Arsenic for the Soul (17 page)

First, they slandered Vivian as an
immature girl who suffered from depression and anxiety. Somehow
this put her on the same level as violent criminals. They had the
nerve to convince Vivian’s boyfriend that she was controlling and
abusive. How ironic, considering the mind games they put him
through.

If he stood up for Vivian, his family
wouldn’t speak to him for weeks. They treated him as if he didn’t
exist.

The last and most devastating phase
entailed the lies they spread about Vivian. They gossiped that she
was sleeping around with numerous men. The doubt was enough to
drive a wedge between Vivian and her beau.

The breakup was just as brutal, a
whirlwind of confrontations with her ex’s family and drinking to
numb the depression.

She vowed to never date again after
the horrendous experience.

A smile creased her lips.
Somehow Milo changed those sentiments in recent weeks. Now she
found herself charmed—no,
intoxicated
with the thought of
him.

She could only imagine how far their
relationship might take them. Was this just a short term fling or
could he be the man she always imagined marrying?

Maybe an adorable son or daughter
waited in her future as well. She beamed at the thought of a
beautiful child with her Chinese heritage and Milo’s European
features.

But those fantasies would have to
wait, she reminded herself, as more watchful eyes from strangers
followed her.

It never bothered her before when
people sent curious glances her way. She was quite used to it given
her bold fashion tastes.

However, something felt entirely
different about the stares leveled at her this time. She was being
monitored like quarry for hunters.

One lone man in particular glowered at
her from the curb. She had never seen him before, yet the look he
cast her was reserved for a mortal enemy—simply because of a media
narrative about dirty immigrants spreading disease.

Vivian deliberately passed within a
hair’s breadth of him. She expected a kick or slap but the coward
did nothing. Of course he wouldn’t. Bullies could only summon the
courage to act when they were surrounded by their foul
ilk.

Once she cleared the block, she
relaxed. Maybe she needed to arm herself with a pocketknife just in
case the worst comes to pass.

She couldn’t trust ordinary people to
behave within the confines of reason while they were besieged by
fear—especially if they rationalized the outbreak as a foreign
threat.

It was common knowledge that panic
often drove the masses to blind rage. Nowadays, her heart beat a
little faster every time she neared a crowd. Who among them
harbored resentment for immigrants?

Who among them might act upon
it?

After all, she knew too
well from her ordeal with the killer Viktor
Rezník
that the human soul was a
playground for sin.

TWELVE

Bryan Hajek retired to the empty
lounge at the University Hospital. Recently, he’d been keeping tabs
on the tuberculosis situation and pushing for more inquiries and
lab tests. Due to his background in epidemiology, he was retained
as an adviser for public response. He was seen as a prominent face
in the investigation and less of a figurehead to the nursing
program. Maybe it was the thrill of his earlier days in disease
control that made him hunger for the truth.

Over the past week, he spent more time
cataloging patients stricken with tuberculosis and tracing it
backward. He was still searching for a common factor that linked
the cases together.

“
Bryan, what are you doing
here?”

Bryan almost choked on his coffee. He
turned around to see he wasn’t quite as alone as he
thought.

“
Sorry for startling you.
I’m just surprised to see you this late at the
hospital.”

“
Yes, clinicals ended for
the day, didn’t they? Well, you’ve found out my little secret. When
I’m not overseeing the students, I’m trying to do my part in saving
the world,” he chuckled. The figure hovered close to Bryan, its
shadow creeping across the lounge.

“
You’ve been quite active
in this health crisis, haven’t you? We’re fortunate you alerted us
to the outbreak.”

Bryan winced. He never did mention
that one of his pupils, Vivian, had been instrumental in his
discovery.

“
Sometimes I feel like I
don’t deserve the credit. To be honest, one of my brightest
protégés tipped me off to the patient symptoms. I thought she was
crazy at first when she mentioned tuberculosis, but I trust her
instincts so I looked into it. You could imagine my surprise when I
discovered she was spot on.”

“
In that case, tell me… Who
really uncovered this outbreak?”

Bryan took another sip of his
coffee.

“
Vivian Xu.” Almost as
quickly as the speaker appeared, the room became ominously silent.
Bryan couldn’t resist looking over his shoulder.

A needle jammed into his neck. Bryan
howled and grappled with the attacker standing over him. His lips
began to tingle and a strange floating sensation relaxed his
muscles. He felt as though his body was melting in an ice cold
bath. The ends of his nerves were seared off to the pain. The face
of his attacker became a blur before his world faded to
white.

Approaching footsteps echoed in the
hallway outside of the lounge. Growing agitated, the assailant
removed the syringe from Bryan’s neck and fled.

The beloved director was
discovered soon after, motionless on the floor without a
pulse.

* * *

“
Please do this for me,
Gavin. I want to know what happened to him.”

Gavin looked positively terrified when
Vivian confronted him at the medical examiner’s office. She rushed
there as soon as the news broke about Bryan Hajek’s death. The
circumstances were suspicious enough to deliver the body to the
medical examiner, where Gavin was unlucky enough to find Vivian
waiting for him.

“
Why are you so insistent?
And frightening?” he said, backing up into the lab.

“
Bryan died shortly after
he started digging around in the tuberculosis outbreak. Don’t you
find that strange?”

“
For all we know, he could
have collapsed of a heart attack.”

“
Level with me here, Gavin.
Do you really think his heart just burst and no one was around to
save him? In a hospital?”

Gavin knew better than to challenge
Vivian to a debate. He gave a boisterous sigh.

“
Very well. I’m inclined to
let students attend an autopsy every now and then. But understand
this, you’ll only observe the operation. I suppose Jezebel wouldn’t
turn down a spectator.”

