Pandemic

The conversation lapsed. Haldane stared out the window at the snowcapped mountains and the lush greenery of the strikingly pretty city around them. He had a soft spot for Vancouver. The world-class outdoors activities in the city where "the mountains kissed the sea" had so enticed him that he once considered relocating there to work in HIV research, but Anna hadn't wanted to move so far from her family.

Arriving at the Vancouver Hospital, Monique Tremblay led them down to the morgue in the basement. Weaving through the hallways, she guided them to Dr. Jake Maguchi's office. Maguchi jumped out of his chair to greet them. The squat Japanese-Canadian pathologist struck Haldane as a study in cultural contradiction. Wearing a ponytail and a diamond stud in his ear, he bowed by way of introduction. Then he smiled broadly. "I've never had such international bigwigs come to visit before." Haldane found Maguchi's laid-back, West Coast dialect spoken with a Japanese accent as jarring as his appearance.

"Thanks for seeing us, Dr. Maguchi," Gwen said as she settled into her seat. "We are impressed by how quickly you diagnosed the Gansu Flu."

Maguchi mopped at his sweating brow with the sleeve of his lab coat. "No thanks to me. The ER team already suspected the diagnosis in the first victim. And as soon as I cracked the chest on the second—"

"Excuse me," Gwen cut in. "Can you back up?"

"No worries." Maguchi nodded with a smile. "The first cadaver came from our own emergency room. A nineteen-year-old university student. Nicole Cadullo. She was found near dead by one of her roommates, after she had coughed up buckets of bloody sputum. The ER boys recognized how unusual her sudden presentation was. With all the news…" He circled a finger in the air. "They put two and two together. Stuck the patient in full isolation and sent off the lab work. Couldn't save the poor girl, though. Nineteen! The bug ate her alive." He reached for a glass of water on his desk and took a long swallow. "By the time I finished the autopsy we had heard a preliminary report from the virology lab that it was the Gansu strain of influenza."

Gwen nodded. "And the second case?"

"Get this!" Maguchi snapped his fingers. "I've just slipped out of my spacesuit," he said, in reference to the biohazard suit, "and who should be my very next autopsy? The Jane Doe from the river." He mopped his sweaty brow again. "Whew, they got the heat cranked up today." He took another sip of water. "No mystery about cause of death with that hole in her forehead. I was just painting by the numbers, really. But when I cracked open her chest, I couldn't believe what I saw inside. Her lungs were chock-a-block full!"

"Wouldn't you expect that in a drowning?" Savard asked.

Maguchi shook his head. "Two types of drowning, wet and dry. Wet drowning occurs when people aspirate the water and fill their lungs. Dry drowning, which is more common, is when the larynx goes into spasm and chokes off the passage to the lungs before much water gets in. It's protective for about five minutes and then you die from lack of oxygen anyway. Either way, it's irrelevant because our Jane Doe didn't drown. She was dead when she hit the water, so she wouldn't have inhaled anything. Besides, it wasn't water we found in her lungs."

"Pus?" Haldane guessed.

"More than that, it was a hemorrhagic, purulent exudate. The same blood-streaked junk I saw in the lungs of the Cadullo girl. I was flabbergasted. Their lungs were interchangeable." Maguchi rose to his feet. "Come on. You got to see this."

Tremblay blocked his path. "Jake, what about my photo?"

"Oh, yeah, yeah. I got it." Maguchi spun around and combed through the piles of paper on his desk.

Haldane and Savard both looked to Tremblay for an explanation. "Dr. Jake is a wizard at bringing corpses — especially unidentified persons — back to life with computer-enhanced photography," she said.

Maguchi reddened. "Guy's got to have a hobby." He grabbed a manila envelope and pulled out the stack of eleven-by-eight photos. "This one couldn't have been simpler. No fancy software required." He passed Tremblay the first snapshot.

Haldane and Savard leaned over either shoulder to view the photo. Despite her open eyes, the woman with the cherubic face and springy black hair still looked very dead to Haldane, even if he could ignore the dime-shaped hole less than an inch above the inner edge of her left eyebrow.

But in the next photo Maguchi passed them, Jane Doe sprang back to life.

"I just did some very minor touch-ups with my photo editor," Maguchi said modestly.