Independence Day Plague (18 page)

Weaving through the bus lanes, he joined a small steady stream of people as they exited the garage, crossed an active alleyway and walked between two buildings into the open court area of Pentagon Row. The airy quadrangle opened to the sky. The sun, low on the horizon, turned sky colors yellow and orange while a breeze cooled the air. The fifty-year-old Row still touted trendy, zero-lot living in the four stories above and bistros, markets, and health club at ground level creating a circle around a large fountain-decorated garden patch. Foot traffic flowed around the garden and across the street to two older curved condominium buildings.

Dorado stood next to the garden circle near the center of Pentagon Row’s patio area. He hadn’t been there for a while and took a minute to look around. Six restaurant and bar combos dotted the half circle, each offering different ethnic foods. Large open table umbrellas inserted into café tables that obscured the facades of four of the bistros. Those black metal tables were filled with young, well-dressed diners enjoying the sunset near large vases and dividing walls of container gardens. Food smells evolved from spicy pizza to beer and fries, waking his stomach with a growl. The Thai restaurant was off to one side with a few filled tables on the outside and a shifting clientele inside.

Once through the glass front doors, Dorado looked around for Sherrie. The decor included walls painted in muted greens and yellows. Half-walls and tall plants divided the large dining room into smaller areas, blocking most of the customers from view. He stepped to the hostess stand, on the end of the bar. Before he moved to walk through the place, he felt a hand softly land on his shoulder and a warm breath on his ear.

“
Hi, Mike. Let’s get out of here and go some place quieter.”

He turned towards her. She smiled and placed the half-filled wine glass in her hand back on the bar. He watched her as she waved goodbye to the bartender. Her blond hair flowed across her shoulders in gentle waves. The transformed Sherrie moved with a relaxed sensuousness that he never saw at work. Her face had only a hint of eye shadow and lipstick. She wore a pale blue cotton button-down shirt tucked into white pants. Two buttons on the shirt were open, revealing the top of her cleavage.

He held the door and followed Sherrie back into the courtyard. They walked north, crossing two more streets until she gestured at a quiet, dark place, half hidden in the bottom of a skyscraper.

“
It’s Rocco’s. Do you like Italian?”

“
Better than Thai.”

The place was dark inside and only half filled with customers. Most of the tables sat center in formed rounded booths for privacy while candlelight flickered on dark red tablecloths. A few couples sat at tables dotted around the room, glancing at them and then quickly looking away. Quiet murmurings flowed out the door instead of the usually loud background music. The place reeked of subdued rendezvous.

The host seated them quickly and efficiently. They talked of restaurants and weather through the quiet flurry of providing of drinks and a warm loaf of bread. After the waiter took orders and gathered menus, Dorado and Sherrie looked at each other across an uncomfortable silence. Because of the clandestine note, he had assumed the meeting was business. He silently cursed himself for not taking more time to clean up.

“
I almost didn’t find your note in time.”

She smiled, “I’m glad you did. I wanted to talk to you privately and quietly.”

“
Everything okay?”

“
Yes, well, I wanted to show you something and not be interrupted about it.” She tugged two files from her black-knit oversized bag. His eyes immediately fell onto the police logo stamped on the right hand corner of both.

He stared at the files in her hand. “What the hell? Did you steal those?” Computers sometimes failed, and backups could be altered. Therefore, the administration had become obsessed with keeping unaltered hardcopies. Five years ago, DCPD prosecuted some of its own personnel for taking bribes to tamper with computer records and remove the precious hardcopies. A citywide investigation followed along with several arrests. Eventually the authorities cracked down on anyone removing paper files from secure areas. Most of the time, the files stayed buried in huge metal storage cabinets, gathering dust since officers accessed information via computers and the right passwords. Having them in the restaurant meant the loss of both their jobs and possible prosecution.

“
Borrowed more likely,” she shrugged. “It wasn’t hard.”

“
Do you know the five kinds of shit that will rain down on us if someone sees those out of the precinct house?” he growled.

“
Look Mike, I needed you to see this and I needed it done privately. That’s why I left the note. The files will be safe and secure in the station tomorrow. Please just look at them.”

He sighed and reached over for them.

She sat quietly; nibbling on a piece of bread as he scan-read the first file.

“
Okay, I don’t get it. A teenage party gets busted based on a parent tip. The kids had designer drugs in their possession. The supplier, this Thayor, was arrested along with the others, open and shut.”

“
He wound up in the hospital two days after the bust.” She replied

“
Beaten?”

Sherrie shook her head.

“
Okay, so he ate some poisoned drugs. That's not unusual with some of the kitchen-sink designer crap that’s on the market. The report also notes that the kid's got wiring so obviously he is a thrill junkie. There’s nothing in the file about hospitalization though.”

“
The medical stuff occurred after he made bail. His parents took him into the hospital right after the arraignment.” Sherrie sipped some of her red wine before continuing.
“
He’s not in for overdosing. The boy was admitted with an anthrax infection of the lungs. None of that appears in the police report.” She tapped the file with a tapered fingernail, “This city boy, an upper middle class, wirehead kid caught anthrax.

Dorado nodded, “That’s an animal disease, right?”

“
Yeah, it’s found in cows but people can get it too, usually by inhaling dried spores. Hasn’t been a case of it in twenty years or more.”

They lapsed into silence as the waiter brought salads. Mike pulled the files into his lap, out of sight.

“
Any idea where he got it from?” Dorado said as he picked through his Caesar salad.

“
The boy was already sick when he was arrested. The county health department examined and interviewed the other kids at the party but they did not know anything about it. The health department searched the boy’s house the remaining drugs have been analyzed. They found no sign of the spores anywhere except on one set of clothes but not the clothes he wore to the party.”

