Natural Causes (22 page)

Her data, amassed over nearly a year, and involving thousands of interviews and cultures, pointed the finger of responsibility directly at the U.S. military. The army, she maintained, was using what they thought was a biologically inactive bacterial marker to test germ warfare/air current theories in the tunnels of the BART—the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. Because of the sensitive nature of her accusation, Rosa did not reveal her findings until her case was, to all intents, airtight. But somewhere along the line, she had spoken of them to the wrong person.

A blue-ribbon commission of the country’s foremost epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists was appointed by Congress to validate her conclusions. What they found, instead, were critical pieces of data missing all along the line. Computer programs that Rosa herself had designed functioned poorly or not at all. Probability calculations failed to support hypotheses. Laboratory technicians denied ever having received specimens that she swore to having sent. Finally, and most ignominiously, one expert on the commission quite easily traced the source of the bacteria to a dump site on the edge of the city. The directors of the private laboratory responsible for the disposal error readily admitted it. They were fined but soon after, Rosa learned, were the beneficiaries of a hefty military contract.

“So,” she said, “the dumping site was cleaned up, and
of course, the rate of infection began to drop. I was put into mothballs, so to speak, and was brought out for this investigation only when no one else was available to do it.”

“They sabotaged your work. I don’t believe it,” Sarah said. “Correction. Actually, I
do
believe it.”

“Well, at least now you may understand why I have maintained some distance from everyone involved in this case—including you.”

“Please, Rosa, don’t worry about it. Just do your work.”

“Tomorrow morning I am returning to Atlanta for a while. My investigation is still in a most preliminary phase. But I have come across some things that disturb me, and I wanted to warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“It’s not what you think,” Rosa said, patting her reassuringly on the arm. “In fact, I’ve wanted for several days to tell you that my initial studies are pointing toward some sort of infection, not a toxin or poison. But I—I’ve just been reluctant to speak of my work with anybody.”

They had reached the doorway of the old stucco Victorian where Rosa was staying.

“Then what is there to warn me about?”

“Sarah, you are a kind and caring person—a credit to your profession. I can see the pain the charges against you have caused. I don’t want to go into details just yet, but I have reason to believe someone may be trying to keep me from getting at the truth in these cases. Assuming that person is not you—and that is an assumption I have chosen to make—you must be careful whom you talk to and whom you trust.”

“But—”

“Please, Sarah. Sharing this much has been difficult for me. I’ll tell you more when it seems right to do so. Meanwhile, I have a great deal of work yet to do, and you have a defense to put together.”

Sarah sighed. “Your assumption is right, you know. I’m not that person.”

Again, Rosa patted her arm. “I
do
know, dear. Just be patient with me, and be very, very careful.”

Sarah waited until the epidemiologist was inside. Then she pedaled slowly toward the inner city. For a time, she worked at clearing her mind entirely. Failing that, she tried to focus on her new lawyer and the strange, stuttering little man. But always, her thoughts drifted back to Rosa Suarez’s cryptic warning.

Just be patient with me, and be very, very careful
.

If the woman’s intention was to frighten her, Sarah acknowledged finally, she had done a pretty damn good job.

T
HE SHOP OF THE HERBALIST
K
WONG
T
IAN
-W
EN OCCUPIED
the ground floor and basement of a dilapidated, four-story brick tenement. Sarah paid more than customary attention to her appearance and to selecting an outfit, then left her apartment at seven-fifteen and walked the few miles from the North End to Chinatown. She sensed some apprehension at having to deal with Jeremy Mallon, and was still bewildered by the frightened, stuttering man and by Rosa Suarez’s strange warning. But the morning was bright and unusually clear, and she felt upbeat—about taking this step to eliminate her herbal supplement from suspicion
and
about seeing Matt Daniels again.

She had known Kwong from her days at the Ettinger Institute, and following her return from medical school, she had checked him out with several members of the Boston holistic community. He was still highly regarded. Nevertheless, she interviewed him twice before selecting him as her supplier. He spoke almost no English, but Sarah’s once-decent Chinese was still good enough to conduct business with him. When she needed
a translator, Kwong would rap his cane on the ceiling or strike it against a certain steam pipe. And within a minute or two, one of his American-born grandchildren would appear.

