“I don't think so,” he said. “Let's go take a look.”
We parked and approached the ambulance on foot. Chunk checked the cab while I checked the side and back doors.
“Locked,” he said.
“Yeah. Back here, too.”
“Can you see in the windows?”
I tried to look through the vent windows in the back door, but my gas mask made it hard for me to get a good angle.
Chunk was trying to look through the side windows. I turned around to tell him I couldn't see anything, when I saw a man walking towards us from between two houses. He was dressed in the same kind of suit and mask we wore, though his fit better. He carried two dead chickens in his left hand, holding the dead birds by the feet. There was a pistol in a clamshell holster on his right hip.
“Chunk.”
Chunk turned to me, saw me looking somewhere else, and followed my gaze to the man.
Neither of us had our weapons. They were secured in the trunk.
The man saw us and stopped. We looked at each other for a moment before he held up the chickens and motioned for us to step away from the ambulance.
We both stepped back toward our car.
When we were far enough back, the man went to the ambulance, removed two red biohazard bags from a side compartment, and dropped a dead chicken into each bag. Once they were secured, he unlocked the side door, stepped inside, and disappeared for a moment.
Chunk and I glanced at each other. What in the hell's he doing?
Chunk shrugged.
The man was inside the ambulance for almost a minute. When he finally came out, he rinsed his gloved hands in blue disinfectant liquid he poured from a cooler on the side of the ambulance, shook off the excess, and then approached us.
He didn't even give us a chance to speak. “This is a restricted area,” he said, his voice bristling, like he'd just caught us watching TV on his couch in the middle of the night. “What are you doing here?”
I could see the top half of his face through the goggles of his gas mask. He was an older man, late sixties, maybe, with liver spots on his forehead and deep rutted crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, which even through the mask I can tell were intensely focused.
He stepped right up to Chunk and stood chest to chest with him, not two feet between them. There was almost a foot of difference in their height, and maybe a hundred pounds, both in Chunk's favor, but the smaller man didn't seem to notice the disadvantage. He just stood there, gloved hands on his hips, waiting for a reply.
“Well?”
Chunk was taken aback by the old man showing him attitude, but he recovered quickly.
“I was about to ask you the same question,” he said. “I'm Detective Reginald Dempsey with the SAPD's Homicide Unit. This is my partner, Lily Harris.”
“Homicide?” The man looked at both of us in turn.
“Homicide,” Chunk said. “Who are you?”
“I'm Dr. Walter Cole,” the man said, regaining a little of his superior edge. “I'm with the Metropolitan Health District.”
That explains the ambulance, I thought. He's using it as a rolling laboratory.
The man stared at Chunk. “What in the world is SAPD Homicide doing in the GZ, Detective?”
“How about you telling me what you're doing with a gun, Doc,” Chunk countered.
Cole glanced at the weapon on his hip. He reached for it, but stopped with his hand on the grip when Chunk raised a fist to knock him out if he drew it. He continued to pull it out, but more slowly, and made an obvious show of handing it to Chunk, butt first.
Chunk took it from him.
“I use it on the chickens,” Cole said. “I have to collect a lot of specimens, and this way is quicker than the traps.”
Chunk looked the weapon over, holding it so that I could see it. “Browning Hi Power,” Chunk said. “.22 caliber bull-nosed target pistol. Walnut grips. Blued barrel. That's an expensive weapon, Doc.”
Chunk ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber, then handed it back to Cole. Cole took the weapon back and slid it into the clamshell. He put the magazine and the ejected round into his pocket. “It pays to use the best,” he said.
“Why are you killing chickens, Doc?” The way it sounded, Chunk was teasing him, though I know him well enough to know that that's just Chunk's way. It was an honest question.
Cole didn't seem to realize that. To him, Chunk was a big dumb cop insulting him.
“It's complicated,” he said, with obvious sarcasm.
“Try me.”
Cole sighed, like we were a big waste of his precious time.
“I am mapping the antigenic shift of the original strain of H2N2 in order to prove that not one, but three, highly virulent strains of the virus are at work here. First I find and kill chickens from various parts of the GZ. Then I perform a test on them to determine whether or not they are infected with the influenza virus. If I detect the virus, then I compare my new sample with the genetic fingerprint of archived samples and attempt to extrapolate the direction of the antigenic shift.”
All of that was said in a matter of fact tone, but it was obvious that he was trying to talk over our heads, just to prove the point, I guess.
Chunk cocked his head to one side doubtfully. “I see,” he said.
“Yes,” Cole said, sneering. “Of course you do.”
I stepped in at that point so that Chunk wouldn't squash the poor man.
“Dr. Cole, we're here investigating the murder of Dr. Emma Bradley. What we're looking for-”
“Who did you say?”
“Dr. Emma Bradley. Do you know her? She was with the World Health-”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “Yes, I know. The World Health Organization. She works with Dr. Myers and that fat, disgusting French woman at the Arsenal Morgue.”
“That's right. How well did you know her, Dr. Cole?”
“Well, I,” he began, but faltered. “Not well, I guess. By reputation, mostly. Whenever I go to Arsenal, it's Myers I prefer to deal with. He's a bit of an eager pup, but at least he's not as full of himself as the rest of those people.”
“You said you know her by reputation, doctor. What exactly does that mean?”
“Excuse me?”
“What was her reputation? Do you mean her professional reputation, or was there something else?”
“She's Laurent's trained pit bull,” he said. “From what I hear, she was supposed to be the bright light of the bunch.”
“You don't sound impressed,” I pointed out.
He shrugged. “Dr. Laurent and I have fundamentally different views on the nature of this epidemic. She believes that her people need to focus on developing a live virus vaccine for the primary strain of H2N2. And there's a chance-a chance, mind you-that in six months they'll have a vaccine that will minimize the impact of the disease among the local population. But I believe they're ignoring the real danger.”
“Really? What's the real danger?”
I could hear him breathing through his gas mask, sudden, deep inhalations, like he was hunting for the right words. Finally, he said, “Did you know we lose 36, 000 Americans a year to influenza? I mean, not counting what's going on here in San Antonio.”
I shook my head.
“We do. It's a staggering number. And the really scary thing is most of those deaths are to mildly virulent strains of the flu. Pedestrian stuff, at least compared to H2N2. What we've experienced here in San Antonio over
