Death Benefit

because they were full of bacteria. I think they might have been hot because of radiation.”

41.

OFFICE OF THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER 520 FIRST AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 12:32 P.M.

Laurie Montgomery had been sitting in her office at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner catching up with an old friend, Detective Captain Lou Soldano, when the phone rang. She saw it was her boss, apologized, and took the call. She was soon rolling her eyes, and Lou smiled.

Laurie Montgomery had been back at the OCME for eleven months, since the harrowing events of the infamous Satoshi Machita case, involving both the New York mob and the Japanese Yakuza, which led to the kidnapping of her infant son, John Junior. The story had been plastered all over the media for several days as the details of the case unfolded. After JJ’s rescue, Laurie had come back to work but only after she had found a live-in nanny, Paula, who immediately proved to be a godsend. With Paula looking after JJ, Laurie felt secure. Right now, her husband and fellow ME, Jack Stapleton, was working in the same building, and JJ was safe with Paula at the couple’s home on 106th Street. It didn’t hurt that she and her husband had friends like Detective Captain Lou Soldano either. Right after the kidnapping, he’d insisted on a twenty-four-hour security detail for the Stapleton home.

From Laurie’s side of the conversation and from knowing Laurie’s boss, Dr. Harold Bingham, Lou sensed he’d be in for a wait. He took his copy of the New York Post from his briefcase and flipped through it until he saw the story: IVY SPACE GERM DOCS DIE. He quickly reread the first few paragraphs. He had wanted to show the article to Laurie, which was one of the reasons he’d stopped by.

“Sorry, Lou,” Laurie said, hanging up the phone. “That was Bingham.”

“I assumed as much. No problem. Did you see this article?” He held up the paper.

“Yes, but not that one specifically. There was the same story in the Times.”

“Crazy and scary at the same time. It says that two researchers at Columbia contaminated themselves in a lab with some virus grown in the space station or something. The bodies were supposedly brought here to OCME. Is this all true?”

“Most of it. But the contamination agent wasn’t a virus. It was a bacteria called salmonella typhi that causes typhoid fever. Jack did both autopsies yesterday. Very sad. I understand they were stem cell researchers who were making huge strides growing human organs.”

“That’s what I understand,” Lou said. “Anything unique about the autopsies? There were some wild theories about the deaths in the article. Apparently one of the guys was a big-deal researcher who was not particularly liked by his colleagues.”

“Jack didn’t mention anything other than that he was impressed with the pathology. He’d never seen an entire gut in both patients in such bad shape. Typhoid fever isn’t usually so generalized. Anyway that was the case I was just talking to Bingham about. He expects there will be some political fallout. If there’s a press conference scheduled, he wanted to give me a heads-up that he might want me to host it. He knows Jack hates doing it and isn’t the most diplomatic.”

Lou laughed because Jack was one of the most undiplomatic men he knew. “You guys make a good pair because you complement each other.” Changing the subject, he said, “What about a bite of lunch today? Do you have time for a quick one?”

“I’m sorry, Lou, they’re dropping like flies out there.”

Lou laughed again. He was glad the public couldn’t hear the black humor that was often engaged in within the OCME walls.

“I hear you.”

Lou levered his stocky frame out of Laurie’s chair, put his trench coat back on, and made his farewells.

42.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 1:18 P.M.

The first time George heard Pia’s theory, he thought she had lost it for sure. She said she believed that Rothman and Yamamoto were murdered using a radioactive agent, polonium-210, that was masked by the salmonella bacteria they had also been given. George had sarcastically asked which James Bond movie she’d gotten that from, but Pia was, as ever, deadly serious.

“George, it’s actually happened before so it’s a copycat crime. Someone was actually murdered in this fashion. Truly. The man’s name was Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian. He was killed in London in 2006. Don’t you remember? It was all over the news.”

“I don’t remember,” George admitted.

Pia waved George over to the desk so he could see several of the newspaper stories she had found online, then she filled him in on the basics of the case.

“Litvinenko was in the KGB, then the FSB, which is what replaced it. He fled Russia and was given political asylum in England. He wrote a couple of books that were critical of the Russian president, Putin. You’d think he would have been super-careful, knowing what he did. He meets these guys, ex-KGB like him, in a London hotel bar for tea. Within hours he’s sick and hospitalized. After several days he’s diagnosed with radiation poisoning, which is later figured out to be polonium-210. He gets progressively worse, since there was not a lot the doctors could do, and dies about three weeks later.”

“Three weeks. That’s a lot longer than Rothman and Yamamoto.”

“Yeah, I know. But polonium’s effects are dose-related. We don’t know how much polonium was used and when Rothman and Yamamoto were poisoned.”

We don’t know if they were poisoned, thought George, but he kept it to himself. Pia was on a roll.

“So the Brits investigate and find out about the bar and the tea, and there was radiation all over the place, especially in the teapot. Ultimately it was proven that he died from deliberate poisoning. They did an autopsy and the pathologists had to wear hazmat suits. Litvinenko’s GI tract was very hot, to use your word. The guy had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin.”

“Okay, I can see why one spy might use something like this to kill another spy, but why use it on doctors? If you want to kill them, why go to all that trouble? Why not just shoot them?”

“That’s the clever part. Whoever did this did not want anyone to know it was an assassination. They wanted it to appear like an accident. The symptoms of radiation poisoning are camouflaged by the salmonella: fever, prostration, delirium, GI symptoms, low white count. Everything’s the same except the hair loss. They were counting on the fact that no one would think to look for this kind of agent because of the typhoid fever diagnosis. Polonium is unique in that it decays by only emitting alpha particles, which would only be detected if someone thought to look specifically for it, but nobody would because the diagnosis of typhoid was so obvious.”

Pia was picking up steam again. It all seemed to fit.

“Nor would the alpha particles make anyone else sick, which obviously has been the case. Alpha particles can only travel about a centimeter, and they can be blocked by as little as a sheet of paper. It’s only if the polonium-210 is breathed in or ingested that it’s dangerous, and then it’s really dangerous, especially in a large dose, which can be rapidly fatal. Even as little as a millionth of a gram can kill you.”

Pia sat back in her seat with a look of triumph on her face. “What do you think, George?”

George was overwhelmed both by the amount of information Pia had thrown at him and by her enthusiasm. Things fit, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Pia was getting ahead of herself. “You have to assume the hair loss had no other cause,” George said. He thought a little more. “But I guess this would explain why the antibiotics