“Do you need help with the salad dressing?” she asked me.
“Of course I do,” I said.
Out in the living room, Edmund was roaring with laughter; Claire was, too, at something Miranda had said, and Jacobi was flushed in a very good way. Cindy was in the big chair, holding Julie on her lap. If or when to have babies had been the big logjam in her otherwise wonderful relationship with Richie, and I think every time she comes to my house, she’s trying Julie on to see if she can imagine herself as a mom.
I saw Richie standing behind the sofa, looking at Cindy holding Julie. Wow. He was in love.
As for me, I ached more than a little.
Joe had been over a few times to see Julie, and it was a meltingly beautiful thing to see them together. But I had never let him stay the night or even for a meal.
I just wasn’t ready. And I didn’t know how I would ever be ready. He had lied. He was mysterious. I didn’t know where he was living, what he was doing, or how I could ever fit in with a man I no longer trusted.
It was Brady, of all people, who helped me take the roast out of the oven. Claire got the vegetables onto the table and Edmund poured the wine.
Richie was clinking his glass with a spoon, saying, “Lindsay, it’s wonderful to be here. I’m personally so glad you had help with the cooking, since we all know you can’t even make coffee.”
Everyone laughed, even Julie and me.
The buzzer rang from downstairs.
Claire said, “That’s the dessert. I’m not telling you from where. Just get away from the door so I can still make it a surprise.”
Claire is a chocoholic, and I say that’s a good thing.
I said, “OK, surprise me.”
I went back to the table and Claire pressed the buzzer. A minute later, I heard the door latch open and Claire say, “You’re not the cake.”
So what was this?
I got halfway to the door and saw my husband standing there in the hallway.
He said, “Geez, Lindsay, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I said to my bosom buddy, “Claire. You set this up.”
“Me? No. Not me. No way. I would never do anything like this. Nuh-uh.”
And she melted away from the door.
Joe had a bunch of roses in his hand. He looked like the prince who woke up Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. Handsome. Expectant. And like, maybe, his steed was tethered down at the curb. I stared into his face and saw the lines in his forehead, which were deeper than they had been a couple of months ago. He had some gray at his temples that I hadn’t noticed before.
I stood at the door, feet firmly planted, blocking the entrance.
He said, “Lindsay?”
I honestly didn’t know what to do or say.
Let him in?
Or say, “Not now. Maybe some other time.”
AN UNSOLVED MURDER AT THE WORLD CUP IN RIO WAS JUST A WARNING. NOW COME THE OLYMPICS.
FOR AN EXCERPT, TURN THE PAGE
Rio de Janeiro
Saturday, July 12, 2014
2:00 p.m.
CHRIST THE REDEEMER appeared and vanished in the last clouds clinging to jungle mountains that rose right up out of the city and the sea. Then the sun broke through for good and shone down on the giant white statue of Jesus that looked over virtually all of Rio from the summit of Corcovado Mountain.
In the prior two months, I’d seen the statue from dozens of vantage points, but never like this, from a police helicopter hovering at the figure’s eye level two hundred and fifty feet away, close enough for me to understand the immensity of the statue and its simple, graceful lines.
I am a lapsed Catholic, but I tell you, I got chills up and down my spine.
“That’s incredible,” I said as the helicopter arced away, flying over the steep, jungle-choked mountainside.
“One of the seven modern wonders of the world, Jack,” Tavia said.
“You know the other six offhand, Tavia?” I asked her.
Tavia smiled, shook her head, said, “You?”
“Not a clue.”
“You without a clue? I don’t believe it.”
“That’s because I’m unparalleled in the art of faking it.”
My name is Jack Morgan. I own Private, an international security and consulting firm with bureaus in major cities all over the world. Octavia “Tavia” Reynaldo, a tall, sturdy woman with jet-black hair, a lovely face, and beguiling eyes, ran Private Rio. And we’d always had this teasing chemistry between us.
The two of us stood in the open side door of the helicopter, harnessed and tethered to the ceiling of the hold. I hung on tight to a steel handle anyway. The pilot struck me as more than competent, but I couldn’t help feeling a little anxious as we picked up speed and headed southeast.
I used to be a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps; I got shot down in Afghanistan and barely survived. A lot of good men died in that crash, and because of their deaths, I’m not a fan of helicopters despite the fact that they can do all sorts of things that a plane, a car, or a man on foot can’t. Let’s just say I tolerate them when the need arises, which it had that day.
Tavia and I were aboard the helicopter courtesy of Mateus da Silva, the only other person in the hold. A colonel with the Brazilian military police, da Silva was also head of all security for the FIFA World Cup and the man responsible for bringing Private in as a consultant.
The final game of the tournament—Germany versus Argentina for the soccer championship of the world—was less than a day away. So far there’d been little or no trouble at the World Cup, and we wanted to keep it that way. Which was why da Silva had asked for an aerial tour of the Magnificent City.
