Peter May - Snakehead

‘Wow,’ Margaret said. ‘That’s a high percentage.’ Then she shrugged. ‘But we have perfectly adequate protection against hep B, or any other nasties in the blood. As long as we’re careful.’ She paused again, looking at him very carefully. ‘What makes you think we might need extra protection?’

For the first time, Margaret saw his mobile brows furrow in a frown. ‘I don’t know, Margaret. I get kinda spooked sometimes, you know, when I don’t know what I’m dealing with. I was paranoid about my first AIDS case. I even wore boots with steel toe-caps in case I dropped a knife or something…’ He laughed uneasily at his own vulnerability. ‘It’s just strange, that’s all.’

‘What’s strange?’ Fuller, with Hrycyk in tow, had come back into Margaret’s station.

‘Injection sites on the underside of the buttock,’ Margaret said. ‘It’s not a place you would normally choose to stick a needle.’

‘You mean there’s more than one of them?’ Hrycyk asked.

‘It looks like they might all have been injected,’ Steve said.

Fuller scratched his head. ‘So why would someone pick the underside of the buttock?’

Margaret shrugged and glanced at Steve. ‘Maybe so it wouldn’t be spotted on a cursory examination. I mean, I don’t figure anyone expected them to be laid out on an autopsy table being subjected to this kind of scrutiny.’

‘So do you have any idea what they were injected with?’ Fuller persisted.

‘A vaccine against West Nile encephalitis.’ Li’s voice startled them, and they turned to find him standing in the entrance to the autopsy station.

‘How do you know that?’ Margaret asked, and she saw immediately that he had been crying. There were telltale red dots around the corners of his eyes that she had seen before. And in that moment she wanted just to hold him, and would have forgiven him anything. But she gave no outward sign of it. Not even the hint of a crack in her cold façade.

Li said simply, ‘Wang’s diary.’ Whatever demons he had had to wrestle with had been banished for the moment. ‘Wang describes how a doctor came and vaccinated them all the night before they crossed the border.’ He dropped the diary, back in its evidence bag, on to the table and peeled off his gloves. ‘They were told it was against West Nile encephalitis.’

‘Bullshit!’ Hrycyk said. ‘Snakeheads aren’t going to spend money vaccinating illegals against anything.’

‘Well, not against West Nile encephalitis, anyway,’ Margaret added. ‘The only cases of West Nile I’ve heard about in the last six months involved a couple of crows.’ She looked to Steve for confirmation.

He shrugged. ‘It’s not a serious problem. I mean, I doubt if any of us round this table have been vaccinated against West Nile. And it’s not a requirement for visitors to the US.’

Li frowned. ‘So what were they injected with? Is it possible they were murdered?’

Hrycyk was scathing. ‘Of course they weren’t murdered. Why would anyone murder them? These people were worth six million bucks — alive.’

A line of stainless steel sinks had been set up at one end of the hangar, supplied with hot and cold running water and dispensers of antibacterial liquid soap to allow the pathologists to scrub down at the end of the day. They had each completed four autopsies and were now halfway through the task of examining all ninety-eight bodies. Conversation along the line of sinks was animated, revolving around important questions like where they were going to get a drink that night, and the best place to get something to eat. Everyone had been booked into the Holiday Inn on West Holcombe Boulevard on the edge of Medicine City, including Margaret.

She stood next to Steve soaping her hands and arms. She had already dispensed with her surgical gown and apron and changed back into her jeans and tee-shirt. Her hair was scraped back from her face and held in a band at the back of her head. She was hot, and tired, and distracted.

Li had left some hours earlier, and she was not sure when, or even if, she would see him again. Their encounter had been unsettling, blowing away the protective fabrications she had built up around herself over the last fifteen months, since she had returned from China determined to put him behind her. The little half lies she had tried to convince herself were absolute truths: that the differences between them of language and culture were too great to overcome; that she would be happier here in the US without him; that he would be happier in China with a woman of his own race.

And now he was in America. Had been here, she knew, for nearly a year, making no attempt to get in touch with her. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know that she had taken up a lecturing position at the college of criminal justice in Huntsville, because she had told him that was where she was going. But from his reaction to meeting her across the autopsy table here in Houston, it was clear he had been unaware that she was now the chief medical examiner for Harris County. At least until today.

‘So…’ Steve’s voice sounded beside her, ‘…suffocation?’

‘That’s how it appears,’ she said. ‘Although they’d probably been in the truck for about twenty-four hours — right through the heat of the previous day.’

‘Ah,’ said Steve. ‘Core liver temperature.’

‘Mine were all a hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit or higher.’

‘Mine, too.’

‘They’d also eaten, and all of my bladders were pretty much empty, so it would seem they had been allowed out at some point to relieve themselves.’

‘Which means that the air vent was open when they set out…’

‘…and closed, either accidentally or on purpose, when they stopped somewhere en route.’

‘And they died either of suffocation or hyperthermia.’

‘Or a combination of the two.’

A thoughtful silence hung between them, then, for a moment, and Margaret noticed a trace of blood in the water in Steve’s sink. She looked at him, immediately concerned. ‘Where’s the blood coming from?’ And she saw for the first time how pale he looked. His smile was almost convincing.

‘Ah, it’s nothing.’

‘You cut yourself?’

He took a long time to compose his reply. Finally he said, ‘Usually I leave the organs piled at one end of the table before I section them. When I went back after coming through to talk to you about the injection sites, they had slid down the cutting board, and when I went to lift them I felt this little jag in my finger. I had left my knife lying on the cutting board and the organs had slipped over the top of it. My left hand is well protected. I wear chain mail under the glove in case of a slip. But on my cutting hand, my right, I usually only wear the latex. That’s the hand I lifted the organs with. The tip of my knife made a tiny puncture about halfway down the middle finger.’ He held his open right hand out for her to see, and she saw a tiny fleck of blood oozing from an almost imperceptible nick. ‘At the time I didn’t think I had cut the skin.’ He grimaced. ‘Guess I was wrong.’

‘Jesus, Steve,’ Margaret said. They both knew that this smallest of accidents would have made him vulnerable to contracting any viral or bacterial infection carried in the blood of the victim. ‘What have you done about it?’

He shrugged. ‘What could I do? I’ve taken a lot of samples from the guy and asked the AFIP people at Walter Reed to do a complete blood screen. I’ve drawn some of my own, for a baseline, and I guess I’ll be checking it every six weeks for the next year for HIV and hep B and C.’

Margaret felt sick. She looked at him with the heartfelt concern of someone who is only ever a split second’s carelessness from exactly the same predicament. ‘You said you thought you hadn’t cut the skin.’