A work booted nerd in khakis met her at the trailer door. He looked bony, had short hair and a long neck. “My name is Dr. Hatton,” he said. Hatton, Latin. This must be the guy with the bug up his bum the size of White’s Buick. His voice was uncharacteristically dark. “I’m senior field officer for the state department of agriculture. You may have seen my picture in the Enquirer last year. I delivered twin Berkshire hogs joined at the head.”
Lydia told him regrettably that she’d missed that issue.
He handed her a single piece of paper. “This the prelim?” she asked.
“There is no preliminary report. This is a state quarantine release form. It authorizes that your agro site can now be safely reoccupied.”
“Then what happened to the agro animals?”
“We’re not prepared to release any conclusions as of yet.”
“In other words,” Lydia observed, “you have no intention of cooperating with the local authorities.”
“I am the only authority here,” Dr. Hatton said.
White’s got this guy pegged pretty good. “Okay,” Lydia agreed, “but do you think you could take that Buick out of your ass long enough to give me something to tell my boss?”
“It’s none of your boss’s business… Buick?”
This might be fun. “You know what I think, Dr. Hatton? I think you’re not giving me answers because you don’t have any. You guys don’t know what you’re doing out here. You’re a bunch of pussies.”
Hatton was getting pissed. “Pussies?” he challenged.
“That’s right. Lightweights. You’ve been sitting out here for two days, blowing tax dollars and doing nothing.”
Hatton glowered.
“Did you at least autopsy some of the animals?”
His tension strained further. He was getting closer to the line she wanted him on. “Of course,” he said. “Dozens. There was an inconsistency in some aspects of the structural pathology.”
“Great answer, Doc. Show me.”
Hatton smiled. “You don’t have the stomach for it.”
Lydia laughed in his face. At D.C. she’d broken into hardhouses full of weeks old corpses of junkies. She’d hauled up maggot swollen floaters. She’d cut down drug stoolies who’d been hung upside down and gutted like deer. “I’ve seen things that would make your worst nightmare look like Ronald McDonaldland. You talk big, Hatton, but if you had any real guts, you’d show me what you’ve got in those rigs.”
Now Dr. Hatton’s true self was beginning to glimmer through. “It would be a pleasure,” he said.
He took her out to the closest semi rig. This would be his morgue on wheels; that’s what the generators were for, to run the coolers while the trucks were parked. Inside, buzzing tubes lit a tiny office. There was a water cooler, a coffeepot, and a little fridge for snacks. Cozy, she thought. A metal door stood opposite.
“So we’re all pussies, is that it?” He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hood, then a plastic face shield. He looked ridiculous in it. “Well, I’ll show you what this pussy has been doing for the last two days.” He heaved open the metal door and led her in.
Inside was very cold. High coolers gusted chill and noise through metal grilles. In back, pairs of animals lay strapped to steel shelving, probably a dozen pairs. Each had been split like a cleaned fish; body cavities were stuffed with bagged organs, and an eye had been removed from each beast, to check ocular potassium levels, she assumed. This great bulk of bagged meat whelmed her.
Dr. Hatton stood by a metal table. On the table lay a dead horse. “You wanted to see? Well, take a look at this.”
He tossed her a small plastic pouch which contained several ounces of some red marbled gray mush. A tag on the bottom gave an index number, time and date of dissection, and Hatton’s initials. The next line read: Palomino, white, 2 yrs. approx., testes.
“They’re balls!” Hatton yelled at her. “Horse balls!”
Confusion screwed up Lydia’s face. “It’s just mush,” she said.
“They’re balls!” Hatton reiterated. “You know, nuts, pecker jewels, doodads! Those are from the first horse I autopsied yesterday! It’s the same for every male animal on the site!”
Lydia had no idea what he meant. Hatton patted the horse on the table. “I was saving this baby to open for the people back at AHL, but what the hell! Who the fuck are you to come here and question my competence!”
“Doctor, I wasn’t—”
“Shut up!” Hatton barked. Then he laughed. “It’s show time!”
Lydia gasped. Hatton raised a sixteen inch Homelite chain saw. It started up on the first try. Hatton flipped down his visor and went to work. He delved the blade up into the animal’s top hind leg, through the joint. The sound was atrocious, a searing, hitching scream. Lydia almost couldn’t watch.
“This is what I’ve been doing the last two days, bitch!”
He’s crazy, she thought. He’s fried.
Hatton continued to saw. Clumped blood and shreds of muscle spat out of the meaty groove; his face-shield and coat were flecked with it. Then the horse’s leg flipped over on the floor. Hatton turned off the saw, then went right to work with a big autopsy scalpel, cutting a deep gash into the animal’s rear belly. He was a maniac. He grinned like a madman through the flecked visor.
“Lo!” he shouted. From the gash, bare handed, he yanked out a flap of yellowed tissue. “A little of the old mesovarium! See?” He threw it on the floor and ripped out more. “A little peritoneal tissue, a little stroma!” Flap, flap! It all went onto the floor. “Ho! A kidney! My mistake!” Flump!
What he withdrew next looked like a large strip of steak with a lump on the end. He slapped it down on the table. “See that?”
Lydia nodded rather morosely.
“It’s the infundibulum, ampula, left side. See that lump?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“That’s the ovary. Next to the brain, it’s the most complex organ in the body, and, like the male testes, it’s the hardest. Harder than the heart, the kidneys, etcetera. It’s dense, heavily celled, firm. Understand?”
“I think so.”
Hatton punctured the ovary’s germinus with the scalpel. Globs of reddish gray mush oozed from the puncture. “See, see?” he said. “It’s almost liquefied, just like the testes on the other horse. But they’re not supposed to be like this. They should still be firm.”
“They’re decomposed,” Lydia ventured.
“No, no, no!” Hatton snapped. “There wasn’t time. The things hadn’t been dead twelve hours before we got them cooled down; they were still in rigor. These organs could not possibly decompose to this consistency in twelve hours under any condition.”
“Maybe it’s a disease, cancer or something.”
“Cancer! In every single animal, at the same time? That’s not how it works.” He washed his hands at a metal sink then shook them dry against the wall, disgusted. “I’m supposed to be the expert here. Shit. My people are going to want an explanation and I can’t give them one. I don’t know anything more than I did the minute we pulled in.”
Now Lydia understood why he’d been stonewalling. He was a preposterous sight, a grown man sitting dejected in a gore-splattered raincoat, hood, and face-shield. “How can you determine that the agro site is safe to reoccupy if you don’t know what killed the animals?”
“State protocol,” he said, shrugging. “We simply followed the standard legal procedures. The bloodwork all came back negative, which satisfied the state quarantine criteria. We screened for everything and found nothing; I had lab couriers coming in and out of here day and night. We exhausted every standard detection test. There were no mold toxins in the feed, no poisons, no bacteria, and there was nothing wrong with the water. We even ran tests on the grass, the soil, the water table. Nothing.”