“Pardon the cliché, but let’s not count our chickens before they hatch,” Vinnie said. “Though it’s looking positive. But it wasn’t me, it was you.”
“All right, enough fun and games,” Jack said as he looked down at the partially exposed Helen VanDam with only her face and arms visible. “Let’s get serious and knock this out. This could be the beginning of a major catastrophe.”
27
WEDNESDAY, 5:35 P.M.
Just as the clinical aspects of Carol Stewart and Helen VanDam corresponded, so did the autopsy results. Except for the heart transplant, the autopsies were mirror images of each other, down to the mild signs of inflammation with extravasation of blood in the gallbladder, spleen, and kidneys. Once again, Jack had been reminded of what was seen with hantavirus, even though he knew it wasn’t hantavirus. But most important were the similarities of the extensive lung pathology, indicating that the victim had essentially drowned in her own body fluids and exudate. Both Jack and Vinnie had been impressed to the point of Vinnie joking that it wasn’t a cytokine storm but rather a cytokinecyclone.
When the autopsy was over, Jack stayed and helped Vinnie clean up and disinfect all the sample bottles and the outside of the body bag with hypochlorite. With that done, Jack left Vinnie to deal with getting the body bag into the cooler and contacting janitorial services to clean the room itself. He also tasked Vinnie to get the viral samples over to Aretha at the Public Health Laboratory. In his mind there was no rush. He was about as sure as he could be that whatever the microorganism was, it was the same in both cases.
After hanging up his moon suit in the hazmat locker room and plugging the ventilator into the charger, Jack went into the main locker room to change back into his street clothes. But first he checked his mobile phone and saw there was a recent text message from Rebecca Marshall. It said that John Carver was on his way in to make a formal identification of Helen VanDam. Jack checked the time of the message. It was 5:11. Quickly he called Rebecca to find out the status. He learned that the man was there and had made the identification.
“Is he about to leave?” Jack asked. “As I said, I’d like to talk to him.”
“Yes,” Rebecca said. “We are all done, and I didn’t think I was going to hear from you.”
“Ask him to hold on,” Jack said. “I’ll be right up.”
Instead of changing, Jack grabbed one of the white coats that were available for the MEs to use between cases and pulled it on over his scrubs. A minute later he was in the stairwell. The back elevator that served the basement took forever if the elevator car wasn’t there waiting.
Jack was able to enter the ID area from the back through what used to be Communications before Communications was moved down to 421. The whole area had been greatly expanded over the previous fifteen years, particularly after the identification problems associated with the collapse of the World Trade Center. He found Rebecca Marshall in her cubicle and was told John Carver was waiting for him in the family ID room.
Walking into the family ID room, which was a modestly large space, Jack found the man sitting on a blue couch. He was the only person in the room, the furniture in which consisted of a large, round wooden table with eight wooden chairs in addition to the couch. On the walls were a number of framed posters of the 9/11 disaster with the phraseNEVER FORGETemblazoned across the bottom of each. Jack had wondered for years why the posters were still up. The only explanation he’d come up with was that they would remind grieving families that as bad as they felt, there had been worse times.
As Jack approached, John got to his feet. He was a slightly built, youthful man, probably in his late twenties, with a narrow and handsome face. He was impeccably dressed, wearing a tight-fitting and possibly one-size-too-small blazer. He had a shock of auburn hair with blond highlights that needed to be constantly pushed out of his face or snapped back with a sudden toss of his head. It was painfully apparent from the man’s expression that he had been sorely rattled by the events of the afternoon.
Jack introduced himself and explained that he had done a postmortem examination of Helen VanDam and wanted to ask him a few questions. “I don’t know what you have already told Mrs. Marshall,” Jack added. “So I apologize if there is a certain amount of redundancy.”
“That’s okay,” John said. His voice wavered. It was obvious that Jack had already added to the man’s discomfiture.
Jack gestured toward the table and both men sat. Jack could see that John was trembling.
“I want to personally thank you for making the identification as you did.”
“Thank you,” John said. “I’ve never had to do this before.”
“It’s not easy,” Jack said. “But it is extremely important.”
“I can understand.”
“I want to ask you if you knew Carol Stewart,” Jack said.
“Of course,” John said. “I recently got to know her quite well.”
“Did you know that Carol Stewart had also recently passed away?” Jack asked.
“No, I didn’t,” John admitted with alarm. He took a deep breath and let it out. “When?”
“Monday,” Jack said.
“What did she die of?”
“That’s still to be determined,” Jack said. “Whatever it was, the symptoms and signs were consistent with Helen’s. We are concerned itmight be a contagious disease. Strangely enough, both became stricken on the subway.”
“Oh my God, it was terrible,” John confessed. He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head at the memory. “When we got on the subway, Helen was fine. She’d been fine. She hasn’t been sick at all. We were having fun. We were coming into the city to shop. Then, before we crossed to Manhattan, she had a chill and soon started having trouble breathing. I didn’t know what to do. Somebody called the conductor. It was awful.”
Jack paused in his questioning for a moment, trying to figure out how to continue. “I’m sorry,” he said empathetically. “I know this is not easy, but because it might involve a contagious disease, I need to ask some personal questions. From the matching tattoos on both women, I’m assuming they were romantically involved. Is that fair to say?”
