The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Fourteen

The steady diet of vending machine Twinkies and old coffee was making him sick. He needed some wholesome, high-protein nourishment. Something like a Big Mac and French fries.

Faas Hanlon crossed the parking lot, got into his car and put the key into the ignition. Glancing up First Street as he started the car, he could see the dome of the Capitol Building rising in the distance. The McDonald's was three blocks north to I Street and two blocks west to S. Capitol. That's what you call fast food, he was thinking when his cell phone rang.

"Crap," he muttered, flipping open the phone.

They wanted him back upstairs. The reports from Arizona were in.

Locking his car, he strode across the lot and took the stairs up rather than wait for the elevator. Food would have to wait.

Faas walked into the conference room and threw himself into his chair. It was still warm. The six agents were spread around the long table, working on their laptops just as he'd left them. Photographs of two of the Sedona victims were on the large screen at the far end of the room. Teenagers.

"Who do we have?"

"On the right, Leonard 'Lenny' Guest, age eighteen. On the left, Tyrone Ty' North, age nineteen. Both graduated from Red Rock High School in Sedona this past June. No criminal records, no arrests, no DWI. Normal, good kids. Always hung together. Described by friends we interviewed as being practical jokers. Lenny was supposed to start at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff this coming September. Ty was headed to Los Angeles at the end of the summer. He had a job prospect to work at an uncle's body shop."

"What happened?" Faas asked.

"They spent the afternoon at Lenny's house next to the pool," one of agents explained. "They were supposed to go to a party at another friend's house, but they never showed up."

"Was anyone else home at Lenny's?" Faas asked.

"The mother came and went. She says the boys were fine when she saw them. Ty was fighting a summer cold, so they were taking it easy."

"From taking it easy to stealing a car, what happened?"

"The accusation about stealing the truck has been dropped," the same agent told him. "The owner of the red pickup was a friend of theirs that they were going to meet at the party that night. It seems that this was another one of their practical jokes."

"The owner hasn't come out and said it, but there's speculation that this is a regular thing, swiping one another's cars," another agent explained. 'The two boys have done this before. They were driving the vehicle with the valet key."

"Drugs in the car?" Faas asked.

"Marijuana. It seems that they never had a chance to use it, though."

"Are we certain about that?" he asked. "We could be talking about some bad weed spreading the bacteria."

"There's nothing in the autopsy report about that." The agent to his left started typing an e-mail as he was speaking. "The chance that the two families in Maine were smoking pot is really slim, but I'll check back with our offices in Phoenix again for a toxicology report."

Faas looked up at the young faces. They were graduation pictures. What a waste of two lives. "I want to know how long they were unaccounted for."

"I have that right here." One of the agents pulled out a sheet. "Eleven-and-a-half hours."

"Twenty minutes to drive to where they were found. An hour or two to die." Faas was speaking to no one in particular. "Why the hell didn't they call someone when they first felt sick? Wasn't there a cell phone in that truck?"

"Yes, sir, there was. Each of them had one," someone offered. But beyond that there were no answers.

Faas leafed through the faxes and e-mail they'd received from Sedona. Lenny's home was under quarantine, as was every location that the boys had been and every person they'd been in contact with during the week prior to their deaths.

They had nothing so far. No one in the area was showing any indication of the disease, including Lenny's mother, who had been in the same room with them the day they died. There was no sign of the bacteria anywhere, except in the corpses in and around that pickup truck.

It just didn't add up. Faas stared at the pictures, his appetite suddenly gone.