The last good man, p.9
The Last Good Man, page 9
Still, it seemed odd that Shaw hadn’t turned up anything useful—or anything at all. He wanted to know Shaw’s movements, his questionings, the steps he’d taken, as if Luke were Shaw’s supervisor. Technically he was, since Luke had brought him onto this case. But Luke didn’t feel right about it. Shaw was a good cop. He’d have turned over information if he’d found any.
Though Luke couldn’t tell Shaw, the real reason for the stop in Syracuse was that Mia had enough equipment and testing chemicals at her home to study the strange tube-like organism she’d extracted from Paul Stermer’s body. And if she needed anything else, her laboratory at the university would be ten minutes away.
As they headed to Syracuse, Luke couldn’t get his mind off the events of the day; and as the adrenaline released during their stint at the medical examiner’s office started to ease off, he began to feel very tired. Mia had offered to drive, but he told her he’d be able to make it to her house. He might crash later, but for the moment the drive helped him calm down and start to process what they’d found.
Mia Mendez’s home was small with a well-kept exterior. Her two-bedroom, two-bathroom single-story house, set off the street and near the university, had a sprinkling of trees in the backyard and a single massive oak in the front. She led him inside, and Luke immediately got the feeling that he was walking into the home of a hoarder.
While he kept his own home lean and sparse, Mia’s was filled—floor to ceiling in some areas—with books. Textbooks, nonfiction, even a few piles of novels. Boxes sat in one corner, filled with some unidentifiable reams of paper.
In the center of the living room, on a couch that barely had room for a single person, sat another three boxes. One of these was empty, its contents spilled out onto a glass-topped coffee table.
“Sorry,” she said. “I can tidy up a bit, just give me a minute.”
“A minute or a week?”
She shot him an evil glance, but he saw she was smiling. “I work a lot. My house is pretty much my storage unit. I spend more time at my office. Which, I might add, is spotless.”
“Ha,” Luke said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She made a comment about going to go “freshen up,” a mysterious statement Luke assumed women used when they simply needed to hit the restroom and were too embarrassed to admit it. He nodded as she left the room. He started to move to sit down, but wasn’t sure where to go or what was appropriate. He hadn’t been in another woman’s home alone since he and Mel had been dating. Instead, he stood by the living room in the hallway, looking around and waiting.
Mia returned in two minutes, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. He tried to force his eyes to remain on her face rather than on her long, slender legs. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you’d… I guess there’s nowhere to sit, huh?”
He shrugged. “No big deal.”
She shook her head and then smirked at him. “Listen, Luke. This is a job, remember? No reason to get all fidgety and weird.”
“Fidgety and weird?” Luke asked. “I’m appalled. I’m taking this investigation seriously, it’s just that usually when I investigate, there’s room to do so.”
“I said I’d tidy up,” Mia responded, moving toward the living room. But instead of picking up any of the junk lying around, she simply made her way through the maze toward what he assumed to be the kitchen and dining room. “But I’ll do it later. Come on, I’ve got tea.”
Luke hated tea, but he followed her into the tiny dining room. A small circular table, much like the one he had back in his apartment, sat in the center of the space. A decent-sized kitchen with matching black appliances was to his left, an open doorway that led into a utility and laundry room to his right.
“Have a seat,” she said. “Want to try this tea? I got it from a cute Ethiopian store in Boston. A mix of herbal remedies that’s good for inflammation.”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “You know, my inflammation’s doing fine right now, and the fancy tea would probably be wasted on me. I’m more of a black coffee guy.”
She eyed him, looking up and down, then huffed into the kitchen. “Of course you are, Preston.”
He waited in the rickety wooden chair for another two minutes, watching her pour a half-pot of filtered water from the refrigerator into a kettle and place it on the front burner of her stove. Then she prepped the tea in a metal ball and set it to the side.
She took care in her work, meticulously moving around the kitchen. Then, as if suddenly remembering that Luke was there, Mia pulled out a black, single-cup coffee machine from deep within a cabinet, plugged it in, and dumped a cup of water straight out the tap into the lid. She dug around a drawer and retrieved a plastic coffee pod, which she then shoved into the top of the machine and smashed it down.
Luke watched all of this with interest. Apparently this woman took pride in her tea ritual but didn’t think too highly of coffee. Or coffee drinkers.
Finally, as both liquid elixirs were heating up, she came back into the dining room. She grabbed the chair across from Luke and reached into her pocket. She placed onto the table the glass vial containing the disgusting little worms she’d pulled from Stermer’s corpse.
Luke shuddered as she set it down. The things were still there, writhing, more slowly now, crawling over one another and examining their newly lit surroundings by making minuscule rotations with their “heads,” or whatever the reddish feathery parts on one side of them were. “You’re going to get that out here? I thought we’d have to do that sort of thing at your lab, at the school or something, to keep things safe and contained. Maybe like in one of those boxes that you access by reaching through the holes, into thick gloves for your hands.”
“An anaerobic glove box, right.” She shook her head. “No, I was thinking about it on the way. I know what it is already.”
