PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

‘Have you sprayed this on your face,’ I said to her.

‘On my plants,’ she said.

‘Plants get bagged and burned,’ I said. ‘Where’s Wingo?’

‘MCV.’

‘I don’t know this for a fact,’ I spoke to everyone, ‘and I pray I’m wrong. But we might be dealing with product tampering. Please don’t panic, but under no circumstances does anyone touch this spray. Do we know exactly how they were delivered?’

It was Cleta who spoke. ‘This morning I came in before anybody up front. There were police reports shoved through the slot, as always. And these had been, too. They were in little mailing tubes. There were eleven of them. I know because I counted to see if there was enough to go around.’

‘And the mailman didn’t bring them. They had just been shoved through the slot of the front door.’

‘I don’t know who brought them. But they looked like they’d been mailed.’

‘Any tubes you still have, please bring them to me,’ I said.

I was told that no one had used one, and all were collected and brought to my office. Putting on cotton gloves and glasses, I studied the mailing tube meant for me. Postage was bulk rate and clearly a manufacturer’s sample, and I found it most unusual for something like that to be addressed to a specific individual. I looked inside the tube, and there was a coupon for the spray. As I held it up to the light, I noticed edges imperceptibly uneven, as if the coupon had been clipped with scissors versus a machine.

‘Rose?’ I called out.

She walked into my office.

‘The tube you got,’ I said. ‘Who was it addressed to?’

‘Resident, I think.’ Her face was stressed.

‘Then the only one with a name on it is mine.’

‘I think so. This is awful.’

‘Yes, it is.’ I picked up the mailing tube. ‘Look at this. Letters all the same size, the postmark on the same label as the address. I’ve never seen that.’

‘Like it came off a computer,’ she said as her amazement grew.

‘I’m going across the street to the DNA lab.’ I got up. ‘Call USAMRIID right away and tell Colonel Fujitsubo we need to schedule a conference call between him, us, CDC, Quantico, now.’

‘Where do you want to do it?’ she asked as I hurried out the door.

‘Not here. See what Benton says.’

Outside, I ran down the sidewalk past my parking lot, and crossed Fourteenth Street. I entered the Seaboard Building where DNA and other forensic labs had relocated several years before. At the security desk, I called the section chief, Dr Douglas Wheat, who had been given a male family name, despite her gender.

‘I need a closed air system and a hood,’ I explained to her.

‘Come on back.’

A long sloping hallway always polished bright led to a series of glass-enclosed laboratories. Inside, scientists were prepossessed with pipettes and gels and radioactive probes as they coaxed sequences of genetic code to unravel their identities. Wheat, who battled paperwork almost as much as I did, was sitting at her desk, typing something on her computer. She was an attractive woman in a strong way, forty and friendly.

‘What trouble are you getting into this time?’ She smiled at me, then eyed my bag. ‘I’m afraid to ask.’

‘Possible product tampering,’ I said. ‘I need to spray some on a slide, but it absolutely can’t get in the air or on me or anyone.’

‘What is it?’ She was very somber now, getting up.

‘Possibly a virus.’

‘As in the one on Tangier?’

‘That’s my fear.’

‘You don’t think it might be wiser to get this to CDC, let them . . .’

‘Douglas, yes, it would be wiser,’ I patiently explained as I coughed again. ‘But we haven’t got time. I’ve got to know. We have no idea how many of these might be in the hands of consumers.’

Her DNA lab had a number of closed air system hoods surrounded by glass bioguards, because the evidence tested here was blood. She led me to one in the back of a room, and we put on masks and gloves, and she gave me a lab coat. She turned on a fan that sucked air up into the hood, passing it through HEPA filters.

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