But who?
“C’mon, talk to me.” Ben was sitting over the microscope in his study at home. He grabbed an eyebrow and started twirling.
It was already six-fifteen and he needed to get to the office, but he couldn’t let it go. He had spent most of the night poring over nearly one hundred slides from the Jane Doe case and still couldn’t match the pattern of what he was seeing to any known disease.
He picked up the last folder. It contained just three slides — the only slides produced in his lab — one each of the girl’s lungs, pancreas, and bile ducts. He took the first slide from the cardboard jacket, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed it between his fingers as if hoping that a genie would appear with some answers.
He agreed with most of Jay Whatchamacallit’s findings. The girl’s smaller airways, pancreatic glands, and bile ducts were decimated, while adjacent tissues were virtually untouched. The damage was selective and precise. Whatever had caused her death was an exquisitely orchestrated process.
But the M.E. had missed at least one finding — damage to the girl’s ovaries. It was subtle. In fact, the gross structure of the ovaries was almost entirely normal. Only when Ben examined them under higher magnification did he find that the oocytes were severely depleted. There were very few eggs. An overworked M.E. could easily have overlooked it or assumed that it had nothing to do with the girl’s death.
Ben also wanted to write it off as unrelated to the cause of death — he already had enough puzzles to solve — but there were a few things that tugged at his curiosity. There were too many lymphocytes in the ovaries; not nearly as many as he had found in the most heavily damaged tissues, but more than he could explain. And unlike the lungs, pancreas, and bile ducts, there were almost no cells undergoing destruction at the moment of Jane Doe’s death. Whatever had damaged her ovaries had occurred sometime before she died.
What was the connection between this case and Josue Chaca? Ben couldn’t let go of the conspicuous similarities — the pattern and precision of the tissue destruction in both cases was unlike anything he had ever seen. But then there was the glaring inconsistency between the cases, too. Adam Smith, a damned good oncologist, had been certain that the boy had leukemia. After reviewing Jane Doe’s bone marrow slides, Ben was just as certain that the girl did not.
He tapped the slide against his palm, then slipped it onto the microscope tray and leaned over the eyepiece. It was a section of Jane Doe’s lung tissue that his lab had stained with an immunofluorescent dye, which selectively bound to Killer T-cells. After hearing Elmer describe how his prototype flu vaccine had caused the toxic reaction in those lab mice, Ben had decided to try the special staining on a hunch. He didn’t like being reduced to hunches, but then, he had very few leads to pursue.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
The slide fluoresced brightly. The lung tissues were bathed in Killer T-cells.
Apoptosis. Unlike other forms of cell destruction, which were messy and chaotic, apoptosis was an exceptionally tidy process that left almost no residue. The cells lining the airways were simply gone, having surrendered to the girl’s immune system, which had marked them for death.
But this wasn’t anything like the normal process of apoptosis, which was subtle and restrained. This was suicide on a massive scale.
Ben suddenly wanted to know more about Elmer’s misadventure with the mice — and a whole lot more about Zenavax’s vaccines.
He grabbed the other two slides from his folder, sections of the girl’s pancreas and bile ducts that had been stained with the same immunofluorescent dye.
Again the slides shone brightly with Killer T-cells. As in the lungs, the destruction was precise and devastatingly complete.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
Something had caused the girl’s own immune system to attack these tissues. The question was, what? Every new piece of this puzzle added another question, another mystery. Now, at least, he had a trail to follow.
As he reached for the phone to call Luke, his beeper vibrated.
It was Caleb Fagan’s office number.
Ben wasn’t expecting any pages; one of the other pathologists was on call. Maybe Caleb was contacting him with the test results. Ben had sent a sample of Jane Doe’s lung tissue to Caleb’s lab for some specialized lymphocyte testing.
He reached for the phone and dialed Caleb’s office.
While Luke’s concerns about Barnesdale had seemed a bit overdone at the time, Ben had gone along with the secretive approach, labeling the transmittal slip with an alias and fabricating some fiction about a research project when he’d spoken with Caleb.
Ben had done the same with the tissue he sent to Genetics for chromosome analysis. He wanted to know whether the girl had cystic fibrosis, even though he wasn’t sure how that information would help him solve this puzzle.
“Looks like you’re up with the roosters,” Ben said when Caleb answered.
“Sorry for paging you so early, but I’ve got a lot on my plate today. Maybe you heard — our clinic in Guatemala burnt to the ground. Night before last.”
“No, I didn’t. How’d it happen?”
“I don’t know yet. But look, that’s not why I paged you. I need you to send me another slice of tissue for those lymphocyte studies. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but my usually crack team managed to lose the tissue.”
Ben could hear the irritation in Caleb’s voice, and decided not to probe. “I’ll get another sample up to your lab this morning.”
As soon as Caleb hung up, Ben dialed his lab. He needed to call his chief technician anyway, to discuss the additional slides she was preparing from Jane Doe’s tissues. Some of the special stains he had asked for were no longer relevant — not after what he’d just seen on those two slides. More importantly, a number of tissue-staining techniques he now wanted done weren’t on the to-do list.
His technician answered on the fourth ring. “Margie, listen, I need you to—”
“Dr. Wilson, I was waiting for you to get here. I need to explain — I don’t know how it happened. Oh, God, I just can’t believe this happened.”
“Slow down, Margie. Take a breath and tell me what you’re talking about.”
“The paraffin blocks — all of the organ tissues for that Jane Doe case. We incinerated them.”
“What?”
“I really messed up here, Dr. Wilson. I don’t know how, but I must’ve put them near the stack marked as biological waste. The night shift destroyed all of it. They said it was sitting with all the other stuff that was marked for incineration. I just can’t believe I would’ve done something like that. I just can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I.”
30
Luke was dialing Ben’s home phone number when someone knocked loudly on his front door. He hung up and grabbed Kate’s photograph from beside the phone.
When he opened the door, Lieutenant Groff was standing on the other side of the threshold holding up a wad of folded papers.
“We have a warrant to search these premises,” he said. “Please step outside.”
Luke looked past the lieutenant at three plainclothes detectives with shields dangling from their neck chains. They were lined up in a tight single-file formation on his stairway. All of them wore latex gloves, including Detective O’Reilly, who was at the end of the column, eyeing him.
Two uniformed cops stood at the end of his driveway under the wash of a street lamp. It was 6:29 A.M. and the city was still dark.
“Can I put on some clothes?” Luke was wearing a T-shirt and scrub pants, and his feet were bare.
“No.”