Rabid (46 page)

She rolled her eyes. “In America, we call this ‘witness tampering.’”

“I just want to know what you told them, not change your mind.” He looked down, and his eyelids covered his black eyes.

“She killed him.” Words left her mouth before her brain vetted them. 

He dropped his fists on her lab bench. “We don’t know that.”

“He didn’t stab himself.” She stripped off her blue non-latex gloves, inside-out and one inside the other, and tossed them in a red-lined biohazard box. They rattled plastic saucers inside.

He pleaded, “We don’t know that.”

“You priests always cover for the criminal. What did you do to help Conroy? He’s dead.” This had turned ugly. She didn’t want to argue with him. She was still too raw, mentally, and tired. “I’m didn’t mean that. Sorry.”

The priest’s hands rose and shielded his eyes. “I don’t-ah know how I am ensnared in this.” He rested his elbows on the lab bench and his head against his hands. “I was trying to help.”

She could reach over to him but it was probably a trick and he was talking again, fast.

“I am a scientist, an academic, not a crusader running around the world and trying to solve all the problems. I am a Vaticanista, not a real priest.” He looked so miserable, a scientist out of his element, yet that Roman collar creeped her out.

Leila regloved, popped open a tube, and started pipetting miniscule quantities of reagents.

The priest looked at the black box labeled
Clonetech
. “That is cloning, not kinase assay.”

“Yeah.” This was ridiculous. If she told him what he wanted to know, he might go away.  “Look, I just told them that we were outside, she called your cell phone, we went in, and Conroy was on the floor.”

The priest stared into her ice bucket. “Vpu? Gp120? Are you working with HIV?”

“A few proteins in transfection.”

“I thought your lab worked on amyloidopathies.”

“Yeah, well, this is just a little side experiment. I didn’t bother to tell anyone about it.”

“How many secret experiments are going on in this lab?”

Leila shrugged. “How many were going on in your lab?”

“None.”

Leila laughed. “None that you knew of.” She felt stupid asking, but she did. “Would you mind taking your collar tab out?”

“All right.” He reached inside his shirt collar and unsnapped the sides, the first step when he stripped off his clothes, and a nervous, steel wire wrapped her ribs and squeezed. The white strip fell into his hand and he slid it in a pocket. “That is better?”

The stamp of God lingered around him like heat shimmering off asphalt, but it was better without the stupid white square. Leila nodded.

“Actually,” she said and tapped the bullet tubes down into the ice, “since you’re here, I’d like your opinion on something.”

He shook his head and his hair flowed as if he were drowning. “I am all out of opinions.”

“A scientific opinion.”

He straightened. “Perhaps, then.”

“You’ve worked with fMRI scans, right? There’re some scans among Conroy’s results. I have no idea what he was doing.”

He shrugged. “It has been a while, but I will look, if you would like.” He smiled with one side of his mouth.

She slid onto a tall stool and handed Conroy’s notebooks to him. Dante settled himself on another stool beside her. She thumbed through manila folders to find the scans, comic book-colored images of brains magnified to a foot across. “Here.”

Dante’s mouth opened, horror-struck. “What is wrong with these people?”

Leila should give the man some context. “They’re mice.”

“Oh,” he sat back and grinned. “Thank God. Their cerebrums and cerebellums were all wrong.” He shook his head and his hair brushed around his face. “All right,
mice
.”

Leila flipped to a new page on her writing tablet and uncapped a pen. She hadn’t taken any neuroanatomy classes. She was pretty much a cell biologist and biochemist, so she needed a consult. When she wrote the paper, maybe she should include him on the masthead. Since his lab was disbanded, a publication might be good for him, if he ever went back into academia.

Dante finished detailing the implications of the fMRI scans. They were all the same: horrific brain damage. The only difference was the extent of the viral violence.

“How about this one?” She handed him a blossoming rotund cerebrum, imploded.

“This is human,” he said.

“Yeah, what do you make of it?”

“It is terrible,” he said. “It is awful.” The scan swirled with malignant color, a plugged volcano ripping itself apart. “He is dying.”

Leila knew that, but hearing it again was hard. “Yeah. She is.”

Dante asked Leila, “Then all these mice were sick?”

“Rabid,” Leila said. “They’re Conroy’s mice.”

Dante pointed to Danna’s brain. “The same phenomenon is occurring here, with these structures heavily engaged in pathology.”

Leila knew that, too, but it was good that he concurred. She nodded. “That’s it. That’s what I needed. Thanks for the help.”

“Are they important, the scans?”

Leila shrugged. “Phenomenological. No mechanisms. No grand unifying theories.”

Dante stood to leave. “Sloan’s funeral is Friday.”

