PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

She was covered in pustules, gray and hard like pearls, her toothless mouth caved in, and dyed red hair wild. I pulled the covers down more, unbuttoning her gown, noting the density of eruptions was greater on her extremities and face than on her trunk, just as Hoyt had said. Itching had driven her to claw her arms and legs, where she had bled and gotten secondary infections that were crusty and swollen.

‘God help you,’ I muttered in pain.

I imagined her itching, aching, burning up with fever, and afraid of her own nightmarish image in the mirror.

‘How awful,’ I said, and my mother flashed in my mind.

Lancing a pustule, I smeared a slide, then went down to the kitchen and set my microscope on the table. I was already convinced of what I’ d find. This was not chicken pox. It wasn’t shingles. All indicators pointed to the devastating, disfiguring disease variola major, more commonly known as smallpox. Turning on my microscope, I put the slide on the stage, bumped magnification up to four hundred, adjusted the focus as the dense center, the cytoplasmic Guarnieri bodies, came into view. I took more Polaroids of something that could not be true.

Shoving back the chair, I began pacing as a clock ticked loudly from the wall.

‘How did you get this? How?’ I talked to her out loud.

I went back outside to where Crockett was parked on the street. I didn’t get close to his truck.

‘We’ve got a real problem,’ I said to him. ‘And I’m not a hundred percent sure what I’m going to do about it.’

My immediate difficulty was finding a secure phone, which I finally decided simply was not possible. I couldn’t call from any of the local businesses, certainly not from the neighbors’ houses or from the chief’s trailer. That left my portable cellular phone, which ordinarily I would never have used to make a call like this. But I did not see that I had a choice. At three-fifteen, a woman answered the phone at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland.

‘I need to speak with Colonel Fujitsubo,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, he’s in a meeting.’

‘It’s very important.’

‘Ma’am, you’ll have to call back tomorrow.’

‘At least give me his assistant, his secretary . . .’

‘In case you haven’t heard, all nonessential federal employees are on furlough . . .’

‘Jesus Christ!’ I exclaimed in frustration. ‘I’m stranded on an island with an infectious dead body. There may be some sort of outbreak here. Don’t tell me I have to wait until your goddamn furlough ends!’

‘Excuse me?’

I could hear telephones ringing nonstop in the background.

‘I’m on a cellular phone. The battery could die any minute. For God’s sake, interrupt his meeting! Patch me through to him! Now!’

Fujitsubo was in the Russell Building on Capitol Hill, where my call was connected. I knew he was in some senator’s office but did not care as I quickly explained the situation, trying to control my panic.

‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘You’re sure it’s not chicken pox, measles . . .’

‘No. And regardless of what it is, it should be contained, John. I can’t send this into my morgue. You’ve got to handle it.’

USAMRIID was the major medical research laboratory for the U.S. Biological Defense Research Program, its purpose to protect citizens from the possible threat of biological warfare. More to the point, USAMRIID had the largest Bio Level 4 containment laboratory in the country.

‘Can’t do it unless it’s terrorism,’ Fujitsubo said to me. ‘Outbreaks go to CDC. Sounds like that’s who you need to be talking to.’

‘And I’m sure I will be, eventually,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure most of them have been furloughed too, which is why I couldn’t get through earlier. But they’re in Atlanta, and you’re in Maryland, not far from here, and I need to get this body out of here as fast as I can.’

He was silent.

‘No one hopes I’m wrong more than I do,’ I went on in a cold sweat. ‘But if I’m not and we haven’t taken the proper precautions . . .’

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