“You're positive you've done all this before, you know how it works?”
“We've kept him alive for a year. I've had him for eighteen years. He's a brave old tom. I don't know what I'd do without him.”
The assistant shook her head, dubious but sympathetic. “I could get in trouble.”
Kaye felt no guilt whatsoever. If she had had a gun, she would have held them up, right now, for everything she needed. “I wouldn't want that,” she said, staring right at the woman.
The assistant waggled her head. “What the hell,” she said. “Old cats. Pain in the butt, huh?”
“You know it,” Kaye said.
“And it's not like we're in the big city. Five liters Ringer's, two hundred mils equine picornavene—that's the smallest we've got—and the Depo-Medrol—” Betsy picked up the printed list. “Credit or debit?”
“Cash,” Kaye said.
39
OHIO
Yolanda Middleton followed Dicken through the school trailers to the old farm buildings. She caught up with him easily and shook out a ring of keys. “We ransacked Trask's office,” she said. “Found master keys to all the buildings. There's a tag from when this was a prison. Some of the nurses say there could still be supplies out here, but nobody knows.”
“Great. Did Kelson ever come out here?”
“I don't think so. This was Dr. Jurie's lab,” Middleton said. “Dr. Pickman was his assistant. Both were authorized to do research. They stayed away from the rest of us.”
“What sort of research?” Dicken asked.
Middleton shook her head.
Dicken stood on the asphalt path and tapped his shoe lightly on the curb, thinking. He looked over his shoulder at the converted barn, the old business education building, and the three blank-faced concrete cubes between. Then he set off. Middleton followed.
A double steel door marked one side of the closest cube. This was labeled “no admittance” in white letters on the door's blue enamel.
“What's in here?”
“Well, among other things, a temporary morgue,” she said. “That's what they told me. I don't know that it was ever used.”
“Why here?”
“Dr. Jurie told us we had to keep the bodies of any children who died. The county coroner wouldn't take them, even though she was supposed to.”
“Were the parents notified?”
“We tried,” Middleton said. “Sometimes they move without giving any forwarding address. They just leave the children behind.”
“Is there a graveyard for the school?”
“Not that I ever heard of. Honestly, Dr. Jurie took care of all that.” Middleton looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We assumed they went to a potter's field somewhere outside of town. There weren't that many, really. Two or three, maybe, since the school opened, and only one since I've been here. Trask didn't let word about deaths circulate very far. He called it a private matter.”
Dicken rubbed his fingers together. “Key?”
Middleton looked for a newer key on the ring, and held one up for his inspection. It was labeled R1-F, F for Front, presumably— and R for what, Research?They agreed with a look that this was the best choice. As she pushed the key into the lock, Dicken turned his gaze up the face of concrete, pale gray in the morning light. He narrowed his eye, as he had learned over the years, to help the fogged lens focus on the vent covers near the top, a few pipes sticking out, a thick power line going to a pole and across to the junction box near the old barn.
Middleton pulled the door open. Inside, it was cool enough to make him shiver.
“The air-conditioner works here, at least,” he said.
“It's separate from the main plant,” Middleton said. “This building's newer than the rest.”
Dicken took a deep breath. He felt as if he were on a wild goose chase. There might be medicine in these buildings, but he doubted it. More likely they would find laboratory supplies—unless Trask had conspired with the doctors to sell those, too. Still, the lab might be better equipped than the small medical facility adjacent to the infirmary. But these were just excuses.
Something else was bringing him here, an instinctive suspicion that had come to him as he walked among the cots in the special treatment center. We're curious monkeys,he thought. We never miss opportunities.
He found a light switch on the wall inside the door and pushed it. Fluorescents bathed the interior in a cool, sterile glow. The north wall of the room was covered by stainless steel refrigerators, huge lab units equipped with tiny blue temperature displays. Expensive, and very unlike the small, hump-shouldered units outside the infirmary.
“When did Jurie and Pickman leave?” he asked.
“I'm not sure.”
“Did they take anything?”
Middleton shrugged. “I didn't see them go. I can't be everywhere.”
“Of course not,” Dicken said. The mask itched. He reached up to rub his nose, then thought better of it.
“How long will this take?” Middleton asked.
Dicken ignored her. The refrigerators were locked and equipped with push-button keypads. He ran his fingers across one of the pads and shook his head.
Middleton found a key on the ring that opened the door across the room. This led to a small pathology lab with a single steel autopsy table, shining clean. All the tools lay neatly in their trays or in cabinets along the far wall. Some tools had been left in an autoclave, but otherwise the lab was beautifully organized and maintained.
“When was the last autopsy conducted here?” Dicken asked.
“I don't think there have ever been any,” Middleton said. “I haven't heard of any, at least. Wouldn't we have to get permission from the county?”
“Not if they refuse responsibility. Maybe Mark will know.” But he was beginning to doubt that Augustine knew anything. It was beginning to look as if his old CDC boss, the putative director of Emergency Action, had finally been hamstrung—perhaps castrated was the better word—by the political wolves in Washington.
Down a short hall and to the right, they came upon the unexpected mother lode: a fully equipped molecular biology and genetics lab, six hundred square feet of space under a high ceiling, crammed with equipment. Tissue centrifuge sorters provided specimen flow to racked analyzers—matrix and variable-probe sequencers specializing in polynucleotides, RNAs and DNAs; proteomizers capable of discerning complete complements of proteins; glycome and lipidome units for isolating and labeling sugars and fats and related compounds. More racks stood at the ends of broad steel lab benches.
The sorter and analyzers were connected by steel and white plastic automated specimen tracks, running like a little railroad through diffraction molecular imagers, inoculator/incubators, and a variety of video microscopes—including two up-to-the-minute carbon force counters. All magnificently automated. A one- or at most two-person lab.
Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of three-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification.
There was more than a wealth of equipment here: What Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn't have been able to compete.
“Wow,” Dicken said in awe. “This is the whole damned Delta Queen.”
Middleton raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing.” He walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north—to its sleeping, glacial form.
If no one else was willing to do it, he was sure he could do it all by himself, right here, and screw the unreasoning outside world. With the help of a few manuals.Some of this equipment he had seen only in catalogs.