or into the IV bag. I don't know enough about crotalid venom to know which or when it was done. But I am absolutely certain of what I'm saying. It is essential that we get this antivenin into her as soon as possible.'
'This is insane,' Ettinger said.
'How do we know the antivenin is what is in those vials?' Randall Snyder asked.
'Well, for one thing, they're sealed. For another, if this was anything but antivenin, there would be no sense in someone placing it in my possession.'
'Assuming someone did,' Peter said.
'Dr. Blankenship,' Sarah asked, ignoring Ettinger, 'do you know if there are any side effects to the antivenin?'
'An allergic reaction to the horse serum it's made in, I would think,' Blankenship said. 'Nothing else comes to mind.'
'We can handle that.'
'Here, let me see the package insert.'
Randall Snyder glanced once again at the fetal monitor. 'Eli, there's been a slight drop in the baby's pulse. You've got to decide.'
'Crotalid poisoning,' Peter said. 'Sarah, you are really crazy.'
'Ettinger, this issue has been decided,' Eli warned, glaring at the taller man from beneath his massive brow. 'Either go stand on the other side of the bed or get the hell out.'
Peter hesitated and then rather meekly did as he was ordered. Eli quickly scanned the instructions and drew the contents of ten of the vials into a large syringe. Sarah explained the situation to Annalee. There was complete silence in the room as Eli slid the needle into the rubber port of the IV tubing and slowly discharged the cloudy liquid into her bloodstream.
The response to the antivenin was dramatic.
In less than five minutes, Annalee reported that the intense pain in her extremities had begun to abate. Twenty-six minutes after the injection, the bleeding from her nose and needle stick sites stopped completely. By early afternoon, her fever was gone and nearly all of her clotting studies and other laboratory tests were normal.
Six hours after the administration of the antivenin, Glenn Paris convened an emergency session of the executive committees of the hospital trustees and medical staff. After hearing the accounts of Randall Snyder, Eli Blankenship, Helen Stoddard, and the labor and delivery nurses, the participants voted unanimously to place Sarah Baldwin on immediate, indefinite, paid leave from the hospital and from her residency until the details of her involvement in Annalee's case became known with certainty.
The body had been in the morgue at the state medical examiner's office for three days before a definitive identification was made. Actually, body was not so apt a description of the remains as skeleton. A week before, the crew of a trawler, fishing seventy-five miles off the Massachusetts coast, had hauled it aboard along with several hundred pounds of haddock.
The skeleton had not a shred of clothing or tissue left on it, except for some cartilage on the ribs and in several of its joints. Still, the medical examiner was able to place the time of death within the past six months. He also had no problem classifying the death as a homicide. There were fracture/dislocations of two cervical vertebrae. The nature of the bony fragments strongly suggested blunt force. The ropes and diver's weights, still tied around the skeleton's extremities and what was once its midsection, removed what doubt remained.
Now, the ME inspected the dental X rays obtained from the Boston police. His dental forensics expert had just matched them with certainty to those films taken of the skeleton. He dictated his findings into a hand-held recorder and then called the BPD detective who had sent the X rays over.
'I think you can contact the missing man's family and tell them he is no longer missing,' the medical examiner said. 'Unfortunately, it would seem that your Dr. Truscott has done his last operation.'
CHAPTER 35
It was early afternoon when Mrs. Annie Frumanian knocked on Rosa's door.
'It's that charming Mr. Mulholland calling from Atlanta,' she twittered.
Mulholland, who had flown home shortly after the visit to BIO-Vir, had spent his one night in Boston at her bed and breakfast. He was an almost legendary insomniac, and had made inestimable points with Mrs. Frumanian by staying up until well past midnight listening to stories of her life. He later told Rosa that no prescription sleeping pill had ever worked as well on him.
'Ken, have you got anything?' Rosa asked, once she was certain the landlady had hung up the extension.
'An address from three years ago is the best we've been able to do so far,' the virologist said. 'If you find our Mr. Fezler, maybe you should let him know that, assuming the social security number we used is the right one, we have inadvertently alerted the IRS that he hasn't filed a tax return in four years.'
Fezler, the creator of the CRV113 virus, was almost certainly the skittish, stuttering little man who had tried to make contact with Sarah. However, although the old-timers at BIO-Vir remembered him as having been there for at least five years, none of them knew anything about his personal life, and there was no record in personnel that he had ever worked for the lab. From what little their inquiry around BIO-Vir turned up, Rosa and Ken had formed a picture of Fezler as an extremely solitary, very bright, and strikingly overweight man, perhaps in his late forties or early fifties. While in BIO-Vir's employ, he lost an enormous amount of weight. He also lost an enormous number of monkeys. And much to the dismay of animal supervisor Cletus Collins, the record of those primates, like Fezler's personnel file, had vanished.
It was Mulholland's idea to use FASTFIND to locate him. The FASTFIND computer network had been implemented in 1981 by a commission secretly appointed by the President. Its purpose, purely and simply, was to track down individuals for the government. It cost over $12 million to install, but in its first year of operation, the tax evaders alone that it located more than paid that bill. It functioned by rapidly integrating data from the IRS, FBI, military, police, social security administration, passport office, immigration and naturalization service, credit bureaus, unemployment offices, motor vehicle licensing offices, and a dozen national mailing lists. Rosa's department had used the system a number of times to locate people who had been exposed to infectious processes and dangerous toxins.
'The address I got for Fezler is in a place called Brookline,' Mulholland said.
'I know where Brookline is.'
'Three thirty-one Beech; apartment two-F.'
Rosa wrote down the address and then located it on her street map.
'I found it,' she said. 'Another cab ride. I don't know which frightens me the most with all these taxis I've been taking: the fares or the drivers. Maybe it's time to think about renting a car.'
'Or borrowing one. Remember, you're on sick leave. No charging rentals to Uncle. Rosa, listen, there's one more thing of interest. While I was in Boston, one of my people here was sneaking in some more tests on Lisa's serum. We're getting a little above normal blip in her level of interferon.'
'Interferon?'
Rosa took some time to process the development. Interferon, a naturally produced antiviral protein, was well known and extensively studied, but still little understood. In high doses, it had definite anticancer effects. In the lower amounts produced by the human body, it almost certainly played a role in keeping chronic viral infections like herpes and chicken pox in check.
'Ken,' she said finally, 'walk me through your thoughts on this.'
'Well, the way I see it right now, Lisa's got a subclinical, no-symptoms infection with CRV113. The growth of the virus is held in check by her own interferon, antibodies, or more likely both. Sort of a biological Mexican standoff. I suspect we all have dozens of different viral infections smoldering in our bodies like that. Some of them may even
