“You’re always trying to make me assume you’re a dinosaur compared to me,” I said. “But somehow I don’t think so.”
“Maybe you just wear the years better than I do.” Her feverish dark eyes met mine.
“Is any of your family still living?” I asked, perusing more photographs.
“My grandparents have been gone about ten years, my father about five. After that, I came out here every weekend to take care of Mother. She hung on as long as she could.”
“That must have been hard with your busy career,” I said, as I looked at an early photograph of her laughing on a boat, holding up a rainbow trout.
“Would you like to come in and sit down?” she asked. “Let me put this in the kitchen.”
“No, no, show me the way and save your strength,” I insisted.
She led me through a dining room that did not appear to have been used in years, the chandelier gone, exposed wires hanging out over a dusty table, and draperies replaced by blinds. By the time we walked into the large, old-fashioned kitchen, the hair was rising along my scalp and neck, and it was all I could do to remain calm as I set the stew on the counter.
“Tea?” she asked.
She was hardly coughing now, and though she might be ill, this wasn’t why she initially had stayed away from her job.
“Not a thing,” I said.
She smiled at me but her eyes were penetrating, and as we sat at the breakfast table, I was frantically trying to figure out what to do. What I suspected couldn’t be right, or should I have figured it out sooner? I had been friendly with her for more than fifteen years. We had worked on numerous cases together, shared information, commiserated as women. In the old days, we drank coffee together and smoked. I had found her charming, brilliant, and certainly never sensed anything sinister. Yet I realized this was the very sort of thing people said about the serial killer next door, the child molester, the rapist.
“So, let’s talk about Birmingham,” I said to her.
“Let’s.” She wasn’t smiling now.
“The frozen source of this disease has been found,” I said. “The vials have labels on them dated 1978, Birmingham. I’m wondering if the lab there might have been doing any research in mutant strains of smallpox, anything that you might know . . . ?”
“I wasn’t there in 1978,” she interrupted me.
“Well, I think you were, Phyllis.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She got up to put on a pot of tea.
I did not say anything, waiting until she sat back down.
“I’m sick, and by now, you ought to be,” she said, and I knew she was not referring to the flu.
“I’m surprised you didn’t create your own vaccine before you started all this,” I said. “Seems like that was a little reckless for someone so precise.”
“I wouldn’t have needed it if that bastard hadn’t broken in and ruined everything,” she snapped. “That filthy, disgusting pig.” Enraged, she shook.
“While you were on AOL, talking to me,” I said. “That’s when you stayed on the line and never logged off, because he started prying open your door. And you shot him and fled in your van. I guess you just went out to Janes Island for your long weekends, so you could passage your lovely disease to new flasks, feed the little darlings.”
I was beginning to feel the rage as I spoke. She did not seem to care, but was enjoying it.
“After all these years in medicine, are people nothing more than slides and petri dishes? What happened to their faces, Phyllis? I have seen the people you did this to.” I leaned closer to her. “An old woman who died alone in her soiled bed, no one to even hear her cries for water. And now Wingo, who will not let me look at him, a decent, kind young man, dying. You know him! He’s been to your lab! What has he ever done to you!”
She was unmoved, her anger flashing, too.
“You left Lila Pruitt’s Vita spray in one of the cubbyholes where she sold recipes for a quarter. Tell me if I don’t get it right.” My words bit. “She thought her mail had been delivered to the wrong box, then dropped off by a neighbor. What a nice little something to get for free, and she sprayed it on her face. She had it on her nightstand, spraying it again and again when she was in pain.”
My colleague was silent, her eyes gleaming.
“You probably delivered all of your little bombs to Tangier at once,” I said. “Then dropped by the ones for me. And my staff. What was your plan after that? The world?”
“Maybe,” was all she had to say.
“Why?”
“People did it to me first. Tit for tat.”
“What did anybody do to you that’s even close?” It was an effort to keep my voice controlled.
“I was at Birmingham when it happened. The accident. It was implied that I was partly to blame, and I was forced to leave. It was completely unfair, a total setback to me when I was young, on my own. Scared. My parents had left for the United States, to live here in this house. They liked the outdoors. Camping, fishing. All of them did.”
For a long moment, she stared off as if there, back in those days.
“I didn’t matter much, but I had worked hard. I got another job in London, was three grades below what I had been.” Her eyes focused on me. “It wasn’t fair. It was the virologist who caused the accident. But because I was there that day, and he conveniently killed himself, it was easy to pin it all on me. Plus, I was just a kid, really.”
“So you stole the source virus on your way out,” I said.
She smiled coldly.
“And you stored it all these years?”
“Not hard when every place you work has nitrogen freezers and you’re always happy to monitor the inventory,” she said with pride. “I saved it.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Her voice rose. “I was the one working on it when the accident happened. It was mine. So I made sure I took some of it and my other experiments with me on my way out the door. Why should I let them keep it? They weren’t smart enough to do what I did.”
“But this isn’t smallpox. Not exactly,” I said.
