Dogs (33 page)

Harper, who'd been turning away, snapped around. His eyes burned. “You saw something?”

“Yes. No. Not directly but…I'm not sure.”

He wasn't sure he should tell this ferocious person, but after all, Harper was a cop. So Del followed him to a corner of the big tent filling up with evacuees and explained about Ed Dormund's leaving home half an hour before the robbery and returning with three other jubilant men. How Del, opening his kitchen window to ask them to please not wake Brenda with their noise, had caught the word “syringes” from Dormund's garage and had closed the window without speaking.

Harper said, “How'd you know about the robbery? It's not on TV yet.”

“It's on-line,” Del said. “The story's on-line already. That never takes long.” He smiled apologetically, although he wasn't sure what he was apologizing for.

"Okay. Thanks, Lassiter." Harper turned away but Del laid a hand on his arm. “Officer, I want to emphasize that I don't
know
that Dormund is involved in anything wrong. I just thought—”

“You did the right thing.” Harper strode away before Del could finish.

When Del returned to Brenda, she and the pink-coated woman were talking about their dogs that had been taken away. Brenda had tears in her eyes for poor Folly, but when she saw Del, she tried hard to smile.

“I want to emphasize that I don't know that Dormund is involved in anything wrong.”

Well, Steve Harper damn well knew. He'd never believed for half a second that Ed Dormund had nothing to do with his wife's death, no matter what the know-it-all detectives decided. Steve had been to the Dormund house twice for domestic disturbance, plus noise caused by those fucking dogs. Dormund was a dirt bag, just the kind to “defend” their bullshit “right” to keep vicious dogs, no matter what the consequence.

The brown mastiff with a single long string of saliva and blood hanging from its mouth onto Davey's body...

Steve got into his car, first scanning full-circle for any sign of loose dogs. He was carrying, and if one of the jackals came anywhere near, the snipers wouldn't be the ones to take it out. Jess Langstrom and his boys were idiots, to not be able to shoot a bunch of dogs. That went for the Guard as well, and FEMA—telling him the best job for him was pouring coffee!—and most of all for Steve's boss, DiBella, who'd handed over his town without so much as a murmur. Well, he didn't have to go to DiBella—DiBella had put Steve on suspension.

Steve drove to his old friend Keith Rubelski's house, taking the back routes to avoid the cars heading for evacuation points. Steve's buddies on the Force couldn't be counted on, not for this. They didn't understand. But Keith had lost his wife to these uncontrolled animals, so Keith understood completely. He knew how it felt to hurt so much inside that you could hardly breathe and sometimes just taking a single step felt like it would shatter your whole body.

Since Davey's death, the only thing that had comforted Steve at all was the president's decision to kill all the dogs in Tyler. And now Dormund and his kind were trying to take that comfort away. Steve knew in his guts that they wouldn't stop with hijacking the Army Vet Corps truck with the euthanasia syringes. They would know that the Army would just send up more drugs from Fort Detrick, under stronger and more alert guard, and that a second hijacking wouldn't work. No, the jackal-lovers had to be planning something else, something bigger.

Let them. Steve knew people like Keith, who understood better than to count on FEMA, or even on the Maryland Guard. The individual soldiers might be good people—probably were—but the command wasn't strong enough to stop the jackal-lovers. Steve had heard talk around the police barracks, talk around town. The fucking feds were too afraid of another Kent State to fire on civilians, if it came to that. It was okay to let any number of kids die from dogs, but don't let a precious dog-protecting protestor die while breaking the law. Well, Steve would just see about that.

The perps who had blown up the Stop 'n' Shop weren't the only ones who knew about explosives. Keith was a trained and certified expert.

The canine silence in Tyler still bothered Jess. Throughout the day he heard a couple of hounds giving voice as they chased a rabbit or squirrel somewhere, and once a dog howled, a long drawn-out howl that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It might have been one of the Nordic breeds, a Husky or Malamute, or even a wolf-dog hybrid. But that was all, all day.

