Читать книгу Edge of Black - J.T. Ellison, J.T. Ellison - Страница 16

Chapter 7

Washington, D.C.

Dr. Samantha Owens

Sam read the text again, then looked up. “Did the congressman see this before he died?”

Fletcher shook his head. “This came in to his official cell number, so an aide holds the phone. There’s a ton of incoming calls we have to trace, and texts. The number was blocked, though, so it was probably a burner phone. We can get the details on it, but you know how long that can take.”

She did. Paperwork on disposable phones was akin to wandering through the seven circles of hell—doable, but no one in their right mind would choose that path.

“Good luck with that.”

“Thanks.” Fletcher got quiet for a moment. “In case the text was sent by the suspect, we need to look at this situation with a fresh eye. That the congressman was the real target. So call me if there’s anything weird here, okay? You can’t imagine the pressure I’m under right now.”

“I can imagine, and of course, I’ll call as soon as I have something.”

With a grateful smile, Fletcher left to start his investigation into the congressman’s last hours. Nocek asked if she needed help. She demurred, so he went to deal with the other insanities, and she and Murphy got to work.

Leighton was the third death of the day, that was indisputable. But without more information, doing the post, seeing the other victims, Sam couldn’t say conclusively that he was a part of the attack.

So she focused on the task at hand. After her initial examination of the body’s exterior, which showed exceptional edema of the head, neck, eyelids, upper and lower extremities, frothy blood coming from the mouth and nose, and a bluish cast to the skin, Murphy did the preliminary dissection, opening Leighton’s chest with her scalpel, a wide-legged Y incision. She fed the flesh away from the breastplate and used the shears to snap the ribs, one crunch at a time, until the breastplate came clear and Sam could look into the chest cavity unhindered.

What she saw was unusual, to say the least. More frothy blood, plus all of Leighton’s organs swollen beyond proportion, especially his heart, bulging in its pericardial sac, and his lungs, so distended they engulfed the chest cavity and touched at the midpoint. She poked around a bit, trying to get the lay of the land. His spleen was visibly bloated, the liver fatty, and more edema present. She began the dissection. His enlarged heart was otherwise healthy for a man his age, with little cholesterol plaque built up in the arteries, so cardiac arrest wasn’t the culprit. She started to work on the block of lungs and quickly realized Leighton was suffering from an underlying disease. His lungs were distended and the air pockets diffusely enlarged, ravaged most certainly from a lifetime of asthma. Bronchiectasis. Which made her wonder—why hadn’t he used his inhaler? In a case of fulminant pneumonia, surely the congressman would have been sucking hard on his albuterol. And if that didn’t work...

“Hey, Murphy, you have his clothes?”

“Sure.” She pulled out the plastic bag and held it up. “What do you need?”

“Look through his pockets for an inhaler. He’s asthmatic. Just curious what he was using.”

Murphy dug in, but came up empty.

“That’s weird. I guess he could have dropped it at his office, right?”

“Sure. In the heat of the moment, absolutely. It’s not something we would grab to bring in, either. What are you thinking, Doc?”

“He’s had asthma for a long time. He definitely had an attack quite recent to his death. The airways are reddened and swollen inside. His inhaler would have started to make at least a little dent in the swelling in his bronchial tree, but I’m not seeing any evidence of that. Honestly, I’m not seeing anything that indicated he tried to arrest the attack at all.”

She went back to the body and looked him over carefully. On a man who had a normal spread of hair on his body, a needle mark could be concealed and missed on the initial examination. On skin as smooth as the congressman’s, though, an injection site should show itself easily. She couldn’t find one. He was in shape, no extra folds of fat to hide the marks. His thighs were clear, as were his buttocks, arms and stomach.

Interesting.

She thought about how the situation must have gone down. The attack would have started small. Staying calm and not hyperventilating is the key to keeping a mild asthma attack from becoming a major event. The congressman might have breathed into a paper bag, or something equally calming. But that didn’t work, so he brought out the defenses—his inhaler, maybe a nebulizer. Perhaps even popped a bit of prednisone, knowing the anti-inflammatory would help. Toxicology would tell what medications he’d taken. A witness would be of help, too, especially since the tox screen wouldn’t show the corticosteroid.