“
Who’s Jezebel?”

“
The medical examiner, whom
should be here at any moment. You’ll both make splendid playmates,
I’m sure. Now let’s get you suited up.” Upon entering the
refrigerated morgue, they slipped into shoe covers, latex gloves,
caps, and surgical gowns.

“
Just what I always
wanted,” Vivian said, topping off her butcher uniform with a
plastic apron around her waist.

“
Don’t you look like a
doll,” said a voice that definitely didn’t belong to Gavin. Vivian
turned around as the shadows spat out a woman with blonde hair and
thick-rimmed glasses. She projected confidence and poise with every
step.

“
You must be Jezebel,”
Vivian said, noting the fox-like smirk on her lips. Vivian
considered herself a little eccentric by society’s standards, but
Jezebel looked a few short-circuits away from a malfunction. Her
eyes definitely looked like they had seen too much of the
underworld to admit her back into society.

“
Have we met before?”
Jezebel asked. “You look vaguely familiar…”

“
No, I haven’t had the
pleasure. I’m Vivian. Gavin was kind enough to let me join you
today. I have a personal interest—”

“—
curiosity about becoming
a pathologist’s assistant,” Gavin spouted. “She’s a medical student
from Charles University.”

Jezebel looked at this raven-haired
girl with renewed excitement.

“
Really? Tell me, Vivian,
why do you want to work side-by-side with death? Do you have a
penchant for unlocking secrets like I do? There’s so much you can
learn about a person’s life from their mortal coil. You’d be amazed
at the stories they can render with a blood spatter or an exit
wound.”

“
No, Gavin doesn’t have a
clue what he’s talking about—”

Jezebel’s almond-shaped eyes glowed a
deeper shade of turquoise in the unnatural light. They were ungodly
penetrating, as if Jezebel sought to uncover her secrets while her
heart was still beating.

“
I hope I’m not
intimidating you. There’s no need to hide your curiosity here.
Anyway, you’re anxious to see your first autopsy, aren’t you?
There’s no sense in us standing in the cold. I’ll fetch the
deceased and we can have a little fun.”

Vivian shot a look at Gavin
that unequivocally said,
Don’t you dare
hook me up with a job at the morgue. You’ll be lying on this cold
slab next.
He conveyed his deepest
apologies with a smile.

Vivian’s swallowed the lump in her
throat when Bryan’s body was wheeled out. He was positioned on an
autopsy table with a rubber block under his head. The stubble on
his chin revealed one too many nights spent at the hospital.
Bryan’s face was a canvas crafted over fifty-seven odd years, and
under every wrinkle a tale waited to be told. How strange and
tearful this reunion felt to Vivian. Not so long ago, they shared a
friendly smile as they passed each other in the hallway. What she
wouldn’t give now to hear one of his ridiculous jokes instead of
the excruciating silence.

Vivian couldn’t help but look into
Bryan’s eyes. It was the last thing you wanted to do when a person
was about to be dissected. His eyes didn’t appear milky in the
traditional sense of decomposition. His eyes seemed just as alive
as the last time they spoke.

“
There are no obvious signs
of injury,” Gavin said, spreading a cloth on the countertop with
forceps, scalpels, enterotome scissors, and a hooked mallet that
came in handy for prying loose the skull cap.

Vivian felt uneasy when Jezebel
produced a 20-gauge needle and carefully retracted Bryan’s eyelids.
She inserted the needle with a syringe into the globe of Byran’s
left eye. She gently suctioned the clear gel into a tube as the eye
itself slowly collapsed.

“
What are you going to do
with that?” Vivian asked as Jezebel detached the syringe but kept
the needle in place. She handed a gray-topped tube to Gavin, who
promptly fetched a saline syringe.

“
We sample it for
biochemical analysis or disease,” Jezebel said, coolly injecting
the saline into the eye. “We can also use this to detect drugs and
toxins.” Vivian’s skin crawled as Bryan’s eyes inflated under the
needle and returned to their former shape.

Goddamn
needles
, Vivian thought.

“
Look here on the neck,”
Jezebel said, motioning for Vivian to draw closer. To the untrained
eye, the object of her interest appeared as no more than a slightly
protruding dot on the skin. “A needle is lodged in his neck. If I
remember correctly, a syringe was bagged among the evidence at the
scene.”

“
It could have broken off
during a scuffle,” Vivian jumped in.

“
We need to consider the
possibility of suicide. A broken needle isn’t enough for us to go
on. In any case, we need to harvest a brain tissue sample to
determine if toxins played a role in his death.”

“
How long will that
take?”

“
Depending on the specific
tests required, the final results could take up to four to six
weeks. Contrary to popular forensic TV, we can’t whip out a
toxicology report overnight.”

For the next twenty minutes, the
autopsy consisted of long periods of silence and brief
interruptions of questions from Vivian. The autopsy didn’t take a
turn for the exciting until Gavin inspected the arms and
wrists.

“
One of the first things I
look at in homicide investigations are the hands. Notice the
defense wounds on his knuckles. It looks like he attempted to fight
off an assailant. Perhaps there is something to your theory about
his murder after all. We should check for tissue under his nails
that may belong to the killer.”

As they went about the task of
collecting the nail scrapings, Gavin piped up.

“
He was your mentor, wasn’t
he?”

“
Yes, he was. I suspect his
death might have something to do with the tuberculosis outbreak.
He’s been digging into it and looking for the source. Maybe he got
too close to it.”

“
I’m afraid I’m losing you.
Why would anyone want to kill him for that?”