Patricia Cornwell - Unnatural Exposure

Cleta, a clerk from the front office, looked frightened. 'Why? What's the matter?'

'Have you sprayed this on your face,' I said to her.

'On my plants,' she said.

'Plants get bagged and burned,' I said. 'Where's Wingo?'

'MCV.'

'I don't know this for a fact,' I spoke to everyone, 'and I pray I'm wrong. But we might be dealing with product tampering. Please don't panic, but under no circumstances does anyone touch this spray. Do we know exactly how they were delivered?'

It was Cleta who spoke. 'This morning I came in before anybody up front. There were police reports shoved through the slot, as always. And these had been, too. They were in little mailing tubes. There were eleven of them. I know because I counted to see if there was enough to go around.'

'And the mailman didn't bring them. They had just been shoved through the slot of the front door.'

'I don't know who brought them. But they looked like they'd been mailed.'

'Any tubes you still have, please bring them to me,' I said.

I was told that no one had used one, and all were collected and brought to my office. Putting on cotton gloves and glasses, I studied the mailing tube meant for me. Postage was bulk rate and clearly a manufacturer's sample, and I found it most unusual for something like that to be addressed to a specific individual. I looked inside the tube, and there was a coupon for the spray. As I held it up to the light, I noticed edges imperceptibly uneven, as if the coupon had been clipped with scissors versus a machine.

'Rose?' I called out.

She walked into my office.

'The tube you got,' I said. 'Who was it addressed to?'

'Resident, I think.' Her face was stressed.

'Then the only one with a name on it is mine.'

'I think so. This is awful.'

'Yes, it is.' I picked up the mailing tube. 'Look at this. Letters all the same size, the postmark on the same label as the address. I've never seen that.'

'Like it came off a computer,' she said as her amazement grew.

'I'm going across the street to the DNA lab.' I got up. 'Call USAMRIID right away and tell Colonel Fujitsubo we need to schedule a conference call between him, us, CDC, Quantico, now.'

'Where do you want to do it?' she asked as I hurried out the door.

'Not here. See what Benton says.'

Outside, I ran down the sidewalk past my parking lot, and crossed Fourteenth Street. I entered the Seaboard Building where DNA and other forensic labs had relocated several years before. At the security desk, I called the section chief, Dr Douglas Wheat, who had been given a male family name, despite her gender.

'I need a closed air system and a hood,' I explained to her.

'Come on back.'

A long sloping hallway always polished bright led to a series of glass-enclosed laboratories. Inside, scientists were prepossessed with pipettes and gels and

radioactive probes as they coaxed sequences of genetic code to unravel their identities. Wheat, who battled paperwork almost as much as I did, was sitting at her desk, typing something on her computer. She was an attractive woman in a strong way, forty and friendly.

'What trouble are you getting into this time?' She smiled at me, then eyed my bag. 'I'm afraid to ask.'

'Possible product tampering,' I said. 'I need to spray some on a slide, but it absolutely can't get in the air or on me or anyone.'

'What is it?' She was very somber now, getting up.

'Possibly a virus.'

'As in the one on Tangier?'

'That's my fear.'

'You don't think it might be wiser to get this to CDC, let them…'

'Douglas, yes, it would be wiser,' I patiently explained as I coughed again. 'But we haven't got time. I've got to know. We have no idea how many of these might be in the hands of consumers.'

Her DNA lab had a number of closed air system hoods surrounded by glass bioguards, because the evidence tested here was blood. She led me to one in the back of a room, and we put on masks and gloves, and she gave me a lab coat. She turned on a fan that sucked air up into the hood, passing it through HEPA filters.

'Ready?' I asked, taking the facial spray out of the bag. 'We'll make this quick.' I held a clean slide and the small canister under the hood and sprayed.

'Let's dip this in a ten percent bleach solution,' I said when I was done. 'Then we'll triple bag it, get it and the other ten off to Atlanta.'

'Coming up,' Wheat said, walking off.

The slide took almost no time to dry, and I dripped Nicolaou stain on it and sealed it with a cover slip. I was already looking at it under a microscope when Wheat returned with a container of bleach solution. She dipped the Vita spray in it several times while fears coalesced, rolling into a dark, awful thunderhead as my pulse throbbed in my neck. I peered at the Guarnieri bodies I had come to dread.

When I looked up at Wheat, she could tell by the expression on my face.

'Not good,' she said.

'Not good.' I turned off the microscope and dropped my mask and gloves into biohazardous waste.

The Vita sprays from my office were airlifted to Atlanta, and a preliminary warning was broadcast nationwide to anyone who might have had such a sample delivered to them. The manufacturer had issued an immediate recall, and international airlines were removing the sprays from overseas travel bags given to business and first-class passengers. The potential spread of this disease, should deadoc have somehow tampered with hundreds, thousands of the facial sprays, was staggering. We could, once again, find ourselves facing a worldwide epidemic.

The meeting took place at one P.M. in the FBI's field office off Staples Mill Road. State and federal flags fought from tall poles out front as a sharp wind tore brown leaves off trees and made the afternoon seem much colder than it was. The brick building was new, and had a secure conference room equipped with audio-visual capabilities, so we could see remote people while we talked to them. A young female agent sat at the head of the table, at a console. Wesley and I pulled out chairs and moved microphones close. Above us on walls were video monitors.

'Who else are we expecting?' Wesley asked as the special agent in charge, or S.A.C., walked in with an armload of paperwork.

'Miles,' said the S.A.C., referring to the Health Commissioner, my immediate boss.

'And the Coast Guard.' He glanced at his paperwork. 'Regional chief out of Crisfield, Maryland. A chopper's bringing him in. Shouldn't take him more than thirty minutes in one of those big birds.'

He had no sooner said this than we could hear blades thudding faintly in the distance. Minutes later, the Jayhawk was thundering overhead and settling in the helipad behind the building. I could not remember a Coast Guard recovery helicopter ever landing in our city or even flying over it low, and the sight of it must have been awesome to people on the road. Chief Martinez was slipping off his coat as he joined us. I noted his dark blue commando sweater and uniform pants, and maps rolled up in tubes, and the situation only got grimmer.

The agent at the console was working controls as Commissioner Miles strode in and took a chair next to mine. He was an older man with abundant gray hair that was more contentious than most of the people he managed. Today, tufts were sticking out in all directions, his brow heavy and stern as he put on thick black glasses.

'You look a little under the weather,' he said to me as he made notes to himself.

'The usual stuff going around,' I said.

'Had I known that, I wouldn't have sat next to you.' He meant it.

'I'm beyond the contagious stage.' I said, but he wasn't listening.

Monitors were coming on around the room, and I recognized the face of Colonel

Fujitsubo on one of them. Then Bret Martin blinked on, staring straight at us.