12.21 (8 page)

Tracking the original source was crucial in any food-borne illness. Vegetables with
E. coli
had to be traced back to the farms where they were grown, so the farms could be shut down and their wares pulled from the shelves. Salmonella had to be traced back to the chicken coop, so every egg could be recalled. It could be the difference between one victim and thousands.

Stanton and his team didn’t even know what animal source to concentrate on. Cows’ prions could obviously cross the species barrier, so beef was the first suspect. But pigs had prions remarkably similar to those of cows. And a prion disease called scrapie had killed hundreds of thousands of sheep throughout Europe; Stanton had long feared lamb might one day carry mutated prions to humans too.

Once they figured out
what
got John Doe sick, the real work of containment would begin. The unnatural way meat was processed and packaged meant flesh from a single animal could be distributed across thousands of different products and end up all over the world. Stanton had traced meat from a single cow to jerky in Columbus and hamburgers in Düsseldorf.

“I want people on the ground checking all the local hospitals,” he told Davies. John Doe was the only case so far, but prion disease was difficult to diagnose, and Stanton was convinced there could be more out there. “See if they’ve had any unusual cases of insomnia. Or any other unusual admissions. And check the psych ERs for anyone coming in with delusions or strange behavior.”

Davies smiled. “That would be everyone in L.A.” After matters sartorial, making fun of the Southland was his primary amusement.

“What else?” Stanton asked.

“Cavanagh called.”

As head of prion investigations for the CDC, Stanton reported to the deputy director. Emily Cavanagh was known for her preternatural calm,
but she also understood how serious prion disease was and took nothing lightly. After butting countless heads over money and treatment protocols, Stanton had enemies in Atlanta; Cavanagh was one of the few who remained an ally.

“What are we calling this thing anyway?” Davies asked.

“VFI for now,” Stanton said. “
Variant
fatal insomnia. But you find me where it came from and we’ll call it Davies’s disease.”

STANTON LISTENED TO
a dozen new investigation-related voice mails before he heard Nina’s voice.

“Got your messages,” she said, “and I assume this is another one of your ploys to get me to go vegan or whatever. Don’t worry. Most of the meat in the fridge was ancient and needed to be thrown out anyway. Guess your furry friend and I’ll survive on fish out here for a while. Call me back when you can. And be careful.”

Stanton glanced at his team, seated at their microscopes. Per orders from CDC headquarters in Atlanta, they weren’t supposed to tell anyone about the possibility of meat-borne illness yet. Every time there was even a hint of a possibility of mad cow, the public panicked, beef futures collapsed, and billions of dollars were lost. So Stanton hadn’t told Nina about John Doe. He’d just hinted that it would be a very good idea to listen to what he’d been saying all these years about not eating meat.

“Dr. Stanton, I’ve got slides.”

One of his postdocs waved him over. Stanton hung up the phone and hurried to a protective hood on the opposite side of the lab. Jiao Chen was sitting next to Michaela Thane. Stanton had invited Thane to the lab after her shift at Presbyterian ended so she could stay in on the ground floor of the investigation. If and when a case of meat-borne FFI broke, he wanted to make sure credit was given where it was due.

“The shape is identical to FFI,” Jiao said, surrendering her seat. “But you won’t believe the progression. It’s moving so much faster.”

Stanton looked through the sights of the powerful electron microscope.
Normal prion proteins were shaped like helices, like DNA, but here the helices had unwound and refolded into what looked like accordion fans.

“How long’s it been since the baseline was taken?” Stanton asked.

Jiao answered, “Only two hours.”

The prions he was used to progressed over a course of months or longer. In investigating mad cow victims, he often had to go back three or four years to find the contaminated meat. But these proteins were changing faster than anything Stanton had ever seen. With the speed of a virus.

“At this rate,” Jiao said, “it’ll take over the entire thalamus within a matter of days. And then only a few more days before brain death.”

“The infection must have been recent,” Stanton said.

Jiao nodded. “If it weren’t, he’d be dead already.”

Stanton looked up at Davies. “We have to try the antibodies.”

“Gabe …”

“What antibodies?” Thane asked.

It was their most recent attempt at a cure, Stanton explained. Humans couldn’t mount an “antibody” defense against foreign prions because the immune system confused them with the normal prion proteins in the brain. So the Prion Center team had “knocked out” these normal prions in mice (one of the side effects was making them unafraid of snakes) and then injected them with
abnormal
prions. The mice produced antibodies to the foreign prion, which could be harvested and theoretically used as a treatment. Stanton and his team hadn’t gotten it to work in a human yet, but it had shown considerable potential in a petri dish.

Davies said, “Believe me, no one wants to tell the FDA to go screw themselves more than I do. But, Gabe, you don’t need another lawsuit.”

Thane asked, “What lawsuit?”

“We don’t need to go into this,” Stanton said.

“It’s quite relevant,” Davies said. He turned to Thane. “He gave a victim of genetic prion disease an unapproved treatment.”

“The family asked for antibody therapy,” Jiao interjected, “and then after he gave it, and the patient didn’t make it, they changed their minds.”

Thane shook her head. “Gotta love patient families. The old
hypocritic
oath.”

