On the drive from the airport to the NIH campus, Tighe had briefed her on the events of the past day. Richard Bragg had been shot seven times in the torso and head while leaving his house in Berkeley and had been declared dead at the scene. Two suspects had been arrested, both male, both husbands of women carrying first-stage Herod’s babies. The men had been captured a few blocks away, drunk, their car packed with empty cans of beer.
The Secret Service, on orders from the president, had been assigned to protect key members of the Taskforce.
The mother of the first full-term, second-stage infant born in North America, known as Mrs. C., was still in a hospital in Mexico City. She had emigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in 1996; she had worked for a relief agency in Azerbaijan between 1990 and 1993. She was currently being treated for shock and what the first medical reports described as an acute case of seborrhea on her face.
The dead infant was being shipped from Mexico City to Atlanta and would arrive tomorrow morning.
Luella Hamilton had just finished a light lunch and was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out over a small garden and the windowless corner of another building. She shared a room with another mother who was down the hall in an examination room. There were now eight mothers in the Task-force study.
“I lost my baby,” Mrs. Hamilton told Kaye as she walked in. Kaye stepped around the bed and hugged her. She returned Kaye’s embrace with strong hands and arms and a little moan.
Tighe stood with arms folded near the door. “She just slipped out one night.” Mrs. Hamilton held her eyes steady on Kaye’s. “I hardly felt her. My legs were wet. Just a little blood. They had a monitor on my stomach and the little alarm started to beep. I woke up and the nurses were there and they put up a tent. They didn’t show her to me. A minister came in, Reverend Ackerley, from my church, she was right there for me, wasn’t that nice?” “I’m so sorry,” Kaye said.
“The reverend told me about that other woman, in Mexico, with her second baby…”
Kaye shook her head in sympathy. “I am so scared, Kaye.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I was in San Diego and I didn’t know you had rejected.”
“Well, it’s not like you’re my doctor, is it?” “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. And the others.” Kaye smiled. “But mostly you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a strong black woman, and we make an impression.” Mrs. Hamilton did not smile as she said this. Her expression was drawn, her skin verging on olive. “I talked to my husband on the telephone. He’s coming by today and we’ll see each other, but we’ll be separated by glass. They told me they’d let me go after the baby was born. But now they say they want to keep me here. They tell me I’m going to be pregnant again. They know it’s coming. My own little baby Jesus. How can the world get along with millions of little baby Jesuses?” She started to cry. “I haven’t been with my husband or anyone else! I swear!”
Kaye held her hand tightly. “This is so difficult,” she said. “I want to help, but my family, they’re having a hard time.
My husband is half crazy, Kaye. They could run this damned railroad so much better.” She stared out the window, held on to Kaye’s hand tightly, then waved it gently back and forth, as if listening to some inner music. “You’ve had some time to think. Tell me what’s happening?”
Kaye fixed her eyes on Mrs. Hamilton and tried to think of something to say. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” she finally managed. “It’s a challenge.”
“From God?” Mrs. Hamilton asked.
“From inside,” Kaye said.
“If it’s from God, all the little Jesuses are going to die except one, then,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “That’s not good odds for me.”
“I hate myself,” Kaye said as Tighe escorted her to Dr. Lipton’s office.
“Why?” Tighe said.
“I wasn’t here.”
“You can’t be everywhere.”
Lipton was in a meeting, but interrupted it long enough to talk with Kaye. They went to a side office filled with filing cabinets and a computer.
“We did scans last night and checked out her hormone levels. She was almost hysterical. The miscarriage didn’t hurt much if at all. I think she wanted it to hurt more. She had a classic Herod’s fetus.”
Lipton held up a series of photographs. “If this is a disease, it’s a damned organized disease,” she said. “The pseudo-placenta is not very different from a normal placenta, except that it’s much reduced. The amnion is something else, however.” Lipton pointed to a process curled on one side of the shrunken shriveled amnion, which had been expelled with the placenta. “I don’t know what you’d call it, unless it’s a little fallopian tube.”
“And the other women in the study?”
“Two should reject within a few days, the rest over the next two weeks. I’ve brought in ministers, a rabbi, psychiatrists, even their friends — as long as they’re female. The mothers are deeply unhappy. No surprises there. But they’ve agreed to stay with the program.”
“No male contact?”
“Not from any male past puberty,” Lipton said. “By order of Mark Augustine, co-signed by Frank Shawbeck. Some of the families are sick of this treatment. I don’t blame them.”
“Any rich women staying here?” Kaye asked, deadpan.
“No,” Lipton said. She chuckled humorlessly. “Need you even ask?”
“Are you married, Dr. Lipton?” Kaye said.
“Divorced six months ago. And you?”
“A widow,” Kaye said.
“We’re the lucky ones, then,” Lipton said.
Tighe tapped her watch. Lipton glanced between them. “Sorry to be keeping you,” the doctor said sharply. “My people are waiting, too.”
Kaye held up the photographs of the pseudo-placenta and amniotic sac. “What do you mean when you say this is a terribly organized disease?”
Lipton leaned on the top of a filing cabinet. “I’ve dealt with rumors and lesions and buboes and warts and all the other little horrors diseases can build in our bodies. There’s organization, to be sure. Rearranging the blood flow, subverting cells. Sucking greed. But this amniotic sac is a highly specialized organ, different from any I’ve ever studied.”
“It’s not a product of disease, in your opinion?”
“I didn’t say that. The results are distortion, pain, suffering, and miscarriage. The infant in Mexico…” Lipton shook her head. “I won’t waste my time by characterizing this as anything else. It’s a new disease, a hideously inventive one, that’s all.”
46
Atlanta
Dicken climbed the gentle slope from the parking garage on Clifton Way, glancing up with a squint at clear skies with low fat-bellied puffs of cloud. He hoped the fresh cool air would clear his head.
Dicken had returned to Atlanta the night before and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and holed up in his house, drinking until four in the morning. Walking from the living room to the bathroom, he had stumbled over a pile of textbooks, slammed his shoulder against a wall, and fallen to the floor. His shoulder and leg were bruised and sore, and his back felt as if he had been kicked, but he could walk and he was pretty sure he did not have to go to the hospital.
Still, his arm hung half-bent, and his face was ashen. His head hurt from the whiskey. His stomach hurt from not eating breakfast. And in his soul he felt like shit, confused and angry at just about everything, but mainly angry at himself.
The memory of the intellectual jam session at the San Diego Zoo felt like a burning brand. The presence of Mitch Rafelson, a loose cannon, saying little substantive but still seeming to guide the conversation, at once challenging their sophomoric theories and spurring them on; Kaye Lang, lovelier than he had ever seen her before, almost radiant, with her patented look of puzzled concentration and no goddamned interest in Dicken beyond the professional.