‘Well, you didn’t,’ I replied.
Her eyes narrowed like evil as she looked at me.
‘No one’s gotten sick except for those people suspected of using the facial spray,’ I said. ‘I’ve been exposed several times to patients, and I’m okay. The virus you created is a dead end, affecting only the primary person but not replicating. There’s no secondary infection. No epidemic. What you created was a panic, disease and death for a handful of innocent victims. And crippled the fishing industry for an island full of people who probably have never even heard of a Nobel Prize.’
I leaned back in my chair, studying her, but she did not seem to care.
‘Why did you send me photographs and messages?’ I demanded. ‘Photographs taken in your dining room, on that table. Who was your guinea pig? Your old and infirm mother? Did you spray her with the virus to see if it worked? And when it did, you shot her in the head. You dismembered her with an autopsy saw so no one ever connected that death with your eventual product tampering?’
‘You think you’re so smart,’ she, deadoc, said.
‘You murdered your own mother and wrapped her in a drop cloth because you could not bear to look at her as you sawed her apart.’
She averted her eyes as my pager vibrated. I pulled it out and read Marino’s number. I got out my phone, my eyes never leaving her.
‘Yes,’ I said when he answered.
‘We got a hit on the camper,’ he said. ‘Traced it back to a manufacturer, then to an address in Newport News. Thought you’d want to know. Agents should be there right about now.’
‘Wish the Bureau had gotten that hit a little sooner,’ I said. ‘I’ll see the agents at the door.’
‘What did you say?’
I got off the phone.
‘I communicated with you because I knew you would pay attention.’ Crowder kept talking at a higher pitch. ‘And to make you try and for once finally lose. The famous doctor. The famous chief.’
‘You were a colleague and friend,’ I said.
‘And I resent you!’ Her face was flushed, bosom heaving as she raged. ‘I always have! The way the system’s always treated you better, all the attention you get. The great Dr Scarpetta. The legend. But ha! Look who won. In the end I outsmarted you, didn’t I?’
I would not answer her.
‘Ran you around, didn’t I?’ She stared, reaching for a bottle of aspirin and shaking out two. ‘Brought you close to death’s door and had you waiting in cyberspace. Waiting for me!’ she said triumphantly.
Something metal loudly rapped on her front door. I pushed back my chair.
‘What are they going to do? Shoot me? Or maybe you should. I bet you’ve got a gun in one of those bags.’ She was getting hysterical. ‘I’ve got one in the other room and I’m going to get it right now.’
She got up as the knocking continued, and a voice demanded, ‘Open up, FBL’
I grabbed her arm. ‘No one’s going to shoot you, Phyllis.’
‘Let go of me!’
I steered her toward the door.
‘Let go of me!’
‘Your punishment will be to die the way they did.’ I pulled her along.
‘NO!’ she screamed as the door crashed open, slamming against the wall and jarring framed photographs loose from their hooks. ,
Two FBI agents stepped inside with pistols drawn, and one of them was Janet. They cuffed Dr Phyllis Crowder after she collapsed to the floor. An ambulance transported her to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where twenty-one days later she died, shackled in bed, covered with fulminating pustules. She was forty-four.
EPILOGUE
I COULD NOT make the decision right away but put it off until New Year’s Eve when people are supposed to make changes, resolutions, promises they know they’ll never keep. Snow was clicking against my slate roof as Wesley and I sat on the floor in front of the fire, sipping champagne.
‘Benton,’ I said, ‘I need to go somewhere.’
He looked confused, as if I meant right now, and said, ‘There’s not much open, Kay.’
‘No. A trip, in February, maybe. To London.’