Infected

12.

Margaret arched her back and took a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves, the Racal suit encumbering her every movement. Her hands shook, only slightly, but it was enough to disturb her control of the laparoscope.

The laparoscope, a surgical tool used for operations in the abdominal cavity, consisted of a sensitive fiber-optic camera and an attachment for various probes, scalpels, drills and other devices. The camera, complete with its own light, was barely larger than a piece of thread. The rig included a big monitor on a video tower. Surgeons utilized the equipment to perform delicate operations without cutting into the patient via traditional means.

Few people used such equipment for autopsies, but Margaret wanted to examine the area surrounding the growth while disturbing it as little as possible. Her strategy seemed to have paid off.

Just as in her examination of Charlotte Wilson’s corpse, the growths had already rotted into a liquefied black pulp. There was nothing in the growth itself she could examine. The surrounding tissues were decomposing at a frighteningly fast pace, but this time she was ready. Using the laparoscope, she’d probed the area in and around the growth. Deep inside, almost to the bone and in the midst of rotting black flesh, she’d found a piece of matter that clearly didn’t belong to the victim.

She cracked her knuckles one at a time. The bones popped silently, muffled by the Racal suit. She drew another breath, then took the camera’s control with her left hand. The monitor showed the growth’s blackened, decaying interior. She knew the rot would soon spread to other parts of the body, dissolving it into a useless pile of putrefaction in a few scant hours. Every second counted.

Her hands grew steady; they had to be for such delicate work. The piece of material, barely a quarter inch across, looked to be part of the growth. It was black, the same color as the decomposed gore around it, but reflected the light almost like plastic. That reflective quality was the only reason she’d spotted it.

Her left hand maneuvered the camera, pushing it closer to the black piece. Her right hand controlled a trocar, a hollow tube through which specialized surgical instruments could access a patient’s body cavities without cutting him or her open. Her trocar carried a tiny pair of pincers. Like a kid with a hundred-thousand-dollar video game, she moved the pincers closer to the black plastic fleck. Her finger rested on a trigger that, when pressed, would close the pincers.

Margaret tweaked the camera controls. The image, slightly distorted from high magnification, focused in on the mysterious shiny fleck. The pincers looked like metallic monster claws about to pluck a lone swimmer from a sea of black.

She gently squeezed the trigger. The pincers gripped firmly on the strange material, squishing out thick bubbles of rancid goo as they closed.

“Nice job,” Amos said. “First try. Give the lady a cee-gar.”

She smiled and pulled back on the pincers. The material resisted the pull. She looked closely at the monitor, then gently moved the pincers from side to side, wiggling the clamped object. The reason for the resistance became clear-the object appeared to be embedded in a rib. She pulled back gently, slowly increasing the pressure. The object bent slightly, then popped free. They heard a wet squelch as the tiny pincers-smeared with black slime-pulled free from the wound.

Amos held a petri dish under the pincers. Margaret released the trigger, but the little fleck clung to the goop on the bottom pincer. He grabbed a scalpel, then gently used the point to push the object into the petri dish.

She took the dish and held it close to her faceplate. The fleck had a shape to it, and she could see why it had stayed so firmly planted in the bone. It looked just like a black rose thorn.

She felt a rush of satisfaction. They were still a hundred miles from figuring out the key to this horrific puzzle, but thanks to Charlotte Wilson she knew better what to look for and how much time she had to work with. The black fleck was something new, and it brought them one step closer to an answer.

“Hey,” Amos said, “what do you make of this?” He stood next to Brewbaker’s hip, one of the places least damaged from the flames. His finger rested beside a small lesion, sort of like a gnarled zit.

A gnarled zit with a tiny blue fiber sticking out of it.

“So he had some acne,” Margaret said. “Do you think it’s significant?”

“I think everything is significant. Should we excise it and send it out?”

She thought for a moment. “Not yet. It doesn’t look like there’s any decomposition on that spot, and I want to examine it for myself. Let’s focus on the areas that are rotting, as we know we won’t have much longer to work with those, then come back to it, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Amos said. He grabbed the camera from the prep table. He leaned in close to the zit, snapped a picture, then put the camera back on the prep table. “Right, we’ll come back to it.”

“How much longer until we get the results from the tissue analysis of the growth?”

“We’ll have info tomorrow. I’m sure they’re working through the night. DNA analysis, protein sequencing and anything else that might pop up.”

She checked her watch-10:07 P.M. She and Amos would also be up all night and well into the next day. Had to be. They knew from hard-earned experience that they had only a few days before Brewbaker’s body rotted away.