On his way to critical incident headquarters he motioned down a patrol car with Eric Lavida and Neil Patman. “Hey, Jess.”

“Hey. You guys have anything yet on who stole the Vet Corps syringes?”

“Not yet.” Eric looked stony. Forty or fifty participants and no arrests yet. “Nobody's talking.”

“Eric, something's brewing here.”

“Don't I know it. We're looking.”

“I hear anything, I'll give you a call.”

“Good.”

Headquarters had changed yet again. The road running between the Cedar Springs Motel and the fields across the street had become the border of a fortified enclave. People came and went freely into the motel parking lot, still dominated by the huge mobile labs. Every room in the motel had become an office for some agency: CDC, USAMRIID, FEMA, FBI, MNG, the entire alphabet soup of crisis. The motel had been supplemented by large Army-issue tents stretching down the road.

Across the street, military law prevailed. Guardsmen ringed more tents occupying at least fifteen acres. Two of the tents were gigantic. These housed dogs; Jess could hear the barking, snarling, yapping, growling, and baying that he'd missed all day in town. Around the two big tents sprouted a few dozen smaller ones. Above it all towered a forest of floodlight poles.

Jess knocked on the CDC lab door and was told by a weary, white-coated woman that Joe Latkin was in the mess tent. The mess tent was warmer than the outside but not really at room temperature, and Latkin wore an open parka. Even in the parka, his slight frame seemed even thinner than a few days ago. With his pale blue, almost white eyes, he looked like a ghost from some scientific afterlife.

“Hello, Jess.”

“Hi, Joe. Listen, Billy told me he brought in a dog with milky film in its eyes but no signs of aggression.”

“Yes, we're very pleased to have it.” Latkin looked far too exhausted for pleasure. “But of course its antibodies may or may not provide us with additional clues to this thing, and a big factor is that viruses mutate constantly. By the time we determine what's going on with that dog's immunity at a cellular level, something entirely different might be going on. For instance…no, wait, come with me. I want to show you something.”

Jess followed Latkin from the mess tent. The winter twilight had begun, a featureless gray under the cloud cover that had been building all day. Latkin strode across the road, where a rifle-carrying Guard stopped him. “This is a restricted area, sir.”

“Oh, for God's sake, I'm Dr. Latkin, head of the CDC team, and this is Jess Langstrom, Tyler animal control officer!”

“I need to see your passes.”

Jess didn't have the pass required, which was apparently a new one resulting from tighter security. Fuming, Latkin summoned a Guard officer, who made two cell calls before allowing them to cross the road. Then they had to sign in, signatures and time: 5:15 P.M.

“They keep changing the rules, the soldiers, and the whole damn protocol,” Latkin seethed. “All the emphasis is on the wrong things. Forms, not substance. Of all the mismanaged…that's Tent A, Jess, where we have the infected dogs, and the other big one is B, uninfected. Come this way.”

The floodlights came on, turning the field brighter than the gloomy day had been, as Latkin led him into a much smaller tent. It held a jumble of equipment, including an open laptop computer on an Army-issue folding metal table. A single large dog cage sat in the middle of the floor. In it was a male Doberman with a large dressing on its left hind leg and the funnel-shaped collar put on animals to keep them from biting off bandages or stitches. Despite the awkward collar and its damaged leg, the Doberman was going through some very peculiar motions. It leapt up as far as the cage would allow, closing its jaws on thin air, for all the world as if it were attacking invisible prey. Leaping, twisting, biting, tearing something only it could see, all in utter, eerie silence.

Jess felt cold around his bones. “What's it doing?”

“We don't know,” Latkin said somberly. “The dog just started this behavior this morning, and so far it's the only one. This is the Doberman that was shot in West Virginia. The one whose saliva samples indicate it to be among the first infected. We're waiting to see if the other dogs present with this behavior, or if this dog progresses to something else. Meanwhile, we have had one piece of luck.”

