No Immunity (2 page)

He headed north. He knew not to call till he got there.

“I
NEED YOU ON
this autopsy, Kiernan.” “No ‘Hello, how are you? How’ve you been for the last five years?’” Kiernan O’Shaughnessy fingered her short dark hair and leaned forward on her desk. When she’d last seen Jeff Tremaine on the plane out of the epidemic site in Africa he had been tall, blond, and despite months in the equatorial sun, pale and burning with anger. Anger at her. She had been at the makeshift Lassa fever hospital only a month, but pictures of the patients staggering down the slippery slope of fever, terror, convulsions, and death still invaded her dreams. Even now, when she’d bolt awake, it would take her a full minute to realize she was safe at home in her La Jolla duplex and the hot film that coated her body was not blood, merely sweat. But those terrified faces never left her. She wasn’t a woman to indulge in what-ifs, but when she thought of Africa it was always,
If only we’d had enough ribavirin to stop the virus reproducing. If only we’d gotten it sooner. If only …
For Jeff Tremaine the problem had been simple; he merely blamed her.

Jeff Tremaine might need a forensic pathologist, but she’d have sworn she would be the last one he would call. “I’m a private investigator now. I haven’t done an autopsy in five years. And I’ve never been licensed in Nevada. Find yourself a local forensic pathologist.”

“There isn’t one in the county.”

“Get one up from Las Vegas, then. A pathologist from there will have seen everything.”

The buzz on the phone line seemed to grow louder. After a moment he said, “I can’t chance word leaking about this death.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Aren’t you being a mite paranoid?”

“Not inappropriately so.”

“That’s what they all say, Jeff.” Kiernan stifled a laugh. Her med-school class had had no dearth of candidates for Class Paranoid, but Jeff Tremaine had not been one of them. Against the liberal backdrop of San Francisco, Tremaine had seemed a throwback to the days of gingham curtains and Dwight D. Eisenhower. His goal had been to return home to eastern Nevada, settle into his father’s office on Main Street, and minister to every mining casualty and sick baby within a hundred-mile radius. As far as she knew, he had never marched against the military or protested a parking ticket. He was a play-by-the-rules guy; he kept the rule book in his pocket and he had been affronted every time someone—student, patient, hospital administrator, or faculty member—had ignored it. In his four years in San Francisco Jeffrey Tremaine had been affronted a lot. He was the last man she would have expected to volunteer for anything as dangerous and quixotic as a contagious-hemorrhagic-fever project on the far side of the world. “Look, Jeff, surely you can tell me what you found in this body—”

“I can’t. That’s just it. I don’t know.”

She sighed, and tried another tack. “Why me?”

“Because you were in Africa, and”—the buzz on the line was stronger, but his gasp for breath was still audible—“because you know how fast things can spread.”

Her breath caught. She felt the hot sweat on her back “Call the health department, Jeff. Right now!”

“I can’t be sure.”

“They’ll make that decision.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“If you’re talking about anything like Lassa fever, you don’t have a choice. You call them, or I’ll do it myself.”

There was a hoarse, scratchy sound on the line; it took her a moment to recall it as his odd, nervous laugh. “And you’ll tell them what, Kiernan? That a crazy colleague of yours somewhere in Nevada is worried about an autopsy? Come, see for yourself. If it weren’t vital, you know I wouldn’t have called … you.”

That much she did know was true.

“You can fly into Las Vegas. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“No,” she said with a sigh, giving up as much to curiosity as to urgency. She didn’t trust Jeff Tremaine enough to let herself end up three hours into the desert without a car of her own. “I’ll get a rental.”

“Bring double gloves and a full head mask,” he said before hanging up.

“A
ND YOU’RE GOING?
T
O
Nevada? Without taking a fee?” Brad Tchernak smacked the serving platter so hard on the table that the skewered, fig-stuffed Canadian quail almost flew to the floor. Ezra lifted his shaggy wolfhound head and tensed his muscles in readiness.

At barely five feet and not quite a hundred pounds, Kiernan was nowhere near Tchernak’s size. But, as she’d taught herself early on, authority was not physical but mental. She let a moment pass before saying, “Yes, I’m going. This is a courtesy to a, uh, colleague, not an agency case.”

