He heard some key punches, then, “Yes, sir. That’s what it — oh wait, no…that person only went to the eighth floor.”
“How do you know?”
“On nights and weekends the elevator returns to the lobby between calls. If that person stopped on the second floor, there’d be a separate entry, a later entry, showing them calling the elevator to the second floor and pushing eight. But that’s not what it says here. It shows that employee entering the building, then pressing both numbers one minute later. The only other entry shows ’em leaving from the eighth floor. That person never got out on the second floor. Musta pressed a wrong number when they first got in the elevator.”
The guard’s explanation didn’t satisfy Barnesdale. Those push buttons, 2 and 8, were probably spaced several inches apart. It seemed unlikely that anyone would miss the button by that distance.
“I want the names of all three employees who accessed the second floor. Can you pull up those names using their badge numbers?”
“Sure. I have to get into another database. Give me a second to write down their ID numbers.”
As he waited, Barnesdale asked, “Do we have a security camera at the Research Tower?”
“Every building has ’em. The tower has just one. It’s in the lobby.” There were more keystrokes, then, “Okay, I have the employee names here. They’re in numerical order. The first badge — number 14793—belongs to Bryant, Susan.”
Barnesdale knew the name. She worked in Pathology. She was the first number on his list, and had entered the building at 11:43 on Friday night. Likely, she was the one who carried the dead boy’s bone marrow to the fourth-floor lab.
“Let’s see here,” the guard said. “The next is badge number is 35976. That’d be Adler, Michael.”
“Who’s he?”
“It says here that he works in Hematology-Oncology. One of their lab technicians.”
His badge number matched the third entry on Barnesdale’s screen. Adler had entered the building Saturday morning at nine-seventeen and stayed most of day — probably the tech who was called in to prepare Josue Chaca’s bone marrow slides.
“That leaves badge number 57943,” the guard said while punching some keys. “That badge belongs to a doctor — Dr. Elmer McKenna.”
Megan reached under her hammock, felt around in the darkness and grabbed one of her trail shoes, then hurled it at the seismic rumble coming from Joe Whalen’s corner of the hut.
She heard her shoe slide off the mosquito netting hanging over his hammock. A second later he erupted in another convulsive snore. How were Eddie and Steve sleeping through this?
She lunged at her ankles and scratched with a fury. She’d been skirmishing all night with gangs of Guatemalan fleas. Chloroquine tablets — protection against malaria — and mosquito repellent had seemed like a better idea than netting when she was packing for her trip, but no one had warned her about the fleas.
Eddie had taken most of the afternoon convincing the village elders to allow her group to stay the night. The result was a decrepit structure near the meeting hall, a late afternoon meal of corn tortillas and lukewarm chicken broth, and an admonition to stay away from the residents of Ticar Norte.
The admonishment had come after her encounter with Josue Chaca’s mother. Megan had approached the woman, but each time she stepped closer to the small hut, the woman had retreated farther into its interior, eventually positioning herself behind a phalanx of other women.
Megan soon learned the reason. Josue Chaca was the angry spirit, and his mother blamed the gringo doctors for “melting his body.” Whatever that meant, she knew it was the reason she and her colleagues had received such a cool reception when they arrived at the village.
Later, Eddie told them that Josue’s father had died several months earlier from mal de ojo—the evil eye.
“It’s a catchall,” Steve had explained. “A name the locals put on any illness they can’t explain.”
According to Eddie, the father’s death also explained why Josue’s mother had come back to the village where she was born, rather than Mayakital, after returning from the United States.
A dog yelped in the distance. Megan lurched up, threw her legs over the side of the hammock, and groped for her backpack. She was done sleeping for the night.
Three minutes later she was standing outside in the night air. There was no moon, but the sky was teeming with stars. A warm, noiseless breeze passed through her hair. The only sound was a distant hum of insects.
She swept her flashlight in wide arcs and walked to the edge of a plateau, then aimed the light downslope at a collection of huts, to the right of which stood the one holding Josue Chaca’s angry spirit. She edged down the slope, toeing the ground in front of her with mincing steps.
A gust of wind noisily flapped the sleeves of her nylon jacket. She switched off the light and stood perfectly still, her face tightening into a knot of contracted muscles as she listened for movement in the nearby huts.
Nothing.
Megan relaxed her eyes and allowed the slivers of reflected starlight to wash onto her retinas. Eventually, the dark outline of a doorway emerged.
She held her palm over the flashlight and turned it on, letting a few strands of light spill through her fingers. Just to the right of the open entry, there were several cobs of corn stacked neatly next to a bowl that held several pieces of chicken. Flies swarmed over the meat.
The hut was empty except for a ceramic water jug sitting in the middle of the dirt floor. It was a glazed vessel, bright purple, and it glistened when the light shone on it.
A minute later she was inside, looking down the neck of the carafe. It was filled with…dirt?
As she studied the bone-dry substance, its dust-like granularity and grayish color emerged.
The gringo doctors melted his body.
She wasn’t looking into a carafe. It was an urn filled with Josue Chaca’s ashes.
She sat down next to the boy’s remains and wondered who had cremated his body. Judging from the mood of the villagers, and the mother’s reaction to her visit, they certainly had not wanted it done. The coroner? If the medical examiners had discovered something they had needed to destroy, the information would have found its way back to the clinic, and to Paul Delgado. Steve Dalton would have known about this. It didn’t make any sense.
When she crawled out of the hut, Megan was no closer to an answer.
She remained lost in her thoughts as she started back up the hill. Eventually her mind nudged her. The slope hadn’t leveled off. She already should have reached the top of the hill. She painted a semicircle with her light. The hilltop was to her right, twenty feet upslope. Rather than ascending the hill, she had followed the slope around to the other side of the village.
Her bladder reminded her that she was going to miss indoor plumbing for the next several days. If she did nothing about it, the uncomfortable stretch would command her attention until sunrise, when she’d probably have to do a half-mile march into the jungle if she wanted any privacy.
Her flashlight found a path to the left, but fear competed with her full bladder. She conjured images of wet, slippery creatures lurking out there, lying in wait. Then she imagined stooping near a trail in broad daylight just as a troupe of teenage boys happened along.
Megan started down the path. Almost immediately the overgrowth formed a low canopy above her head. She felt closed in, as if in a tunnel. Gangly fronds caught the flashlight’s beam, and disorienting fragments of light bounced back at her.
She had gone about twenty yards down the path when she heard a sound to her right.