“Who is the victim?” Rachel shouted.
“No idea.”
They were silent for a long period. Bosch concentrated on the driving. And his thoughts. There were so many things that bothered him about the case. Soon he had to share them.
“How do you think they targeted him?” he said.
“What?” Walling replied, coming out of her own thoughts.
“Moby and El-Fayed. How’d they zero in on Stanley Kent?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if this is one of them at the hospital, we’ll get to ask.”
Bosch let some time go by. He was tired of yelling. But then he called over another question.
“Doesn’t it bother you that everything came out of that house?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The gun, the camera, the computer they used. Everything. There’s Coke in liter bottles in the pantry and they tied Alicia Kent up with the same snap ties she uses to hold her roses up in the backyard. Doesn’t that bother you? They had nothing but a knife and ski masks when they went through that door. Doesn’t that bother you at all about this case?”
“You have to remember, these people are resourceful. They teach them that in the camps. El-Fayed was trained in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. He in turn taught Nassar. They make do with what’s available. You could say that they took down the World Trade Center with a couple of airliners or a couple of box cutters. It’s all in how you look at it. More important than what tools they have is their relentlessness-something I am sure you can appreciate.”
Bosch was about to respond but they came up on the exit and he had to concentrate on weaving around the traffic on surface streets. In two minutes he finally killed the siren and pulled into the ambulance run at Queen of Angels.
Felton met them in the crowded emergency room and led the way to the treatment area, where there were six ER bays. A private security cop stood outside one of the curtained spaces and Bosch moved forward, showing his badge. After barely acknowledging the rent-a-cop he split the curtain and moved into the treatment bay.
Alone in the curtained space was the patient, a small, dark-haired man with brown skin lying beneath a spider web of tubes and wires extending from overhead medical machinery to his limbs, chest, mouth and nose. The hospital bed was encased in a clear, plastic tent. The man barely took up half the bed and somehow looked like a victim under attack by the apparatus around him.
His eyes were half-lidded and unmoving. Most of his body was exposed. Some sort of modesty towel had been taped over his genitals but his legs and torso were visible. The right side of his stomach and right hip were covered with blooms of thermal burns. His right hand exhibited the same burns-painful-looking red rings surrounding purplish wet eruptions in the skin. A clear gel had been spread over the burns but it didn’t look like it was helping.
“Where is everybody?” Bosch asked.
“Harry, don’t get close,” Walling warned. “He’s not conscious so let’s just back out and talk to the doctor before we do anything.”
Bosch pointed to the patient’s burns.
“Could this be from the cesium?” Bosch asked. “It can happen that fast?”
“From direct exposure in a concentrated amount, yeah. It depends on how long the exposure was. It looks like this guy was carrying the stuff in his pocket.”
“Does he look like Moby or El-Fayed?”
“No, he doesn’t look like either one of them. Come on.”
She stepped back through the curtain and Bosch followed. She ordered the security man to get the ER doctor who was treating the man. She flipped open her phone and pushed a single button. Her call was answered quickly.
“This is legit,” she said. “We have a direct exposure. We need to set up a command post and a containment protocol here.”
She listened and then answered a question.
“No, neither one. I don’t have an ID yet. I’ll call it in as soon as I do.”
She closed the phone and looked at Bosch.
“The radiation team will be here inside of ten minutes,” she said. “I’ll be directing the command post.”
A woman in hospital blues walked up to them, carrying a clipboard.
“I’m Dr. Garner. You need to stay away from that patient until we know more about what happened to him.”
Walling and Bosch showed her their credentials.
“What can you tell us?” Walling asked.
“Not much at this time. He’s in full prodromal syndrome-the first symptoms of exposure. The trouble is, we don’t know what he was exposed to or for how long. That gives us no gray count and without that we don’t have a specific treatment protocol. We’re winging it.”
“What are the symptoms?” Walling asked.
“Well, you see the burns. Those are the least of our problems. The most serious damage is internal. His immune system is shutting down and he’s aspirated most of the lining of his stomach. His GI tract is shot. We stabilized him but I’m not holding out a great deal of hope. The stress on the body pushed him into cardiac arrest. We just had the blue team in here fifteen minutes ago.”
“How long is it between exposure and the start of this produro-whatever syndrome?” Bosch asked.
“Prodromal. It can happen within an hour of first exposure.”
Bosch looked at the man beneath the plastic canopy enclosing the bed. He remembered the phrase Captain Hadley had used when Samir was dying on the floor of his prayer room. He’s circling the drain. He knew the man on the hospital bed was circling it as well.
“What can you tell us about who he is and where he was found?” Bosch asked the doctor.
“You’ll have to talk to the paramedics about where he was found,” Garner answered. “I didn’t have time to get into that. And all I heard was that he was found in the street. He had collapsed. And as far as who he is…”
She raised the clipboard and read from the top sheet.
“He’s listed as Digoberto Gonzalves, age forty-one. There’s no address here. That’s all I know right now.”
Walling stepped away, pulling her phone out again. Bosch knew she was going to call in the name, have it run through the terrorism databases.
“Where are his clothes?” he asked the doctor. “Where’s his wallet?”
“His clothing and all his possessions were removed from the ER because of exposure concerns.”
“Did anybody look through them?”
“No, sir, nobody was going to risk it.”
“Where was it all taken?”
“You’ll have to get that information from the nursing staff.”
She pointed to a nursing station in the center of the treatment area. Bosch headed that way. The nurse at the desk told Bosch that everything from the patient was placed in a medical waste container that was then taken to the hospital’s incinerator. It was not clear whether this was done in accordance with the hospital’s protocol for dealing with contamination cases or out of utter fear of the unknown factors involved with Gonzalves.
“Where’s the incinerator?”
Rather than give him directions, the nurse called over the security guard and told him to take Bosch to the incinerator room. Before Bosch could go, Walling called to him.
“Take this,” she said, holding out the radiation-alert monitor she had taken off her belt. “And remember, we have a radiation team coming. Don’t risk yourself. If that goes off, you back away. I mean it. You back away.”
“Got it.”
Bosch put the alert monitor in his pocket. He and the guard quickly headed down a hallway and then took a stairway to the basement. They then took another hallway that seemed to run at least a block in length to the far side of the building.