After two months in Rio, I agreed with the nickname. I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world, but there’s no place like Rio de Janeiro, and certainly no more dramatic an urban setting anywhere. The ocean, the beaches, the jungle, and the peaks appear new at every turn. That day a million hard-partying Argentine fans were said to be pouring over Brazil’s southern border, heading north to Rio.
“This will give us a sense of what Rio might look like during the Olympic Games,” da Silva said as we peered down at dozens of favelas, shantytown slums that spilled down the steep sides of almost every mountain in sight.
Below the favelas, on the flats, the buildings changed. Here, on the city’s south side where the wealthy and super-rich of Rio lived, modern high-rise apartment complexes lined the sprawling lagoon and the miles and miles of gorgeous white-sand beaches along the coast.
We flew over the tenuous seam where slums met some of the world’s most expensive real estate toward two archshaped mountains side by side. The Dois Irmãos—the Two Brothers—are flanked by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the ultrachic district of Leblon to the north, and a sprawling favela known as Rocinha to the west.
Once one of the most violent places in any city on earth, Rocinha was among the slums Brazilian military police tried to “pacify” in the years leading up to the World Cup. The government trained a hard-core group of elite fighters known as BOPE (from the Portuguese words for “Special Police Operations Battalion”) and declared war on the drug lords who had de facto control over the favelas. Da Silva was a commander in BOPE.
The special unit killed or drove out the narco-traffickers in dozens of slums across the city. But they’d succeeded only partially in Rocinha.
The favela’s location—spilling down both flanks of a mountain saddle—made access difficult, and the police had never gained full control. Da Silva remained nervous enough about that particular slum to demand a flyover.
The helicopter climbed the north flank of the mountain, allowing us to peer into the warren of pastel shacks built right on top of each other like some bizarre Lego structure.
“You might want to stand back from the door, Jack,” Tavia said. “They’ve been known to shoot at police helicopters like this.”
Tavia was very smart, a former Rio homicide detectiv
e, and she was usually right about things that happened in her city. But da Silva didn’t move from the open doorway, so I stayed right where I was too as we flew over the top of the slum, dropped off the other side, and curved around the south end of the Two Brothers.
We stayed low to avoid the ten or fifteen hang gliders soaring on updrafts near the two mountains. To the east, the coastal highway was clogged with traffic as far as we could see. The Argentines had come in cars and buses. They hung out the windows waving blue and white flags and bottles of liquor. Bikini-clad girls danced on the hoods and roofs of the vehicles and crowded the beach on the other side of the highway.
“They’ll be coming all night,” Colonel da Silva said.
“Can the city handle it?”
“Rio gets two million visitors on New Year’s Eve,” Tavia said. “And five million during Carnival. It might not be managed flawlessly, but Rio can handle any crowd.”
Da Silva allowed himself a moment of uncertainty, then said, “I suppose, besides traffic jams, as long as the final goes off tomorrow without incident, we’re good to—”
“Colonel,” the pilot called back. “We’ve got an emergency on Pão de Açúcar. We’ve been ordered to get a visual and report.”
“What kind of emergency?” the colonel demanded.
As we picked up speed, the pilot told us, and we cringed.
I hung out the door, looking north toward Pão de Açúcar, Sugarloaf Mountain, a thirteen-hundred-foot monolithic spire of dark granite that erupts out of the ocean beyond the north end of Copacabana Beach.
“Can people survive something like that?” Tavia shouted at me.
Even from eight miles away, I could clearly make out the sheer, unforgiving cliffs where they fell away from the peak. I thought about what we’d been told and how bad the injuries might be.
“Miracles happen every day,” I said.
IN A LAB at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio’s Centro District, Dr. Lucas Castro tried to steady his trembling hands as he waited impatiently for a machine to finish preparing a tissue sample for examination.
Please let me be wrong, Dr. Castro thought. Please.
There were two others in the lab, young technicians who were paying more attention to the television screen on the wall than to their work. Soccer analysts were discussing the next day’s game and still shaking their heads over the thrashing Brazil had taken in the semifinal against Germany.
Seven to one? Castro thought. After everything done to bring the World Cup to Brazil, after everything done to me, we go down by six goals?
The doctor forgot about the tissue sample for a moment, felt himself seized by growing anger yet again.
It’s a national embarrassment, he thought. The World Cup never should have happened. But, no, FIFA, those corrupt sons of—
The timer beeped. Castro pulled himself out of the thoughts that had circled in his brain ever since the crushing loss four days before.
The doctor opened the machine. He scratched his beard, a habit when he was anxious. He retrieved and cooled a small block of sterile medium that now encased a sample of liver tissue he’d helped extract from a very sick eight-year-old girl named Maria. She and her six-year-old brother had been brought to the institute’s clinic violently ill in a way Castro had rarely seen before: sweating, shaking, decreased function in almost every major organ.
The doctor took the block to another machine that shaved razor-thin slices off it. He stained these, mounted them on slides, and took them to a microscope. Castro was a virologist as well as an MD. In any other situation, he would have run a time-consuming test to determine whether a virus was involved, but if his suspicions were right, looking at the cells themselves would be a much quicker indicator.
He put the first slide under the lens.
