The Slammer

Unable to sleep, Maggie paced. Her room was sixteen paces wide and fourteen paces deep except where the bathroom jutted out into the room, which was three paces wide and six paces deep.

With no windows she relied on her wristwatch and the TV to give her a sense of time. In another forty minutes she knew she would be peeing in a plastic cup again. And what was worse, she found herself looking forward to the woman in the blue space suit’s visit though it included drawing blood or gagging her for a throat culture or peeing into a plastic cup. And each time the woman came into Maggie’s room, Maggie asked to talk to Colonel Platt. Each time, the woman nodded and said, “OF COURSE.”

On the woman’s last visit Maggie had reminded her that she had been told they would keep her overnight. They had plenty of samples of Maggie’s fluids to know whether or not she had been exposed. USAMRIID had some of the most advanced laboratories in the country. Shouldn’t they know by now what Mary Louise’s mother had been exposed to? She tried not to run through the possibilities.

In fact, to keep her mind off the possibilities, Maggie resorted to the one thing she knew she could rely on, the one thing that would stop her from thinking about the drafty hospital gown, the electrical hum of equipment and the claustrophobia that clawed at her insides every time she heard the air-lock seal of the door. She tried to do what she did best, work out cases in her mind and start putting together the puzzle pieces, though she had few pieces for this case.

She took a deep breath and let it out. Where to begin? In the morning she would get the envelope to Agent Tully somehow, or at least the return address. She had good suspicion that whatever was or had been inside that envelope was what caused Ms. Kellerman’s crash. But from everything Maggie had observed in the Kellerman house, both Mary Louise and her mother seemed unlikely victims of the kind of killer…Maggie shook her head. No, that wasn’t right. He hadn’t killed anyone yet. They seemed unlikely victims of a terrorist who could leave a box of doughnuts at Quantico with a death-threat notice tucked inside. Not just Quantico, but down in the BSU department.

She wondered if Ms. Kellerman was related or connected to an FBI agent or some other personnel at the academy. That was easy enough to check. Too easy, perhaps. This guy wouldn’t go through the trouble of staging such an elaborate “greet and meet” threat with the FBI if he knew they could connect him to the victims. No. Chances were, the terrorist had no connection to Mary Louise and her mother, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t chosen them specifically for one reason or another.

Maggie tried to remember the contents of the note. It had sounded like bits and pieces thrown together. Or that might be exactly what he wanted them to believe, that they were randomly chosen words, emotionally charged, when, in fact, every word may have been calculated. Something about the phrases he used rang familiar. Perhaps she had simply read too many notes from twisted, evil minds. It was an occupational hazard, letting the words of criminals take up space in a compartment of her brain. Sometimes the words meant nothing. Sometimes they meant everything, valuable clues like secret messages waiting to be decoded. Words like crash.

Despite her best efforts she kept seeing Ms. Kellerman and the blood-splattered bedsheets. She could still hear the poor woman’s raspy breaths, the wet gurgle in her throat, the rattle in her chest. She could smell the sour vomit. The bedroom reeked of it, but there was something else, something that hinted at raw sewage, like a septic tank had backed up, only the smell had been coming from Ms. Kellerman’s bed.

The medical term was “crash and bleed out.” Maggie knew there were certain toxins, biological agents and infectious diseases that, once they invaded the body, caused severe hemorrhage. Ricin and anthrax attached to and attacked lung cells. Infectious viruses weren’t particular about what cells they attacked. The invaded cells eventually exploded. The body’s immune system would shut down. Organs began to fail, one by one. In effect, the body did actually crash and bleed from the inside out.

Both she and Cunningham had misinterpreted the note. When the author wrote that there would be a “crash,” he didn’t mean an explosive device. He meant Ms. Kellerman’s body.

The phone on the wall rang and Maggie jumped. She spun around to look at it and saw a man standing on the other side of the glass. He held the other receiver to his ear and motioned for her to answer hers. It rang twice more before she crossed the room and picked it up.

“Good morning, Agent O’Dell.”

The voice sounded graveled with fatigue, deeper than before, as though he was fighting laryngitis. She almost didn’t recognize the voice or him until she met his eyes.

“Colonel Platt, I thought perhaps you had forgotten about me.”

“Never. Though I may not have recognized you in your new outfit.”

She remembered the thin hospital gown and restrained from clutching at the back to make sure it was closed. She had been pacing without paying much attention. His smile made her face grow warm. Why should she care whether he got a glimpse of her bare backside?

“I would have brought my overnight case if I knew I was spending the night in Hotel USAMRIID.”

“My apologies for not having better accommodations for you,” he said as his smile faded and the jovial tone became more serious. “We have to wait several more hours, then I’ll have them bring you some breakfast.”

“But first we’ll talk.” It wasn’t a question or a request.

He paused, his eyes not leaving hers. For a second she thought he might recognize the panic that she had carefully hidden. He pointed to a chair on her side of the glass while he sat down in similar one on his side.

“But first we’ll talk,” he conceded.