Luke cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s a parasite,” she said. No emotion, as if she were simply discussing a class assignment.
“And?”
“And that means that if it is contagious, it’s something that will have to be spread through touch.”
“As in, as long as we don’t touch it, we’re fine?” Luke asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. Basically. Well, kind of. I mean, it’s extremely rare for a parasitic infection to be transmitted through anything but some sort of contact. This is a living organism, right? So we’d have to somehow come into contact with it physically for it to jump to us as a host. And since right now it’s far from microscopic, I find that—at least in its current state—rather impossible.”
Luke knew that something had happened, but he didn’t want to press too hard. There was still too much of this he didn’t understand. “But it got into the Stermers somehow.”
“Yes, again, my guess is it would have been much smaller when it was ingested, but judging by how large it is now, probably not microscopic. It was transferred to them somehow, entered their bodies. Point is, now what we’re looking at is the adult form of whatever it is—and, most likely, it’s too large to contract its disease unless you flat-out eat it or have sex with it.”
Luke shot her a glance.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s true. But, like I said, unlikely. And what’s more, these little guys are dying—they need a host to stay alive and multiply, and without one of those…”
“Okay, so we’re safe to handle it?”
She leaned her head sideways. “No, I’m not saying that, since we still don’t exactly know what it is. But we are safe to observe it, maybe even pull a bit out and examine it under some glass.”
“Right,” Luke said, letting out a deep breath. He was feeling more and more uncomfortable by the minute. He’d almost forgotten how this felt, the early stages of a case. As a detective, he thrived for the moment after this—the moment he had his first breakthrough, when his work building and putting together the pieces of the puzzles earned him some small insight. “So what can we do? Even with a microscope, we won’t really know what it is, right? Don’t we have to send it somewhere?” He wanted that breakthrough, but he also knew this was far from a normal case. There were clues that he wasn’t going to be able to find alone.
She laughed. “Yeah, Luke. When you and your cop buddies needed stuff analyzed, like blood and fecal matter, and whatever else it was you scraped off the floor of the crime scene, you’d send it away, right? To be ‘analyzed’?”
He nodded.
“Well, people like me are the ones who do the analyzing. We look at this stuff all day, every day, and poke it with needles and drop goo on it to see how it reacts. That’s basically it. Enough positive tests against known parameters and we make a judgement call and send the results back to you.”
“I’d always meant to thank you guys for that,” Luke said. He offered a sheepish grin as well.
“Much appreciated. Anyway, I do have a microscope here that’ll work, and the stain and some tests we can run. It might not be conclusive of anything specific, but it’ll at least give me a direction to start searching.”
“Okay, great,” Luke said. “What do you need from me?”
She started to stand up, and she leaned over and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re the cop, remember? I’m the parasitologist.”
He arched an eyebrow.
“So if I need to arrest something or shoot something, I’ll call you in. Otherwise, just sit there and look pretty.”
23
The Richter Optica UX1 was the gift Mia never thought she’d wanted. Her parents had given her the microscope when she’d been accepted into graduate school, and she remembered laughing at the idea that she’d turned into a true, real-life nerd. Who asks for—and gets—a microscope as a present? she’d thought at the time. Sure, as a girl, she’d spent hours down by the creek at her house catching and examining bugs, butterflies, and anything she could fit into her jars, but she’d never imagined herself moving into an actual career doing that sort of thing.
But, like most things in life, she’d come to learn that opportunities presented themselves at every turn. It was up to the opportunist to accept them and turn them into success. She’d been presented with opportunities plenty of times, and it was her constant longing for knowledge—the desire to understand the world on a micro level—that she’d followed most often.
That longing had turned into success after success, until she found herself on the doorstep of a career in parasitology, both teaching and studying the exact same sorts of things she’d loved doing as a kid.
She’d walked through that doorway with her head held high, knowing that she’d chosen a career path as much as it had chosen her. She was now a “professional nerd,” and she loved it—personal microscope and all.
She plopped the heavy black case onto the dining-room table. Usually she kept the instrument in her second bedroom, which she had converted into a study and small laboratory, there was no room for a second person in there.
She had to admit she was enjoying the company right now. Having Luke around was akin to having an undergraduate assistant in their first week of study—interested but confused, and eager to please but at a loss as to how exactly to help.
She slid the case over to Luke. “Here, open this. Take it out and set it up.”
“Set it up?”
“Remember chemistry class in high school? Same thing. Take out of box, set carefully on table, look into eyeholes.”
Luke laughed and began working the clasps on the outside of the case. “Are they really called eyeholes?”
“No.”
Mia retrieved a smaller box from the edge of the table that contained slides and stain, as well as two pairs of exam gloves. She began preparing the slide glass and cover slips, and reached for the tube still sitting at the center of the table.
“Just like that?” Luke asked. “Is there any more prep work or anything? Like, shouldn’t we make sure that when we pop the top on those things, they won’t just jump out and start attacking us?”
Mia grinned. “You carrying a gun right now, officer?”
Luke looked at her but didn’t respond.
“Like I said, if I need you to shoot something, I’ll let you know.”