“What about your time? Does this guy, this doctor, think that just because you’re not part of the exclusive medical fraternity anymore, your time’s worth zip? Clients could call while you’re gone. Ongoing cases could go sour. Investigation waits for no woman. This could mean big bucks lost while you fly off to play around with an uh—colleague.”

“Boundaries, Tchernak! You’d think a former offensive lineman would have a clearer concept of the meaning of out-of-bounds.”

“When I was playing football, the quarterback stayed in the pocket,” he reminded her.

“I am not in your pocket. I’m your employer.” Before Tchernak could get to the real focus of his pique, she added, “You were in the process of serving dinner.”

He pursed his face in what she assumed was the fierce look he’d aimed at defensive tackles across the line of scrimmage. Tchernak had been invalided out of the pros before the era of trash talking, so his threatening glare must have been his entire preamble to each play. That scowl, under a helmet and above shoulder pads the size of a 747, doubtless was once a fearsome thing. But now, with a wreath of wiry brown hair capping brown eyes as big as Ezra’s, an oft-broken nose that pulled to one side when he laughed, and a ripped T-shirt on a hundred pounds less of sleek muscle, the effect was no longer terrifying. It was endearing.

But this was an inopportune moment to mention that. She watched Tchernak stride into his half of the duplex. If the way the man had played football was anything like the way he worked for her, he must have blocked the defensive tackles down the field and into the bleachers. There was a time when she would have said Brad Tchernak had been the second best addition to her life, the first being Ezra, her wolfhound, whose loyalty was severely strained by the meaty smell on the table. She had advertised for a housekeeper and ended up with a gourmet cook who adored her dog. Adored her work. And her. For ninety percent of America’s women, and men, that would have been heaven. Sometimes she wished she were in that majority. But then she had seen the truth.

It had been revealed in two epiphanies. The first had been right here in her living room. She had been sitting outside on the balcony rail watching the deep apricot sun settle into the green-gray Pacific. Her eyes were adjusting to the indoor light when she walked into the living room and spotted Tchernak on the sofa, his wiry brown hair unfettered as he leaned forward, elbows on knees, whiskered chin cupped in palms. Beside the sofa lay Ezra, paws crossed, whiskered chin resting on forelegs. The physical resemblance she had noticed before. But that was the first time she registered that they were brothers under the fur.

She hadn’t yet felt it appropriate to mention the similarity to Tchernak. But she thought of it when Ezra eyed her food, sniffed at her work papers, stood beside her bed with his big brown eyes staring at her lovingly, his head tilted to one side. It was only through consistent discipline that she’d kept him off the bed.

The second great realization was that Tchernak could never be trusted off leash. He had taken the job as house-keeper-cook-dogwalker to “find himself” after the sudden end of his football days. The man was so quick to learn her tastes, to take over the
affaires de maison
, she had assumed he was a pro instituting his new quarterback’s regime. What she had forgotten was that great offensive linemen work on instinct. The lineman makes his move first. He clamps hands on the defensive guy’s jersey regardless of the holding penalty, he leg-whips ignoring the fifteen yards it might cost. For him the rules are mere impediments. Linemen who never deviated from the playbook were second string. Tchernak had been elected to the Pro Bowl.

Kiernan did love breaking the rules, as long as the rules in question weren’t hers.

“So, tell me more about this vital phone call you just got” Tchernak loomed—six feet four inches—over the table.

It was irrational to resist talking about it, as if it made the danger less, but she ached to put off the specter of disease for another few hours. She cut a piece of quail and chewed, savoring the sweet meat as much as possible under her cook’s demanding stare. “Great! Quail was an inspired choice. And your glaze!”

Tchernak shrugged away the diversion as if he had forgotten he had made the dish.

“Jeff Tremaine was in med school with me,” Kiernan admitted.

“And that’s enough to make you drop everything?”

“He’s never asked a favor before.”

“So of course you can’t wait to see what the big deal is.”

“Got it.”

