Randy White - Dead of Night

Sounding woozy, the woman said, “Oh-hhh, that’s revolting. I’ve got to get out of here.” She turned and walked toward the hallway door. “What about the deceased? Is it safe for us to bag and transport?”

I told her I thought it was, but suggested she contact the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta right away.

“They need to get a team down here and start collecting samples. It takes the female parasite a year or so inside the host to reach sexual maturity. If Applebee was infected locally, then they’ve had at least twelve months to spread.”

The Everglades watershed begins just below Orlando as a series of lakes known as the Kissimmee Chain. Lake Toho was one of the largest lakes in the system. I didn’t tell her that the entire southern part of the state might already be infested because of the natural, slow flow of water.

No one was more aware of the Everglades’ complicated interlinkings than Jobe Applebee.

Something else I chose not to impose on Rona Graves was a request for plastic specimen bags. I wanted to harvest samples of the parasite so I could have a look under the microscope when I got back to Sanibel.

The medical investigator didn’t seem up to that.

LOG

(Kissimmee motel)

13 Dec. Monday

Cold front dissipating, gray jet stream clouds. Damaged my boat. Nose, shoulder, ribs ache. Dreamed of parasites, then old familiar nightmare. Awoke w/sweats.

Spoke w/Dewey 3 times this mom. Still pissed off, irritable, eager to get off phone.

List: 1. Meet Frieda, search Applebee’s house. 2. Call Laken, check on sharks. 3. Xmas presents.

Frieda Matthews told me the family seldom disclosed the truth about Jobe, he’d done so well professionally.

There was a reason he was different.

“When we first found out, I guess we were ashamed. By the time we knew there was no reason to be ashamed, he’d already made it on his own. So it didn’t seem to matter.”

Her brother had been born with Asperger’s syndrome. She said it had nearly destroyed him as a child, but then defined him as an adult. He was one of those uncommon people who found success through his handicap.

Asperger’s is a form of autism; a neurological disorder that causes developmental problems.

“Aspey people, like Jobe, have a unique view of the world because their neuron pathways develop differently. They approach problems from unexpected angles because their brains are uniquely wired. It’s like there are two different software platforms for human beings. For every thousand IBMs like us, there are two autistic Macs.”

It was a little before noon on Monday, the thirteenth day of December, the morning after I’d found Applebee’s body. A gusty north wind was pushing gray stratus clouds toward Key West. The void was filled with Canadian chill, dropping the temperature into the midfifties. Because she’d been unable to sleep after hearing about her brother’s death, Frieda had left her son and husband in Tallahassee, pointed the family SUV toward Kissimmee, and called me on the way. Would I wait there for her?

I didn’t want to spend another night away from Sanibel. But how do you say no to a twin whose sibling has just died?

I got a room at a place outside Kissimmee called Caribbean Villas-but only after first having a late-night bottle of wine with Rona, the much-shaken medical investigator.

“I usually don’t guzzle my wine like this,” she’d told me more than once. “But after witnessing something like that-my God.”

I replied, “I’ll believe it about you if you’ll believe it about me. Then maybe we can rationalize a second bottle.”

Now Frieda and I were in my leaky skiff, idling away from the marina, headed for Night’s Landing. I wore a red Gore-Tex squall jacket zipped tight. I would have worn gloves if I’d had them-water intensifies cold. I was taking my time, going slow. A sheriff’s detective said he wanted to meet us at the house and go through Applebee’s personal effects, maybe find something that would tell them why two foreigners had been interrogating the man. Also how and why he had died.

I’d told Frieda about the Russians, but not about their interrogation techniques. Also told her about the two late calls made from my cell phone.

While on our second bottle of wine, Rona and I had re-dialed the numbers. At that late hour, we’d expected to get recordings, and did.

One was the voice of a woman who said I’d reached the environmental engineering office of Tropicane Sugar. The second was a digitized message that said I’d reached the Florida offices of Environmental Protection and Oversight Conservancy, a nonprofit group, and that I should try again during regular business hours.

Neither gave the option of leaving a message.

I knew a little about them both. Tropicane was one of Florida’s largest producers of cane sugar. It was a privately owned, megadollar corporation, from what I’d read. It employed hundreds of people, maybe thousands. A major economic and political player.

Frieda said it might have been Tropicane that had commissioned one of her brother’s dioramas. He’d done work for both organizations.

The Environmental Conservancy, or EPOC, was a watchdog organization. It kept a low profile in the way of The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was well financed, politically conservative. It favored lawsuits over headlines, unlike more controversial nonprofits, such as Greenpeace, PETA, and the Earth Liberation Front. It was a more thoughtful group that preferred to work in the background. That was my impression, anyway.

Frieda surprised me, saying, years back, she’d been introduced to EPOC’s founder, but the meeting had had nothing to do with environmental issues.

“At the time,” she said, “he was still a practicing research physician. Dr. Desmond Stokes. A real doctor, but he had a more holistic approach to medicine. I wanted to get pregnant, but was worried because I had an autistic twin. The genetics were risky.”

Stokes had published a study that suggested that high doses of vitamins during pregnancy, combined with a diet of organic whole foods, reduced the risk of autoimmune disorders in infants. Stokes was working on the premise that autism had an autoimmune link. His research suggested neurotoxin pollutants in the environment were contributing factors.

“Heavy metals,” she said. “The sort of stuff you and I find all the time in water samples. Mercury’s the most dangerous during pregnancy. It’s everywhere-vegetables, fish, even some infant vaccines. People don’t realize. So I went to one of Stokes’s lectures. Impressive. But a very neurotic guy. What’s the phobia when a person’s afraid of germs?”

I said, “I don’t know, there’s a whole list. Germ-a-phobic?”

That got me a smile. “Whatever it’s called, he told the audience his parents were doctors who’d specialized in infectious diseases and parasitology, and they’d given it to him-the phobia. Like he was kidding, but I think he was serious. He was explaining why he wouldn’t be shaking hands, hanging out later. I signed up for what he called a ‘dietary protocol,’ which meant buying his designer line of vitamins.”

Even I recognized the brand when she said it.

She added in a wry tone, “A year or so later, I read that the state took away his medical license because of a new procedure he was trying, sheep placenta injections. Something like that. You don’t remember?”

I told her I’d been working out of the country during that time. There was an entire Florida decade missing from my memory banks.

“It was ugly. Tabloid stuff, which I followed because I felt like I’d been taken in by a quack. He moved his whole operation to the Bahamas. The vitamin company’s huge, and Dr. Stokes is now so rich that he doesn’t have to worry about strangers and their germs. Founding EPOC was maybe a PR move, but it’s also a way he can fire back at the U.S. government with lawsuits. The ‘Angry Expatriate.’ He’s been called that.”