he adds, talking about his ex-wife. “Creeps me out to think about it now. You can get it from honey, you know.”
“Mostly that’s a risk for infants,” I reply distractedly, as I listen to Benton’s conversation. “They don’t have the robust immune systems adults do. I think you’re fine to eat honey.”
“Nope. I stay away from sugar, fake sugar, and I sure as hell don’t want honey or home canning or maybe salad bars, either.”
“You can get the stuff for like twenty bucks a vial from China.” Lucy has her MacBook on the dining-room table, typing with one hand as she eats a piece of bread with the other. “Fake name, fake e-mail account, and you don’t have to be a doctor or work in a lab. Order what you want from the privacy of your own home. I could do it as I sit here. I’m surprised something like this hasn’t happened before now.”
“Thank God it hasn’t.” I begin to clear the dishes while I continue to debate whether I should call General Briggs.
“The most potent poison on the planet, and it shouldn’t be this easy to get,” Lucy says.
“It didn’t used to be,” I reply. “But botulinum toxin type A has become ubiquitous since its introduction into the treatment of numerous medical conditions. Not just cosmetic procedures but migraine headaches, facial tics and other types of spasms, hypersalivation — drooling, in other words — crossed eyes, involuntary muscle contractions, sweaty palms.”
“How much of it would you have to use, saying you could order vials of it off the Internet?” Glass clanks as Marino drops empty bottles in the recycle bag inside the kitchenette, where he’s followed me.
“It comes in a crystalline form, a white powder, vacuum-dried Clostridium botulinum type A, that you reconstitute.” I turn on the water in the sink and wait for it to get hot.
“Then you just inject it in a package of food, for example,” Marino says. “Or a take-out container.”
“Very simple. Frighteningly so.”
“So if you got hold of enough of it, you could wipe out thousands of people.” Marino finds a dish towel and begins to dry as I wash.
“If you tampered with some product, like a prepackaged food or beverages that aren’t heated sufficiently to destroy the toxin, yes,” I reply, and that is what scares me.
“Well, I think you should call Briggs.” He takes a plate from me.
“I know you do,” I reply. “But it’s not that simple.”
“Sure it is. You just friggin’ call him and give him a heads-up.”
“It sets things in motion before we have lab results.” I hand him a wineglass to dry.
“Dawn Kincaid’s got botulism. That’s one lab result.” He opens cabinets and starts putting away dishes. “You ask me, that’s the only confirmation you need when you think of everything else we’re finding out and start putting the pieces together. Like the shit in Kathleen Lawler’s sink that fits with the burns on her foot.”
“It might fit with that. I’m speculating.”
“The person you should be speculating with is him.”
He means General Briggs, the chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my commander and an old friend from my earliest days when I began my career at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Marino wants me to tell Briggs that Kathleen Lawler’s gastric contents appear to be undigested chicken and pasta and cheese that possibly were poisoned with botulinum toxin, and that scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive x-ray analysis of the odd-smelling residue recovered from her sink revealed magnesium, iron, and sodium. The answer to Colin Dengate’s question about whether the finding of these elements in the chalky residue means something to me is yes. Unfortunately, it does.
When water is added to food-grade iron, magnesium, and sodium or salt, the result is an exothermic reaction that rapidly produces heat. Temperatures can reach up to one hundred degrees centigrade, and it is this technology that is the basis for the flameless ration heaters used to cook or warm up food eaten by soldiers in the field. MREs, meals ready to eat, offer dozens of different menus, including chicken with pasta, and many of the tough tan plastic bags they’re packaged in offer additional rations, such as cheese spread. Each of these self-contained meals includes a water-activated flameless ration heater packaged in a sturdy polybag, an ingenious device that requires a soldier in the field to do nothing more than cut off the top, add water, and then place the bag under the MRE, propping both against “a rock or something,” according to the operating instructions.
I realize it’s possible there might be other explanations for why swabs of the residue in Kathleen’s sink show trace elements of iron, magnesium, and sodium, but it is the combination of evidence that offers a possible nightmarish answer that can’t easily be explained away. The unpleasant odor that reminded me of a shorted-out blow-dryer or overheated insulation strikes me as consistent with a chemical reaction producing heat, and Kathleen had burns on her left foot that prison officials claimed she could not have sustained while incarcerated in Bravo Pod. I believe she accidentally dripped a hot liquid on her bare skin, and it may very well have been the boiling water from a flameless ration heater.
The first-degree burns were recent, and I can’t dismiss from my thoughts her obsession with food and certain comments she made to me, and I wonder if a missing diary or more than one might have contained what Kathleen was doing and thinking and possibly eating since she’d been moved to Bravo Pod. Tara Grimm was taking care of her, was good to her, and Kathleen was more than happy to be a
“Plus, there’s the shit about the camera,” Marino continues to lecture me about what I should do. “Defeating infrared with infrared, a strip of tiny IR LEDs on her bike helmet, assuming Lucy’s right about that. Whatever this person did, the camera got defeated with something, and that’s a fact, completely whiting out her head the instant she got close enough for her face to be recognizable on the camera, and Lucy says the recording can’t be fixed or restored. Like the damn Chinese blinding our spy satellites with lasers. You should call him.”
“It will be sounding an alarm that could end up in the Oval Office,” I say what I’ve said before. “General Briggs will have to pass the information up the chain, straight to the Pentagon, the White House, if there’s even the slightest possibility that the bigger target is our troops — that what we’re dealing with is the preliminary if not plenary stages of a terrorist plot,” I’m explaining, as Benton appears.
“She isn’t going to say it outright.” He tells me about his conversation with Special Agent Douglas Burke, who is a woman. “But reading between the lines, the answer is yes. Fifteen-cent stamps matching the description we have were found in Dawn Kincaid’s cell. A pane of ten with three removed that are on a letter she didn’t get around to mailing. A letter to one of her lawyers.”
“The question is, where might she have gotten the stamps?” I ask.
“Dawn received mail yesterday afternoon from Kathleen Lawler,” Benton says. “Douglas wouldn’t confirm that the stamps were included, but the fact that she is letting me know about the letter suggests it.”
“Written on party stationery?” I ask.
“She didn’t say.”
“Mentioning something about a PNG and a bribe? In other words, derisive comments, probably about me?”
“Douglas didn’t go into that level of detail.”
“Fragments of indented writing I could make out while in Kathleen’s cell. What struck me as sarcastic, and understandably so, if she were under the impression that I sent her the stamps and stationery, what would appear to be cheap leftovers, something I didn’t want,” I say, as I recall Kathleen’s snide comment about people sending inmates their detritus, things leftover and expired that they no longer want. “That I might try to butter her up or
