He shook his head violently because he could not talk through the coughing.
“Can't,” he finally said. “Muscles aching, raspy, unproductive cough. Chills. Nausea. God, even diarrhea. So cold. I can't believe how fast this strain works through the body. My lungs are burning.”
“Why, Dr. Cole?”
“I knew you'd come back. I knew I didn't have much time. I need you to contact Dr. Herrera at Arsenal. Tell him to make sure he does an autopsy on my body. Give him my research in the van. Make sure he knows about Strains Two and Three. Make sure…”
The rest trailed off in a string of coughing.
“How did you know we'd come back?” Chunk said.
Cole smiled at him. “Dr. Bradley and her policeman bodyguard. I knew you'd figure that out sooner or later, though I confess I thought it would be sooner than this.”
I holstered my weapon. “Dr. Cole, you know you're not under arrest. We didn't come here to arrest you. You don't have to talk to us if you don't want to.”
The words came out of me automatically, a force of habit. Tell the suspect they're free to leave at any time, that you have no intention of arresting them, whatever they might say. It's the legal way to bypass the Miranda Rights and still get a suspect to confess.
“Please,” he said. “I'm dying here. I don't care about being arrested.”
Chunk said, “Dr. Cole, did you kill Dr. Bradley?”
“Of course I did.”
“And Kenneth Wade? The policeman?”
“Him, too.”
“And the looters near the garage?” I said.
He smiled, coughed into his hands, then nodded. “You must think me a regular serial killer.”
“I don't understand why, Dr. Cole,” I said. “Explain that to me.”
He coughed so hard that it rocked him off balance. He swayed drunkenly, teetered at the edge of the curb, and fell back onto his butt.
Chunk and I both ran forward, but he held up a hand to stop us.
“I'm okay,” he said. “It'll pass.”
“Tell us what happened, Dr. Cole.”
He put his face in his hands, then dragged his fingers through his cap of uncombed white hair.
“I told those fools at WHO about Strains Two and Three, and they laughed me out of their office. Then I'm out here, and I find that Bradley woman doing the same tests I'm doing.”
“Did you speak to her about it?”
He nodded. “I wanted to know what she was doing. That policeman told me to beat it.”
“But you didn't?” I said.
“How could I?” Cole said. “There are millions of lives at stake.”
“So you saw her again? You argued?”
“Yes.”
“She'd found evidence to support your claim of the two additional strains?” I said.
“Yes.”
“So, what happened then?”
“She was an idiot.”
“Who?” I said. “Bradley?”
“Yes, Bradley. She wanted to exterminate every bird in the area. Can you imagine that? She wanted to poison everything, kill all the chickens and the Mexican doves and the blue jays. All of them.”
“That wouldn't work?” I said.
“Of course not. You might be able to kill a lot of birds, but there's no way to get them all. And doing that also ignores the real threat. When the grackles come back in November… when that happens, all the poison in the world won't stop the spread of the disease to the world outside of San Antonio.”
“But why kill her, Dr. Cole? I don't understand. Why not just report what she was doing?”
Cole didn't even bother to laugh at that.
“No good,” he said. “WHO intended to suppress the evidence in order to keep the public from going mad. And the local organizations are too corrupt or mismanaged by fools to make good on my research.”
“But you think Dr. Herrera will be able to do something with the information?”
“I hope so. He's the only one I trust. And now he'll have a human victim to report. That should give him the ammunition he needs.”
Cole suddenly seemed very frightening to me, talking about his own death like it was just a means to a higher end.
“Tell me about killing Dr. Bradley,” Chunk said, putting him back on track.
Cole just shook his head. “A small matter. Not like this,” he said, coughing and pointing at his chest.
“Humor me,” Chunk said.
“We argued,” Cole said. “Bradley and I. It got ugly. I was frustrated, so I went back to my van and got behind the wheel. That's when that policeman started yelling at me.” Cole nodded his head, in his mind back at that morning, seeing it all over again. “That smug bastard. He was yelling at me to leave. Saying he would arrest me if I didn't go. I got angry. He was maybe fifteen feet in front of the van. I put it in gear and stepped on the gas. I hit him with the front of the van and knocked him down. I think he hit his head on the curb.”
“What happened then?” I said.
“I was still so angry. I got out, took his hood and gas mask off, and started punching him in the face. I don't know how many times I hit him, but when I stopped he was dead.”
“Bradley was there?” I said.
He nodded. “I took that policeman's gun. Bradley was standing a little ways off, watching the whole thing, screaming like some bimbo in a horror movie. I walked over to her and shot her once.”
“Where?” I said, meaning where on her body.
“Here,” he said, and pointed to the correct part of his chest. “She knew I was going to shoot her at that point. She turned away from me, trying to run away.”
“What about the two looters? How do they come into it?”
Cole was still looking inward and back in time. He chuckled.
“I thought of taking Bradley and the policeman to the morgue. From there, I thought there was a good chance they'd get lost in the system. I started with Bradley. I took off her clothes and dragged her back to my van.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You were behind her, your arms under her arms, her feet dragging through the dirt?”
“That's right,” he said. He looked genuinely surprised that I knew that.
“The bottoms of her feet were dirty,” I said. “She had a gray toe tag-an autopsy tag. They rinse down the bodies after an autopsy.”
“Ah,” he said. He coughed, tried to smile. “That's good,” he said. “It's like Jimmy Stewart said in that movie Rope. There's no such thing as a perfect crime.”
“That's right,” I said. I remembered the picture. Billy and I had watched it years earlier, the two of us on the couch with popcorn and beer, while Jimmy Stewart outsmarted two effeminate literati types. “All crime is by definition flawed.”
He chuckled again. “I put her in the back of my van,” he said. “Then I went back for the policeman. But before I could strip him, those looters showed up. Usually they're scared of the van, because they have a vague idea of the work I do, but these two gave me trouble. They wanted the cop's gun. I gave them each a bullet instead.”
“Why didn't you take them all to the morgue?” I said.
“Too much time,” he said. “And besides, those looters are like fleas. There's never just one or two.”
“So you put Wade in the passenger seat of the van, hid it in the garage, and stashed the bodies of the looters in the weeds?”
He nodded.