When none of the usual treatments worked, he should have called 911 and broken out his EpiPen. Jammed the lifesaving medicine into his thigh and gotten his ass to the hospital.

But he didn’t have a mark on him.

But he did have massive pulmonary edema. His lungs were yellowish and heavy, and the fluid in the chest cavity was bloody. Significant airway wall thickening showed evidence of a hyperacute pulmonary attack and fulminant pneumonia.

All signs pointed to a massive asthma attack, of that Sam was sure.

But what had triggered it? Without knowing Leighton’s schedule, without knowing if he’d been exposed this morning, she couldn’t say for sure that his death was related to the others.

Tracking down Leighton’s every move was Fletcher’s job. For the meantime, all Sam could do was send the samples to the lab and have them tested, and begin the long wait. But there was something more present in the congressman’s system. An irritant, something that caused the blood to froth.

She’d never seen a ricin poisoning up close and personal, but this certainly looked like what she’d read about. But the tests so far had been negative for ricin. That was very strange.

Sam made quick work of the rest of Leighton’s organs, dictated her findings to Murphy, then stripped off her gloves and mask and tossed them in the trash. She desperately wanted to wash her hands, and it wasn’t just the OCD talking. Posting the congressman had solidified her feeling that there was more than met the eye about the attacks this morning.

She left Murphy behind to close the body and sought out Dr. Nocek. He was in his office, writing up his findings from the earlier autopsies.

She took a seat across from him and smiled. “Good thing you talked me into getting licensed here in D.C. This is becoming a regular event for us.”

“My dear Samantha, I wish that it would be a daily occurrence. Your talents are not wasted teaching our young doctors the skills they need to succeed in pathology, but they could certainly be put to advantageous use with us. It was kind of you to indulge the detective’s wish for a completely unbiased postmortem. Perhaps you’d like to rethink your current path and join us?”

Nocek smiled at her. He was an odd man, cadaverously thin, with thick glasses and a long beak of a nose. He was called Lurch behind his back, or The Fly. He did bear an uncanny resemblance to a winged insect. But he was unfailingly kind, intelligent, intuitive and unafraid to ask for help when he felt it was needed. Sam liked him a great deal.

“I’ll think about it. How many are ill?”

“At this point, reported illnesses have topped two hundred. But still only the three deaths. If this is a biological agent, it could be several days before we are in the clear on mortality rates. It is entirely possible people have been exposed and are simply not showing symptoms yet.”

“I was thinking it could be ricin despite the negative field finding. But it’s not textbook, that’s for sure. What were your findings on the two dead?”

“Internal bleeding, pulmonary edema and hemorrhage. Perhaps anthrax. Do you recall the case in 2001? Five died, seventeen survived. I worked on two of the victims. The findings had some similarities.”

“Similarities, but not exact, right?”

“Yes. I did not witness the external pustules that were apparent in the 2001 cases.”

“We won’t know until the toxicology comes back, so there’s no sense in speculating. But just between us, it looked very much like ricin poisoning to me.”

“Detective Fletcher is not going to want to hear you say that.”

Sam played with the stress ball Nocek kept on his desk. Squish, roll, squish, roll. “Fletch will live. I will tell you this. The congressman had a massive, acute asthma attack, and that was what killed him. He had pneumonia, too, which didn’t look like it was being treated. Until the tests are back on the tissue and blood, I won’t know if he inhaled what everyone else did. But it is feasible his death is unrelated to the attack. Just a matter of bad timing.”

Nocek steepled his considerably long fingers in front of him.

“Do you believe this is the case?”

“I don’t know. Something isn’t right. If he was in acute respiratory distress, there were steps he would have taken. He’d been asthmatic for a very long time, surely this wouldn’t have been his first pulmonary event. I didn’t find any evidence he used an EpiPen. So either things progressed normally and he stupidly forgot his pen today, or...”

“Or?”

She shifted in her seat. “The possibilities are endless. Let’s see what Fletch has to say first. Now, why don’t you show me the bodies of the other two DOAs.”