“‘Fraid so, Harry.” I told him that the search for the missing Hispanics was now just a whole lot more urgent than before, and then told him why.
“You gotta be shittin’ me, Carl.”
“Nope.”
“Are you sayin’ they’re contagious? Like with a plague or like that?”
“Could be that, or it could be something toxic at the plant. Maybe the chemicals they use to cool the place, or to disinfect, or something like that. All I know is I’m standing here at our clinic, getting checked out pretty damned thoroughly. Here, how about I let you talk to Doc Z? “I handed Henry my phone. I noticed he wiped it off with a sterilization wipe before using it. He was serious.
A lab tech named Lois, who I knew all too well from my quarterly cholesterol tests, came in with the familiar tray of tubes. As she wrapped the ligature around my arm, I said, “Could we do my regular checkup now, too?” I expected a smile. Nothing. Deadly serious.
“What are we looking for, Henry?” I asked Dr. Z.
“His white count was astronomical,” said Henry. “Whatever this is, it gets the attention of your immune system in a big way. That’s what I’m looking for right now. Just to see if your white count is up.” His eyes twinkled. I knew right then I was in deep trouble. “And, according to my little manual here. let’s see, ‘Useful testing includes a complete blood count (which may reveal leukocytosis), electrolytes, BUN, creatinine, glucose, prothrombin time, activated partial thromboplastin time, international normalized ratio, type and screen, fibrinogen, liver enzymes, amylase, and lipase. An arterial blood gas may reveal hypoxemia.’ Well, what do you know about that.”
“What?”
“I’ll bet that, even if we leave out the blood gasses, we’ll need at least…whatcha think, Lois? Five tubes?”
“At least,” said Lois.
“Five tubes? Hell, Henry, you’re gonna have to feed me for five tubes.”
“Be brave,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “This will hurt you more than it does me.”
“Right,” I muttered. “So, then, if it is, you treat me for the thing, right?”
“If I knew what it was, and if there turned out to be a treatment for it, you bet.”
That didn’t help much at all.
“Not even a guess?” I asked, watching tube after tube fill from the needle embedded in my arm.
“No. Remember when Alice and I went to Machu Picchu? How sick I got? Just some tropical kind of bug we’d picked up on the way. Still don’t know what it was.” He sort of cleared his throat. “Hell on wheels is what that bug was. But I still can’t name it.”
“Ah.”
“It could be some strain of something I’ve never heard of. Or it could be a chemical that’s toxic. Don’t worry,” he said. “With your cholesterol level, it might even be good for you.”
Don’t worry, my butt. I took a deep breath. “Okay. So, how soon will you know?”
“Shortly. If you don’t have an elevated white count, it’s a very good sign.”
“I’m sure,” I muttered. The needle came out, and Lois pressed folded gauze over the puncture and pushed my arm up so I’d hold it in place until she got some tape. “I got lots going on, Henry,” I said. “I can still rule out foul play on this one, can’t I?”
“There’s no sign of it,” he said. The way he said it left him a bit of room, though.
Lois pressed a Buzz Lightyear bandage over the gauze pad inside my elbow.
“Hey, thanks,” I said. I looked back over at Henry. “So it’s not likely? “I didn’t want two homicide investigations going at the same time, and the ME was the only one who could classify Gonzales as a possible murder case at this stage.
“No. But if it’s something like a transmittable disease or a toxic contamination of the workplace…we could lose a bunch of people.”
My cell phone rang. Lamar.
“What in the hell is going on?”
“You mean about the dog? “I asked, trying to lighten it up a bit.
“Screw the dog. What’s with all the commotion with the medical stuff?”
I told him. It’s very important to manage information that might mean an impending plague with at least some discretion. Since the anthrax-in-the-mail thing after 9/11, it was even more important. In a small, rural jurisdiction, where just about everybody is known to or related to just about everybody else, it’s absolutely vital.
“What does Doc Z think?”
Henry cleaned my cell phone off again before putting it to his ear. He told Lamar that the medical investigation was precautionary but absolutely necessary, and that the point of origin was probably not Jose Gonzales. “Gonzales is a victim, but I’d be surprised if he was the only one,” was what he said. Doc Z was right, but in a way that never would have occurred to any of us at the time.
About fifteen minutes later I knew my white count was just fine, and so was Hester’s. That was a real relief, I think, because we’d both seen what Jose Gonzales, aka Orejas, had looked like. It couldn’t have been a pleasant way to go.
Henry was now leaning toward some toxic substance that Jose Gonzales had been exposed to somewhere, and fairly recently.
“How recent, Henry?” asked Hester.
“I don’t even know that yet,” he said. “Since we don’t know what it is, we don’t know how fast a lethal dosage will take to advance. But within the last week, I’d say. When I examined him, I half expected to find some chemical burns in his throat or windpipe, or in his nasal passages…Nothing. Inflammation, though. But chemical burns would have given me a toxic chemical to work with. Nothing.” He was half talking to himself. “Chemicals would be faster acting, probably…”
Part of this was settled by my next cell phone call. It was the office, who told me that Ben had returned my call. They had strict orders not to give my cell phone number to anybody. I called Ben Hurwitz back, and he told me that Jose Gonzales had been at work Monday. He’d done his normal shift, which was from 3 P.M. to 10:30 P.M. A seven-and-a-half-hour shift wouldn’t jeopardize his part-time status.
“Where does he work?” I asked. “In the plant.”
“Well, he’s logged in as doing his usual job. He carried meat into the refrigerated trucks.”
“Semitrailer trucks? The kind where each trailer has its own refrigerant plant?”
“Yes.”
“Would he be exposed to a refrigerant leak, or anything like that, maybe?” The checking had to start right now.
“There weren’t any reported. We keep good records of that.”
“We’ll need the serials of the trailers he might have helped fill that shift, too,” I told Ben.
“Yes.”
“He’d be lugging swinging meat, right?”
“Yes.”
“Couple hundred pounds, on his shoulder, like quarters that dangle from hooks?”
“Yes.”
“So he’d have to feel at least okay, to do that, you think? “I was assuming that to do such heavy labor for a nearly eight-hour shift, he sure couldn’t have any serious respiratory problems.
“I’d think so. Yes.”
“Okay, Ben. I’ll need to talk to some of the people he worked with. As soon as you can contact any of them…”
That was the problem. Everybody was still on that impromptu “coffee break.”
“Can you tell me what this is about? “he asked.
I thought about it for a second. Why not? He’d likely find out very soon anyway, and I thought it was better for the relations between his plant and our department if he heard it from me first. “Well, Jose Gonzales is dead. It looked like natural causes at first, but now it looks like it might have been some toxic substance, not necessarily a disease, that did him. We don’t know yet.”