Please let me be wrong about this.
Castro peered into the microscope, adjusted it, and saw his fears confirmed in several devastating seconds. Many of the cells had been attacked, invaded, and hideously transformed.
They looked like bizarre, alien reptiles with translucent coiled-snake bodies and multiple heads. Seeing them, Dr. Castro flashed on a primitive jungle village exploding in flames and felt rattled to his core.
How many heads? he thought in a panic. How many?
Castro zoomed in on one of the infected cells and counted five. Then he looked at another and found six.
Six?
Not five? Not four?
He looked and quickly found another six-headed cell, and another.
Oh dear God, this can’t be—
A nurse burst into the lab, cried, “The girl’s crashing, Doctor!”
Castro spun away from the microscope and bolted after her.
“Who’s with her?” he demanded as they raced down a hallway and through a door that led them outside onto a medical campus.
“Dr. DeSales,” she said, gasping.
Castro blew by her and sprinted down the street to the institute’s hospital.
He reached the door of the ICU two minutes later. A man and a woman in their thirties stopped him before he could go in.
“No one will tell us anything, Doctor!” the woman sobbed.
“We’re doing our best,” Castro told the girl’s parents, and he dodged into the ICU, where he yelled at the nurses, “Get us hazmat suits. Quarantine the room. Then quarantine the entire unit!”
Castro grabbed a surgical mask, went to the doorway, saw Dr. DeSales working furiously on a comatose eight-year-old girl. “John, get out of there.”
“If I do, she dies,” Dr. DeSales said.
“You don’t, you could die.”
Various alarms started sounding from the monitors and machines attached to a six-year-old boy in the bed next to the girl. Dr. Castro scanned the numbers, saw the boy was crashing too.
Throwing aside all caution, Castro yanked on sterile gloves and went to work, frantically adding a series of medicines to the IV.
“What the hell is it?” DeSales demanded.
“A virus I’ve seen only once before,” Castro said. “We called it Hydra. Goes after the major organs.”
“Transmission?”
“Not certain, but we think body fluids.”
“Mortality rate?”
“Roughly sixteen percent the last time it appeared,” Castro said. “But I think there have been mutations that made it deadlier. C’mon, Jorge, fight.”
But the boy continued to fail. The doctors tried everything that had helped in these cases before, but no matter what they did, Jorge and his sister kept slipping further from their control. Their kidneys shut down. Then their livers.
Eleven minutes after Castro entered the ICU, blood began to seep from the little girl’s eyes. Then Maria was racked by a series of violent convulsions that culminated in a massive heart attack.
She died.
Fourteen minutes later, in the same terrible way, little Jorge did too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to Captain Richard Conklin, BCI Commander, Stamford, Connecticut, PD, and Humphrey Germaniuk, Medical Examiner and Coroner, Trumbull County, Ohio, for generously sharing their time and expertise. We also wish to thank our excellent researchers, Ingrid Taylar, Renee Paradis, Lynn Colomello, and Pete Colomello, and give a high five to Mary Jordan, who keeps it all on track.
MEET THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB
Four women sit at their usual table in Susie’s bar, and the conversation, as always, is murder…
LINDSAY BOXER
A homicide detective in the San Francisco Police Department, juggling the worst murder cases with the challenges of being a first-time mother. Her loving husband Joe, baby daughter Julie and loyal border-collie Martha give her a reason to protect the city. She’s not had the easiest start in life, with an absent father and an ill mother, and she doesn’t shy away from a difficult career. Keeping control of her head and her heart can be tough, but with the help of her friends, Lindsay makes it her mission to solve the toughe
st cases.
CLAIRE WASHBURN
Chief Medical Examiner for San Francisco and one of Lindsay’s oldest friends. Wise, confident and viciously funny, she can be relied on to help, whatever the problem. She virtually runs the Office of the Coroner for her overbearing, credit-stealing boss, but rarely complains. You may hear her called ‘Butterfly’ thanks to a tattoo just below her waist. Happily married with children, her personal life is relatively calm in comparison to her time in the Women’s Murder Club.
CINDY THOMAS
An up-and-coming journalist who’s always looking for the next big story. She’ll go the extra mile, risking life and limb to get her scoop. Sometimes she prefers to grill her friends over cocktails for a juicy secret, but, luckily for them, she’s totally trustworthy – most of the time … She’s just published a book, somehow finding the time to write between solving cases, writing articles for the San Francisco Chronicle and keeping her on–off relationship with Lindsay’s partner, Rich Conklin, together. Other than reading, she loves yoga and jazz music.
YUKI CASTELLANO
One of the best lawyers in the city, and desperate to make her mark. Ambitious, intelligent and passionate, she’ll fight for what’s right, defending the underdog even if it means standing in the way of those she loves. Often this includes her husband – who is also Lindsay’s boss – Lt. Jackson Brady. Her friends can barely get a word in edgeways when she’s around, unless she’s got a Germain-Robin sidecar in her hand!
WHEN YOUR JOB IS MURDER, YOU NEED FRIENDS YOU CAN COUNT ON.
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