“Well, that’s even worse, now isn’t it?” Her lips were trembling with emotion as she recalled those days. “I spliced the DNA of monkeypox into the smallpox genome.”
She was getting more overwrought, her hands trembling as she wiped her nose with a napkin.
“And then at the beginning of the new academic year, I get passed over as a department chairman,” she went on, eyes flaming with furious tears.
“Phyllis, that’s not fair . . .”
“Shut up!” she screamed. “All I’ve given to that bloody school? I’m the senior one who has potty-trained everyone, including you. And they give it to a man because I’m not a doctor. I’m just a Ph.D.,” she spat.
“They gave it to a Harvard-trained pathologist who is completely justified in getting the position,” I flatly stated. “And it doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse for what you’ve done. You saved a virus all these years? To do this?”
The teakettle was whistling shrilly. I got up and turned the burner off.
“It’s not the only exotic disease I’ve had in my research archives. I’ve been collecting,” she said. “I actually thought I might do an important project someday. Study the world’s most feared virus and learn something more about the human immune system that might save us from other scourges like AIDS. I thought I might win a Nobel Prize.” She had gotten oddly quiet, as if pleased with herself. “But no, I wouldn’t say that in Birmingham my intention was to one day create an epidemic.”
“Well, you didn’t,” I replied.
Her eyes narrowed like evil as she looked at me.
“No one’s gotten sick except for those people suspected of using the facial spray,” I said. “I’ve been exposed several times to patients, and I’m okay. The virus you created is a dead end, affecting only the primary person but not replicating. There’s no secondary infection. No epidemic. What you created was a panic
, disease and death for a handful of innocent victims. And crippled the fishing industry for an island full of people who probably have never even heard of a Nobel Prize.”
I leaned back in my chair, studying her, but she did not seem to care.
“Why did you send me photographs and messages?” I demanded. “Photographs taken in your dining room, on that table. Who was your guinea pig? Your old and infirm mother? Did you spray her with the virus to see if it worked? And when it did, you shot her in the head. You dismembered her with an autopsy saw so no one ever connected that death with your eventual product tampering?”
“You think you’re so smart,” she, deadoc, said.
“You murdered your own mother and wrapped her in a drop cloth because you could not bear to look at her as you sawed her apart.”
She averted her eyes as my pager vibrated. I pulled it out and read Marino’s number. I got out my phone, my eyes never leaving her.
“Yes,” I said when he answered.
“We got a hit on the camper,” he said. “Traced it back to a manufacturer, then to an address in Newport News. Thought you’d want to know. Agents should be there right about now.”
“Wish the Bureau had gotten that hit a little sooner,” I said. “I’ll see the agents at the door.”
“What did you say?”
I got off the phone.
“I communicated with you because I knew you would pay attention.” Crowder kept talking at a higher pitch. “And to make you try and for once finally lose. The famous doctor. The famous chief.”
“You were a colleague and friend,” I said.
“And I resent you!” Her face was flushed, bosom heaving as she raged. “I always have! The way the system’s always treated you better, all the attention you get. The great Dr. Scarpetta. The legend. But ha! Look who won. In the end I outsmarted you, didn’t I?”
I would not answer her.
“Ran you around, didn’t I?” She stared, reaching for a bottle of aspirin and shaking out two. “Brought you close to death’s door and had you waiting in cyberspace. Waiting for me!” she said triumphantly.
Something metal loudly rapped on her front door. I pushed back my chair.
“What are they going to do? Shoot me? Or maybe you should. I bet you’ve got a gun in one of those bags.” She was getting hysterical. “I’ve got one in the other room and I’m going to get it right now.”
She got up as the knocking continued, and a voice demanded, “Open up, FBI.”
I grabbed her arm. “No one’s going to shoot you, Phyllis.”
“Let go of me!”
I steered her toward the door.
“Let go of me!”
“Your punishment will be to die the way they did.” I pulled her along.
“NO!” she screamed as the door crashed open, slamming against the wall and jarring framed photographs loose from their hooks.
Two FBI agents stepped inside with pistols drawn, and one of them was Janet. They cuffed Dr. Phyllis Crowder after she collapsed to the floor. An ambulance transported her to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where twenty-one days later she died, shackled in bed, covered with fulminating pustules. She was forty-four.
EPILOGUE
I could not make the decision right away but put it off until New Year’s Eve when people are supposed to make changes, resolutions, promises they know they’ll never keep. Snow was clicking against my slate roof as Wesley and I sat on the floor in front of the fire, sipping champagne.
“Benton,” I said, “I need to go somewhere.”
He looked confused, as if I meant right now, and said, “There’s not much open, Kay.”
“No. A trip, in February, maybe. To London.”
He paused, knowing what I was thinking. He set his glass on the hearth and took my hand.
“I’ve been hoping you would,” he said. “No matter how hard it is, you really should. So you can have closure, peace of mind.”
“I’m not sure it’s possible for me to have peace of mind.”
I pulled my hand away and pushed back my hair. This was hard for him, too. It had to be.
