Rabid (7 page)

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that.”

Leila’s opinions were sometimes too near her tongue. “That’s what the
SJ
after his name means: Society of Jesus
.
He’s not
just
a priest; he’s a
Jesuit
. Christ, Conroy. What did you do to get the
Jesuits
after you?”

Conroy shifted in his chair. “Click on some of the links.”

The links led to many papers in very good journals. “Damn,” Conroy said. He closed the browser window on his own computer. A window holding a gel showed up.

A groan rose in Leila’s throat. She needed to go home, drink fluids, and sleep it off, not stare at a glaring computer screen over Conroy’s shoulder and point to icons that Conroy would laboriously drag the cursor over to and click. She said, “I’m not a hundred percent today.”

Conroy looked surprised, and then he stared back at the screen. “We can do it tomorrow.”

His monitor’s engorged plasma screen showed a picture of a preternaturally schmutzless gel with five dark, smooth bands. She asked, “What is that?”

Conroy minimized the window. One of his eyebrows dipped and he frowned at her. “You look like hell. Go home.”

When a neurologist who specializes in the end stages of organic brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and mad cow-associated prion dementia says that you look like hell, you should go home and sleep it off. “Okay. I’ll split cells and then leave.”

“You can ask someone to split your cells.”

Considering that she had stepped over Joe when she had left O’Malley’s this morning, Leila doubted he was in yet. Danna went AWOL about three in the morning, when one of O’Malley’s writer friends also disappeared. Yuri might ask why Leila had primary neurons in culture and what was grotesquely killing them. “No, thanks.”

Conroy dropped his voice. “Are you all right? Do you need a scrip for antibiotics?”

“It’s probably one of those twenty-four hour bugs.”

“Headache?”

“Enormous.”

“You didn’t pick it up in the lab?” His gray eyebrows clenched over his blue eyes. “Because God only knows what’s growing in here half the time. Yuri’s doing some secret experiment that he won’t talk about. Lab accidents happen all the time, infections, contaminations, weird stuff.”

“I’ll bet I caught it somewhere else.” She walked out.

In the tissue culture room, she pressed her face to the hood, and the glass cooled her forehead. On the other side of the glass shield, her hands efficiently pipetted media. Her poisoned body could do the work without any higher brain function at all. Miraculous, really.

She slid her flasks into the incubator. Mysterious dishes slathered with Conroy’s handwriting tiled the shelf below hers.

Leila gloved and set one of Conroy’s dishes on the microscope. Neuroblastoma cells half-covered the bottom of the dish. The bloated, dying cells looked virus-infected, but a chemical or cytokine or reagent virus or transfection might cause the same cytopathic effect.

Leila went home to sleep off her hangover.

~~~~~

Chapter Four

The Daily Hamiltonian:

Contamination at NIH

By Kirin Oberoi

In an assumed accident at the National Institute of Health, a scientist, Dr. Joy Chan, was contaminated by carbon-14, a radioactive isotope commonly used in scientific research. The chemical was found on her lab chair last week.

Though Dr. Chan is six months pregnant, the isotope is not expected to harm the fetus.

The NIH declined to comment.

~~~~~

Dante interlaced the packing box’s flaps and taped them shut. The books that remained on the shelves huddled, shamed that they had sheltered the criminals rather than recoil and expel them.

So many tapes and magazines and movies on CDs, some slickly commercial, others rickety and homemade, had been stuffed on those motley shelves.

Homemade
: these despicable tracts sullied that vanilla-cookie word.

Dante’s despair was bilious black. Angry acidity burned the barriers between his gut and his heart, and the bile recirculated through his body and felt like a heart attack.

Heart-sick,
Dante was heart-sick. Exorcisms and battling demon-strong men and women and expelling the Latin-spewing devils by holy water and crucifix had been easier.

Knocking pattered at the library door.

“Come in,” he said and scooted the chairs to form a triangle.

The doorknob grated. The metal-studded door opened. The Sloans surveyed the library, its chairs and its shelves.

Mrs. Sloan said, “Hello, Father.”

Dante grasped the stuffed arms of the chair and sat.

They sat.

Mr. Sloan jiggled his leg, eyed the bookcases, and sighed dramatically.

Mrs. Sloan, roused, looked over at him and then back down at her hands. She seemed ashamed that they had to be there, whereas he looked annoyed. Dante studied them. A relationship is a sinuous, gauzy thing stretched between two people but not of either one.

Dante wove his fingers into a double fist at his chest and waited. He waited until the silence oppressed, until it hung from the ceiling and slouched in the corners, until it blanketed the room and no one wanted to peep out from under the covers lest the unspoken thing devour them.

Dante asked, “And who is the woman who left her underwear in your suitcase?”