He didn’t seem satisfied, but Mia was already busy preparing her sample.
Wearing the gloves, she opened the top of the vial and reached in with a pair of tweezers. She pinched around a tiny, wriggling worm, about an inch in length, but it was wrapped tightly around another strand of parasites. She shook it a bit until they fell apart, and then she pulled out a smaller specimen, this one only about a quarter-inch.
As dangerous as she knew the specimen was, the inner nerd in her was thrilled by getting hands-on with it.
“Okay,” Luke said. “Here you go.” He pushed the microscope over toward her.
“There’s an iPad in the box, too,” she said. “Turn it on. It should be unlocked and ready to connect with the microscope.” She didn’t bother watching to see if he did it correctly, as she was too fascinated by the parasite beneath the lens.
Luke whistled. “Wow. Fancy. We didn’t have these in high school.”
“‘Digital remote viewing.’ It’s basically just a way for microscope companies to stay relevant.”
“Microscope companies are relevant?” Luke asked, sarcasm thick in his voice.
She ignored him, speaking aloud as she worked. “So, there are three types of parasites. You’ve got the protozoa, which are usually single-celled organisms, the kind of stuff that causes diseases like malaria. They’re carried by a vector—a mosquito, for example. Then there are what are called ectoparasites, like ticks and fleas. They live on their hosts, instead of inside them. Usually those jerks carry another parasite inside of them, which causes diseases in the host. This is essentially what happened with the Bubonic Plague—diseased fleas carried the bacterium into human hosts through their bite. Finally, there are helminths, which are like these little guys. Worms.” She turned on the microscope’s lamp with one hand and placed the helminth on the slide, pressing the cover over it. “Sorry, little guy. You aren’t going to recover from this one.”
She saw Luke watching the iPad screen, and she played with the scope’s magnification, moving it down from its max setting to 400x.
She placed her eyes into the eyepieces and blinked a few times, then adjusted the zoom and focus a bit more until the slide beneath the device was in perfect focus.
“Whoa,” she heard Luke whisper.
It was truly impressive—a fully functioning organism, no larger than a tiny piece of capellini pasta, with multiple working components that had only moments ago been actually alive. She felt the gentle shake and warmth of satisfaction through her body as she fell into her work.
“Okay,” she began. “I’m seeing the columnar epithelium inside the cuticle. Segmented. Polychaete, I’m assuming. That chitinous stuff up there? That’s why it’s called chaetae.”
Luke grunted, and she looked up. He shrugged. “Sure, whatever you say, doc.”
She fell back into her rhythm. “Very interesting. Seems to be a bristle worm, but…”
“But what?”
“But those are almost exclusively found in marine environments. Oceanic specifically.”
“It’s an ocean worm?”
“It seems to be,” she answered. “The vast majority—so far, about 98.89%—of these polychaetes are found in saltwater rather than freshwater, but it’s kind of like the biological equivalent of the Johari Window: we don’t know how many species there are that we don’t know about.”
“Right,” Luke said. “Because we haven’t found them yet.” He paused, still examining the iPad screen. “And I can see how these things can go pretty much unnoticed. Could be a lot more species of them out there.”
“Precisely,” Mia said. “But we do have some basic familial characteristics to match them up against. That narrows the playing field a lot. For example, generally, we know some forms of these polychaetes can survive in extremely cold, extremely deep and dark recesses of the ocean. Some were found in the Challenger Deep and the Marianas Trench. And we also know that some can survive in oceanic vents, literal underwater volcanoes—so they can thrive in extremely hot environments. But these survived and multiplied in a completely different environment—that of a freshwater-heavy, 98.6-degree human. It at least gives us an idea as to what they’re capable of living in. And…”
She stopped, looking through the scope again. She blinked more, trying to push aside the small vitreous globules that were floating across her eyes. She readjusted the diopter knob once again, but the strange phenomenon was still there.
“What is it?” Luke asked.
She ignored him, staring intently down at the tiny specimen. She grabbed the tweezers with her right hand, then poked the cover on the glass to move the polychaete around.
Through the microscope, she saw that the side of the worm was slit open, a tiny tear along the tube-like body of the parasite.
But inside, through the folds of the chitinous body, she saw more of them. All microscopic compared to the larger body they were tucked inside, and all moving slowly, dancing in a nervous, smooth rhythm.
“Mia,” Luke said. “Fill me in. What’s—”
“Luke,” she answered, cutting him off as she increased the magnification. “I think I know what these things are.”
As she stared down at them, she thought through the possibilities. She rarely missed a detail in this sort of work, and she rarely misclassified something. But this was something she’d never actually seen in person. Something she hadn’t thought possible outside of some very specific environments.
And yet the evidence was staring her in the face, magnified close to 1,000 times.
What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?
24
Luke was watching Mia work, seeing the same image she was looking at through the microscope on the iPad screen in front of him. Mia pushed up from the table abruptly and walked out of the dining room. He heard her rummaging around in the living room, in or around one of the boxes, and then she returned a moment later with the oldest, crappiest laptop he had ever seen.
