Phantoms (41 page)

 

 

Dr. Sara Yamaguchi walked into the Hilltop Inn, paused to answer a question from one of the guards at the front door, and came across the lobby toward Jenny and Bryce. She was still dressed in her decontamination suit, but she was no longer wearing the helmet, the tank of compressed air, or the waste recycling unit. She was carrying some folded clothes and a thick sheaf of pale green papers.

Jenny and Bryce rose to meet her, and Jenny said, “Doctor, has the quarantine been lifted already?”

“Already? Seems like I’ve been trapped inside this suit for
years.”
Dr. Yamaguchi’s voice was different from what it had sounded like through the squawk box. It was fragile and sweet. Her voice was even more diminutive than she was. “It feels good to breathe air again.”

“You’ve run bacteria cultures, haven’t you?” Jenny asked.

“Started to.”

“Well, then . . . doesn’t it take twenty-four to forty-eight hours to get results?”

“Yes. But we’ve decided it’s pointless to wait for the cultures. We’re not going to grow any bacteria on them—neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.”

Neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.
That peculiar statement intrigued Jenny, but before she could ask about it, the geneticist said:

“Besides, Meddy told us it was safe.”

“Meddy?”

“That’s shorthand for Medanacomp,” Dr. Yamaguchi said. “Which is itself short for Medical Analysis and Computation Systems. Our computer. After Meddy assimilated all the data from the autopsies and tests, she gave us a probability figure for biological causation. Meddy says there’s a zero point zero chance that a biological agent is involved here.”

“And you trust a computer’s analysis enough to breathe real air,” Bryce said, clearly surprised.

“In over eight hundred trial runs, Meddy’s never been wrong.”

“But this isn’t just a trial run,” Jenny said.

“Yes. But after what we found in the autopsies and in all pathology tests . . .” The geneticist shrugged and handed the sheaf of green papers to Jenny. “Here. It’s all in the results. General Copperfield thought you’d like to see them. If you have any questions, I’ll explain. Meanwhile, all the men are up at the field lab, changing out of their decon suits, and I’m itching to do the same. And I do mean
itching
.” She smiled and scratched her neck. Her gloved fingers left faint red marks on her porcelain-smooth skin. “Is there some way I could wash?”

Jenny said, “We’re got soap, towels, and a washbasin set up in one corner of the kitchen. It doesn’t offer much privacy, but we’re willing to sacrifice a little privacy rather than be alone.”

Dr. Yamaguchi nodded. “Understandable. How do I get to this washbasin?”

Lisa jumped up from her chair, casting aside the crossword puzzle. “I’ll show you. And I’ll make sure the guys who’re working in the kitchen keep their backs turned and their eyes to themselves.”

With Bryce looking over her shoulder, Jenny leafed through
the first section of the report, which was a transcription of Seth Goldstein’s autopsy notes. Goldstein noted indications of possible suffocation, as well as even more evident signs of severe allergic reaction to an unidentified substance, but he could not
fix a cause of death.

Then her attention came to rest on one of the first pathology
tests. It was a light microscopy examination of unstained bacteria in a long series of hanging-drop preparations that had been contaminated by tissue and fluid samples from Gary Wechlas’s body; darkfield illumination had been used to identify even the smallest microorganisms. They had been searching for bacteria that were still thriving in the cadaver. What they found was startling.

The print-out continued to list bacteria for which the computer and Dr. Bettenby had searched, all with the same results.

Jenny remembered what Dr. Yamaguchi had said, the statement that she had wondered about and about which she had wanted to inquire:
neither benign bacteria nor otherwise.
And here was the data, every bit as abnormal as the computer said it was.

“Strange,” Jenny said.

Bryce said, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. Translation?”

“Well, you see, a cadaver is an excellent breeding ground for all sorts of bacteria—at least for the short run. This many hours after death, Gary Wechlas’s corpse ought to be teeming
with Clostridium welchii
, which is associated with gas gangrene.”

“And it isn’t?”

“They couldn’t find even one lonely, living
C. welchii
in the water droplet that had been contaminated with bowel material. And that is precisely the sample that ought to be swimming with it. It should be teeming with
Proteus vulgaris,
too, which is a saprophytic bacterium.”

“Translation?” he asked patiently.

“Sorry. Saprophytic means it flourishes in dead or decaying matter.”

“And Wechlas is unquestionably dead.”

“Unquestionably. Yet there’s no
P. vulgaris
. There should be other bacteria, too. Maybe
Micrococcus albus
and
Bacillus mesentericus.
Anyway, there aren’t any of the microorganisms that’re associated with decomposition, not any of the forms you’d expect to find. Even stranger, there’s no living
Escherichia coli
in the body. Now, damn it, that would’ve been there, thriving, even before Wechlas was killed. And it should be there now, still thriving.
E. coli
inhabits the colon. Yours, mine, Gary Wechlas’s, everyone’s. As long as it’s contained within the bowel, it’s generally a benign organism.” She paged through the report. “Now, here. Here, look at this. When they used general and differential stains to search for dead microorganisms, they found plenty of
E. coli
. But all the specimens were dead. There are no living bacteria in Wechlas’s body.”

“What’s that supposed to tell us?” Bryce asked. “That the corpse isn’t decomposing as it should be?”

