Dead On Arrival Read online

Now, standing here, he thought aloud, “We could call the police, or wait until night to see if she comes back. Or . . .” He paused. “We could see about the back. There’s a small yard, accessible by an alley. Looks pretty desolate back there, so if there’s a back door . . .” He let it hang there, stared at the house. “In any case, it’s, what, four fifteen, so we don’t have long before—”

  His sentence was interrupted by Jerry opening his door. He stood and straightened his dark blue windbreaker.

  “I got this,” he said. “You two relax.”

  He walked purposefully to the street corner. Lyle felt a tug of conscience and turned to see it was being beamed at him by Eleanor. She stared at Lyle and he shook his head, knowing exactly what he’d done. It wasn’t quite condemnation, though.

  “Let’s use the powers of the gun for good,” he said.

  “Watch out or it will turn on you.”

  A few minutes later, the front door opened. Jerry beckoned them inside. Lyle looked around the street and didn’t see so much as a mail truck. It was still shy of quitting time. He and Eleanor stepped out of the fog. Jerry closed the door behind them.

  “What did you do?” Eleanor asked.

  “Piece of cake. Some stuff I learned doing a hotshot-firefighting weekend training. I’ll spare you the gory details.” Lyle thought it condescending but mostly was focused on the musty smell in this classic midcentury San Francisco flat. A narrow hallway led to a bathroom and two bedrooms in the back. Halfway down the hallway, a doorway led to the kitchen and to the right of the front door, a living room and dining room with creaky wooden floors. The place looked little lived in. Lyle closed his eyes and inhaled. He took in humidity that had seeped into these walls, the low-level mold. He winced; virus could take root here. That wasn’t today’s business. They searched the house, first with great care, and then with more urgency when nothing of relevance, or even mild interest, revealed itself. Other than that the outdated and Spartan decor—an old futon couch in the front room, a garage-sale dining-room table, a beanbag chair, a refrigerator with a pizza magnet holding a sloppily written shopping list and little inside—reminded him very much of his own surroundings and habits. It told him that Jackie Badger focused on things inside her head, not the external. Know your virus, he thought, as he descended wooden stairs from the back of the kitchen to, presumably, the garage. Halfway down, he heard: “Dr. Martin . . . Lyle.”

  It was Eleanor, calling from the bedroom. Lyle found the airline captain looking at a photograph. Of Lyle. He was standing at the café near his house, holding his bicycle, about to mount it. It looked like the photo had been taken by a long lens.

  “It was tucked in behind that picture,” Eleanor said. She gestured to a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, now hung askew after Eleanor had delved behind it. She looked at the picture. “I wonder why she’s collecting photos of people who look bewildered,” she teased lightly.

  Jerry stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. “You’ve never been here?” he asked Lyle pointedly.

  “Who even prints pictures anymore?”

  Lyle took Eleanor’s meaning: everyone keeps their photos online.

  “Someone who wants you to find it,” he muttered. “Everyone’s phone is off, right?” he said just a touch less absently.

  Lyle looked up to find Jerry staring at him. “Now why would she leave us the photo, huh? You’ve got a lot of strange answers, pal. Maybe you’re trying to throw us off the scent.”

  “Jerry . . .”

  The sound of their back-and-forth reminded Lyle, somehow, of Steamboat. “There’s going to be more,” Lyle said obliquely. He walked out of the room and into the second bedroom next door. It served as an office. Now, all tenderness or care was gone from Lyle’s search. He swept things around on the desk, pulled out books from the shelf. He pawed through pockets in the two jackets hung in the closet and shuffled through plastic cartons holding files and folders. On the desk, he stared at a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was from four days earlier. The headline on the lead story referred to the upcoming march on Washington. It was tomorrow, Lyle realized.

  He stood to find Eleanor and Jerry looking at him. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He thought about the note on his fridge, about how this person said she’d met her match. He brushed past them, through the linoleum and bad tile kitchen, down the stairs to a dark, damp garage. At the bottom, he found a string hanging from the low ceiling and pulled it to click on a lightbulb. It provided dim light but enough to make out a garage converted into storage space, no car, boxes, junk, a bicycle and a treadmill. Then he saw the flies. Bingo.