“Yeah. Everyone else in the lab is going.”

“But you aren’t?”

“No.” Leila shook her head. She could not imagine being there, in that church, when they performed death theater and then planted Conroy.

“You were his graduate student,” the priest said. “It will look odd if you do not go.”

Leila added a drip of ligase to each cloning reaction, crammed the tubes in foam cushions, and floated the tubes in a body-temperature water bath. “Katherine Hepburn didn’t attend Spencer Tracy’s funeral. I don’t want to cause a scene.”

He said, “I’ll make sure everyone is calm. It would look odd if you were not there.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see. Look, if you need something for the funeral or whatever,” and she couldn’t believe she was doing it but she wrote her number on a quarto-sized paper scrap, “call me on my cell.”

The priest took the trembling scrap from her fingers.

If Conroy needed anything, she would be there for him. She couldn’t imagine what that would be, but she would be there.

~~~~~

Later that afternoon, Bev was waiting by the front door when Dante returned. Her muscles slithered like wriggling worms all the way to her nervous toes. “Could we stop by the church before we pick up the girls?”

Dante nodded. His eyes wandered over her and settled on her sweatshirt. She had slit the sleeve up to the shoulder to accommodate the ridiculous pins and cast. “I look terrible.”

“You look fine,” he said. “That looks like it hurts.”

“Oh, it’s okay.” She had lots of little pills to make it okay.

In the car, Bev rested. Dante drove in silence.

In the church, Dante genuflected with the blessed water by the door.

Bev dipped her fingers toward the water and stopped, nervous. She believed, she really did, in all the magic of the Church. It wasn’t fashionable to believe in the miracles and the intercession of saints and the small, still voice of God anymore, but she did. The Church had kept her afloat when everything else in the world conspired to sink her. Flaunting her sin would be yet more sin, and she feared what might happen if she touched the shining surface of the water in the font.

She mimed dipping her fingers in the water and pressed her dry fingers to her brow, sternum, and shoulders.

Together, they teetered up the aisle toward the altar. Dante held her elbow and helped her kneel, then retreated to the front pew.

Bev needed help. Telling her children that their father was dead would be too hard if she didn’t have some measure of divine grace. Just a taste, just a glimmer.

The golden wood beams and pews echoed her breath in the transparent air. A wave of dust motes crested in a slanting beam of afternoon sunlight. She muttered the Lord’s Prayer and still felt only loneliness.

She turned back. Dante’s head rested on his hands, bowed over the prayer rail. “Father Dante?”

He stepped over to her, held her good elbow, and started hauling her up.

“No, just a minute. Could you pray with me?”

Dante blinked. Bloody light stained the black stubble that crept up his jawline. He rubbed his forehead as if warding off a headache. “All right.” He lowered himself to his knees and glanced up at the graven image of the Christ.

Bev extended her unpinned hand and he held it. His cold fingers touched the swollen fingertips protruding from the bandage over her palm.

“Our Father,” began Bev, and Dante recited aloud with her, his canorous baritone an octave below her alto. Near the end, “Forgive us our trespasses,” she choked. Her voice cracked as if she were a pubescent boy in the middle of the word
trespasses
.

She grabbed her throat. The Lord wouldn’t even let her
ask
for forgiveness.

“Bev?” Dante asked. “Are you all right?”

“I can’t,” Bev said, and her throat closed up again.

“I have a bottle of water in the library.” Dante stood and lifted her elbow. He held her arm until they got to the library door.

“I can’t. I can’t say it.” She felt panicky, and the church felt empty to her.

“You are dehydrated.” He unlocked the library door and helped her inside. From his desk drawer, Dante took a bottle of water and twisted the top open. “Drink this.”

She sipped from the bottle. The lukewarm water seeped into her leathery tongue and gums. The water absorbed so fast that there wasn’t any of that first sip left to swallow. She sipped again, and some of that water ran to her throat, which closed, choking her. “I can’t swallow.”

Dante’s mouth opened slightly. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“What, for my arm?” She sipped again and choked less.

“No, to start your vaccinations.”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “I’m current on my tetanus shot.”

He reached out, took her good right hand, and said, “We must go back to the hospital, right now.”

~~~~~

Dante drove Bev to the emergency room carefully, calmly, because if they got in an accident it would delay them and they must not be delayed.

There, he explained that Beverly, too, had been exposed to Dr. Sloan’s experiments, and then he explained to her what that meant.

She seemed to not understand at first, but then took it as yet one more blow that Conroy had exposed her to a disease from his lab.

The ER resident swabbed Bev’s tonsils for lab tests and started the rabies inoculations. Dante badgered the terse resident until he called the neurology attending physician for a consult.