The Slammer

The telephone on the wall startled Maggie again. She had been so engrossed in her Internet computer searches that she hadn’t noticed someone come in and take a place by the window.

When she looked up, Platt’s eyes were on her, so intense, so penetrating she didn’t want to meet them. He knew something and it wasn’t good news. She took her time, closing a file, signing off a site and all the while letting the phone ring and letting him stand there.

“Thanks for the computer,” she said when she finally answered. “You’re about to tell me I’m going to get a lot of use out of it, right?”

He just stared at her and she could see his jaw was clenched too tight, so tight that the muscles twitched.

“You’re always trying to preempt me,” he said, his expression remaining unchanged.

“Sorry, it’s a habit. I’m usually the bearer of bad news. I’m not used to it being the other way around.”

“Are you always this cynical?”

“I chase killers for a living.”

“Awww…” He smiled, tilting his head back as if that were explanation enough. “You’re used to throwing people in the slammer, not being in it yourself.”

He pointed to her chair and started to sit in the one on his side, but stood back up and waited for her. She didn’t want to sit. She’d rather take bad news standing up, or better yet, pacing. But he looked so exhausted. His freshly washed hair was still damp. Dark bags puffed out under his eyes. A white smear of something—soap perhaps—left on his chin, bright white against the stubble. And he had changed clothes, a William and Mary T-shirt and navy sweatpants. But the same white Nikes.

“So something tells me you didn’t just get back from a leisurely jog?” she asked as she took her seat.

“No jog this morning.” He followed suit but sat up straight when she thought he looked as though he’d rather slump down and stretch out like he had before.

“I may have found something,” she told him only because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear his news yet. “I think this guy might be duplicating certain pieces of unsolved or old crimes.”

“What makes you say that?” He looked curious but nothing more.

“I have a mailing envelope I found at the Kellerman house so I’ve been searching—”

“You removed evidence from a crime scene? A hot zone?” Now he was on the edge of his chair.

“I double-bagged it.” When his brow stayed furrowed, she offered, “It was with me, on my person and inside here now, so I’d say it’s as safely decontaminated as I am for the moment.” She stared him down, didn’t flinch. “Don’t you want to know what I found?”

“You know I could charge you with obstructing a United States Army medical operation.”

“Oh, sure. Go ahead. What are you going to do to me? Throw me in the Slammer?”

They stared each down again, gunslingers, neither willing to be the first to look away. Finally he did. His free hand went up to his face, fingers rubbing deep at tired eyes, and then they wiped down to his jaw, getting at the white smear; all the while he sank back into the hard plastic chair, but he kept the phone pressed to his ear.

“I’ll need to process it,” he finally said.

“It’s yours.”

Maybe he expected her to argue. Maybe he was simply tired.

“So what did you find?”

She explained it him, about the return address, about James Lewis and the Tylenol murders from September 1982, about Mary Kellerman and Mary Louise Kellerman, about the towns’ names being almost the same and how this killer wanted the anniversary to be commemorated with a crash.

“What was in the envelope?” he asked.

“Nothing except an empty plastic bag with a zip lock. I didn’t open it. It is evidence.” She smiled at him. She was trying to make amends. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Well, the Kellermans were definitely exposed to something,” Platt said. “But it wasn’t cyanide. I almost wish it were that simple.”

“It’s not a poison or a toxin?”

“No. It’s not a poison.” A slow shake of the head as if he wished it had been. “Not a toxin.”

She waited.

“I know you have a medical background.”

“Premed in college,” she said. “It was a long time ago.” He was making her a colleague so she’d understand his angst. Yet minutes ago he had treated her like an opponent, obstructing justice. Maybe it was simply his exhaustion. She hadn’t slept, either. “Please just tell me,” she said, the impatience slipping. “I don’t need it candy coated but I don’t need all the techbabble.”

This time he took a deep breath. Sat forward again. His eyes never left hers.

“Ms. Kellerman has been exposed and her body has been invaded by a virus. It’s been trying to replicate itself inside her. Inside her cells. Bricks of virus, splintering off, exploding the cell walls then moving through the bloodstream onto the next cell.”

Maggie was sure she had stopped breathing at the word virus. She didn’t need to hear more, but Platt continued.

“It’s a parasite like one you hope to never see. A parasite searching for a perfect host.” He stopped himself as if trying to find a better way to explain it. As if trying to remember something from long ago. “The biggest problem is that humans aren’t a perfect host. They last maybe seven to twenty-one days. The virus almost always destroys them. Then it bleeds out. It spills out of them and looks for a new host to jump to.”

“You sound like you’ve seen it before.”

“That village I told you about, outside Sierra Leone. I held something similar in my gloved hands.” He said it reverently, quietly, like a whisper or maybe a prayer.

“But you didn’t get sick.” Maggie hated that she sounded so hopeful when his face did not look it.

“That was Lassa fever. Also a Level 4 hot agent. Same family of viruses. But nothing like this.”

She closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. She didn’t wait for him this time. She didn’t need to.

“It’s Ebola, isn’t it?” she asked as she kept her eyes closed and leaned her head back.

The phone’s receiver stayed pressed against her ear so she could still hear him clearly. So she could hear him over the catch in her breathing, the ache in her chest, the slamming of her heart against her rib cage.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s Ebola Zaire.”