“What's that?” Jess said. He couldn't look away from the Doberman. Leaping, twisting, biting at things that didn't exist. At ghosts.

“Doctors Without Borders came across a similar virus in Africa, and somebody at their headquarters found saliva samples frozen in the specimen library. They're being flown to Atlanta now. Maybe a comparison will turn up something interesting.”

“Hope so,” Jess said, although he didn't understand how that would help. “Doctor, can I visit an uninfected dog? For just a minute?”

“Go ahead. I'm needed back at the lab.”

At Tent B, Jess had to sign in on a clipboard hanging from a rope beside an unsmiling Guardsman. As he endured the soldier's hard stare, Jess tried to remember the time when it had been he who had jurisdiction over the animals in Tyler. All of ten days ago.

Tent B was brightly lit. The noise was incredible but mostly benign; hundreds of uninfected dogs barked or slept or lapped water or chewed on rawhide or tried vainly to get at each other. Jess was startled to realize how many he recognized from rounding them up all over Tyler.

Applejack and Schnapps. He heard Tessa's voice saying, “
Rich people like to give their dogs alcoholic names."

Daisy, giving off the soft, strange, yodeling sound that only Basenjis make.

Rio, a Bernese mountain, asleep in a huge cage.

Folly, a tiny Chihuahua, shivering on her mat.

Oxford College, the beagle belonging to a pair of over-educated commuters.

Jess couldn't find his great-niece Hannah's collie, Missy, or Missy's four pups. He hoped that didn't mean they'd already been “sacrificed” for research. Although what did it matter, since as soon as the Army Vet Corps could get enough sodium pentobarbital to Tyler, all these dogs were dead anyway.

He shouldn't have come in here.

Rounding a corner created by the stacked cages, he nearly bumped into a cluster of animal handlers deep in serious conversation. Jess heard “—have to remember to—”

“Mr. Langstrom!”

The group sprang apart. The girl who'd gasped his name was Melissa Taney, a twenty-something who worked with the county vet, Carl Venters. She looked as startled and upset as if Jess had caught her naked.

“Hi, Melissa. I'm looking for a specific dog, a toy poodle named Minette, address 142 Farley Street. Can you help me?”

“She's over there,” a man volunteered. He was older than Melissa but not by much, and looked vaguely familiar to Jess. He realized that FEMA must be using locals for routine dog care. Well, that made sense—you didn't need highly trained K-9 specialists to clean cages and pour kibble.

“Thanks,” Jess said. He walked in the direction the man pointed, feeling all their eyes on his back.

Minette lay asleep in her cage but woke as soon as Jess squatted beside it. As he squatted beside her, she barked and pushed against the bars to get close to him and feverishly licked his fingers. Did all this joy mean she remembered him, or would she have reacted the same to attention from anyone? He didn't know.

Jess stood, his eyes moist. Definitely he shouldn't have come. Probably right now a second van, under much heavier guard, was on its way from Fort Detrick.

Melissa stood beside him. “Mr. Langstrom, I'm sorry but you really should go now. This is a restricted area and we could get in trouble with Mr. Lurie.”

He didn't want that. “All right, Melissa,” he said in his deepest, most soothing voice, and then watched her mottle maroon. Something wasn't right here. “I certainly don't want to get anybody in trouble with Mr. Lurie.”

She nodded, not meeting his eyes.

Jess walked back across the brightly lit field, signed himself out, and headed for the mess tent. Might as well have dinner there as at his silent apartment, and it seemed a good idea to stick around here for a while.

Just in case.

It was 5:37.

Tessa was running out of supplies. She'd eaten five cans of stew and one of the two packages of dried figs. Worse, the propane that heated Ebenfield's cabin was running out. He must have gone down the mountain every few days to buy supplies and steal wireless Internet service.