Patient Zero

Chapter Ten

Baltimore, Maryland / Saturday, June 27; 6:19 P.M.

“DR. SANCHEZ’S OFFICE.”

“Kittie? It’s Joe. Rudy free?”

“Oh, he’s gone for the day. I think he went to the gym-”

“Thanks.” I cleared the call and then thumb-dialed the number for Gold’s on Pratt Street. They got Rudy to the phone.

“Joe,” he said. Rudy sounds like Raul Julia from The Addams Family years. “I thought you were in Ocean City. Something about a tan, an endless stream of bikinis, and a sixer of Corona. Wasn’t that the great master plan?”

“Plans change. Look, you free?”

“When?”

“Now.”

A slight pause as he shifted gears. “Are you okay?”

“Not entirely.”

Another shift, this time from concern to caution. “Is this about what happened at the warehouse?”

“In a way.”

“Are you feeling depressed or-”

“Cut the shit, Rudy, this is off the clock.” He got that. Since long before Helen’s first suicide attempt Rudy had been my shrink some of the time and my friend all of the time. Now I needed my friend, but I wanted his brain, too. “Get dressed and come outside. I’ll be there in five.”

I MET RUDY Sanchez ten years ago during his residency at Sinai. He’d worked with Helen since the first time she’d been checked in after the spiders started coming out of the walls. Now we were both dealing with Helen’s suicide in different ways. I needed him for my part of it, and he needed me for his. None of Rudy’s patients had ever killed themselves before, and he took it pretty hard. There’s professional detachment and then there’s basic humanity. Rudy’s a great shrink. He was born for the profession, I think. He listens with every molecule of his body and he has insight.

He came out of Gold’s wearing electric-blue bike shorts and a black tank top, carrying an Under-Armour gym bag.

“You have a bike?” I asked, looking around.

“No, I drove.”

“What’s with the shorts?”

“There’s a new fitness trainer. Jamaican gal tall, gorgeous.”

“And ”

“Bike shorts show off my package.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jealousy is an ugly thing, Joe.”

“Get in the fucking car.”

We drove to Bellevue State Park, bought some bottled water, and walked off into the forest. I hadn’t said much of anything in the car and Rudy let it be, waiting for me to open up, but after we’d been walking for five minutes he cleared his throat. “This is getting pretty remote for a therapy session, cowboy.”

“Not what it is.”

“Then what? Does the FBI want you to get your forestry merit badge?”

“Need privacy.”

“Your car won’t do it?”

“Not sure about that.”

He smiled. “You ought to consider seeing a therapist about that paranoia.”

I ignored him. The park trail brought us into a small clearing by a brook. I led the way down to the scattering of rocks. For a small brook it had a nice steady burble. Useful. Not that I really expected long-range mics, but safe is better than careless.

“Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, Rudy, but I’m going to take off all my clothes. You can turn around. I wouldn’t want you to lose confidence in your package.”

He sat down on a rock and picked up some small stones to toss. I stripped down to the skin and first examined every inch of my boxers, checking the seams and label. Nothing, so I put them back on.

“Thank God,” Rudy said.

I shot him the finger and went through the process with the borrowed clothes.

“What are you looking for?”

“Bugs.”

“Bugs as in creepy crawlies or bugs as in I’m being ape-shit paranoid and my psychiatrist friend had better keep the Thorazine handy?”

“That one,” I said as I put the sweats on and sat on a rock five feet away.

“What’s going on, Joe?”

“That’s the thing, Rude I don’t know.”

His dark eyes searched my face. “Okay,” he said, “tell me.”

And I did. When I was finished Rudy sat on his rock and stared for a long time at a praying mantis that was sunning herself on a leaf. The sun was a ruby-red ball behind the distant trees and the late afternoon heat was giving way to a breezy coolness as twilight began to gather.

“Joe? Look me in the eye and tell me that everything you’ve said is true.”

I told him.

He watched my pupils, the muscles around my eyes, looking for any shifts in focus. Looking for a tell. “There’s no chance this Mr. Church was playing some kind of game on you? There’s no chance this Javad was in on it?”

“A few days ago I shot him twice in the back. Today I smashed the guy’s face to jelly and then snapped his neck.”

“That would be a no, then.” His color was starting to look bad as all of this sank in.

“Could a prion do that?”

“Before today I would have said no unreservedly. And I still don’t think so.”

“What the hell are prions anyway? I can’t remember what I remember about them.”

“Well, there’s a lot of mystery attached to them. Prions are small proteinaceous infectious particles that resist inactivation by ordinary procedures that modify nucleic acids. Does that make sense?”

“Not even a little.”

“Sadly it doesn’t get much simpler. Prions are cutting-edge science and we are quite sure that there is more we don’t know than we do know. Prion diseases are often called spongiform encephalopathies because of the postmortem appearance of the brain with large vacuoles in the cortex and cerebellum; makes the brain look like Swiss cheese. The diseases are characterized by loss of motor control, dementia, paralysis, wasting, and eventually death, typically following pneumonia. Mad cow disease is a type of spongiform encephalopathy. Coming back from the dead, however, is definitely not a known symptom.”

“So prions couldn’t turn a terrorist into one of these monsters?”

“I don’t see how. You said Church was only guessing. It’s been what five days since you shot Javad? That’s not a lot of time to do that kind of medical research. Church may be completely wrong as to the cause.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that Javad was dead, though.”

“Dios mio.”

“Rudy you do believe me, right?”

He stared at the mantis some more. “Yes, cowboy. I believe you. I just don’t want to.”

I had nothing to say to that.