Pandemic

"Just a little clumsy." Maguchi chuckled. "It's why I got kicked out of the neurosurgery program." He pushed himself upright. He stepped over to the corpse's midsection. With both hands, he folded back the skin of the incision, opening it like a tent. Her intestines had been removed, and her chest cavity was so empty it displayed the ridges of her vertebrae poking through from the back. He pointed to a smooth shiny surface, separating the chest from the abdomen. "Look at her diaphragm and chest wall." Gobs of blood and yellow-green pus still clung to the diaphragm and along the inside of the chest, more so on the left than the right side, looking like the skin on top of a left-open paint can.

"She had a big empyema, meaning the pus was trapped between her drenched lungs and the chest wall," Maguchi said. "When I made the first cut into the chest, the stuff sprayed out and hit me in the gown like a garden hose. There must have been four or five liters' worth in her chest, which trust me is a huge amount."

Haldane could picture it in his mind. He had experienced the same phenomenon putting chest tubes in live patients, but he viewed Maguchi questioningly. "Empyema? That's unusual for a viral pneumonia."

"I know," Maguchi said. "But the previous cadaver had the same."

"Dr. Maguchi," Gwen said, "can you tell how long she had been submersed?"

"Not long," Maguchi answered. He ran a finger over the arms and legs. "See her limbs? No skin sloughing at all, which at these temperatures would occur after twelve to twenty-four hours. And she's got none of the log scrapes or nibbles that we tend to see after twenty-four hours."

"Nibbles?" Gwen shrugged.

"Fish bites," Maguchi said nonchalantly.

Savard showed no sign of reaction. "So she was found at dawn yesterday," she said. "Means it was likely that she was shot and dumped in the river either early that morning or late in the previous evening."

"Yup. I've put time of death between midnight and 2:00 A.M." He turned away from the cadaver and started for the door. "Come on. I want to show you her lungs. I have them in the room next door."

Maguchi stumbled as he headed for the door. He made it within a few feet of the wall when his legs buckled. He dropped to his knees. He grabbed for the sink on the wall in front of him, but his arm span wasn't long enough to reach. He flopped forward and hit his head on the floor with a loud thud.

Noah lunged forward but reached Maguchi a moment too late to stop his head from making contact with the floor. Haldane rolled Maguchi from facedown onto his side. A cut had opened above the pathologist's left eye and blood started to leak out from under his face shield and drip on to the floor.

When Haldane put a hand to Maguchi's forehead, the skin was burning hot. "Jake, are you okay?"

Maguchi stared back at him, bleary-eyed. "It couldn't be. I took precautions."

"What's wrong?" Savard said, crouching on the other side from Haldane and leaning over Maguchi.

"Hot and cold," Maguchi said. "And the aching. So stupid! I never put it together. I have the bug, don't I?"

"Do you know where you are?" Haldane asked.

"In big trouble is where," Maguchi said with a weak laugh.

"Your breathing okay?" Haldane asked.

"No problem. A tickle in my throat." He gawked at Haldane, fear creeping into his eyes. "I took all the precautions."

Haldane shook his head slowly. "When you started the autopsy on the Jane Doe, what were you wearing?"

"Gown, mask, gloves, and all that," Maguchi said.

"But no eye shield, right?" Haldane said. "You didn't know she had the Gansu Flu."

"Yeah, but still—"

"The empyema, Jake. Remember?" Haldane said. "You told us it sprayed into your chest. The splash probably got up by your eyes and face. Droplets could have snuck under your mask. Or maybe you rubbed your eyes later with the virus still on them?"

Maguchi nodded. Then he glanced urgently from Haldane to Savard. "Get away from me! I could spread it to you two."

"It's okay, Jake," Haldane said calmly. "We're wearing universal precautions."

"But back in my office you weren't!" Maguchi pointed out anxiously.

"You weren't coughing then," Haldane said with a confident nod.

But when Noah looked up and caught Gwen's concerned eyes, a cold rush ripped through him as he remembered Maguchi's drinking water-induced coughing spasm.

CHAPTER 24

POLICE HEADQUARTERS, CAIRO, EGYPT

The meek face stared harmlessly up at Sergeant Achmed Eleish from his computer monitor, but he knew that in the last few hours of her life the woman had been anything but harmless. He reread the cautiously worded description on the Interpol Web site. It characterized the woman as a "person of interest" in connection with the outbreak of the Gansu Flu virus, which had infected thirty-two people so far in Vancouver. Eleish had seen enough Interpol bulletins to know that "person of interest" always meant the prime suspect. And though the caption implied otherwise, he suspected she was already dead.