Chaos

CHAPTER 41

PANGUITE WAS DISCOVERED SEVERAL years ago when geologists at Caltech were analyzing pieces of a meteorite that fell in northern Mexico in 1969.” Ernie leans over to pull up a sock that’s been eaten by his cowboy boot.

“I’ve never heard of a mineral called panguite,” I reply.

“Named after Pangu, the god that split Ying from Yang or something,” he says as my incredulity grows. “And what Bill says is just because panguite was recently discovered doesn’t mean it’s not present in other meteorites that have struck the earth. You’d have to go around testing space rocks in every museum in the world to know.”

“How can you tell we’re talking about a meteorite?” I indicate the monitors across the top of the room. “And you do realize how completely illogical this is? Molly Hinders certainly wasn’t struck by a meteorite while she was watering her yard on Labor Day. Not that there’s a case on record of anyone being struck by a meteorite but had she been? I would expect a lot more than a small burn on her scalp, and she certainly didn’t die of blunt-force trauma. She’s clearly an electrical death.”

“The metals we’re seeing are significant,” Ernie points out. “Especially zirconium and scandium, but also iron, titanium et cetera.”

“But there could be other explanations for finding them.”

“But not for panguite. It doesn’t naturally exist on earth.” He points out peaks for Ti⁴⁺, Sc, Al, Mg, Zr, Ca-the elemental components of what he goes on to explain is a new form of titania.

It occurs as fine crystals that at a magnification of 200,000X are reminiscent of pitted white bone or coral. I can see strange areas of red patina, and also irregular surface features including cracks, pits and crystal inclusions mixed with shiny fibers, what Ernie informs me are bundles of single-walled carbon nanotubes.

“Now you see our problem,” he says.

“I certainly do.”

“Mother Nature has been tampered with.”

“You’re thinking someone has built a weapon from a meteorite and carbon nanotubes?”

“Possibly.”

Nanotubes are lightweight, incredibly strong, and structures made of these extremely fine fibers can be superfast and efficient at conducting electricity and heat. It’s believed and feared that molecular nanotechnology is the future of everything, including war.

“Imagine making a small powerful bomb out of nanothermite or super-thermite?” Ernie is saying. “Or how about mini-nukes? Or God forbid bioterrorism delivered in the nano range? Scary shit.”

“Yes it is, and I understand the utility of building something out of nanotubes, but what would anyone use panguite for?”

“That was my question too. And the possibility Bill came up with is if it’s like titanium then maybe it’s an undercoating, some sort of thermal protection.”

“Then why not use titanium? And where might someone get hold of a meteorite, assuming the person doesn’t work with them?”

“That’s not hard,” Ernie says. “You can buy all sorts of pieces and parts of meteorites off the Internet.”

“But would they have panguite in them?”

“That’s what I’m saying. We don’t know. We can’t know if they’ve not been analyzed. But I’m going to assume that this is rare.” He means finding panguite is rare. “If the mineral was only recently discovered, it’s hard for me to believe it’s turned up often in the past or you might think it would have been discovered a long time ago.”

“We’re also talking about someone familiar with nanotechnology,” I reply. “And if this person is actually modifying materials at the atomic level? Then we’re not talking about the average bear.”

“What do I say if the FBI wanders in here and starts asking me what I’m doing?” Ernie asks.

“Keep your door locked and they won’t be wandering in. If you’re quiet they’ll never find you down here.”

“Because if something like this got out, Kay? It would create a panic if the public thinks meteorites are killing people or some new death-ray-like weapon is.”

“Discretion is imperative right now.” I get up from my chair.

AFTER I LEAVE ERNIE, I return to the CT-scan room but it’s empty now. I head back to the receiving area, where two FBI agents are drinking coffee near the door that leads out to the bay.

“I tried to call you,” I say to Georgia as I pause by her desk.

“I bet you did right about the time I was out in the bay telling them they can’t park in there. You see how much good it did. That big-ass SUV’s still sitting in there, isn’t it?”

“If it gets scraped by a stretcher they have no one to blame but themselves.” I’m always warning Lucy about that.

She doesn’t listen and nobody dings or sideswipes her cars. It hasn’t happened once. But there’s always a first time for everything, and I head in the direction of the autopsy room, which is dark and silent as I walk past its shut door. Beyond it is another autopsy room, what’s really an isolation area for badly decomposed or possibly infected cases, and the two agents on either side of the steel door leading inside don’t look happy to be here.

Using my elbow, I press a hands-free steel button on the wall and the door automatically swings open on a cloud of stench that sends both agents scurrying out of the way.

“How are we doing in here?” I ask cheerfully as I take my time holding the door open wide, and the foulness is thick and bristles like something alive.