“
You think he’s making it somewhere?”

“
I don’t know. The county health officer didn’t think he's bright enough. The police decided not to investigate because it's not related to the drug possession charge."

Dorado paused as the waiter took away the salad dishes. “How did you find out about all this?”

“
Let’s just say I’m good with computers and I have other computer friends around. The attending physician called the Center for Disease Control. I’ve been putting out feelers for common bio weapon diseases. My friend told me since the boy was in police custody, she wanted to quietly let the officers know that they may have been exposed to anthrax. She didn’t think the physician cared enough to contact them. Evidently, he's a bit of a bastard. CDC’s investigating but they hushed up this case to avoid panic until a second case shows up.”

Dinner came, chicken alfredo with angel hair pasta for her and pasta penne with prosciutto for him. Dorado picked at his food, brow furrowed in thought.

“
Why sneak this to me here. Why not just bring it into the task force.”

“
Cardell's the arresting officer. I started to tell him about the case to warn him that he might be infected. He cut me off, saying the case was closed. The boy’s illness had nothing to do with his drug bust,” she replied. She ate for a few minutes before continuing. “Cardell’s in the meetings sometimes. He causes trouble for anyone that questions his reports. As you can see, nothing relates the disease back to the task force or the Fourth of July. Cardell will think I’m routing around him. But Mike, my friend was right to alert me. Anthrax was the bug of choice in the early 2000s terrorist scares. The spores stay in a white powder form and they don’t activate until they hit something moist like lungs. The powder's too small to see with the naked eye but then terrorists mix it into another fine powder like baby powder or powdered sugar and then mail it to the intended victims. The recipient opens it up and gets a lungful, exposed before they know it. At that moment the spores are in the air, spreading to everyone else around them.”

Dorado nodded. “So this kid or someone around him is cooking up some terrorist-style bioweapon.”

“
I thought we should look into it.”

He stirred the noodles around the half-empty plate then put his fork down. “We worried about this kind of thing. A lone wolf.” He sat for a few minutes, rereading the case. “How much do you know about this anthrax?”

She looked up from her plate and took a deep breath before answering. “It comes from a bacterium and doesn't usually move from man to man in its normal form which is lucky for the officers on the scene. The early symptoms act like a cold with muscle aches and a cough. As time goes on, the victim gets sores on his face and has trouble breathing.”

“
Where do you get it from?” Dorado waved a hand at the food. “I know bacteria's in dirt, on skin, that kind of thing. Where does someone get a sample of anthrax bacteria to grow?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s not common. You wouldn’t find it in household dust or something like that. It comes from cows and goats but contamination from animals tends to be more the skin kind, not the inhaled kind. The spore kind comes from having contaminated cow manure around that slowly dries out in the sun. Lab researchers get it from some legal stockpile or a business that sells it for research, I suppose. My friend in the hospital says those purchases are heavily regulated.”

“
So we check and see who’s buying anthrax bacteria samples in the DC area. Wouldn’t hurt to talk to some of the kid’s friends either.”

“
Yes. I can ask around more about any other cases.” She handed Mike the second file. “After the Cabbot case, I sent word around my network of friends to be notified of any unusual health issues. A data analyst from Alexandria PD sent that one over.”

Dorado thumbed through it reading slowly while she ate. “He’s an army guy who died of heart failure. Why do we have a police report on it?”

“
The wife freaked out when she found him. She called the cops. When she first found him, she thought he was asleep. His body was positioned upright in one chair facing another, both chairs moved far out of their standard place. Look at the photo. His hand held a used glass and second used glass sat on a table nearby. The scene's obviously staged. Heart failure hurts. People flay about, fall on things. They can die in their sleep but when it happens in the middle of the day, it's rarely peaceful. The man didn’t attempt to get to the phone. All of that doesn’t necessarily add up to murder though.”

“
What does?”

“
Autopsy shows his heart was fine. Colonel Forester ran marathons like many of the military guys. A healthy, fit man of age 42.”

“
So what did he die of?”

“
Botulism.”

Dorado paused, tea glass halfway to his lips. “Okay, I’m not up on the latest diseases.”

Sherrie smiled, “Don’t worry. I had to look it up too. The U. S. hasn't reported a case in almost fifty years except if the very rare greenie screws up his home-canned meat. It’s not really a disease, more of a type of food poisoning. You get it if a canned food is punctured and the bacterium sealed inside grows.”

“
Or eating bad eggs or raw chicken?”

“
No, that’s the more common salmonella. It doesn’t kill as easily as botulism. Botulism comes from a toxin made by a bacteria called Clostridium. It only grows in airless conditions such as inside sealed cans. Since the food industry perfected canning, no one ever gets poisoned anymore.”

“
Not counting the occasional greenie.”

“
Right, because they do their own canning and only when they really screw it up. This guy lived all Army, the exact opposite of a greenie. The wife doesn’t even cook that much.”

Dorado thumbed through the file. It read like most incident reports and no mention of suspected murder. Nothing hinted at food poisoning. He stopped at the last page, the coroner’s report. “Why didn’t they change the cause of death?”

“
According to my friend, the Army stepped in. They took all the samples and the body. They ordered Alexandria PD to close the case. The Army hushed it all up, citing national security. The guy worked for the Pentagon but in the Medical Corps. When I got this file yesterday, I tried to call the wife. The incident was eight days ago but the wife's already history. An officer from the Alexandria PD told me that the house sits empty and put up for sale.”

“
Sounds like one of their own got clumsy.”

Sherrie nodded slowly, “At home? Maybe, but I don’t know what to think.”