  Lyle sidestepped crud until he got to the recycling, trash, and compost bins near the front of the garage where the bugs hovered. They told him these bins hadn’t been attended recently. Then he opened the compost and saw it was more foul than he thought. Inside, a bird, half eaten away by bacteria, maggots, and flies. He withdrew from the bacteria scent and closed the green lid. The trash held similarly little interest, as he poked through what looked like the detritus of a Dustbuster, fluff and dust bunnies. He heave-dragged the blue recycling bin over the piles and stacks until he came back to the stairs and the lightbulb above. Jerry and Eleanor stood there speechlessly watching. He tipped the tall bin and dumped. Half a foot of junk mail and assorted papers slipped out. Lyle picked through it. He paused on a scrap, held it close to his face, put it on the stair for further examination. Leafed some more, tossed most of it aside. Found another small scrap and scrutinized it. Then picked up the first scrap.

  He started looking again with greater intensity.

  “Lyle,” Eleanor said.

  Lyle didn’t answer and she couldn’t be sure he even heard her, so lost was he.

  “Hey, so-called doctor, what’s the deal?” Jerry said.

  Lyle now looked intently at another sheet of paper culled from the pile. He stood and whisked right between the two flummoxed pilots and up the stairs he went, into the kitchen to the fridge. He pulled off the shopping list held by the pizza magnet—a magnet that matched his own exactly—and opened the sheet of paper, which had been folded in quarters. Inside was a grainy image of a mouse. It looked to have been printed in black and white on a not-very-fancy printer. Beneath the picture, a caption that read: “The deer mouse is three to four inches long with a brown back and a white stomach.”

  Lyle closed his eyes and rocked on his feet, thinking. Then, suddenly, he walked purposely toward the door.

  “Hey!” Jerry said.

  Lyle, lost in thought, kept walking. Eleanor hustled behind him. She took his arm and gently spun him around. “Hello, Earth to Dr. Martin. What’s up?”

  He looked up, seeming surprised he had company.

  “I know where she is.”

  Forty-Three

  Lyle kept walking. Eleanor wondered if he was muttering to himself. She resisted the urge to look back at Jerry because she didn’t want to encourage his skepticism. Truly, though, she felt some of it herself. She hustled up behind Lyle and walked next to him, hearing the sound behind her of Jerry shutting the door.

  “You ever fly a plane, Dr. Martin?”

  “What? Um, no.” He kept toward the car.

  “It takes all the concentration in the world. Still, though, you have to pause now and again and communicate to the passengers, y’know, explain to them what’s happening.”

  “Uh-huh.” He kept walking.

  “Or they’ll storm the flight deck and tear you limb from limb. Unless, of course, you’ve given them Wi-Fi. Then they’ll be so distracted you can fly into the ocean.”

  Lyle laughed. “Fair enough.” He opened the door and climbed into the back.

  “Somebody tell me what the hell is going on,” Jerry said, standing with arms crossed in irritation. “Or we’re not going anywhere, capiche?”

  Eleanor shot him a look.

  “Give me a break and quit the lovebird crap,” Jerry said.

  She held her arms
up, like What the hell, where did that come from?

  “Flight plan calls for Nevada,” Lyle said.

  Jerry shook his head in disbelief.

  “So-so start. This is the part where you need to communicate,” Eleanor said.

  She climbed into the passenger seat and Jerry took the wheel. He put up the top of the sports car and Lyle explained what he’d found.

  In the recycling bin were several receipts that caught his eye. He fanned four of them in his hand. One was a restaurant, another for an electric-car charging station, and a third for a hotel. The fourth was for a place called “Winter Place,” but left no other evidence what it was. The restaurant and charging station had come from three months earlier, well prior to the Steamboat flight. The Days Inn hotel was from the week before.

