Quarantined (2 page)

He stopped me, a hand the size of a dinner plate on my shoulder. “Really,” he said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, and tried to make my smile reassuring, though I’m sure it didn’t counter the agitation in my voice. “Really. It’s just—I’ve got a lot on my mind. Connie, mostly.”

Connie’s my little girl, five years old going on 30. She was going to turn six in less than a week, but her life wasn’t that of a regular six year old. She was growing up in a city under quarantine, the specter of the most dangerous influenza virus ever recorded looming over her life like the very shadow of Death himself. She used to have friends, playmates, but some of them died, and the ones that are still alive she is prohibited from playing with. She wore a brave face to the world, but she was always scared, just old enough to understand that things were bad, but not old enough to understand why. And her mother, the person who should have been there to protect her, to chase away the fears, spent nearly fourteen hours a day burying corpses in the Scar, counting their toe tags for posterity.

Chunk didn’t bother with the predictable garbage about how one day Connie would understand, about how one day all of this death would be a bad dream. He had more substance than that.

“Come on,” he said gently, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Let’s get this done.”

We drove from the Scar to the Arsenal Street Morgue on empty roads. Fuel shortages had made it so that you could only get around if you had access to city gas or the limited amount that found its way onto the black market. In the first few months of the quarantine, seeing the streets lined with car after car that had been abandoned wherever they ran out of gas was surreal. Now, they were just part of the scenery.

We left the wealthy neighborhoods that surrounded the Scar, palatial homes built into the sides of low-domed, heavily-wooded hills, and entered a land of run down streets, vacant businesses, and hollowed out warehouses. Maintenance was one of those things that had fallen by the wayside inside the quarantine walls. Even in the nicer parts of the city, the streets were cracking and blistering from the summer heat, potholes turning into craters because there were no resources to fix them.

But in the poorer parts of town, the view was far worse. There were crowds of frustrated people everywhere, sick of waiting in lines for food, for second hand clothes, for medical care. The Metropolitan Health District had put out orders against public gatherings and large crowds, but the angry faces we passed didn’t look like they cared about that. They seemed to feel that the powers that be had turned their backs on them. You could see it in their eyes. They had been abandoned, and they resented it. They resented us as symbols of the government that had failed them, and as we drove by, they watched us the way animals in a zoo watch their keepers. It made me sad.

I saw a group of men staring at me. Behind them, a dog ate from a trash can.

“God, they really hate us, don’t they?” I said.

Chunk stared out the windshield at a man fixing the burglar bars on the windows of his house and said: “It’s not us they hate. It’s the feeling of being helpless.”

“I heard they rioted at the District Three food distribution center last week.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I heard that too. I wouldn’t worry about these folks though. Long as there’s beer, they won’t do nothing but complain.”

I was relieved when we entered the gates that surround the Arsenal Street Morgue. It was a huge complex, what used to be a cold storage facility for the Merchant Brothers Trucking Line. The main building was a blockish, three story red brick building that took up most of the fourteen hundred block of Arsenal Street. The whole east side was dedicated to truck bays, where the Metropolitan Health District guys brought the bodies to be catalogued by doctors from the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, the Center for Infectious Diseases, and the World Health Organization.

Later, after the doctors finished with the bodies, the same death wagons that dropped the bodies off picked them up again and took them to the Scar, where they were pitched into mass graves with all the ceremony of flushing a goldfish down the toilet.

The process was every bit as confusing as it sounds, and mix ups were common. Everybody involved worked unbelievably long hours, and most of the mistakes went unnoticed because people were either too tired, or too lazy, or both, to care anymore.

We parked in the sally port and changed into our mop suits. Then we went to the loading docks.

A lot of guys in the cheap, one-size-fits-all bio suits of the Metropolitan Health District milled around without talking to each other. They worked helter skelter, in teams of twos and threes, moving bodies wrapped in white sheets from the building to the waiting trailers. A voice over the loud speaker reminded them constantly to be careful when handling the dead, as they might still be infectious.

Everywhere we turned we saw the familiar orange warning posters of the Metropolitan Health District. Always wear your face mask. Practice good hygiene. Avoid crowds. Cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing. Avoid suspicious smelling objects or places.

The stenciling on the backs of our white mop suits identified us as
SAPD
Homicide. We showed the Jane Doe’s picture around and got a few grunts and shrugs and a lot of glazed, uninterested expressions.

We went inside, onto the main floor of the morgue. It was filled with row after endless row of bodies under sheets, their belongings in small brown paper bags at their feet.

A few of the bodies were uncovered, and on those we saw the obvious signs of death from H2N2, that sleeper strain of the flu that had returned to haunt and hunt the streets of San Antonio more than sixty years after it caused the 1957 pandemic.

Some of the faces were streaked with dark rivulets of dried blood. The hemorrhaging was disgusting, and it never got easier to look at, despite being so common. When the quarantine was still something new, and there was still room for the sick in the hospitals, you’d walk down the halls, pushing your way through crowds, stepping over the sick dying on their backs in the hallway because there weren’t enough beds, and all you heard was hacking coughs. You’d hear people bringing stuff up, but it wasn’t phlegm. It was blood. By the time they were brought to the morgues, their clothes would be splattered with it. Blood would be coming out their noses, out their mouths. Sometimes even their ears.

You’d also see the cyanosis. That was the worst. Blue splotching all over their faces because their lungs couldn’t put any oxygen into their blood. Most of the time, the blue was just around their mouths and ears, like they’d just stuck their faces into a blueberry pie. But other times it was everywhere and they’d turn so dark blue you couldn’t tell who was white, or black, or Hispanic. They were all just blue, and dead.

We went around asking for Dr. Manuel Herrera, the guy whose signature was stamped on the autopsy tag. We found him out on the floor, a team of two assistants following him down the rows of corpses.