They were interrupted by another of the postdocs. Christian wasn’t wearing the earbuds through which he usually played hardcore rap at all hours—an undeniable sign of the heightened tension in the lab. “The cops called again,” he said. “They searched the Super 8 motel room where they picked up our John Doe, and they found a receipt from a Mexican restaurant. It’s right by the hotel.”

“Where do they source their meat from?” Stanton asked.

“Industrial farm in the San Joaquin. They put out about a million pounds of beef a year. They haven’t had any breaches, but they also do their own rendering.”

Stanton glanced at his partner.

“It’s possible,” Davies said.

“Rendering?” Thane asked.

“You know the toothpaste you use?” Davies said, all too delighted to discuss the nastier side of the meat business. “And the mouthwash you gargle with? How about the toys little children play with? They’re all made with the byproducts of rendered meat after animals have been slaughtered.”

“Rendering was probably the original source of the mad cow outbreak,” Stanton explained. “Cows were fed remains of other cow brains.”

“Cannibalism by force,” Thane said.

Stanton turned back to his postdoc. “Which industrial supplier is it?”

“Havermore Farms,” said Christian.

Stanton sat up in his chair. “The Mexican restaurant sources from Havermore?”

“Why? Do you know that name?” Thane asked.

He reached for his phone. “They supply all the meat for the Los Angeles Unified School District.”

HAVERMORE FARMS
nestled in the valley of the San Emigdio Mountains, where the wind couldn’t carry its smell anywhere near civilization. It took Stanton and Davies an hour to get there in morning traffic, which left them two hours to prove that the mutated prion had come from here, before the L.A. public schools served Havermore Farms lunch meat to a million students.

The doctors sped past the cow pens, where thousands of cattle were crowded together. These were the slaughter animals Stanton was worried about; they were being force-fed corn, and their diets were likely being supplemented with protein cakes from the other side of the facility, a potential source of the new strain of prion.

They’d arranged to go directly to the rendering floor, where the protein cakes were made, the likeliest place for contamination. Stanton and Davies followed Mastras, the floor manager, past conveyor belts on which sat heads, and hooves that once belonged to pigs, cattle, and horses, and euthanized cats and dogs. Men wearing bandannas, goggles, and masks yelled to one another in Spanish while bulldozing skinned and defleshed carcasses into a large pit where cow limbs were mixed with pig jaws, hair, and bone. Only the traces of Vicks VapoRub they’d placed beneath their noses upon arrival kept the smell tolerable.

“We’ve been open with the inspectors,” Mastras said. “They poke around, we give them feed logs, the whole thing. We’ve always come up clean.”

“You mean the tiny fraction of samples the USDA tests has come up clean,” Davies said.

“You know we’ll be screwed as soon as word gets out you guys are investigating us,” Mastras yelled over the bulldozers. He had red hair and pasty skin, and Stanton had taken an instant dislike to him. “It won’t even matter if it’s true or not.”

“We’re not making anything public until we find the source,” said Davies. “CDC is keeping this all under wraps.”

Stanton ran a quick calculation of the animal remains he could see
scattered throughout the room. “This is a lot more than what you’re slaughtering here,” he said. “Are you rendering material from other farms?”

“Some,” Mastras said. “But we don’t take any meat that’s still in the plastic from supermarkets, and we don’t grind up any flea collars with those insecticides either. The pound takes off the collars before dropping their animals off, or we don’t take them. Bosses insist, because they want the highest standards.”

Davies said, “Or, as we call it, the law.”

They arrived in front of a series of conveyor belts, on which carcasses of different animals came in off the trucks once they were skinned. All the belts were covered with indistinguishable organs, bloody skin, masses of mixed bones, and broken sets of teeth.

Davies started with the belt on which the pig remains were carried inside. Using forceps and an X-Acto knife, he cut samples from the belt and dropped them into a specimen retrieval cup for the ELISA—enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay—a test they’d developed years ago for finding traces of mad cow. Stanton focused on the cattle remains, placing pieces of flesh on a plastic plate with twenty different holes, each of which contained a clear protein-infused liquid. If there was any mutated prion, the solution would turn dark green.

Ten minutes later, after checking a dozen samples coming in on the conveyor belt, there was no change in any of the solutions. When Stanton repeated the process, the result was the same.

“No reaction,” Davies said as he came back across the floor.

Stanton turned to the floor manager. “Where are your trucks?”

Out on the loading docks, they worked over every inch of the vehicles used to cart the remains in from the slaughterhouse. They swabbed and tested the bloodstained walls and floors of all twenty-two trucks.

But swab after swab was negative, and when they got through all of them, the ELISA solutions stayed clear.

Mastras was smiling now. He hopped out of the last truck and called upstairs to report that they could begin serving to LAUSD immediately.

“I told you,” Mastras said. “We’ve always been clean.”

Stanton prayed they hadn’t missed anything and chided himself for believing they’d find the answer so quickly. Rendering was only one of the dangerous ways man manipulated meat. They’d just have to widen their search for what made John Doe sick. With every passing hour, others could be infected.

When Stanton stepped out of the truck, he saw that Mastras had left the loading dock and walked off down the road. He was staring at something in the distance. Stanton followed the manager until he had a clear look. Dust rose up in clouds beneath the tires of vans with antennas pointed in all directions.

“Motherfucker,” Mastras said, looking back at Stanton.

News crews were speeding toward them.