  All of them had the 702 area code. The hotel had an address in “Hawthorne, Nev.”

  “How do you know she’s there now? Why wouldn’t she be at work?”

  “Fair question and easy enough to check. We can call Google,” Lyle said. “She won’t be there. She’s here,” he mused, and it sounded very much like he was talking to himself or the receipts. He realized it and looked up. He explained his reasoning. The receipts were from very different time periods. That wasn’t necessarily a big deal—after all, Jackie might have dumped receipts together over time and then cleaned her office and recycled them at one time. But Lyle suspected it was a clue for two reasons. One was that a bird had been left in the compost. This, Lyle thought, had been designed to draw flies and to attract their attention.

  “To the compost? Give me a break,” Jerry said.

  “I agree it sounds thin,” the pilot said.

  “Or just dumb luck,” Lyle said with a shrug.

  “Keep going.”

  He showed the mouse picture and told them that the deer mouse had become a particularly nagging source of hantavirus.

  “It’s a symbol of sorts, something any immunologist would recognize,” Lyle said. “Comes from Nevada. I think she was giving another gentle reminder, and it was held on the refrigerator with the same magnet I’ve got—the one where my own note disappeared.” He’d already told them that story.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jerry. “And you’re telling me you’ve never met her.”

  “So, like, she’s leaving clues?” Eleanor ignored Jerry. “Why in the world would she do that? Why not just leave a note saying where she is?”

  Lyle looked blankly at Eleanor. He had no answer for her.

  “Fair enough,” Lyle said. His logic did sound thin. “We can call the hotel in Nevada and see if she’s checked in there.”

  “Well now, there’s a sane thought,” Jerry muttered. “Except that you’ve made us all turn off our phones.”

  With about as much sense of cohesion as the United States Congress, they drove to a nearby café and Eleanor asked a man if she might borrow his phone because she’d lost hers and needed to call a friend. No biggie, the guy said. She looked at the number on the receipt for the Days Inn.

  She asked for Jackie Badger’s room.

  “Connecting you now to 106,” the woman said.

  Eleanor hung up.

  Jackie’s phone rang. She looked down and recognized the number.

  “Ms. Badger?”

  “This is she.”

  “Hi, it’s Becky from the Days Inn.”

  “Hi, Becky.”

  “You asked me to call you if anyone called to ask for you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Someone called just a few minutes ago.”

  “Asking for me.”

  “Right. I told them what you said to.”

  “Becky, well done. Was it a man or a woman?”

  “Woman’s voice.”

  Jackie winced and her eye twitched. “Thank you, Becky,” she managed.

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for the new iPad and a new iPhone. I don’t know what to say. I’ve never gotten anything like this before in my life.”

  “My pleasure. I take care of the people who take care of me.”

  “Is there anything else you need, Ms. Badger?”

  “No, Becky. I’m good. Just keep me posted.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And, um, ma’am—”

  “Jackie is fine.”

  “Yes, Jackie. You want me to do the other thing, too?”

  “Yep, just like we talked about. Thank you, Becky.” She hung up. She sighed. It had been a long time without sleep, and hard work. She’d moved her operation downstairs into one of the exam rooms they had used for study subjects. It had entailed moving a computer and two monitors. The gadgets sat on a table, Jackie in the swivel desk chair, and Alex lying on her side, dumb smile on her face. Jackie liked the idea of having her there, a mascot. Down here, at least on the scientists’ side of the room, it was protected from the electromagnetic field. Not so much on the other side, where the study subjects used to sit. An empty chair was there and, as Jackie looked at it, she sure hoped she’d eventually have Lyle on her side and that she wouldn’t have to put him in that chair.

  She turned back to her screen. On the window, a news website showed streaming video of protesters beginning to gather for the next day’s public display of citizen gun power. Mostly white men, wearing camouflage or green, milling the National Mall, looking at the National Guardsmen, stoically standing with automatic rifles strapped against their chests. The guardsmen peered back. They scanned the crowd for weapons. A policeman with a megaphone repeated that “citizens who open-carry weapons without a permit will be subject to arrest.” Salivating journalists dotted the mall, setting the stage for tomorrow’s possible conflagration. “Twelve hours and counting,” a sideline reporter said, trying to sound concerned about this prospect: Would a protester open fire? A cop?; Would you be arrested if you had an open-carry permit from your home state?; Would it become a firefight? The reporter said: “It’s a tinderbox.”