He’d stop at a body, pull the sheet back, if there was one, glance at the body for a few seconds, then say something over his shoulder to the assistants, who jotted it down on their clipboards. Then he’d put the sheet back and go on to the next one.

Their mop suits were just like ours, only theirs had Bexar County Medical Examiner stenciled on the back and not
SAPD
Homicide.

“Did you do an autopsy on this woman?” I said, holding up Jane Doe’s picture so he could see it.

Through the face plate of his suit I saw him squint at the picture. His eyes blinked in recognition. Then they flew open wide.

“What—” he said, stammering, words failing him.

“You know her?” I asked.

“That’s Dr. Emma Bradley,” he said. He blinked at me, then looked at Chunk. His face was an open-ended question mark.
What the hell is going on here?
“She’s one of the doctors with the World Health Organization.”

A doctor. Perfect.

“She showed up on a truck at the Scar a few hours ago,” I explained. “She was wearing a gray toe tag with your stamp on it.”

“Me?” He cocked his head to one side inside the suit, like a dog who’s just been asked to do an algebra equation. Then he caught on. “Oh.”

“I take it you didn’t do an autopsy on her?”

“No.”

“Any idea how your stamp got on her tag?”

“Detective,” he said, and I could see his shoulders slump inside his suit, “I’ve got three or four of those things lying around.”

“You just leave them lying around?” Chunk asked. “Isn’t there some kind of document control policy around here?”

Chunk’s voice is like a deep bass drum, and it startled Herrera a little. Chunk had that effect on a lot of men.

“They’re in my office,” Herrera said.

“And you don’t keep track of them?”

“My staff needs access to them. They handle my paperwork for me. Supply requisitions, memos, that kind of thing.”

“So, how many people on your staff?” I asked.

“Six.”

“We’ll need their names.”

“Sure,” he said.

I changed tack on him. “How did you know Dr. Bradley?”

Some air seemed to go out of the man, like he was immensely tired but only just realizing it. “She was well-liked around here,” he said. “A bright young woman.”

Chunk and I traded glances. She worked out of here and was well-liked. Why was it that well-liked people always seemed to end up dead?

“That’s all you can tell us?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve kind of blindsided me with this.”

“Anything would help, Doctor.”

He shook his head inside his suit. “How did she die? Can you tell me that?” His tone wasn’t demanding. It was gentle, respectful.

“She was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

I nodded.

“But that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, who would want to hurt Emma. She was the friendliest person in this hellhole. Everybody liked her.”

Apparently not everybody.

“What about boyfriends?” Chunk asked. “She date anybody around here?”

He shook his head again.

“I wouldn’t know. I mean, I’ve seen her around at the lounge of course, drinking with the others, but … No, I’ve never seen her with anybody. She had an effervescent personality, you know? The kind of woman who makes everybody in the room smile when she walks in.” He said, “My God, I can’t believe somebody would want to kill her. That just doesn’t make sense.”

“You said she was with the World Health Organization? Is that who you mean when you say the others?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Their office is through that door over there,” he said, and pointed to a green metal door on the opposite side of the morgue. “You’ll have to go out the south exit and then you’ll see their trailers right up against the building.”

“We’ll come back for that list of your staff,” I said.

“I’ll be here,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders at the bodies out on the floor.

“We’ll probably have some more questions too.”

“Like I said, Detective, I’ll be here.”

The World Health Organization’s office was a mobile home they’d parked about fifty feet from the rear of the morgue’s main building. A couple of used U-haul vans were parked next to it. They’d been painted white and decorated with the
WHO
logo on the side panels, but you could still tell they were just old battered moving vans under the paint.

After we went through the decon showers, we stripped out of our mop suits and donned regular gauze face masks.

Inside the trailer, the first thing I noticed was how packed-in everything was. They’d stuffed computers, laboratory glassware, office supplies, field gear, lap tops, cameras, radios, TV screens, and machines doing God knows what into every available cubby hole and overhead bin in the place. The staff moved through the clutter like bees in a hive.

We stood there for half a minute before anybody noticed us. But finally, a skinny, dopey-looking guy about my age, maybe thirty, thirty-one, came over with a questioning, but friendly enough expression on his face. He walked like a duck, feet pointing outwards, and he had a black eye. The left one. It looked like somebody had hit him pretty hard, and recently.

His eyes were smiling at first. Then he saw our
SAPD
badges, and he stopped smiling.

“Yes?” he said, a noticeable chill entering his voice.

I asked him, “Who’s in charge?”

“Dr. Madeline Laurent. Back there.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.

It looked like he didn’t want to get out of the way though, like maybe he wanted to challenge why we were there, or maybe just tell us to go spend some quality time with our thumbs up our butts. But it also looked like he didn’t want to get into it with Chunk.

What the hell’s wrong with this guy?

Then, suddenly, he said, “Is there something I can help you with?”

“We’ll want to speak to the entire staff,” I told him. “Later. But now we want to talk to Dr. Laurent. Do you mind?”

I looked him square in the eye, and he looked away almost immediately.

He stepped aside.

Chunk and I followed a short hallway back to Dr. Madeline Laurent’s office. She was there, her back to us, hunched over a lap top computer that was running some kind of bar graph program. The bars flickered up and down busily, and she watched them intently, like they were telling her something in plain English.

I was shocked at how fat she was. And short, too. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, but she probably weighed more than Chunk. She was practically ball-shaped.

Chunk whistled quietly.

“You still got that magazine?” he asked. “How to feel good about yourself naked?”

I elbowed him in the ribs.

Dr. Laurent didn’t notice us, though we were standing right behind her. She was lost in thought. I watched her make a few key strokes. Watched the bars flicker. Watched her shake her head. She typed some more, waited, watched, then shook her head again.