Germ

For a brief moment, surprise contorted his face. Then he smiled, that same smile she'd caught before.

She spun around, saying, "Sorry . . . sorry . . ."

"Job hazard, I guess," he said calmly. "The blood, I mean, not being caught with my pants down by a pretty woman. That doesn't happen enough, I'm afraid."

She heard the snap of elastic and assumed that he had just removed his underwear.

"Do you . . ." she started, getting over her initial shock through the realization that he was flirting with her. His lack of humility riled her, especially considering what had just happened, whose blood he was ridding himself of. "Do you always take your clothes off in public?"

"Only after surgery. It's kind of a ritual we surgeons have."

"I need to talk with you. The person you worked on, the one who died—"

"He was your partner, I know."

"He was my friend."

"I'm sorry."

"What can you tell me about his injuries?"

She heard the rustle of clothes.

"You can look now," he said.

She turned apprehensively, not convinced his invitation to look meant he was decent. To her relief, he had donned surgical pants.

"Actually," he said, "these scrub rooms are usually fairly private. I'd go up to the locker rooms, but they're on the sixth floor and, well, this is just more convenient." He opened a drawer, pulled out a folded smock, and handed it to her. "You'd better play doctor until you can change."

She looked down at her blood-soaked clothes. "Thank you."

"Are you a cop here in Chattanooga?"

"Federal. Out of Atlanta." She pulled out her identification and held it up to him.

He looked at it closely. "Centers for Disease Control," he said slowly.

His face paled, but she decided it was a trick of the light.

"I didn't know they had a law enforcement division."

"Part of Homeland Security. Mostly we're FBI special agents on permanent reassignment." She removed her business card from behind the ID card, jotted her mobile number on the back, and handed it to him.

"I see." He picked up a smock from a shelf, thinking hard about something. "So you investigate . . . what? Threats involving diseases, viruses?"

"Among other things. Doctor, what killed my partner?"

Parker shook his head. "Well, that's up to the medical examiner to decide, but an educated guess? Couple dozen razor-sharp disks, probably shot into his body from a large-bore firearm, like a shotgun."

"Disks?"

"Wait here." He walked through a glass door she had not seen before, which led directly into the trauma room. He picked up a small metal pan and returned.

Julia looked in and inhaled sharply.

"My thoughts exactly," said Parker. "Some of the disks were penetrating. That is, they entered his body and stayed there. This one"— he raised the pan, indicating the disk inside—"was lodged in his sternum. I suspect most of the disks probably went right through him and are embedded in whatever was behind him. By the looks of the injuries, they took a lot of his body with them when they exited."

"May I have this one?" she asked.

He squinted at her. "Is that okay?"

"We haven't established jurisdiction on this case yet, but we will. I might be able to get a jump on it if I can run this through our database, see if something like it has been used before in a crime."

"I see," he said thoughtfully. "Well, I don't see why not. The medical examiner will probably find plenty of others in the body, and the police undoubtedly already have all they need at the crime scene."

He took the pan to a sink and ran water into it. He said, "Was the man who was with your partner a cop as well?"

"No. Did they bring him in? I didn't—" She hadn't even thought of Vero. She had assumed, vaguely, in the back of her mind, that he also had been shot and killed, but she hadn't realized until that moment that she hadn't seen him come in. If he had died at the scene, they would have kept him there for processing—photographs and such—and then taken him directly to the morgue.

Parker said, "One of the attendants who brought in Mr. Donnelley said the killer took the other man's body."

"Took it?"

"A witness said he shot him, flipped the corpse over his shoulder, and walked out the door."

A nurse opened the door behind Julia and leaned in. "Dr. Parker?"

"Yes?" he said without looking.

"There's a Detective Fisher on 3 for you."

"Thank you." He carefully drained the water from the pan. He opened and closed cabinets and drawers, selected a white-and-blue box the size of a pack of cards, and removed a pad of gauze from it. He used the gauze to pick up and dry the disk, then dropped the disk into the box.

"Apparently it was a pretty bizarre scene. Confusing." He handed the box to Julia. "Excuse me." He walked to a phone on the other side of the room. He raised the handset and said, "Dr. Parker . . . Yes." He looked at his watch. "I have an appointment off-site in forty-five minutes. How long will you be? . . . I see . . ."