“You can’t just—”

“It’s
my
agency, Tchernak; I go where I choose!” Ignoring his hurt expression, she forked another piece of meat, then gave up and let the fork slide to the plate. “Jeff’s talking hemorrhagic fever, like the epidemics that swept through Africa and South America. He’s probably panicking over nothing; it wouldn’t be the first baseless conclusion he’s jumped to. But if he’s right, if he’s got anything like Lassa fever up there, it’s a crisis. It would spread from town to town, and if it hit Las Vegas, even if it’s a virus we knew how to treat, there wouldn’t be enough of the drug in the world to treat all the people who’d get sick.”

“You mean this is like the Ebola epidemics?”

“There are a whole range of arenaviruses—Lassa fever, Junin, Argentine or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. This could be any of them—deadly stuff, passed from rodents to humans through scratches, bites, and abrasions, or, and this is the scary part, Tchernak, sometimes through the air.”

“You mean a cough on a bus—”

“Exactly. With airborne contagion no one is immune. But I don’t know what Jeff Tremaine’s got up there in rural Nevada. It could be a new arenavirus, one of the RNA viruses we’ve never heard of, or something entirely different. Or Jeff Tremaine could have gone off the deep end. I’ll get a flight first light and catch the midnight special back.”

Tchernak pulled out his chair and sat. “Okay, one day. I’ll hold down the office in your absence.”

She felt the sides of her neck tighten protectively. Leaving Tchernak in charge of her hard-gained agency was like leaving Ezra to guard the quail. Even with the best of intentions he might decide a leg or two wouldn’t be missed. “Okay, but follow the instructions I—”

The phone rang and she leaped for it. “Hello?”

“Is this Kiernan O’Shaughnessy? O’Shaughnessy Investigations?”

The call was not her business line; it came through on her unlisted number. “And you are?”

“Reston Adcock, Adcock Oil Explorations. Remember me?”

There was no point in asking how he got this number; the arrogance in his voice said it all. She certainly hadn’t given it to him. She remembered that, and him.

Tchernak was chewing very slowly, ear cocked in her direction, meat hanging from the fork he held absently at half mast.

“Here’s my problem. A guy who does some work for me, Grady Hummacher, he’s gone missing. He was supposed to be here this morning at ten. He’s not the type to forget. I’ve called his place all day, even had my girl check the hospitals.”

“And did your
girl
call the jails about this Grady Hummacher?”

Of course Adcock missed her sarcasm. “Yeah, them too. Grady can be a hotdog, but he’s no fool. Not the type to drink and speed.”

She pictured Reston Adcock: big, his skin burned a permanent tan from years in the oil fields, muscles just beginning to sag, hair just beginning to gray at the temples, blue eyes squinting, as if looking for whatever angle he could find. “So if Grady Hummacher is really missing, as opposed to merely having skipped a meeting with you, he’s been gone less than a day, right?”

Adcock’s voice was now just a mite sharper and she could tell he was restraining the urge to snap. He was not a man who restrained himself often. “It wasn’t just any meeting Grady missed. That meeting was key, for me, and especially for him. If it were anything less, I wouldn’t be calling a detective.”

“An out-of-state detective whose fees are substantial.”

“Right,” he said without pause.

Tchernak put down his fork and shifted his head in front of her.
Grady Hummacher
? he mouthed.

Adcock’s office was in Las Vegas. It would be an easy stop on the way back from Jeff Tremaine. An easy fee to justify the trip, she thought. But no; she definitely did not need a fee that badly. “Mr. Adcock, since you called me at home at dinnertime, I’m sure you’ll understand if I seem abrupt. Clearly you are not looking for a standard straightforward missing-person’s investigation or you would have gotten someone locally who would know the possibilities for mishap much better than I. Your need is more complicated than that, and more immediate. I have a pressing commitment, so there is no way I can help you.”

Tchernak cleared his throat.

“I don’t want someone else. I need the best.”

“I can’t be in two places at once.”

“Grady Hummacher’s missing! He could be lying dead somewhere. Look, I’m asking for your help.”

Tchernak pointed his finger at himself.

She hesitated, then said to Adcock, “You and I have different standards. People are too expendable to you. I’m not going to endanger my agency working for you again.” Before he could start another round, she hung up.

“Me!” Tchernak shouted. His wiry hair bristled. He looked like he’d stuck a finger in the socket. “Grady Hummacher, right?”

“So?”