Mahant, Anne, Harold and Luke are swathed in protective clothing and clustered around the only table in a room with a thirty-foot ceiling and banks of high-intensity lights, and I note that the observation window in the upper wall is empty and dark. Anne didn’t think to tell our FBI visitors that they could sit behind glass in a teaching lab and avoid unnecessary unpleasantness if they preferred. They could drink coffee up there and monitor everything we’re doing on a live audio-video feed. But Anne accidentally on purpose forgot to mention it, I guess.

Luke snaps a new blade into a scalpel. The paper bags have been removed from Elisa Vandersteel’s hands, feet and head, and her sports bra, blue shorts, and socks are off and spread out on a white-paper-covered countertop. He begins to run the blade through her flesh, from clavicle to clavicle, then down her torso.

“It’s looking like she has cardiac damage, possibly a torn posterior pericardium, and hemorrhage in the area of the left myocardium,” he tells me what he observed on the CT scan. “Plus what looks like suffusion of blood in the interventricular septum.”

“What about her head injury?” I reach for rib cutters on the nearby surgical cart, and situate myself across the table from Luke.

I’m shoulder to shoulder with Mahant.

“No skull fracture,” Luke says as I cut through ribs, removing the breastplate, exposing the thoracic organs, and the putrid odor blooms up our nostrils like a dark deadly flower.

Mahant’s face shield isn’t going to save him, and I watch as he turns a tint of grayish green. Luke lifts the bloc of organs out of the chest cavity and sets it on a big cutting board with a wet heavy sound.

“Is something wrong with the air in here?” Mahant has inched back from the table, and he’s staring at me without blinking.

“Too cold? Too hot?” Anne innocently inquires.

“I mean the ventilation.” He swallows hard.

“It could be worse. We had a floater in here the other day.” She looks at me as I snip open the stomach with surgical scissors. “In fact that’s when the ventilation didn’t seem to be working all that well.”

“It’s the heat wave,” Luke says.

“How would that affect the ventilation?”

“It affects everything.”

“You can imagine how hard our air-handling system has to work in this weather.” I dribble the gastric contents into a plastic carton, and I’m surprised to find undigested peanuts and raisins.

“Obviously she had a snack not long before she died,” I show Mahant the palm of my glove as he backs up another several inches.

“Maybe a trail mix or something like that?” Anne suggests as I snip through the connective tissue of the bowels, dropping sections into a plastic bucket on the floor while Luke removes a kidney from the scale.

“You might want to find out about that,” I say to Mahant as Luke begins sectioning the kidney and Harold makes an incision around the top of the skull.

Then Bryce walks in, and he couldn’t be more oblivious to what’s normal for him and for all of us.

“Taking breakfast orders,” he announces cheerily, and I resist looking at Anne, who clearly has gotten to him with her evil plan. “How many takers do we have for pizza?”

“Jesus,” Mahant stares wide-eyed at him, and Harold pulls the body’s face down like a collapsed rubber mask so he can access the top of the skull, gleaming white and round like an egg.

“Meat or veggie?” Bryce asks as Harold plugs the Stryker saw into an overhead cord reel. “And we have gluten-free.” Bryce raises his voice over the loud whining of the oscillating blade cutting through bone. “But nothing glutton-free,” he can’t resist his favorite pun. “Because you can’t stop eating it,” he says.

Harold picks up a chisel to pop off the skullcap.

“The trick is to cut a little notch right here,” he shows Mahant, who isn’t blinking and hardly breathing anymore. “Then I insert the chisel and give it a little quick turn like a skate key.” Harold does it as he talks, and then he’s catching the ASAC as he topples like a tree to the tile floor.

“Oh dear. Let’s get him some air.” Harold holds him up and walks him to the door, and he’s done this quite a lot in his career. “Here.” He opens it and leads him out. “Let’s find you a chair,” he says in his best funeral-director voice. “Can one of you gentlemen please find a chair? He just needs a little air,” he says to the agents in the corridor, and I must be a bad person.

I stay inside the decomp room and do nothing to help Mahant. As long as he doesn’t throw up on the body or crack his head on the floor, I don’t care if he’s faint or queasy. I pretend I do but I know it’s not true, and maybe he and his merry band of agents will leave and not come back.

“Take a look.” Luke is slicing the heart on the cutting board.

He uses a towel to pat dry a section, and the fresh myocardial contusion is a tiny bluish-black spot on the pale heart muscle.

“Basically the electrical current walloped her heart and stopped it,” he says.

“Do you think the injury to her head would have knocked her out?” Anne asks. “On CT she definitely has subarachnoid hemorrhage.”

“It might have,” I reply, “but it doesn’t matter because the head injury didn’t contribute to her death. Maybe it would have but there wasn’t a chance. She was already dying when she hit the ground.”

“Taking everything into account?” Luke adds as he takes photographs. “Death resulted from respiratory arrest due to electrocution. She probably didn’t survive longer than several minutes, and I doubt she knew what hit her.”