‘Kay,’ Gallwey’s voice sounded inside my hood. ‘Got something good out here.’
I went down the steps, careful to keep my air line from tangling. He was in front of the camper, squatting by the area of the tongue where the VIN had been obliterated. Having polished the metal mirror-smooth with fine grit sandpaper, he was now applying a solution of copper chloride and hydrochloric acid to dissolve scarred metal and restore the deeply stamped number underneath that the killer thought he had filed away.
‘People don’t realize how difficult it is to get rid of one of these things,’ his voice filled my ears.
‘Unless they’re professional car thieves.’ I said.
‘Well, whoever did this didn’t do a very good job.’ He was taking photographs. ‘I think we got it.’
‘Let’s hope the camper’s registered,’ I said.
‘Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.’
‘What about prints?’
The door and aluminum around it were smudged with black dusting powder.
‘Some, but God knows whose,’ he said getting up and straightening his back. ‘In a minute, I’ll tear up the inside.’
Meanwhile, Lucy was tearing up the computer, and like me, not coming up with anything that might tell us who deadoc was. But she did find files he had saved of our conversations in the chat rooms, and it was chilling to see them on screen, and wonder how often he had reread them. There were detailed lab notes documenting the propagation of the virus cells, and this was interesting. It appeared work had begun as recently as early in the fall, less than two months before the torso had turned up.
By late afternoon, we had done all we could do with no startling revelations. We took chemical showers as the camper was blasted with formalin gas. I stayed in my army-green house clothes because I did not want my suit after what it had been through.
‘Kind of hell on your wardrobe,’ Lucy commented as we left the changing room. ‘Maybe you should try pearls with that. Dress it up a little.’
‘Sometimes you sound like Marino,’ I said.
Days crept into the weekend, and next I knew that was gone too with no developments that were anything but maddening. I had missed my mother’s birthday. Not once had it crossed my mind.
‘What? You got Alzheimer’s now?’ she unkindly told me over the phone. ‘You don’t come down here. Now you don’t even bother to call. It’s not like I’m getting younger.’
She began to cry, and I felt like it.
‘Christmas,’ I said what I did every year. ‘I’ll work something out. I’ll bring Lucy. I promise. It’s not that far away.’
I drove downtown, uninspired and weary to the bone. Lucy had been right. The killer’s only use of the phone line at the campground was to dial into AOL, and in the end, all that came back to was Perley’s stolen credit card. Deadoc did not call anymore. I had gotten obsessive about checking and sometimes found myself waiting in that chat room when I could not even be sure the FBI was watching anymore.
The frozen virus source I found in the camper’s nitrogen freezer remained unknown. Attempts at mapping its DNA continued, and scientists at CDC knew how the virus was different, but not what it was, and thus far, vaccinated primates remained susceptible to it. Four other people, including two watermen who turned up in Crisfield, had come down with only mild cases of the disease. No one else seemed to be getting sick as the quarantine of the fishing village continued and its economy foundered. As for Richmond, only Wingo was ill, his willowy body and gentle face ravaged by pustules. He would not let me see him, no matter how often I tried.
I was devastated, and found it hard to worry about other cases because this one would not end. We knew the dead man in the trailer could not be deadoc. Fingerprints had come back to a drifter with a long arrest record of crimes mostly involving theft and drugs, and two counts of assault and attempted rape. He was out on parole when he had used his pocketknife to pry open the camper door, and no one doubted that his shotgun death was a homicide.