“We believe these contaminations were intentional,” Boldt said. “You understand the need for confidentiality.”
“Exactly what the hell are you saying?”
“Product tampering-food product tampering. It was a can of soup. Chicken soup.”
“Protein base,” Mann mumbled, nodding. And then to explain himself, “The cholera needs a protein base to survive. Soup would provide that.” He rubbed his eyes. “What’s this world coming to?”
Boldt was thinking that this man could be the bastard behind it all. His lab. His cholera. Why not? Except that Dixie swore by Mann, and that was good enough for Boldt.
“How many have access to the cholera? To the lab?” he questioned.
“Too many,” Mann said. “Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
“Anything?”
“Tea would be nice.”
“Give me a minute, will you? I pulled some stuff for you to read.” He stood. Boldt called out, “No cream. No sugar.”
“Be right back.”
A lot of what Boldt read was over his head, but some was not. He was distracted, in part by the fact that this was a children’s research hospital. In the last forty-eight hours, he had seen precious little of his boy. Liz, too, for that matter. When he was away from Miles for too long, he missed him in a way that until the boy’s birth he had never experienced, and would never have expected. It was a chemical longing, like an addict after his fix.
“Make any sense of that?” Mann asked, setting down Boldt’s tea in a Styrofoam cup. Liz would not drink out of Styrofoam cups anymore.
The tea tasted terrible, but Boldt choked it down for the caffeine. “If I’m the person doing this, why do I choose cholera?”
Dr. Mann considered this a long time. When he finally spoke, it was cautiously, a man unfamiliar and uncomfortable with being inside the mind of a stranger. “It depends on what you hope to accomplish. I would guess he considered three choices-a poison, a viral contaminate, a bacterial contaminate. The toxins, the poisons-strychnine, or something like what we saw in the Sudafed product tampering-can and will be immediately detected in the blood of the victim. If you’re just looking to kill a few people, then that’s the poison of choice, I would think. Most of your other choices, if you’re talking food products, will give themselves away, either by producing a gas you can smell or a taste that warns you immediately what you’re into. Also, all of the more common of these would be immediately detected in the state lab. If it was me, I too would choose cholera if available. What’s interesting about cholera is that labs around here once tested for it, but many don’t any longer. This gets political, I’m afraid; this enters into health care and insurance costs, and believe me, you don’t want to get me started. But the point is, this is the exact area where reduced health care costs are felt. The lab has to cut something and they cut right here. We see virtually no cholera up here. Dropping that test is justifiable at every level of bureaucracy. Don’t tell that to these two kids, mind you.”
“You’d miss the cholera. Is that what you’re saying?”
“It would take longer to type-which is what happened. If I wanted to make a few people real sick, if I wanted to use something that would take awhile to detect, confuse the authorities, then I’d look to something like this strain of cholera.”
“A scare technique?” Boldt took out his notebook and pen.
“Could be.” Mann tasted his coffee. He grimaced, but drank it. “Is it?”
Boldt did not answer.
“Make this company look bad?” Mann glanced up. Again, Boldt did not answer. “Which company? Or can’t you say?”
“Adler Foods,” Boldt answered. He wrote the product-run number on a page of his notepad, tore it out, and handed it to Mann. “They’re clearing the shelves of this product-run number as we speak. The number will be announced on the news tonight, and in the papers for the next couple of days. At this point the public won’t be told exactly why there’s a recall.”
“Why not tell them?”
“The individual has warned against police involvement. And there’s also a concern about copycats. It’s the biggest risk with product tampering. We want to keep the actual tampering, the connection to these kids, out of the press just as long as possible. A lot more people are at risk if we don’t. We know that. In a British food-tampering case, after word of the contamination hit the press, police faced fourteen hundred reports of similar tamperings.”
Mann winced. “Fourteen hundred?”
The two men shared an uncomfortable silence. “You won’t hear it from me,” Mann said. Boldt looked out the window at the crowded sea of houses. How many cans of contaminated soup might they miss? How many were sitting in a kitchen pantry ready to go off like time bombs?
“I’ll need the names of everyone who has access to the lab,” Boldt informed him.
“One of my people?” Mann asked defensively. “That strain is marked clear as day.”
“But a person can’t just walk in and take it,” Boldt suggested.
“Why not?”
“You’re kidding, I hope.”
“Not a bit. This is a university lab. Dozens of people pass through every day, many of them complete strangers to one another. Students. Grad students. Researchers. We get visitors from all over the world. Every walk of life. Every look you can imagine. It’s a teaching hospital. Men, women, young, old, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, African, Middle Eastern, you name it. Every week of the year. Sometimes there are a half-dozen techs working in that lab, sometimes one or even none.”
“Just walk in and take it?” Boldt asked, astonished.
“If you know what you’re looking for.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Try it.”
“What?”
“Go ahead and try it.” Mann pushed back his chair and came to his feet. He eyed Boldt as would a haberdasher. “Not bad. That’s the look you need: the run-down professor thing. I’m telling you, just go ahead and try it.” The doctor clearly said this as his chance to remove his lab workers from suspicion.
He grabbed his lab coat from a hook on the back of the door and offered it to Boldt, and Boldt put it on. It was a little snug. Mann said, “If you look like you know what you’re doing, you’re in. Confidence is everything. It’s in a half-size refrigerator on the right. If I’m your man, I go in at lunchtime, because the place is deserted at lunch. It’s a little late for that-but that’s all the better for your test. Straight to the fridge. You’re looking for a petri dish.” He scrambled and found an empty dish by the computer that was filled with paper clips. “Like this, but containing a tan gelatin with florid spots. You’re looking for one marked cholera or V. cholerae, INABA strain, and a number.
“Anyone asks you a question, you say you’re working the third floor. You’re looking for some vibrio cholera. You watch: They’ll hand it to you if you’re polite.”
“I gotta see this,” Boldt said.
“Out through this lab, down the hall, first door on your right.”
By the time Boldt was in the hall, he could once again feel himself as the would-be thief. With each step he felt a little more nervous. There were three people perched on metal stools working at the lab counter. Wearing goggles and plastic gloves, they appeared focused on their work. The place was littered with hundreds of glass flasks, plastic petri dishes, test tubes, and other lab equipment. A mess. He headed directly to the small refrigerator, stooped, and pulled open the door. No one said a word. He caught himself expecting it, but it never happened. The refrigerator shelves were crammed with petri dishes. He picked one up, inspected it, and dropped it as it came apart.
The woman nearest him glanced over at him. An attractive Asian woman in her midtwenties. She smiled at him and returned to her work. He returned the fallen dish and sorted through the others. Way in the back he found it, marked with a black grease pen: V cholerae-395. He took it, shut the refrigerator door, and walked out.