“That's true,” I agreed. “But we still have to explain how Emma Bradley got naked in the GZ and then made her way back here.”
Chunk flipped the security log forward to the next page.
“Well, it doesn't look like she came in on Hernandez’ truck. The gate officer shows him coming in with an empty truck at ten after ten. Leaving with a full truck at eleven-twenty.”
“What about his first run of the day? We had him at the Scar the first time at ten after eight.”
He flipped through the log, stopped on a page towards the front, and nodded. “In at six fifty-eight, out at seven-forty. That fits.”
“Okay,” I said. “So whatever happened to her happened between five-forty at the earliest, and eleven- twenty at the latest?”
“Right.”
“And Myers has an alibi for that time?”
“Right.”
“And it doesn't look like Hernandez could have done it?”
“Right.”
“So that leaves Wade?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head sadly. “While we're here, you want to check on the autopsy?”
“Sure,” he said.
“That's not exactly what we were expecting to hear,” I told Dr. Herrera.
He looked at us curiously. He'd thrown us a curve, and he apparently didn't understand why. A bullet hole in the chest must have seemed perfectly obvious to him.
“You said you found pieces of fabric inside the wound?” I asked.
“That's right.”
Chunk grumbled under his breath. Herrera looked confused.
“We had sort of assumed that she was naked when she was killed,” I explained.
His eyebrows arched expressively. “Why in the world would you think that?”
I rubbed a hand across the back of my neck. I was beginning to feel just as much the amateur as Lt. Treanor believed me to be.
“We thought there was a possible sexual relationship between Dr. Bradley and Officer Wade of the SAPD Research Protection Detail.”
He shrugged. “Well, that's possible, I guess. It's also possible that she was shot with his gun.”
“How's that?”
“The bullet passed cleanly between the ribs. No real deformation upon entry. I was able to identify it pretty easily as a Speer Gold Dot.40 S amp;W, one hundred and fifty-five grain hollow point. That's an expensive bullet. SAPD and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office are the only ones inside the wall who still have access to them.”
“Great,” said Chunk. “Thanks, Doc.”
“Sure,” said Herrera, but without a trace of irony. “No problem.”
“So somebody shot her while she was wearing her spacesuit, and then stripped her?”
“Looks that way,” Chunk said.
“Why?”
“Who knows,” he said. “Doc didn't find any bruising around the vagina. And there was no semen in her, so I guess we can rule out any freaky postmortem stuff.”
“Thank God.”
“Yeah.”
Chunk drove us across the Arsenal Station parking lot and through the security desk. Two baby-faced patrolmen with machine guns waved us through.
“But why strip her? Why bring her back here? Why not just dispose of the body out in the field somewhere?”
“I don't know,” Chunk said. “Maybe it's somebody who works out of Arsenal and can't be away too long, somebody whose absence would be noticed. They stripped her so that she could blend in with all the other bodies coming out of there.”
“That would make sense,” I agreed. “After all, the killer would have to have access to toe tags, and only authorized people are allowed on the floor.”
“True,” he said. “It narrows the field at least.”
Chapter 10
Ground zero, the GZ.
All the homes in the GZ were vacant and scrawled with graffiti. The yards were overgrown with barnyard grass and sunflowers. Hardly a window anywhere was left unbroken. Morning sunlight lanced through the oak trees. Startled pigeons erupted from a hole in a nearby roof.
Those streets felt haunted. Death seemed to leer out at us from the shadows.
Chunk and I felt like infidels, drifting through the quiet streets where some terrible, flesh-consuming religion was born.
The Metropolitan Health District required all personnel entering the GZ to wear protective clothing. Chunk and I wore gray hooded plastic jumpsuits that crinkled when we walked and trapped heat close to our bodies. Even before we stepped out of the car, sweat soaked through our clothes. Our breathing sounded labored and difficult through the gas masks, even though it really wasn't. I learned to get used to the gas mask early on.
Outside the car, the MHD had posted orange warning handbills on every light pole and abandoned car in sight, many of the bills so sun-bleached they appeared almost white.
We had no plan other than to systematically explore every street in the five square miles around the Produce Terminal.
It turned out to be a more difficult task than we'd thought. Long ago, perhaps in the twenties or thirties, judging by some of the houses we saw, the area around the Produce Terminal had been quite nice. We saw quite a few large, two story Queen Anne-style homes that had fallen into tragic disrepair and had since been carved up into multiple apartments, and an equal number of one story bungalow and Craftsman-style homes. And in between those-stuffed in, really-were an unbelievably large number of leaning shacks and add on sheds that made the place look like a hive. Overgrown alleys crisscrossed every street, and in some places the vegetation was so thick you could barely tell there were homes hiding behind it.
We went slowly, and wound through street after street, looking for anything unusual.
“Look at that,” Chunk said, and pointed at a street sign swaying gently in the breeze from an overhead stop light cable.
The fifteen hundred block of Matamoras Street, I read, and a knot formed in my throat.
That was the real GZ, the very street upon which H2N2 found its first victims. Somewhere down that street was the home of Mrs. Villarreal, whose chickens were San Antonio's equivalent of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.
Chunk slowed the car to a crawl and we turned down Matamoras, both of us tense, alert, and more than a little frightened.
Suddenly Chunk stopped the car-harder than he needed to. I almost went into the windshield.
I lurched forward, my hand on the dashboard to stop my momentum.
“You see that?” he asked.
Ahead of us, parked in the grass in the shade of two large oak trees, was an old EMS wagon. The Fire Department's decals had been peeled off, though their outline remained. Converted, by the looks of it.
“Do you think it might have been left here?” I asked him. It wouldn't be the only costly piece of City equipment abandoned by the roadside in the early days of the war against H2N2.
