"So you're imagining some ... what? Some poison in the water so strong that it could eat through a pipe? Leak into the street?" He laughed, too. "Think of it. If a germ was that strong, we'd all be dead."
"Well, don't snicker at me for trying too hard."
"Actually, I'm laughing at myself! When we were doing the testing, I asked Leo Stetson over in the Utilities Department about that puddle one day. He and I were driving to my house. It looks funny—like it doesn't have a source. Stetson assured me that puddles in streets have nothing to do with the water towers in question. There's just a leak in the vein somewhere near Shore Road, though he did say if it were in front of the Blumberg or the Endicott estates, it would be fixed by now. That part is a shame. We gotta make sure to look after that little Holman girl."
Right now, I'm looking out for my mom, I reflected, though I said, "Yeah."
"They're a good bunch, down at the CDC." Alan shifted around, his face growing serious. "They ran all sorts of tests for the water; the whole thing amazed me. There are tests to tell them if the water is suspicious—even if they can't name the substance making it suspicious. Trinity's towers came up pristine; same with all the townships I supervise. It was an expensive exercise, but the CDC and Washington are sparing no expenses this year. I think that's why they agree to pay for random autopsies here and there."
I still hoped if anything bizarre showed up in an autopsy, it might be found in USIC's pile of memos—certainly not in mine. My memo mound from the CDC on emerging infectious disease symptoms was growing, despite my attempts to keep up with it all: West Nile virus, E. coli, mutations of the common cold, hoof-and-mouth, blah blah. For whatever reason, Saint Ann's had decided that paramedics need to know this stuff, too, so I wished I had a computer chip for a memory.
"No matter what, I'd rather have my job than yours," I muttered. I remembered after the media discovered the water-tower check, he said on television that they'd tested all water supplies because of some "chatter" they'd captured online.
"One thing I would hate about your job is having to acknowledge a threat as real that was found in a chat room. A chat room. It just sounds like smoke and mirrors. Like you're chasing Captain Hook, ya know?"
He nodded. "I was always a phone guy, a face-to-face guy. Maybe it's my age..."
"It's not your age," I assured him. "My buddies e-mail me something, and if I have something to say back? I pick up the phone. I'm pretty good at picking up on people's thoughts. But it's from watching faces and motions and expressions, and from hearing the clicks in people's voices ... you know. It's the only way to do things."
"For us, maybe. I'll tell you something interesting. It's not exactly a secret—it was vaguely referred to in a January issue of Newsweek."
I don't have time to read Newsweek. "Go for it"
"The reason we tested all those water towers was that a Pakistani informant had captured a lot of related chatter over a few weeks' time. This Pakistani informant, he's sixteen years old."
That was younger than Owen. "You gotta be kidding."
"No. Supposedly he's an ace hacker, and he writes programs that help the intelligence community find spies online. USIC just calls him the Kid. Of course, that age thing may be an idle rumor. I don't ask any more questions than I feel I have to. But I've seen copies of the chatter he captured, along with the notes of his interpretations."
"Really? Does he sound sixteen?"
Alan laughed. "He's not saying 'kewl!' and 'f-this' before all the chatter he sends us. He sounds ... invisible. Truthfully, I only remember the chatter."
"What'd it say?"
He sighed like he was exhaling the many hours of nights not slept. "'Waters will run red in Colony One ... Waters will run red three hours from Home Base in December ... They will drink in December and die like mangy dogs in April.' Isn't that sweet?"
"What's 'Home Base'?"
"The agents were thinking Home Base was the headquarters of some terror cell. They were checking water supplies in Yemen, Jordan, Ethiopia ... But the kid thought Home Base was New York, for reasons I wasn't privy to. So along with all other supervisors within three hours of New York, I decided to test the water."
"You mean to tell me ... our government spent all that money testing water, based on the theories of a sixteen-year-old?"
Alan shrugged, looking weary again. "Sixteen or fifty-two. It's simpler than it sounds. You get a dozen scripts of chatter like that, and you have two choices: You either investigate or you ignore them."
