From the hall, I recognized her British accent as she talked on the phone.
‘I know. I understand that,’ she was saying as I knocked on the open door. ‘But you’re either going to have to reschedule or go on without me. Something else has come up.’ She smiled, motioning me in.
I had known her during my residency days, and had always believed that kind words from faculty like her had everything to do with why I had come to mind when the chief’s position had opened in Virginia. She was close to my age and had never married, her short hair the same dark gray as her eyes, and she always wore the same gold cross necklace that looked antique. Her parents were American, but she had been born in England, which was where she had trained and worked in her first lab.
‘Bloody meetings,’ she complained as she got off the phone. ‘There’s nothing I hate more. People sitting around talking instead of doing.’
She pulled gloves from a box and handed a pair to me. This was followed by a mask.
‘There’s an extra lab coat on the back of the door,’ she added.
I followed her into the small, dark room, where she had been at work before the phone had rung. Slipping on the lab coat, I found a chair as she peered into a green phosphorescent screen inside the huge viewing chamber. The TEM looked more like an instrument for oceanography or astronomy than a normal microscope. The chamber always reminded me of the dive helmet of a dry suit through which one could see eerie, ghostly images in an iridescent sea.
Through a thick metal cylinder called the scope, running from the chamber to the ceiling, a hundred-thousand-volt beam was striking my specimen, which in this case was liver that had been shaved to a thickness of six or seven one-hundredths of a micron. Smears like the ones I had viewed with my light microscope were simply too thick for the electron beam to pass through.
Knowing this at autopsy, I had fixed liver and spleen sections in glutaraldehyde, which penetrated tissue very rapidly. These I had sent to Crowder, who I knew would eventually have them embedded in plastic and cut on the ultramicrotome, then the diamond knife, before being mounted on a tiny copper grid and stained with uranium and lead ions.
What neither of us had expected was what we were looking at now, as we peered into the chamber at the green shadow of a specimen magnified almost one hundred thousand times. Knobs clicked as she adjusted intensity, contrast and magnification. I looked at DNA double-stranded, brick-shaped virus particles, two hundred to two hundred and fifty nanometers in size. I stared without blinking at smallpox.
‘What do you think?’ I said, hoping she would prove me wrong.
‘Without a doubt, it’s some type of poxvirus,’ she hedged her bets. ‘The question is which one. The fact that the eruptions didn’t follow any nerve pattern. The fact that chicken pox is uncommon in someone this old. The fact that you may now have another case with these same manifestations causes me great concern. Other tests need to be done, but I’d treat this as a medical crisis.’ She looked at me. ‘An international emergency. I’d call CDC.’
‘That’s just what I’m going to do,’ I replied, swallowing hard.
‘What sense do you make of this being associated with a dismembered body?’ she asked, making more adjustments as she peered into the chamber.
‘I can make no sense of it,’ I said, getting up and feeling weak.
‘Serial killers here, in Ireland, raping, chopping people up.’
I looked at her.
She sighed. ‘You ever wish you’d stayed with hospital pathology?’
‘The killers you deal with are just harder to see,’ I replied.
The only way to get to Tangier Island was by water or air. Since there wasn’t a huge tourist business there, ferries were few and did not run after mid-October. Then one had to drive to Crisfield, Maryland, or in my case, go eighty-five miles to Reedville, where the Coast Guard was to pick me up. I left the office as most people were thinking about lunch. The afternoon was raw, the sky cloudy with a strong cold wind.