“Ha ha. She doesn't go because she thinks that's going to give them away.”
“So after the fight, Wade storms out.”
“Yeah. When she's had some time to think it over, Bradley calls him. Says, let's make up.”
“So they have sex?”
“Chunk, you've got a one track mind, you know that?”
He laughed. “I'm being serious, Lily. They've got to have sex. Or at least be headed in that general direction.”
“Why?”
“The dirt on the bottom of her feet, remember? How else is she gonna get dirt on the bottom of her feet unless she's naked?”
I frowned. That was a hard one.
“Maybe,” I concede. “But what's she doing naked in the middle of ground zero? She would know better than that.”
It was Chunk's turn to frown. “Danger sex?” he offered.
“Yeah, right.”
“Okay, so they had sex in the WHO van they took out.”
“How? There's no room in those things.”
“Oh come on,” he said. “You're a married woman. You ought to know there's more than one way to have sex.”
I punched him in the shoulder, hard. “That still doesn't explain the dirt. Somehow, she's got to be naked outside the van.”
“Hmmm.” Chunk wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel, deep in thought. It looked like a toy in his huge hands.
“Okay,” I said, sensing we'd stalled out. “Doctor John Myers.”
“Mr. Lonelyhearts?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Chunk said. “Same set up. Wade and Bradley are getting it on. Only, they don't want the rest of the WHO staff to know.”
“Why?”
“Because if hippo woman finds out, she'll throw her off the team. Or, if she doesn't throw her off the team, she'll demand that Wade be sent to another station for his duty assignment. Either way, she'll bust them up for the good of her whole staff.”
“Wait a minute, Hippo woman?”
“Yeah, you know. Dr. Laurent.”
“I know who you mean. I just can't believe you called her hippo woman. Now I'm not going to be able to get that out of my head.” It was a spot on description of her.
He laughed, but it didn't last long. We were entering the hard scrabble parts of town. We passed a long line of people waiting in line for their weekly rations of groceries. Two women started to fight. No one jumped in to break it up, and when one of the women got thrown out of line, no one bothered to listen to her pleas for help.
Chunk let out a heavy sigh, more out of frustration than tiredness, even though he was feeling the strain of the long hours same as me.
“Myers,” he said, “has some small idea that maybe something's going on between Wade and Bradley. He wants Bradley for himself, though, so he provokes Wade into a fight.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he's drunk enough he thinks he can win,” Chunk said.
“I doubt it.”
“Maybe he thinks it will earn him sympathy from Bradley when he gets his ass kicked.”
“Pathetic, but maybe. They did walk back to their trailers together.”
“Yeah,” he said. “So they get back to the trailers. He makes a move. Gets turned down.”
“Okay, that works. So the next morning he sees Wade coming to pick up Bradley?”
“And he gets pissed. He follows them out to the GZ.”
“Doesn't work,” I said. “He's got an alibi till ten thirty, eleven o'clock.”
“He does it before they leave,” Chunk counters.
“To do that, he has to go past the security desk, get rid of the van, and then come back, on foot, to put Bradley's body onto Hernandez’ truck. And we haven't accounted for Wade's body. Did he dump it somewhere? Did he put it on another truck that somehow slipped through at the Scar? And you've still got to put dirt on Bradley's feet.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, and sighed again. “What about Isaac Hernandez?”
“Opportunity, but no motive,” I pointed out.
“What about revenge?”
“For what?”
“His family. He's lost most of them to H2N2. Maybe he's out in the GZ, sees the WHO van, and loses it. He overpowers Wade and kills Bradley.”
I looked at Chunk seriously for a moment. It occurred to me that only someone who has actually lost a family member in this damn quarantine can understand the frustration that would drive somebody to commit a completely illogical crime like the one he described.
“What's wrong?” he said, looking at me curiously. It seemed to me a very long time since I'd seen his face, that bent-toothed grin of his. By that August, all you ever saw of anybody were their eyes above that damn white surgical mask.
“Nothing,” I said after an uncomfortably long pause. “Just thinking.”
I watched more angry faces staring at us from the curbs and the porches we passed, and said, “So he blames the WHO? Why?”
“A convenient scapegoat maybe. Or maybe he sees them as a symbol of the medical establishment that failed his family.”
“Maybe.”
“You like that one?”
I looked at him and smiled. My head started to clear a little, at least after I'd stopped thinking about his grandmother.
“Two problems,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said. “Shoot.”
“He kills Wade and Bradley. Why only take Bradley's body back?”
“Hmmm,” he said, thumping his thumbs on the steering wheel. “What's the second problem?”
“He kills Wade. Bradley, maybe. But Wade? I don't think so. If Wade managed to knock you on your butt, I doubt seriously an over the hill, beer-bellied slouch like Hernandez could have gotten the better of him.”
“Maybe,” Chunk said, except there was a serious, strained edge in his voice when he said it. “Still, don't ever sell a man short who's got that kind of anger in him. After all, it's not the size of the dog in the fight-”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. It's the size of the fight in the dog.”
When we got to the Arsenal Station Morgue we started filling in some holes.
We checked with the security detail and found that Kenneth Wade entered the lot at five-fifteen. Under the ‘reason for access’ section of the log the gate officer had written ‘escort research personnel.’ Dr. Bradley checked out a WHO van at five-twenty. She didn't list a destination, which according to the security guys wasn't all that uncommon. The security detail checked them out of the gates at five-forty. Their destination was listed only as ‘field research.'
“Twenty minutes between the time they check out a van and the time they leave,” Chunk observed. “Not enough time to have sex.”
“That depends on who you ask?” I said.
Chunk chose to ignore that one.
“Well,” he said, “at least we know that whatever happened, happened while they were out.”
