Edition until he got to 'C.' A few pages along, he ran his fingers down eight columns of words starting with 'can.' Nothing caught his attention so he began the process again, this time more slowly. At the midway point, he passed a word, then returned to it as if he had overshot the mark: the finger equivalent of a double take. He slammed the dictionary shut and pumped his fist. The word was 'canister.' The silver canisters. 'Yes!' he exclaimed aloud.
His mind's eye focused on Victor Spritz's equipment room, his 'Ambulance Without Wheels,' with its spare parts and shelf of silver canisters. Six in all, and identical to the ones that had held gauze and cotton in a Navy treatment room years ago. He mouthed words and word fragments and suddenly realized he had forgotten the names of the two 'Can' cities in Turkey. He returned to the bedroom, smiled at Kathy's deep breathing and, in the dark, groped for his pants.
Back in the living room, he removed the index card from his wallet and now had all the pieces of the mosaic, he thought. He took one word at a time. 'CAR' is 'Cartagena,' so we have 'Cartagena Canister.' 'CAN' is either-he looked at the card-'Canakkale' or 'Cankin. ' So it's either 'Canakkale Canister,' or 'Cankin Canister.' And who care's, it's over there in Turkey. David rubbed his decision scar before editorializing. Where they grow the old opium poppy, and process it into heroin, and smuggle it all over the place, like in the old U.S. of A., to fry human brains. And the same for Cartagena, only we're not talking Colombian coffee here, we're talking cocaine, Big C, lady, nose candy. Candy to fry the same human brains.
He wanted to leave immediately for Spritz's office but, at the same time, wanted to digest the events of the past day. And of the days before that. It was Saturday so he let Kathy sleep. Over coffee, he sat at her desk, took his notepad out from Friday and began to make notes which he would later polish to enter into his computer. He wrote about shipment dates, coded containers, drugs, murder suspects, loss of forensic support, excursions to known drug producing countries-estimating relevance, drawing lame conclusions, offering actions to consider. And he didn't know what to make of the Bernie/Marsha alliance, but since he had cast everyone he had come across lately as a killer, he characterized them temporarily as Bonnie and Clyde desperadoes.
At eight-fifteen, he left for the hospital, charged with questions and few answers, determined to enter Spritz's office even if it meant breaking down the door. He had forgotten the Red Cross blood drive next door in Pathology. While working there two years ago, David was instrumental in expanding the drive to three mornings at a stretch and in having the doors open at eight.
He walked into the Pathology wing and at the entrance to its large conference room, stopped to view donors lying on tables-two rows of four each-like live bodies in a morgue, their arms restrained and guarded by nurses in grey uniforms. The room's fluorescence was more than it could handle. David leaned against the archway, picking up the smell of alcohol sponges and smarting from the sting of needle insertions, while pink smocked ladies tended to plastic pouches bearing the Red Cross logo or to intravenous tubing and refrigerated white boxes. Men and women sat beside desks for screening interviews and blood pressure recordings; others waited in line.
He winked at Marsha who looked up while interviewing the psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Corliss, but David didn't bother to address Nora Foster as she scurried from table to table and desk to desk, straightening tubing, whispering to volunteers. Nora had been the director of Hollings' blood drives for as long as David could remember.
He watched the cool precision of bloodletting for only a minute because he had other matters on his mind. Deciding to take a shortcut to Spritz's office, he bypassed the labyrinth of laboratories and zigzagged through empty suites off a parallel corridor. The Saturday morning silence of the department's administrative rooms bothered him.
In the last room before the hall to the EMS office, he came upon John Bartholomew, the hospital's chief microbiologist and a confidant during David's four years of Pathology there. Although Bartholomew was not an M.D., he was considered an expert in the clinical findings of infectious diseases as well as one of the area's top bacteriologists. He sat at a desk, pressing the telephone receiver down against his shoulder. David had often asked the veteran, skin-creased researcher how it felt to witness the laying of Hollings General's cornerstone in the century before.
'Hey there, John, you're not whistling, what's up?' Startled, Bartholomew dropped the phone on the desk before replacing it in its cradle. His hands shook. 'Oh, David, it's you. Sorry, I'm a bit jumpy.' David narrowed his eyes. 'Can I help?'
The microbiologist appeared to welcome the question and said, 'Can you keep a secret? I've been bottling it up too goddamned long.'
'Of course. You know better than to ask that.' Bartholomew relaxed his shoulders. 'Alton Foster just hung up on me. I called him at home. He still refuses to notify the County Health Department about something I think is an emergency-and I don't want to be a part of it any longer.'
David sat on the corner of the desk. 'What emergency?'
'You remember the botulism study we started just before you left here?'
David nodded.
'Well, it was expanded. We got a grant from CDC to see if we could find a way to improve the trivalent botulinum antitoxin.'
'And?'
'As you know, you need clostridium bacilli to generate the toxin.'
'You're beating around the bush, John. What happened, you ran out of clostridium?'
'Worse,' Bartholomew said, swallowing audibly. 'We kept it in a tube of thioglycolate broth, and it's gone.'
What do you mean, gone?'
'Disappeared. I can't find it.'
'Since when?'
'Thursday.'
David pulled at his ear until it hurt. Jesus Christ, now what, germ terrorism? He pushed himself away from the desk and paced. 'Anybody else know about this?'
'Just Foster. I called him immediately.'
'No one in the department knows?'
'No. Remember, it was my baby, so nobody else paid much attention to it.'
'Hmm,' David said, 'and what's with Foster?' 'He says I probably spilled it down the sink-which is ludicrous-and that the Health Department would only create panic if they heard about it. That they'd go to the press, ask a lot of questions around here. And he went on and on about the census of the hospital. He said the murders were more than enough to overcome-if we ever did-and we shouldn't scare people about something that probably didn't happen. David, it did happen. Someone stole the tube. I would have remembered spilling it. And there'd be an empty tube lying around.'
'The whole tube couldn't have been discarded accidentally somewhere, like in the trash can?'
'I doubt it. ' After a burst of eye blinks, the microbiologist repeated the phrase.
David was well aware that botulism food poisoning was on the list of biological weapons reportedly stockpiled by international terrorist groups, along with anthrax, brucellosis and plague.
'Look,' he said, 'don't do anything on your own quite yet. Let me speak to Foster-he sounds completely off base on this.'
'Tell him if he doesn't, I'm reporting the theft myself.'
'Hold off, John, I'll call him. You working today? 'I'll be here till noon.'
'Good, I'll try to get back to you. If not, later. Now, don't do anything rash.'
David took his leave, walking more slowly now, as if uphill. A vial of poison had been added to a consciousness already scrambled with people, places and other things, including the silver canisters he hoped to examine momentarily.
He had anticipated calling Security for a key to Victor Spritz's office, but he found the door unlocked, the overhead lights on. The status of the outer room was the same as when he looked in from the corridor ten days before: mostly empty and in general disarray. In the center was a table burdened by days of unopened mail. He danced around the litter on the floor.
In the past, he had entered the back room on only a few occasions but now, approaching it, he clearly pictured the six canisters that had caught his attention each time. It was a large room, perhaps twenty-five feet square, and after he walked in and looked toward the shelf on the right wall, he arched back as if he had been shot. The canisters were not there.