“You must miss him,” I said. “You never talk about it, but he was like a brother. I remember all the times we did things together, the three of us. Cooking, watching movies, sitting around talking about cases and the latest lousy thing government had done to us. Like furloughs, taxes, budget cuts.”
He smiled a little, staring into flames. “And I would think about what a lucky bastard he was to have you. Wonder what it was like. Well, now I know, and I was right. He was lucky as hell. He’s probably the only person I’ve ever really talked to, besides you. Kind of strange, in a way. Mark was one of the most self-centered people I’ve ever met, one of these beautiful creatures, narcissistic as hell. But he was good. He was smart. I don’t think you ever stop missing someone like him.”
Wesley was wearing a white wool sweater and cream-colored khakis, and in firelight he was almost radiant.
“You go out tonight and you’ll disappear,” I said.
He gave me a puzzled frown.
“Dressed like that in the snow. You fall in a ditch, no one will see you until spring. You should wear something dark on a night like this. You know, contrast.”
“Kay. How about I put on some coffee.”
“It’s like people who want a four-wheel-drive vehicle for winter. So they buy something white. Tell me how that makes sense when you’re sliding on a white road beneath a white sky with white stuff swirling everywhere.”
“What are you talking about?” His eyes were on me.
“I don’t know.”
I lifted the bottle of champagne out of its bucket. Water dripped as I refilled our glasses, and I was ahead of him, about two to one. The CD player was stacked with hits from the seventies, and Three Dog Night was vibrating speakers in the walls. It was one of those rare times I might get drunk. I could not stop thinking about it and seeing it in my mind. I did not know until I was in that room with the wires hanging out of the ceiling and saw where gory severed hands and feet had been lined in a row. It was not until then that the truth seared my mind. I could not forgive myself.
“Benton,” I quietly said, “I should have known it was her. I should have known before I got to her house and walked in there and saw the photographs and that room. I mean, a part of me must have known, and I didn’t listen.”
He did not answer, and I took this as a further indictment.
“I should have known it was her,” I muttered again. “People might not have died.”
“Should is always easy to say after the fact.” His tone was gentle but unwavering. “People who live next door to the Gacys, the Bundys, the Dahmers of the world are always the last to figure it out, Kay.”
“And they don’t know what I do, Benton.” I sipped champagne. “She killed Wingo.”
“You did the best you could,” he reminded me.
“I miss him,” I said with a sad sigh. “I haven’t been to Wingo’s grave.”
“Why don’t we switch to coffee?” Wesley said again.
“Can’t I just drift now and then?” I didn’t want to be present.
He started rubbing the back of my neck, and I shut my eyes.
“Why do I always have to make sense?” I muttered. “Precise about this, exact about that. Consistent with, and characteristic of. Words cold and sharp like the steel blades I use. And what good will they do me in court? When it’s Lucy in the balance? Her career, her life? All because of that bastard, Ring. Me, the expert witness. The loving aunt.” A tear slid down my cheek. “Oh God, Benton. I’m so tired.”
He moved over and put his arms around me, pulling me into his lap so I could lean back my head.
“I’ll go with you,” he quietly said into my hair.
We took a black cab to London’s Victoria Station on February 18, the anniversary of a bombing that had ripped through a trash can and collapsed an underground entrance, a tavern and a coffee bar.
Rubble had flown, shattered glass from the roof raining down in shrapnel and missiles with terrible force. The IRA had not targeted Mark. His death had nothing to do with his being FBI. He simply had been in the wrong place at the wrong time like so many people who are victims.
The station was crowded with commuters who almost ran me over as we made our way to the central area where Railtrack ticket agents were busy in their booths, and displays on a wall showed times and trains. Kiosks were selling sweets and flowers, and one could get a passport picture taken or have money changed. Trash cans were tucked inside McDonald’s and places like that, but I did not see a single one out in the open.
“No good place to hide a bomb now.” Wesley was observing the same thing.
“Live and learn,” I said as I began to tremble inside.
I silently stared around me as pigeons flapped overhead and trotted after crumbs. The entrance for the Grosvenor Hotel was next to the Victoria Tavern, and it was here that it had happened. No one was completely certain what Mark had been doing at the time, but it was speculated that he had been sitting at one of the small, high tables in front of the tavern when the bomb exploded.
We knew he had been waiting for the train from Brighton to arrive because he was meeting someone. To this day I did not know who, because the individual’s identity could not be revealed for security reasons. That’s what I had been told. I had never understood many things, such as the coincidence of timing, and whether this clandestine person Mark was meeting may have been killed, too. I scanned the roof of steel girders and glass, the old clock on the granite wall, and archways. The bombing had left no permanent scars, except on people.
“Brighton is a rather odd place to be in February,” I commented to Wesley in an unsteady voice. “Why would someone be coming from a seaside resort that time of year?”
“I don’t know why,” he said, looking around. “This was all about terrorism. As you know, that was what Mark was working on. So no one’s saying much.”
“Right. That was what he was working on, and that was how he died,” I said. “And no one seems to think there was a link. That maybe it wasn’t random.”