“It’s a tissue library,” Dicken said. “Healthy tissue, pathological specimens, whatever they could get. There’s a fully equipped laboratory for analyzing them. Jurie and Pickman autopsied all the children who died at this school, and all the schools in this region. I presume they were bringing the dead here from wherever they could get them,” Dicken said. “A central clearing house for cadavers.”
“Cross paid for the equipment?” Augustine asked. His demeanor was so quiet, his expression so utterly devastated, that Dicken pushed back his anger.
“Americol,” he said.
“Mm hm,” Augustine said. He took the list of codes from Middleton and unlocked and examined the next three doors. Two contained the by now familiar stacked trays of specimens. The last contained five cadavers, wrapped in transparent plastic, suspended by hooks and slings from rails at the top of the compartment.
“My God,” DeWitt said.
“I should have known,” Augustine murmured. “That’s certain. I should have known.”
Middleton approached the open compartment. “Autopsies would be standard, wouldn’t they? Is that what we’re looking at, a pathology study being done on behalf of the students, to protect them?”
“No,” Augustine said abruptly. “No studies were ever passed up to Washington, and I doubt they were even sent to the Ohio Central authority, or I would have heard of it. Before this week began, a total of three hundred and seventy-nine children in custody of the schools have died. Very low mortality, statistically speaking. Many of them are probably here. They were supposed to be returned to their families or buried if left unclaimed.” Augustine closed the door. “I did not authorize this.”
Dicken stepped forward. “Was there any value to the children in doing this… research?”
“I don’t know,” Augustine said. “Possibly. Doubtful, however. Anatomically, the children are so much like us that storage of organs or whole cadavers for research never seemed strictly necessary. Biopsies and specific tissue samples from the dead were all I ever authorized. You would have done the same.”
Dicken admitted this with a quick nod.
“This implies some sort of large-scale morbidity study. Whole body assessments, thousands of tissue analyses… I need to sit down.”
DeWitt brought a chair. Augustine slumped into it and leaned forward, shaking his head. “I’m trying to make sense of it,” he said.
“Try harder,” Dicken urged.
“I know of no reason other than retrovirus expression,” Augustine said. “Tracking expression of novel HERV in the new children. A statistical sampling of expression in dozens or hundreds of individuals, correlated with known biographies, stress patterns. That would require an unprecedented effort. Monumental.”
“To what end?”
“It could be an attempt to understand the whole process. What the ancient viruses are up to. What dangers they might present.”
“To predict incidence of Shiver?” Dicken asked. “That’s being done elsewhere. Why do it here, unauthorized?”
“Because nowhere else do they have access to so many new children, dead or alive,” Augustine said.
“This is making me sick,” DeWitt said, and leaned on the small desk, pushing aside the folder.
Augustine looked up at Dicken. “I’m not the puppet master, Christopher. They broke me in the ranks months ago. I’ve been trying to keep whatever responsibility was left to me in order to maintain some sense of order.” He waved his arm feebly at the stainless steel doors. “People died, Christopher.”
“That’s what Marian Freedman said, last time I visited Fort Detrick. Some excuse. Anything goes. You’re not the bad guy here?” Dicken asked.
“Were they bad guys, really?” Augustine asked. “Do we know that?”
“What about the parents?” DeWitt asked.
“Sentiment must be considered,” Augustine said. “Medical ethics should prevail even in an emergency. But we’ve never faced this kind of problem before.”
Dicken took Augustine’s arm and lifted him to his feet. “One last bit of evidence,” he said.
Augustine walked slowly through the benches in the molecular biology lab, taking in the collection of expensive machinery with impassivity, long past the possibility of surprise. Dicken opened the hatch at the back of the lab and switched on the fluorescent lights, revealing a long, narrow room. All hesitated before entering.
Steel shelves reaching to the ceiling held hundreds of long cardboard boxes. Dicken pulled out one and opened the hinged lid. Within were bones: femurs, tagged and arranged according to size. Another box held phalanges. Bigger boxes on the lower right, none more than four feet in length, held complete skeletons.
Augustine leaned against the edge of the frame. “There’s nothing I can do here,” he said. “Nothing any of us can do.”
“This isn’t all,” Dicken said. “There’s an upper floor. It’s still locked.”
“What do you think they keep up there?” DeWitt asked, her face ashen.
“No excuses, Christopher,” Augustine said. “We should not forget this, but what in hell does anger do for us, now? For the sick children?”
“Not a goddamned thing,” Dicken admitted. “Let’s go.”
44
THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA
Eleven in the morning, the dashboard display said. Mitch looked left on the two-lane asphalt road and saw, about a hundred feet ahead, the red plastic strip hanging on a big old pine. He slowed and rolled down the window.
The signpost was still standing, though it had been knocked askew. The wooden plaque read:
Mitch got out, unlocked the pipe, and pushed it back through its iron hoop. He took the plaque down from the signpost and stashed it in the back of the Jeep.
The cabin was made of whole stripped logs just beginning to gray with exposure. It sat on the shore of a private half-acre lake, alone in the pines. The air was scented by pine needles and dry dirt. Mitch could smell the moisture from the lake, the greenness of shallows filled with reeds. Sunlight slanted down through the trees onto the Jeep, illuminating Kaye in the backseat.
Mitch walked up onto the porch, his heavy shoes clomping on the wood. He unlocked the door, deactivated the burglar alarm with the six-number code, then returned to the Jeep.
Kaye was already halfway up the walk from the driveway, carrying Stella.
“Get a bag of Ringer’s and set up an IV,” she said. “A lamp hook, flowerpot hook, anything. I’ll spread some blankets.” She carried Stella into the cabin. The air inside was cool and sweetly stuffy.
Mitch spread a sleeping bag on the floor behind a big leather couch and took down an empty hanging pot, then slung the bag of Ringer’s solution, inserted the long, clear plastic tube into the bag, opened the butterfly clamp, let the clear fluid push through the tube and drip from the needle. Kaye lay Stella on the bag, tapped her arm to bring up a vein, poked in the needle, strapped it to the girl’s arm with medical tape.
Stella could barely move.
“She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, kneeling beside her daughter.
Mitch looked down on them both, hands opening and closing helplessly. “In a better world,” he said.
“There is no goddamned better world,” Kaye said. “Never has been, never will be. There’s just ‘suffer the little children.’”
“That’s not what that means,” Mitch said.