Sarah was impressed with the man’s knowledge and drawn to his consistently optimistic outlook. And of course, there were the striking similarities—physical
and
metaphysical—between him and Louis Han. She could not help but believe that in Kwong, she was getting a glimpse of her mentor had he lived into his seventies.

Initially Sarah picked up her herbal orders herself. But as the pressures of her medical training mounted, she had begun having the mixture delivered. Now, perhaps for the first time, she realized how much she missed her visits to the shop. The frayed connection with Kwong was, she thought sadly, just another item on the list of casualties exacted by her residency.

The shop was on a narrow street, barely more than an alley, off Kneeland. As Sarah rounded the corner, she saw the old man and Debbie, one of his granddaughters, standing by the building. She was wondering why the two weren’t inside when she noticed the yellow vinyl ribbon crisscrossing the doorway and windows. It pained her to think of Kwong’s humiliation and confusion when some sheriff’s deputy or constable showed up with a court order to seal off the place.

“Hello, Mr. Kwong,” Sarah said in Cantonese. “Hello, Debbie. I’m sorry for this.” She gestured toward the ribbons.

Kwong brushed off the apology with a gnarled hand, but Sarah could tell he was agitated. She suddenly realized that it had been perhaps a year since they had actually seen one another. His gray-white goatee was unkempt and stained with nicotine below his lip. His blue silk robe—possibly the only outfit she had ever seen him wear—was threadbare and frayed. Had he aged so? Or had she simply been viewing him through younger, more naive eyes?

“A man has been guarding the shop ever since they put up those ribbons,” Debbie said. “He goes from the alley back around to here, and then to the alley again. He said he wants to make sure no one tampers with anything inside. What does he mean?”

“Nothing, Debbie,” Sarah said. “Things will be back to normal for you before you know it. I’m just so sorry that you and your grandfather have to go through this at all.”

The old man’s frailty was striking. Sarah prayed that Mallon and his people would simply take whatever samples they wanted and leave. If they tried intimidating Kwong in any way, it would be up to Matt to protect him at all costs. She was about to try to explain the situation to Kwong through Debbie when Matt entered the street from the far end. Eli Blankenship was lumbering along beside him, gesticulating forcefully, as if to get across a difficult point. Sarah was relieved to have him along. There was no finer intellect at MCB, nor any more imposing physical presence, either. Matt was reasonably tall and well built, but next to the professor, he looked slight.

With Debbie’s help, she introduced the men to Kwong. It seemed clear the herbalist had no interest in any of them beyond having them leave him alone.

Matt immediately excused Sarah, Blankenship, and himself and led them to the other side of the street.

“Does the old guy know what’s happening?” he whispered.

Sarah shrugged.

“He’s not addled by any stretch,” she said. “I suspect he has a pretty good idea of what’s going on. But I’m not sure he understands that it all has to do with me, and not with him.”

“He looks like he’s spent more than his share of time with his lips curled around the stem of an opium pipe.”

“So what? Opium is part of his culture. Any idea where Mallon is?”

“Nope. I expected him to be late, though. It’s an old legal ploy to unnerve and annoy the other side. It’s survived in the law game over the ages mostly because it works.” He motioned them back to Kwong and the girl. “Debbie,” he said kindly, “please apologize to your grandfather for our imposing on him, and promise that we will compensate him for the trouble and inconvenience.”

The girl, dressed in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, was perhaps thirteen. She had a plain face and short, jet hair. Sarah was about to suggest that Matt choose words she was more likely to understand than
impose
and
compensate
, when the teen rattled off a translation to Kwong. The old man responded with no more than a grunt and a dismissive wave of his hand.

“He says that it is his pleasure to serve you, and that you need not think about paying him,” Debbie said.

At that moment, a Lincoln Town Car pulled up at the end of the street. Sarah turned to Kwong to reassure him about the new arrivals.