  “Get a load of this, Alex,” Jackie said to her comatose coworker. “We could look like heroes. Shutting it all down, hitting pause, right before all hell breaks loose.”

  She looked at Alex and then back at the screen.

  She clicked into a box reading China Telecom.

  13:45:18

  13:45:17

  Forty-Four

  The drive took place largely in silence, aside from the slipstream of wind seeping into the car. The Miata was not built for road trips. It was loud and cramped. And goose chase didn’t begin to capture the quixotic basis for the trip. Each, though, had motivations. Jerry, who fashioned himself as a man of action, wasn’t about to sit around and let this infuriating moment pass without doing something. Plus, this Lyle guy irked the shit out of him, the more so because Jerry saw some connection between Lyle and Eleanor. I’ve got your back, he thought to himself as he watched Eleanor, and you’ll be grateful for it when the time comes.

  Eleanor had made a simple calculation that it made more sense to go than not. But it wasn’t satisfying in the least because the margin of her decision was razor thin, like 51 percent to 49 percent. Or maybe her decision was more of a plurality: 50 percent go on a goose chase; 49 percent don’t go; 1 percent have no freaking clue, or what’s the alternative?

  Two things pushed her over the top. One was that someone had died on her airplane, an old man, and she knew—absolutely knew—that she’d done nothing wrong to cause that. The second thing was that, on some basic level, she trusted this Dr. Martin. Such an odd combination of guileless and cunning. Not evil cunning, or wily, but brilliant cunning. She’d looked him up on the Internet before their first meeting. She knew what he’d been once. She was left to wonder what had caused him to come undone. It bore watching. She sat in silence in the passenger seat, trying to take in as much information as she might, watching the side of the increasingly dark road disappear in the rearview mirror.

  For his part, Lyle had moved beyond thinking and into instinct. The frontal lobe of his brain, the part involved in decision m
aking and higher-level analysis, would be surprisingly free of activity at times like these. What prevailed was free association, the appearance in his mind’s eye of ideas that might be loosely described as taking the shape of puzzle pieces. He tried to link them and, sometimes, frustrated, he would emit a sound of disgust. In a couple of these moments, Eleanor would glance at Jerry, which would send her first officer into a pleasure spiral because the two of them were seeing eye-to-eye. Jerry felt the shape of his gun in his back holster and he smiled.

  They pulled off at an exit just before nine o’clock looking for gas and food.

  At the Chevron, Jerry fueled up and they all stared at the video monitor located on the pump. It was a split screen, one side featuring an ad with an adorable-looking cartoon car smiling because it was being filled up with Chevron gas; the other side showed marchers descending on the Washington Mall. One held a placard with an automatic weapon drawn on it. He was being confronted by a young person poking a finger in his chest.

  Jerry looked at Lyle.

  “What is it with you and this woman?” Jerry asked.

  “I don’t know. Other than . . .” Lyle’s back ached from the small backseat confines. “How much do you guys know about the immune system?”

  “Fights disease,” Jerry said.

  “Exactly. The way it does so is kind of incredible. First, it has to recognize a threat. There are trillions of possible alien threats and some of them can look a lot like normal cells. So that’s no small feat. Then it has to—”

  “Please tell me he’s going somewhere with this,” Jerry whined condescendingly to Eleanor.

  “I think so.”

  Jerry pulled out of the gas station and into the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger and took a spot while Lyle explained how the immune system has to look for subtle signs of a dangerous, often deadly, invader, then look for ways to attach to those cells and figure out how to produce proteins capable of attacking the offender. It is an extremely delicate task, arguably the most sophisticated cat-and-mouse game in the world.