"Well ... he was wrong," I said, feeling somehow victorious. The idea of a kid younger than Owen steering some sort of rudder on American intelligence—that oiled my puke factor. My brother couldn't even remember to keep his feet off the coffee table.
"In the case of the Internet, we're grateful for what we can get, Scott. It's a vast, dark galaxy of hiding places. But we got a double whammy on that water supply threat, because anytime someone mentions waterborne agents of bioterror, it's a punch in the gut. You know..."
Yeah, I did know, but I let him say it anyway. Our towers had come up clean, so it was merely interesting.
"A potential water attack is different from a mustard gas attack or a subway bombing—where knowledge of the crime and the display of symptoms are simultaneous. In the case of waterborne agents, people don't drop like flies. The three germ agents we studied during my training took weeks, even months, to build up in the human body before people became symptomatic. Therefore, with water threats, intelligence has to jump on things like chatter, which, in and of itself, feels like smoke and mirrors. But we can't afford to wait around for symptoms, or for the crime scene to be compromised many times over. There are just a thousand and one problems with water threats."
There's nothing much to say to that glurt of tasty news. I shuddered. He took the reassuring high road.
"There's nothing ... nothing to hook up the Holman woman with anything I'm aware of," he said. "But you tell me what you would do if you walked into a DOA that was the slightest bit suspicious—and your desk was covered with the types of memos that are covering mine."
"I'd dot all my i's, sure. So, what was Johnny Gallagher saying about the corpse?"
"Not a lot. I watched him start the autopsy from the observation deck so I wouldn't have to superscrub. All looked fine to him from the neck down. She didn't even have the enlarged heart of a morphine addict, considering the number of collapsed veins. All her organs looked healthy. He said she probably built up an amazing immune system, waltzing through every disease in Asia and Africa while working as a photographer."
"That's where she was a photographer? Asia and Africa?"
"So the rumor goes."
"Shooting pictures of what?" Growing restless, I got to my feet and pulled him by the arm. "I'd like to take a quick peek at the corpse, listen to Johnny ramble for a couple of minutes. Maybe by that time Dr. Godfrey will be finished with his late-night shit-shower-shave routine and I'll find him with Mom"
Alan walked along beside me down the corridor to the basement elevator, telling me his lump of Holman gossip, being that he had known the grandmother, Natalie Holman. "Aleese was freelance. I heard she worked on a newspaper in Beirut for a while. But I think most of her freelance jobs were for charities. Feed the Children, Peace Corps, stuff like that."
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
I scratched my head, remembering that sweet little Holman babe hiding her face when I had mentioned a morphine addict's tendencies toward violence. "You have no idea," she had said. "How the hell does a photographer for Feed the Children end up addicted to morphine and beating up on her kid?"
He pushed the elevator button. "I remember Aleese Holman from when she was in high school. She was always ... a little different. You know how some parents run around saying their kids are too smart, and that's why they don't do well in school?"
"You mean, ye ol' they're-just-bored routine?"
"Yeah. Natalie Holman was the song l
eader of that tune. Not that the kid ever did anything horrendous. She got arrested a couple of times, but it wasn't for drugs or boozing. It was for..." He chuckled as the elevator door opened and we stepped in. "I had just gotten on the FBI down here when she and a couple of kids from the student newspaper broke into the, um, Not-So-Humane Society and let all the dogs loose from the death row pen."
I snickered. The girl sounded like a cop's nightmare, but a part of me wanted to say, Nice going.
"Another time, she got arrested for lying across the doorway to that old abortion clinic on New York Avenue in Atlantic City. When the cops showed up, all the protesters moved amicably to the curb—except for her. In either case, most picketers would have been happy to carry a sign around on the front sidewalk. She was, um..."
"A determined little prick," I finished for him as the elevator delivered us into the basement.