“It isn’t decomposing
at all.
Not only that. Something a whole lot stranger. The reason it isn’t decomposing is because it’s apparently been injected with a massive dose of a sterilizing and stabilizing agent. A preservative, Bryce. The corpse seems to have been injected with an extremely effective preservative.”

 

 

Lisa brought a tray to the table. There were four mugs of coffee, spoons, napkins. The girl passed coffee to Dr. Yamaguchi, Jenny, and Bryce; she took the fourth mug for herself.

They were sitting in the dining room at the Hilltop, near the windows. Outside, the street was bathed in the orange-gold sunlight of late afternoon.

In an hour, Jenny thought, it’ll be dark again. And then we’ll have to wait through another long night.

She shivered. She sure needed the hot coffee.

Sara Yamaguchi was now wearing tan corduroy jeans and a yellow blouse. Her long, silky, black hair spilled over her shoulders. “Well,” she was saying, “I guess everyone’s seen enough of those old Walt Disney wildlife documentaries to know that some spiders and mud wasps—and certain other insects—inject a preservative into their victims and put them aside for consumption later or to feed their unhatched young. The preservative distributed through Mr. Wechlas’s tissues is vaguely similar to those substances but far more potent and sophisticated.”

Jenny thought of the impossibly large moth that had attacked and killed Stewart Wargle. But that wasn’t the creature that had depopulated Snowfield. Definitely not. Even if there were hundreds of those things lurking somewhere in town, they couldn’t have gotten at everyone. No moth that size could have found its way into locked cars, locked houses, and barricaded rooms. Something
else
was out there.

“Are you saying it was an insect that killed these people?” Bryce asked Sara Yamaguchi.

“Actually, the evidence doesn’t point that way. An insect would employ a stinger to kill and to inject the preservative. There would be a puncture wound, however minuscule. But Seth Goldstein went over the Wechlas corpse with a magnifying glass. Literally. Over every square inch of skin. Twice. He even used a depilatory cream to remove all the body hair in order to examine the skin more closely. Yet he couldn’t find a puncture or any other break in the skin through which an injection might have been administered. We were afraid we had atypical or inaccurate data. So a second postmortem was performed.”

“On Karen Oxley,” Jenny said.

“Yes.” Sara Yamaguchi leaned toward the windows and peered up the street, looking for General Copperfield and the others. When she turned back to the table, she said, “However, everything tested out the same. No animate bacteria in the corpse. Decomposition unnaturally arrested. Tissues saturated with preservative. It was bizarre data again. But we were satisfied that it wasn’t atypical or inaccurate data.”

Bryce said, “If the preservative wasn’t injected, how was it administered?”

“Our best guess is that it’s highly absorbable and enters the body by skin contact, then circulates through the tissues within seconds.”

Jenny said, “Could it be a nerve gas, after all? Maybe the preservative aspect is only a side effect.”

“No,” Sara Yamaguchi said. “There aren’t any traces on the victims’ clothes, as there would absolutely have to be if we’re dealing here with gas saturation. And although the substance has a toxic effect, chemical analysis shows it isn’t primarily a toxin, which a nerve gas would be; primarily, it’s a preservative.”

“But was it the cause of death?” Bryce asked.

“It contributed. But we can’t pinpoint the cause. It was partly the toxicity of the preservative, but other factors lead us to believe death also resulted from oxygen deprivation. The victims suffered either a prolonged constriction or a complete blockage of the trachea.”

Bryce leaned forward. “Strangulation? Suffocation?”

“Yes. But we don’t know precisely which.”

“But how can it be either one?” Lisa asked. “You’re talking about things that took a minute or two to happen. But these people died
fast
. In just a second or two.”

“Besides,” Jenny said, “as I remember the scene in the Oxleys’ den, there weren’t any signs of struggle. People being smothered to death will generally thrash like hell, knock things over—”

“Yes,” the geneticist said, nodding. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why are all the bodies swollen?” Bryce asked.

“We think it’s a toxic reaction to the preservative.”

“The bruising, too?”

“No. That’s . . . different.”

“How?”

Sara didn’t answer right away. Frowning, she stared down at the coffee in her mug. Finally: “Skin and subcutaneous tissue from both corpses clearly indicate that the bruising was caused by compression
from an external source
; they were classic contusions. In other words, the bruising wasn’t due to the swelling, and it wasn’t a separate allergic reaction to the preservative. It seems as if something struck the victims. Hard. Repeatedly. Which is just crazy. Because to cause that much bruising, there would have to be at least a fracture, one fracture, somewhere. Another crazy thing: The degree of bruising is the same all over the body. The tissues are damaged to precisely the same degree on the thighs, on the hands, on the chest, everywhere. Which is impossible.”

“Why?” Bryce asked.

Jenny answered him. “If you were to beat someone with a heavy weapon, some areas of the body would be more severely bruised than others. You wouldn’t be able to deliver every blow with precisely the same force and at precisely the same angle as all the other blows, which is what you would’ve
had
to’ve done to create the kind of contusions on these bodies.”

“Besides,” Sara Yamaguchi said, “they’re bruised even in places where a club wouldn’t land. In their armpits. Between the cheeks of the buttocks. And on the soles of their feet! Even though, in the case of Mrs. Oxley, she had her shoes on.”

“Obviously,” Jenny said, “the tissue compression that resulted in bruising was caused by something other than blows to the body.”