Sloan leapt up. His fist twisted at his side as he turned to his wife. “You told him
that!
”

Mrs. Sloan shrank in her chair and clutched the arms as if acceleration drove her back.

Horrors, that bastard had
hit
her.

Dante rose to his feet. “Stop! Stop this.”

Sloan’s voice dropped and he snarled at his wife, “Who else have you
told
?”

She didn’t say anything, but she searched from Dante to Sloan as if one of them would save her from the other.

Sloan took a step toward his wife.

Dante jumped between them and glared up at Sloan. Dante was accustomed to being among the tallest men in the room, but Sloan was half a head taller.

Dante stepped toward Sloan, chest to chest. “Sit down. Now.”

Sloan blinked and stepped back and Dante advanced, herding him toward the chair.

Sloan stepped back again, the chair caught his leg, and he sat. He looked up at young and powerful and
towering
Dante. Men like this thought they could stick their dick in any hole they wanted and damn the consequences. Arrogance and selfishness like that begat pedophiles. A violent urge knotted Dante’s throat. “What about your wife, and your children, and
what about the other woman?
”

Sloan shook his head and rolled his eyes, somewhere between dismissive and possessed.

Dante leaned down and braced himself on the arms of Sloan’s chair, their faces inches apart. Onion-skinned wrinkles around Sloan’s eyes stretched upward, and he jammed his white-haired head against the chair’s upholstery.

Mrs. Sloan’s fingers plucked Dante’s black shirt sleeve. “He said he would stop.”

Dante asked quietly, “Have you stopped?”

“Yes!” Sloan’s eyes widened more, and the small folds in his eyes’ skin turned to rigid lines. He dropped his head away and to the side, nearly leaning over the chair arm.

Rage clawed Dante, raking his heart and his temples, worse than the time a possessed priest had tried to escape, spitting blood, and Dante had hauled back the old man and flung him into the chair to continue the exorcism.

Mrs. Sloan grasped his biceps and tugged. “That’s enough.”

This was not an exorcism. Wrath is a sin. Violence is a sin. Sloan was just a selfish old goat. Dante should calm himself.

He pushed off the arms of Sloan’s chair. “You will cease the affair. Until you have satisfied me that you have stopped, you will not receive communion.”

Sloan, belligerent, chucked up his chin. “We’ll join a different church.”

Dante sat in his chair and stretched his legs out. “This is a small city, Mr. Sloan. If you were excommunicated, no church would admit you.” He wove his fingers together. “Community ties are important to American universities.”

Mrs. Sloan looked stricken. “You wouldn’t excommunicate him.”

Sloan rallied. “I give this parish a hell of a lot of money.”

“I don’t care,” Dante said.

The Sloans, Mr. Sloan sitting and his wife standing beside his chair, looked at each other, their first sign of communication and common purpose.

No doubt a parish priest would have salved their wounds and encouraged them to rebuild, if only Sloan had shown the slightest bit of willingness to do that. Dante drew a deep breath and waved a hand to Mrs. Sloan’s chair, indicating she should sit. “Now,” he said, “Mr. Sloan, when did you begin this adultery?”

Unrepentant anger squinted Sloan’s blue eyes. “Six months ago.”

Mrs. Sloan said, “I don’t want to know this.”

“Then, Mrs. Sloan, would you wait outside?” Dante asked. He gestured toward the door and didn’t dodge Sloan’s stare. Lines of anger coalesced in the beige skin around Sloan’s eyes.

Mrs. Sloan hesitated, but she left. The door clanked softly behind her.

The lines on Sloan’s face strained upward, and smugness replaced his anger. “Father, I wish to confess my sins.”

Dante had no doubt about Sloan’s intention. “Confession is to beg God’s forgiveness. You cannot use a sacrament for selfish ends.”

Sloan didn’t blink. “I want to be reconciled.”

Dante leaned his elbows on the chair arms and pressed his fingertips together. “Can you say the prayer before confession with an open heart?”

Sloan grunted, “Okay.”

Arrogance again. Arrogance that he could fool a psychiatrist, who diagnosed lies and illness and the haunted and the evil and the damned and the possessed. If Sloan genuinely wanted to confess, and Dante wished he did and knew he didn’t, Dante must grant him absolution and the conversation would be under the seal of confession. The sin would pass out of Sloan’s soul like rotten chicken out of his gut.

But Sloan had to make a genuine confession. Loopholes didn’t apply.

Dante smiled to unnerve Sloan. “Pray for your soul’s salvation, and I will don the stole.”

Sloan crossed himself perfunctorily and clasped his hands. He sped through, “Come Holy Spirit into my soul. Enlighten my mind that I may know the sins I ought to confess, and grant me your grace to confess them fully, humbly, and with a contrite heart.”

“Stop,” Dante said.

Sloan’s mouth snapped shut. “What the hell?”