"Crusade rider, that's for sure. I'd imagine her over in Beirut, either siding with the extremists or picking them up by the throat and hurling them into the Wailing Wall. It's hard to say what she did over there, because I think she was a morph addict already when she came home five years ago. All Natalie Holman ever said was 'She's home, she's injured, and it's sad.'"
We turned the corner of a long hallway. The morgue is buried deep, down near the back entrance.
He went on. "Johnny looked at her arm, the old injury, just for curiosity's sake. He dug in with a scalpel just below the shoulder and stopped ... said if he went even halfway around her flesh, the whole limb would have landed on the floor with a splat. Hell of an injury. The muscle and cartilage were 90 percent severed, hanging mostly by veins and scar tissue. It's a wonder she didn't get gangrene."
"Wonder how she got hurt in the first place," I muttered, remembering Cora Holman's claims not to know herself.
"Johnny said the only time he'd seen an injury like that, right at the joint, was in a guy who'd had his shoulder run over by a truck. Only in her case, none of the bones had been broken. Looked to him like somebody just tried to wrench her arm off—just kept twisting and twisting, back and forth until—" He stopped himself with a cough and a sour face. Even I was struggling with that mental picture. "At any rate, gangrene might have been a blessing. An amputation and an artificial limb would have been a better deal, though it's neither here nor there now."
"So, did Johnny examine her brain?"
"He was just getting out the buzz saw when a guy from your night squad bumped into me in the men's room, said they'd brought in your mother about an hour back. I shot up here. I ought to call Rain—make sure she's not out cruising—"
"Rain's at our house," I told him casually. "She dropped in to see Owen after swimming and fell asleep on the couch. She woke up when the squad came in to pick up Mom, but she's with Owen."
"She was sleeping before midnight?" He slowed again, watching me. "Is she all right? She has a cold ... thinks I don't know. I'd hoped it wasn't caught from your house."
I didn't feel it was my job to bust Rain yet, though I watched him sympathetically. "Alan. Don't freak. Your kid does not have an emerging infectious disease."
The door ahead opened, and Johnny Gallagher appeared in fresh scrubs. I wondered if he was just taking a needed break. I knew doctors don't like to work on potential AIDS autopsies for long periods without a break. The theory goes that they can lose their concentration and get careless with the scalpel. He rubbed Mr. Steckerman's shoulder as we came up. "I don't think you want to go back up there. She, um, looks a bit strange."
Strange... that was an unusual term for our normally precise coroner. "What, you still got her face down under her chin? Sew her back together so Alan won't puke, and let us on the deck. What's the story?"
"She's sewn up. She, uh ... bled out into her skull," he said. "Brain aneurysm. I'm certain the lab results will show she was loaded up on morphine, but aneurysm is the cause of death."
Nothing contagious. Nothing I hadn't seen before. "What do you mean, she looks strange? She looked fine when I picked her up. For a corpse."
"Her features are ... let's say ... without their usual dimension." He spoke more to Alan than to me. "The problem is that aneurysm usually just bleeds out into the skull. It doesn't penetrate the sinus cavity and exit the facial orifices. Passages to the ear, nose, and throat are not easily compromised, but some of her tissue samples were like cooked noodles, and her sinuses were like Jell-O. They had started to crystallize before I even opened them. I sewed her back up as fast as I could, but I needed the samples and had to follow protocol. Personally, I've never seen tissue compromise quite like that before. I could have written my name in her sinuses with a blunt pencil."
I suddenly wished Alan and I had not just been heaped in conversations about the CDC. Sometimes there's a thin line between thinking of the worst that can happen and letting your imagination run wild, especially when your work involves the more colorful aspects of public service.
But I changed my mind about seeing this corpse and backed away slowly toward the elevator. Alan didn't try to stop me, but we locked eyes as I pushed the elevator button. The eerie chat-room blather he'd mentioned was stuck all over my head: Waters will run red in Colony One ... Waters will run red three hours from Home Base in December ... They will drink in December and die like mangy dogs in April. I tried telling myself all sorts of reality, like that of all the places on the globe to be terrorized, it just doesn't happen to your hometown, and also that the water towers had come up pristine when they had been tested.
