“What makes you think Officer Wade's got something to do with this?” Chunk asked.
Laurent glared at him. Her contempt was plain to see. Chunk used to intimidate just about everyone he met when he was on-duty, but not Laurent.
“That's a serious accusation, Dr. Laurent,” I said. “Can you tell me why you think he has something to do with Dr. Bradley's murder?”
She uncrossed her arms and put her palms flat down on the desk. It was a tired gesture, the movements of a woman who has worked for far too long on a knot that just gets more intricately tied for all her efforts to untangle it.
But for all her tiredness, I couldn't help but notice the anger. It was still there, like the molten rock under the thin black skin that hardens on lava flows.
“There was an incident last night.”
“What kind of incident?”
“There was a fight. Here in the staff lounge. Officer Wade and several members of my staff were at a party last night. There was much drinking. Your Officer Wade, he became very intoxicated.”
“Did Officer Wade and Dr. Bradley see each other off-duty?” I asked.
“I do not understand your question.”
“Were they an item? Romantically involved?”
“I should say not,” Laurent said. “I do not make it a point to intrude upon the personal affairs of my staff, but I do not believe that Dr. Emma Bradley would become romantically involved with a man such as Officer Wade. The idea is, well…” She waved her hand in the air like she meant to chase the image out of her head, like it was a fly buzzing her food.
“What started the fight?” Chunk asked.
Again, the glare. Okay, rude to me, but hateful to him. Maybe she just doesn't like men. Or maybe it's just male police officers. Or maybe it's giant black male police officers.
Chunk picked up on it at the same time I did and backed off. I had always respected him for the professional detachment that allowed him to do that. As a woman trying to do what most people considered to be a man's job, I had some idea how he felt, how hard it was to hold one's tongue when somebody bad mouthed you for how you looked before they even bothered to decide if you knew what you were talking about.
“Your Officer Wade apparently thinks himself quite the lady's man,” Laurent said derisively. “I was not present last night, but I have heard that he has what my mother used to refer to as Roman hands. I can only imagine that he tried to impose himself upon her and Dr. Bradley objected to the behavior. Another doctor stepped in and asked Officer Wade to leave and Officer Wade brutalized him.”
Dopey guy. The one with the black eye.
“This doctor,” I asked her, “he's up front?”
She nodded. “Dr. John Myers. A fine researcher.”
“The one with the black eye?”
She nodded.
“We'd like to speak with him, too.”
“Of course.”
“Did you tell Officer Wade's supervisor about the incident?” I asked. “About the fight?”
Her eyes looked like polished coal, hard and black and intense. There was a hatred there that went beyond the bad news we'd brought her and the resentment she clearly felt for Officer Wade.
She fixed her hard gaze on me and said, “I called Lt. Treanor and voiced my displeasure. He promised to address the situation.”
“You don't sound convinced.”
“I am not. He sent the man to us again this morning. When Officer Wade arrived here, he offered no apologies. He simply marched in here, helped Dr. Bradley carry her field gear to one of the vans, and then drove her out to collect specimens. That was the last I saw of either of them. Now you come, telling me this, and you ask me who I think would want to hurt her.”
Chunk and I traded glances. Doesn't sound like Dr. Bradley was too pissed about his Roman hands if she went out alone with him.
“She went out with Officer Wade this morning? After the fight last night?”
Laurent leaned back in her chair and it creaked painfully under her weight. She regarded me for a moment before she answered.
“As I say, detective. I do not intrude upon the personal affairs of my staff. I look only at their abilities in the field and in the laboratory. Dr. Bradley has been on my staff since she graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School. She has helped me research the influenza virus in Rwanda and Thailand and China, and I have come to rely upon her as a competent professional in the field and a careful researcher. I have voiced to her in the past my concerns about her extracurricular activities, but she is young and pretty. Men like her, and I think she likes the attention. But as I say, it never interferes with her work.”
The present tense, I noticed. It still doesn't seem real for her that Bradley's dead.
“When did you see them last?” I asked. “What time this morning?”
“Perhaps six o'clock. Sometime around dawn. Perhaps a few minutes after that.”
“Where were they going?”
“She did not say exactly. Though she has been doing much research around the Produce Terminal area east of here.”
Not good, I thought. The five square miles that made up the Produce Terminal area were considered a no- fly zone by both the SAPD and the Metropolitan Health District. The outbreak started there, and from what I knew at the time, they still hadn't removed all the corpses from the street. In the language of the plague city, the Produce Terminal area was ground zero, or the GZ.
“What was she doing in the GZ?” I asked.
“Our work is on genetic typing. We are trying to identify the most virulent genes in the H2N2 virus, modify them, and hopefully develop a live virus vaccine. Dr. Bradley's work is part of that effort.”
“You said she took one of your vans this morning?”
“That's right.”
“Do you have any idea where that van is now? Are they equipped with GPS trackers maybe?”
Laurent shook her head. “It is not here. That's all I know.”
Okay, I told myself, dead girl, missing van, and a cop is my best suspect. What a miserable day this is turning out to be.
“I think we ought to speak to Dr. Myers next,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “I'll call him back.”
Chapter 4
Dr. John Myers was so shocked at the news of Emma Bradley's death that I was worried he was going to have an asthma attack.
We had taken him into a little office just barely big enough for the three of us to sit down. It was hot, and the little window-mounted AC unit made a lot of noise without giving off much in the way of cool air.
He had demanded to know what we wanted and refused to sit down, but after we told him about Emma Bradley, he started to sway on his feet, like the heat was already too much for him.
“Would you please sit down, Dr. Myers,” I said.
I put my hand on his shoulder and tried to guide him to a chair, but he wouldn't let me.
“I'm fine,” he said. “Thank you.”
After a moment he sat down and took a few deep breaths until the color started to return to his face.
He was 33, English, effeminate to the point of being prissy, with a black mop of curly hair that spilled over the top of his collar. His uninjured eye was wide open all the time. His other eye was a slit between two bruised and puffy lids, the skin around them the color of damaged fruit. The lab coat and surgical mask he was wearing
