seal down in one of the labs…that they’d encountered a dangerous substance.” She looked at me in a kind of personal way, totally unlike the “reporter being sincere and caring” look we normally get. “My friend said it involved a cadaver that had been received from up here in Nation County. Yesterday. Is this your murder victim, the one found on the road?”
Okay. In my mind, the words “dangerous” and “protective gear” just screamed contagious. That was my first concern.
“Contagious?” I asked.
“I don’t know. The personnel at the clinic have protocols they follow. Some of it is precautionary. But I’m assuming that it’s contagious.”
“But nobody said so,” persisted Hester.
“No. Nobody.”
“Maybe not,” interjected her cameraman, “but you might tell ‘em about the hazmat gear in the back of our rig.”
“That’s just in case,” said Judy. “But don’t stray on me, here. Is this the murder victim from the roadway? And if so, how could a gunshot make him contagious? Or was it suicide?”
Just then, Henry stuck his head out of the lab doors. “Oh, hello,” he said to Judy and the cameraman. “I didn’t know you were here. Carl, Hester, could you come in here a moment?”
We certainly could. “We’ll get right back to you,” I said to Judy. “Just a few minutes…” I thought it would be best to keep her in one place, instead of wandering all around the hospital and clinic, prying. I hoped it worked.
Once in the lab with the door firmly shut, Henry just said, “How do they do it?”
“Who?”
“The TV people. They are here about the Gonzales case?”
“Yep,” I said. “I don’t know. Tips, mostly, I guess.”
“Amazing,” said Henry. “Anyway, I just got a call from the U of I labs. The good news is that it’s not contagious,” he said. “Not from secondary aerosol exposure, which is what you seem to have had.”
That was a genuine relief.
“The bad news is that they think it’s a toxic agent, one that is frequently mentioned in the chemical and biological warfare handouts.”
“What? “That was from Hester.
“I’m afraid so. They think it’s ricin, or something very like it, aerosolized, and with the Gonzales exposure within the last forty-eight to sixty hours.”
I’d never heard of ricin. Hester obviously had.
“That’s made from castor beans,” she said, “isn’t it.” A statement, not a question.
“Yes.”
“Is it only dangerous in aerosol form?” Hester’s background as a crime-lab technician was showing.
“Well, I’ve got the info right here,” said Henry, and reached over and picked up a brochure. “It says that ricin’s also potentially fatal if ingested. But that the preferred method of distribution is airborne.”
It took a second for me to realize some of the implications. “Gonzales works with food. Worked. Is that a big factor?”
“Maybe,” said Henry. “I know he worked at the plant. We don’t know how he contracted the stuff. What kind of work did he do there?”
“He carried swinging meat into the refrigerated trucks,” I said.
“Then I suspect there’s a reason for concern,” said Henry. “Direct physical contact.” He picked up the phone. “There’s going to be a lot of activity around the plant,” he said. “A lot.” He began pressing keys. “Thank God it’s a mechanical vector,” he said, half to himself.
“A what? “I knew what a vector was. I also knew what mechanical meant, but I wasn’t connecting.
Henry looked at me and held up his hand, then began to talk on the phone. I looked at Hester. She’d started her career in the Iowa Crime Lab.
“Whatever caused the condition,” she said, “won’t grow. Won’t change. Not like a mutating bacteria. More like a poisonous chemical.”
“Good,” I said. “We only have one thing to deal with, then.”
“Right,” she agreed. “But that should really be plenty.”
Henry hung the phone up, and said, “U of I lab. Good news. They say that it has to be in a pretty heavy concentration for ingestion to kill somebody. The greatest risk is with the elderly or infants. Infants don’t eat much beef.”
Better and better.
“Now all we need to do,” said Hester, “is find out how Gonzales was exposed to the agent. That’s our key.”
“Well,” I said, ever hopeful, “where do they use that stuff?”
“Nobody uses it,” said Henry. “It’s toxic. No benefit whatsoever. It’s a natural by-product of the castor bean. Ricin is a small percentage of what you have left over when you make castor oil.”
“Waste,” said Hester. “Or it should be. This stuff, if I remember, would only be used as a weapon, intentionally, and after some difficulty.”
“That’s true,” said Henry.
“Wonderful,” I said. “By who?”
“Whom,” said Hester automatically. “Hard to tell. But if you thought that the 9/11 anthrax-in-a-letter stuff was a tough one, this is ten times worse to trace. Ricin doesn’t even require a particularly sophisticated lab to produce.”
“Where does this stuff grow? Castor beans, I mean.”
Henry held up his brochure again. “This thing is a gold mine. It says that the plant originated in Africa, but it grows throughout the southwest United States. For example. Anybody manufactures castor oil, they probably have the waste that contains this protein.”
“It’s a protein?” High school biology and chemistry were a very, very vague memory. I knew that meant something, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what.
“That it is,” said Henry. “It’s just a whitish substance. But it’s very toxic.”
“So, I’m trying to remember anything about proteins…”
“It’s synthesized by living things,” he said, keeping it simple. “But it isn’t alive itself. So it’s biologically produced, but can’t reproduce. That’s good news, by the way. We’re dealing with finite quantities here. Not a rapidly expanding and mutating organism.”
“Okay.” Sometimes a simple response is best for changing the subject, and at the same time concealing ignorance. “Do we know anybody who manufactures castor oil?”
“Well,” said Henry, “nobody springs to mind. It can be used as a medicine, to treat constipation…and I think as a lubricant and as a replacement for other hydraulic fluids in machinery…”
“But the oil itself isn’t harmful, is it?” said Hester.”
“No.”
“So, even if they used it as machine fluid at the plant, the ricin wouldn’t be present…”
“True,” said Henry.
“It’s a kosher plant,” I said. “Very high standard for cleanliness. And they’re even careful about what lubricants are used in the machines.”
“The whole plant?” asked Hester. “I mean, is there some sort of nonkosher processing, too?”
“Well, Ben told me that they only use about the front half of the beef in kosher stuff, and that’s the half that gets the full treatment. The back half is used for nonkosher, but the plant’s the same, really. The difference is that the nonkosher stuff doesn’t get soaked and salted, that’s all.” I’d asked Ben about that stuff a while back.
Even while I told them all that I knew about kosher, I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about the case. I think it had something to do with the “front half/back half” part of my explanation. My mind works that way. But if somebody wanted Rudy Cueva dead, and did him…and the same somebody wanted Rudy’s good buddy Jose Gonzales dead, and did him-very likely over a drug deal-and we had a Colombian connection, which we did…and castor beans were grown in southern climates…