But I kept seeing the image of Mom sticking her worn-out Evian bottle up to the tap several times a night. And the sicker she got, the more she'd try to flush it by drinking the water.
I didn't want to make myself nuts. I just felt like I ought to go see her again and make sure she was okay.
FIVE
CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2002
4:59 A.M.
I WOKE AGAIN toward dawn to actually find myself in Oma's room, pulling boxes off her closet shelf. The line between sleeping and waking had been that thin for many hours, so I was not exactly stunned.
But I couldn't remember what I had been rooting for, until boxes lay strewn around me and I had the item in my grip, pulled from a box of my fourth-grade Girl Scout projects.
Baba.
"Cora, how can you put that crusty lamb under your face? Give it to me. I'm gonna wash it—"
"Oma, you can't put Baba in the washer! He'll drown!"
"Just so you know..." Oma waves her cigarette toward Baba, so I cover Baba's nose. "...that lamb is full of five years of kid drool. And the terry cloth might as well have gone through chemo. Oh, what the hell. God bless America, where kid germs are sweet as honey."
I sniffed Baba warily. And as if I had smelled the sweet aroma of comfort and security only yesterday, I squashed him into my neck like I used to and stumbled back down the hall.
As I waited for sleep in the dark, I noticed my mother's notebook on the nightstand. I couldn't remember bringing it into my bedroom. Had I walked in my sleep earlier? It seemed to me I woke up one other time to find myself at the window—staring out at Shore Road as if I were waiting for some car. But I couldn't remember bringing that journal in here, and now it had a strange hue, as if the pages in the binding were glowing neon.
The room had turned from black to an ashen gray. Outside, the blackbirds were already calling. Sunrise is causing that glow. But I had no intention of reading Aleese's blather—not when I felt so weak and chilled after my trip down the hall.
"Jack fell down ... broke his crown ... Jill ... gets gangbanged by a—"
I cleared my throat just to wipe out the crude echoes of Aleese's humor. It made me cough, which made me realize my left eye had been throbbing for some time. It seemed hard to pick out one particular ache when I ached all over, but now it was strong enough that I couldn't control where my mind went.
"...by a goddamn bunch of rabid, fucking goons."
My mo
ther sounded like some bizarre combination of Alice in Wonderland and Boyz N the Hood. Oma's words returned, about Jack and Jill and kings and queens and countries losing wars.
Was Aleese "Jill" and my father "Jack"? Was this Jeremy Brandruff Ireland "Jack," and some sort of a great leader? Was my father royalty? Had he led Aleese to take pictures of a battle? I enjoyed a number of possibilities until echoes of Aleese's moaning filled my head again. "Oh ... Mogadishu!"
I remembered something ... A bunch of guys from school had seen a movie, Black Hawk Down, and they came into physics one Monday talking in disgust about the Somali people in the city of Mogadishu, either ... eating American soldiers alive ... or dragging them alive through the streets until they died ... I hadn't been paying enough attention.
Obviously, Aleese had been in Mogadishu at some point, though that information, like most concerning her adult life, had died with her. I knew she had not been in the military and could not have been involved in the Black Hawk Down violence, which had occurred in the midnineties. Putting anyone I knew at the events that sparked a movie seemed almost impossible—and with my mother, it seemed almost laughable.
"It wouldn't kill you to pick up after yourself once in a while. I'm not your nursemaid, Aleese."
I'm just back from singing in the choir's holiday show. I'm picking up socks, beer cans, used tissues that have been thrown at the television screen, at yet another depressing documentary. I realize I've kept my posture very straight while picking things up, squatting with my legs turned sideways instead of stooping or bending. It's part of me lately, this perfect posture, along with reaching for perfect, proper English. It sets me at odds with Aleese, assuring me that I don't have to end up like her.