off their faces. He was beginning to feel the stress. Maybe he had stretched things too thin. Maybe the plates were beginning to crash.
He reached his Cadillac and sat behind the wheel, breathing deeply and reminding himself of the resources he had in place. He had not reached this position in life without risk. The only difference now was that the risk was coming at him from numerous fronts. All he had to do was weather the turbulence. Four or five months, six tops, and the corrections would be in place. It was going to be a rough ride, but he could weather it.
As he started his car, he noticed something. He was smiling. And somehow that made him feel better.
13
Doug Hughes twisted the handset on his front door and pushed, all in the same motion. The handle didn’t turn, and he almost smacked his face into the door. He tried the handle again. Locked. He rang the doorbell and waited. Nothing. It was just after five on Monday-no reason for Elsie to be out with the kids. He dug in his pocket, fished out a key, and opened the door. The house was quiet.
“Hello,” he said, a slight lilt to his voice. “Honey? You home?”
Silence.
A small, scarred wooden table sat in the foyer, and he dropped his keys on it. The day’s mail, usually stacked neatly and waiting for him, was nowhere in sight. He opened the front door and checked the mailbox. It was full. He closed the front door and set the mail on the table next to his keys. Something wasn’t right. Unless the kids had some sort of sports or after-school activity, Elsie was always home when he arrived from work, and tonight was no different from any other: The train had dropped him at the station precisely when it did every night. He was positive their calendar was clear. And where were the kids? He slipped off his shoes, calling again for his wife and kids.
Silence. Not a sound.
His wife had been under the weather for the last week, quite sick actually, but if she was heading out to the doctor’s office, she would have called. He stopped at the garage door and peeked in. Her vehicle was parked next to his. He felt his heart beating faster and a steely taste in his mouth. Panic. He moved quickly through the house now, checking each room as he went. The main-floor family room was clean and quiet, the television and audio system both turned off. The kitchen was exactly as he had left it, the glass from his morning fruit shake still in the sink. He ran up the open staircase to the upper floor, glancing in the kids’ rooms as he moved down the hall. Nothing. Everything clean and quiet. He grasped the handle to the master bedroom and turned. The knob rotated easily and the door swung in a couple of inches.
“Elsie,” he said quietly as he entered the room. The bed was ruffled and he could see the outline of his wife under the covers. He took a deep breath and exhaled. She was sleeping. Probably had a neighbor or one of her friends pick up the kids so she could sleep off whatever bug she was fighting. He walked across the room, his stocking feet making no sound on the thick nylon carpet. He reached the edge of the bed and folded the covers back.
And then he screamed.
Doug Hughes screamed again and again as he staggered back from the bed, knocking over the night table and spilling a full glass of water. Staring at him with bloated eyes, one popped completely out of its socket, was a dead person. His wife’s face was a strange shade of purple, her lips almost black. A thick, vile liquid was oozing from her mouth onto the sheets. Her mouth was set in a horrific grimace, as though her last breath had been in total agony. A pungent odor drifted to him and he vomited onto the carpet. It was an odor he had never smelled before. It was the odor of death.
He grasped the phone with unsteady hands and dialed 911. “My wife is dead,” he said when the operator came on. “My wife is dead. Oh my God, my wife is dead.”
He dropped the phone on the floor, then fainted.
14
“What killed her?” Gil Jacoby asked. Elsie Hughes’s death, although not a homicide, had been assigned to his department and he’d drawn the short straw. No one in homicide wanted to deal with any infectious-disease death, let alone one this ugly.
Katie Wood, the chief medical examiner for Austin, Texas, snapped off her protective gloves and deposited them in the biohazard trash just outside the autopsy room. She shook her head as she removed her plastic hair net. “I’m not sure, but I know what it looks like and I hope I’m wrong.”
Jacoby was suddenly awake. The tone of the ME’s voice was not good. “What?” he asked.
“You’ll have to wait a few minutes,” she said. “I’ve got to shower.” She left the detective standing in the anteroom, wondering what had just happened. He was even more concerned when another employee showed up a few minutes later in full protective gear and removed the trash can that contained the gloves and hair net. Another person, dressed from head to toe in rubber and plastic, placed a strip of yellow tape across the door to the autopsy room. Neither spoke to him.
“What’s going on?” he asked when Wood returned. Her short dark hair was still wet.
She pointed to another room abutting the examining room and they entered, shutting the door behind them. “This is serious,” she said, pouring two coffees and offering one to the homicide detective. “Right from the start I suspected this was something different, dangerous. The symptoms the victim exhibited were synonymous with some sort of hemorrhagic fever. Pharyngitis, conjunctivitis, and bleeding from openings in her body.”
“Whoa, talk English, Doc. What did you just say?”
“Her throat was inflamed, as were the mucous membranes in and about her eyes. That’s what forced her eyeball out of its socket.”
“Okay, but what makes this so dangerous?”
“Ever heard of Ebola?” she asked, sipping her coffee.
Jacoby instantly went white. “Of course. But that only happens in Africa. And it’s spread by animals.”
Wood raised an eyebrow. “Very good, Detective. Ebola’s not the only virus that causes hemorrhagic fever. There’s one more: Marburg. They’re both filoviruses, and they’re both very dangerous and very communicable. Once I suspected I may have a filovirus, I stopped normal autopsy procedure, cut out a slice of infected tissue, and magnified the sample on our electron microscope. The viral particles are about fourteen thousand nanometers long and encased in lipids. The only reason I know it’s not Ebola is that the particles are over a hundred and sixty nanometers in diameter, twice that of the Ebola virus. And I’m pretty sure they’re not Marburg, either.”
“Then if the virus isn’t Ebola or Marburg, it isn’t a filovirus,” Jacoby said hopefully.
“I can’t say for sure that it is or it isn’t,” she said. “But we’ll know soon enough. Can you find out for me if the victim has been in Africa recently?”
“Of course. I’ll call her husband.” He started to stand up, but the ME put her hand on his arm.
“Use your cell phone, Detective, because neither you nor I are going anywhere until we find out if we’ve been infected.”
Jacoby slowly sat down. “How does that happen?” he asked after a few seconds.
“An hour from now, this place is going to look like something from one of those plague movies. Everyone in protective suits, washing every square millimeter of this place down with the strongest industrial cleaners on the market. They’ll bring the necessary equipment with them to run an immunohistochemical procedure once they’ve fixed a skin biopsy with formalin. It’s a pretty definitive test. And if whatever killed her turns out to be a filovirus, we’ve got a real problem.”
“What’s that?”
“This facility is rated Biosafety Level Two. Somehow they’ll have to get her body to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. It’s the only Biosafety Level Four facility in the country.”
“Holy shit,” Jacoby said. “What about us?”
