“For ten years,” Gordon said, “we’ve kept this technology quiet. When you think about it, it’s a miracle. Traub was the first incident to get away from us. Fortunately, it ended up in the hands of some doofus cop, and it won’t go any further. But if Doniger starts pushing in France, people might start to put things together. We’ve already got that reporter in Paris chasing us. Bob could blow this wide open.”
“I know he’s considered all that. That’s the second big problem.”
“Going public?”
“Yes. Having it all come out.”
“He’s not worried?”
“Yes, he’s worried. But he seems to have a plan to deal with it.”
“I hope so,” Gordon said. “Because we can’t always count on having a doofus cop sifting through our dirty laundry.”
* * *
Officer James Wauneka came into McKinley Hospital the next morning, looking for Beverly Tsosie. He thought he would check the autopsy results on the old guy who had died. But they told him that Beverly had gone up to the third-floor Imaging Unit. So he went up there.
He found her in a small beige room adjacent to the white scanner. She was talking to Calvin Chee, the MRI technician. He was sitting at the computer console, flicking black-and-white images up, one after another. The images showed five round circles in a row. As Chee ran through the images, the circles got smaller and smaller.
“Calvin,” she was saying. “It’s impossible. It has to be an artifact.”
“You ask me to review the data,” he said, “and then you don’t believe me? I’m telling you, Bev, it’s not an artifact. It’s real. Here, look at the other hand.”
Chee tapped the keyboard, and now a horizontal oval appeared on the screen, with five pale circles inside it. “Okay? This is the palm of the left hand, seen in a midsection cut.” He turned to Wauneka. “Pretty much what you’d see if you put your hand on a butcher block and chopped straight down through it.”
“Very nice, Calvin.”
“Well, I want everybody to be clear.”
He turned back to the screen. “Okay, landmarks. Five round circles are the five palmar bones. These things here are tendons going to the fingers. Remember, the muscles that work the hand are mostly in the forearm. Okay. That little circle is the radial artery, which brings blood to the hand through the wrist. Okay. Now, we move outward from the wrist, in cut sections.” The images changed. The oval grew narrower, and one by one, the bones pulled apart, like an amoeba dividing. Now there were four circles. “Okay. Now we’re out past the palm, and we see only the fingers. Small arteries within each finger, dividing as we go out, getting smaller, but you can still see them. See, here and here? Okay. Now moving out toward the fingertips, the bones get larger, that’s the proximal digit, the knuckle . . . and now . . . watch the arteries, see how they go . . . section by section . . . and now.”
Wauneka frowned. “It looks like a glitch. Like something jumped.”
“Something did jump,” Chee said. “The arterioles are offset. They don’t line up. I’ll show you again.” He went to the previous section, then the next. It was clear — the circles of the tiny arteries seemed to hop sideways. “That’s why the guy had gangrene in his fingers. He had no circulation because his arterioles didn’t line up. It’s like a mismatch or something.”
Beverly shook her head. “Calvin.”
“I’m telling you. And not only that, it’s other places in his body, too. Like in the heart. Guy died of massive coronary? No surprise, because the ventricular walls don’t line up, either.”
“From old scar tissue,” she said, shaking her head. “Calvin, come on. He was seventy-one years old. Whatever was wrong with his heart, it worked for more than seventy years. Same with his hands. If this arteriole offset was actually present, his fingers would have dropped off years ago. But they didn’t. Anyway, this was a new injury; it got worse while he was in the hospital.”
“So what are you going to tell me, the machine is wrong?”
“It has to be. Isn’t it true that you can get registration errors from hardware? And there are sometimes bugs in scaling software?”
“I checked the machine, Bev. It’s fine.”
She shrugged. “Sorry, I’m not buying it. You’ve got a problem somewhere. Look, if you’re so sure you’re right, go down to pathology and check the guy out in person.”
“I tried,” Chee said. “The body was already picked up.”
“It was?” Wauneka said. “When?”
“Five o’clock this morning. Somebody from his company.”
