Ten or fifteen more minutes passed. She estimated that she had been at Fort Detrick for almost an hour, maybe an hour and a half. With no windows and a broken watch, it was impossible to judge.
Then the door opened and Admiral Zoll, the two Captains, and Colonel Chittick returned to the room and again sat down. All of them unwittingly placed their shiny shoes under the table in Stacy's urine, which had puddled there.
"Okay," the Admiral said, "we just verified that somebody probably snuck into our primate lab and stole a classified document. I'm sure you found it very interesting, but you'd need advanced medical training to understand the intricacies of an M. E.'s death report. You undoubtedly misunderstood what you were reading. It is military property and we demand it back."
"Your own autopsy says that the shotgun blast obliterated the palatoglossal arch and moved upward, destroying everything from the soft palate uvula to the sphenoid sinus. Those two membranes, by the way, are in the back of the mouth roughly at the veli palatine muscle."
Admiral Zoll now looked at the two Captains, who had their eyes on Stacy.
"I can read a medical report," she clarified. "I'm less than two weeks from my doctorate in microbiology at USC." Admiral Zoll and the other officers now traded surprised looks.
"If that's what it says, then okay, that's what it says," Admiral Zoll replied.
"What it also says is, the pattern of buckshot continued up, expanding and destroying everything in its path, including the brain stem. The exact word the report used was 'obliterated' the brain stem. Then the pattern passed into the cerebellum, exiting out the back of his head near the crown."
"Where is this going?" Admiral Zoll asked.
"The autopsy also stated that in the middle region of the left lung, in the anterior region, and in the basal quadrant of the right lung, he had substantial quantities of aspirated blood."
The Admiral looked over at Colonel Chittick. Zoll wasn't a doctor, Colonel Chittick was.
"He inhaled blood before he died, sir," Colonel Chittick clarified, but already he could see where she was going and was getting pale.
"So what?" Zoll snorted. "So he blew his head off and inhaled the blood from the wound before he died. What the hell does that prove?"
"Can't happen," she said. "It's a medical impossibility. What I think happened was somebody beat him up, for what reason I don't know yet, maybe to find out what he knew. During this beating, he inhaled the blood that was in his mouth. At this point, he was still alive. Then somebody shot him in the mouth to hide the extensive damage the beating caused. Because Max knew something he shouldn't have, they needed him dead to get him out of the way."
"Of course that's ridiculous, and I don't see why it couldn't happen my way," the Admiral said.
"Sir," Colonel Chittick said, but the Admiral held up his hand for silence, glaring at Stacy.
"The brain stem was gone, Admiral, obliterated." She continued, "The brain stem controls the breathing reflex. Without it, he couldn't inhale. It is impossible that blood was inhaled into his lungs after he was shot. It had to happen before… making your whole theory on Max's death a lie."
There was a long silence in the room.
Now there was something new in Admiral Zoll's eyes. The killer look that had once defined him as a pilot in Vietnam. He flew Intruders off the deck of the Kitty Hawk. One afternoon in '72, seven Chinese MiGs jumped him. Young Lieutenant James Zoll became an ace in less than three minutes, splashing five MiGs in the ocean before flying his mortally wounded Intruder at a sixth, ejecting scant moments before impact. He'd been fished out of the drink two hours later. His fellow pilots and shipmates had done something that almost never happened; they changed his call sign from "Hacksaw" to "Crazy Ace." It had followed him throughout his career, and after he reached Admiral, it had been his nickname, behind his back.
"Just what are you suggesting?" Admiral Zoll asked, after taking several moments to consider.
"I'm suggesting he was murdered," Stacy replied, holding his gaze across the wooden table. "And I think you know why."
Then his manner changed abruptly. "Just who the fuck do you think you're talking to?" he said, rising out of his chair and leaning across the table at her.
"I guess, under the right circumstances, even an Admiral will use a little truck-stop language," she said.
"You have the fucking audacity to sit there and say somebody on this base murdered your husband. Okay, so you can read an autopsy finding, big deal. But you can't say without a shadow of a doubt what happened. It's just your opinion. You can't say your husband was murdered!"
"Yes, Admiral, I can! And unless you're planning on doing the same thing to me that you did to him, which would really be tough for the police in this county to swallow, then you've got yourself a giant-sized problem, 'cause I'm gonna keep digging until I find out what got Max killed."
Admiral Zoll looked at her almost as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You have a remarkable imagination, honey," he said.
"I'm not your honey." She had lost all sense of caution, and her anger over what had happened to Max was spilling over everything. But the anger was at least therapeutic. For the first time in two days, she felt the knot in her stomach unclench.
"You have no idea what kind of problems we can make for you," he hissed.
"You got it backwards, Admiral. It's me promising to make problems for you."
"We fund that fucking university where you were about to get your doctorate. This program at Fort Detrick gives millions a year in research grants. Why do you think we picked the head of the USC Microbiology Department to come here? If you. pursue this, you will never get your doctorate. I personally guarantee it!"
"I personally don't give a shit," she said, washing out four years of exhaustive study with one cathartic sentence.
Finally, Admiral Zoll pushed back from the table. Something splashed up on his sock. "What the fuck is under here?" he said, reaching down under the table and feeling the puddle of moisture.
"I wouldn't put my hands in that," Stacy said mildly.
Admiral Zoll pulled up his wet hand. Realization dawned, and his face went red with anger. He got out of his chair, shook the urine off his fingers and both of his wet shoes, then, holding his hand away from his side, walked across the floor, his rubber soles squishing as he went. Colonel Chittick and the two pet Captains followed.
They closed the door and again she was alone.
Stacy sat in the empty room. Nobody came back. She tried the door, but it was locked. She realized that anger had induced her to badly overplay her hand.
Roughly another two hours went by, and she sat there, looking at the blank, windowless walls in the huge concrete room. In her mind, she played out some ghastly fantasies. Would they just kill her anyway? The Provost Marshal could be in on it. What if they rigged it to look as if she were despondent over Max's death and had taken her own life? Would they use some bio-weapon on her and say she had wandered into a "hot" lab? Would they arrange a traffic accident? She had no way of knowing. There was nothing she could do but wait. Exhausted, she lay down on the table and finally got an hour of deep REM sleep.
She awoke with somebody shaking her shoulder. She sat up abruptly and found herself looking at a middle-aged woman in civilian clothes.