“The pudgy guy’s Sheriff Mooney,” she heard Matt say to Eli, “and that tall guy—isn’t he the one from the weight loss shows on TV?”

She groaned softly and looked back at the Lincoln. Peter Ettinger, ramrod straight, towering above Mallon and the sheriff, was staring down the narrow street, straight at her. Even in the pale, indirect morning sun, his silver hair looked almost phosphorescent.

“You bastard,” she muttered to herself. This must be Mallon’s expert witness.

She gave Kwong, who now looked somewhat confused, a gentle touch. Then she stood back and watched as the two groups of men, like combatants in some macabre sport, approached one another for introductions. She took the moment when Matt reached across to shake Peter’s hand and froze it in her mind for future reference.

The county sheriff, the MCB chief of medicine, Peter
,
Matt, a bewildered old Chinese man, a precocious teen
. The whole affair was suddenly taking on a carnival atmosphere. In just a few minutes, when the eight of them worked their way inside, things were bound to get even more bizarre. Kwong’s shop was an impressive hodgepodge, with no clearly defined aisles. Eight people would be well beyond its critical mass.

Matt led the opposition back to where she was standing. Peter allowed himself to be introduced to her. He reached out his hand, but Sarah refused to take it.

“So,” he said. “It appears we’ve gotten ourselves in a wee bit o’ trouble.” His smug expression was close to the one Sarah remembered from that last horrid day in his office.

“And it appears
we’ve
become even more overbearing and unpleasant than
we
used to be,” she replied.

This isn’t the wide-eyed earth child you brought back from the jungle, Peter
, she was thinking.
If it’s a fight you’re spoiling for, you’re not going to be disappointed
.

“You two know each other?” Matt said.

“Dr. Baldwin once did some work for me,” Ettinger said quickly.

“Hard labor
would be a more descriptive term, Matt. I’m not proud of it, but we lived together for three years before I woke up and jumped the wall.”

“Lived together!” Matt exclaimed. “Mallon, what in the hell?”

In the second or two before Mallon responded, Sarah could see the confusion in his eyes.
Peter hadn’t told him!
The bastard wanted to get back at her so badly, he hadn’t said a word about their past.

“He—um—Mr. Ettinger is being used to help us organize our case,” Mallon said, blustering. “We—we certainly never intended having him appear in court. He is serving us strictly in an advisory capacity.”

“Well, I would certainly hope you can do better than a rebuffed suitor for your expert witness,” Matt said.
“I’d hate to have my job made that easy. Shall we go in and get this over with?”

Mallon said nothing. But it was clear from his stony expression that Matt had drawn blood, if only a drop or two.

“Nice going,” Sarah whispered. “Now please, just make sure Mallon doesn’t take it out on Mr. Kwong.”

The vinyl ribbons were cut away, and the combatants, led by Kwong Tian-Wen and his granddaughter, filed into the herbalist’s shop.
Carnivale de Baldwina
, Sarah mused. Sheriff Mooney, the ringmaster, in his white seersucker suit. Jeremy Mallon, snake and charmer in one. Eli Blankenship sans leopard skin, nearly spanning the narrow doorway. Peter Ettinger, the Human Stilt, ducking to enter.
Carnivale de Baldwina
. Once inside, Sarah noted with some pleasure that the protruding rafters kept The Stilt in a persistent hunch.

The shop was more cluttered and more fragrant than Sarah remembered. Stalks of wild reeds and dried flowers were everywhere, interspersed with barrels of roots, various ground flours, rice, and leaves. The old glass-front counter and the shelves behind it were packed with jars of widely varying sizes, shapes, and contents. One contained desiccated scorpions; another, huge beetles; still another, an eel in preservative. A few of the jars had labels handwritten in Chinese, but many of them had none.

Two somewhat mangy, long-haired cats, one pure white, the other black as chimney soot, huddled sleepily in one corner. And standing like a totem, or perhaps an exclamation point, in the center of the disarray, was a well-stocked wire display rack of Dr. Scholl’s foot products.

“I don’t think parading a jury into this place will help our cause too much,” Blankenship whispered.

“Let’s hope it never comes to that,” Sarah said.