“Well, that company’s way over by Sandia,” Wauneka said. “Maybe they’re still driving the body—”
“No.” Chee shook his head. “Cremated this morning.”
“Really? Where?”
“Gallup Mortuary.”
“They cremated him here?” Wauneka said.
“I’m telling you,” Chee said, “there’s definitely something weird about this guy.”
Beverly Tsosie crossed her arms over her chest. She looked at the two men. “There’s nothing weird,” she said. “His company did it that way because they could arrange it all by phone, long-distance. Call the mortuary, they come over and cremate him. Happens all the time, especially when there’s no family. Now cut the crap,” she said, “and call the repair techs to fix the machine. You have a problem with your MRI — and that’s all you have.”
:
Jimmy Wauneka wanted to be finished with the Traub case as soon as possible. But back in the ER, he saw a plastic bag filled with the old guy’s clothes and personal belongings. There was nothing to do but call ITC again. This time he spoke to another vice president, a Ms. Kramer. Dr. Gordon was in meetings and was unavailable.
“It’s about Dr. Traub,” he said.
“Oh yes.” A sad sigh. “Poor Dr. Traub. Such a nice man.”
“His body was cremated today, but we still have some of his personal effects. I don’t know what you want us to do with them.”
“Dr. Traub doesn’t have any living relatives,” Ms. Kramer said. “I doubt anybody here would want his clothes, or anything. What effects were you speaking of?”
“Well, there was a diagram in his pocket. It looks like a church, or maybe a monastery.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know why he would have a diagram of a monastery?”
“No, I really couldn’t say. To tell the truth, Dr. Traub got a little strange, the last few weeks. He was quite depressed, ever since his wife died. Are you sure it’s a monastery?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know what it is. Do you want this diagram back?”
“If you wouldn’t mind sending it along.”
“And what about this ceramic thing?”
“Ceramic thing?”
“He had a piece of ceramic. It’s about an inch square, and it’s stamped ‘ITC.’ “
“Oh. Okay. That’s no problem.”
“I was wondering what that might be.”
“What that might be? It’s an ID tag.”
“It doesn’t look like any ID tag I ever saw.”
“It’s a new kind. We use them here to get through security doors, and so on.”
“You want that back, too?”
“If it’s not too much trouble. Tell you what, I’ll give you our FedEx number, and you can just stick it in an envelope and drop it off.”
Jimmy Wauneka hung up the phone and he thought, Bullshit.
:
He called Father Grogan, the priest at his local Catholic parish, and told him about the diagram, and the abbreviation at the bottom: mon.ste.mere.
“That would be the Monastery of Sainte-Mère,” he said promptly.
“So it is a monastery?”
“Oh absolutely.”
“Where?”
“I have no idea. It’s not a Spanish name. ‘Mère’ is French for ‘Mother.’ Saint Mother means the Virgin Mary. Perhaps it’s in Louisiana.”
“How would I locate it?” Wauneka said.
“I have a listing of monasteries here someplace. Give me an hour or two to dig it up.”
:
“I’m sorry, Jimmy. I don’t see any mystery here.”
Carlos Chavez was the assistant chief of police in Gallup, about to retire from the force, and he had been Jimmy Wauneka’s adviser from the start. Now he was sitting back with his boots up on his desk, listening to Wauneka with a very skeptical look.
“Well, here’s the thing,” Wauneka said. “They pick up this guy out by Corazón Canyon, demented and raving, but there’s no sunburn, no dehydration, no exposure.”
“So he was dumped. His family pushed him out of the car.”
“No. No living family.”
“Okay, then he drove himself out there.”
“Nobody saw a car.”
“Who’s nobody?”
“The people who picked him up.”
Chavez sighed. “Did you go out to Corazón Canyon yourself, and look for a car?”
Wauneka hesitated. “No.”
“You took somebody’s word for it.”
“Yes. I guess I did.”
“You guess? Meaning a car could still be out there.”
“Maybe. Yeah.”
“Okay. So what did you do next?”