Chapter 35. Coroner
Murielle Winston received Tsung’s latest call as she was about to speak to the eleventh neighbor in her canvass, a Fatuma Haane, wife of the other recently departed hospital doctor. With Agent Pond translating, Murielle, wearing a surgical face mask, identified herself as an American doctor from the Centers for Disease Control and asked if she could have a word. The widow opened her door and welcomed Murielle Winston in. She was dressed all in black, and, judging from the red, swollen eyes and red, runny nose, she had obviously been crying. Haane led the American scientist and the CIA agent to the kitchen table.
“I understand your husband was one of the two doctors at the hospital?” asked Murielle.
“Yes, he was.”
“I am very sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Why are you wearing masks? Are we in danger of catching something?”
“We are here because the doctors in the hospital were treating a very dangerous airborne form of virus.”
“Virus?” The widow gave a frantic expression. “I thought it was a gas explosion.”
“Yes, there was a gas explosion, but coincidentally, on the same day as the explosion, your husband was helping to treat some sick patients who had been exposed to this virus.”
“Do I have it?”
“We don’t know that yet, but I do not think so. We are going to be conducting tests this week. But if you had contracted the virus, you probably would have symptoms by now.”
“What kind of symptoms?”
“Red, bloodshot eyes, purple lesions under the skin, terrible nausea, hot black vomit, things like that.”
“Red eyes?” asked the widow. She ran over to a mirror. “Why, I have red eyes!”
“No, ma’am, we are talking about red eyes where the red takes up almost the entire white part of the eye. Your eyes just look a little red from crying. And you do not appear to have any other symptoms.”
“OK,” the widow said nervously. “When can I get tested?”
“Right away, very soon. Now tell me, Mrs. Haane, did you see your husband on the day of the explosion?”
“No, I did not. He was at the hospital early that morning and I did not see him all day.” When the widow began thinking of the terrible day, she started whimpering again, drying her wet eyes with a handkerchief.
“Did you talk to him that day?”
“Once. He called me on the phone and told me to stay inside today. That’s it.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, but I was not planning to go out anyway, so I did not pay much attention to it. So you’re saying he was trying to warn me about this virus?”
“Yes, that’s probably right,” said Winston.
The widow began sobbing again. “That is so like him. He was such a good man, and a good father. He cured people and saved people’s lives every day. People loved him so. My God, I miss him already. I look around the house and I keep expecting him to walk through the door, you know what I mean?”
Pond put a reassuring hand on the widow’s shoulder. “Yes, I know what you mean.”
“Did your husband mention anything about seeing a bat or a bat cage?” asked Pond.
“No, nothing like that. Why do you ask?”
“There was a report of a bat at the hospital. We were just checking out that lead.”
“Have you seen anyone else in town who appears to be very sick?” asked Winston.
“No,” said the widow. The widow poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher.
While Murielle was questioning, Agent Pond was walking around the room, looking at family photos and gathering whatever intelligence about the doctor that he could. Pond noticed a certificate on the wall from the Tanzanian Army.
“Was your husband in the military, ma’am?” asked Pond.
“Yes, he was, as a military doctor. Four or five years ago, there was a civil uprising, and many of the doctors were called up for service. My husband treated the soldiers. He even got a medal for being injured in the line of duty.” The widow seemed particularly proud of this accomplishment of her late husband. She went into a nearby desk, pulled open a drawer, and pulled out a ring box. Opening the box, she showed the investigators her husband’s medal.
“How was he injured?” asked Pond.
“Shot in the leg when he was bringing in an injured soldier off the field. He always walked with a slight limp after that.” The widow looked at a photo of her late husband. “I remember when he came home I asked him about it. He shrugged it off. But that’s just how he was. Unselfish.” She began crying again. “He was such a good man.”
Murielle Winston, convinced they had garnered enough information from the woman, looked at Pond and gave him a head nod, signaling it was time to go. The two investigators thanked the doctor’s wife and told her they would be in touch. They proceeded on to their twelfth house in the canvass.
Identifying bodies which had been charred beyond recognition was usually the work of the forensic dentist. However, the Kigoma team quickly learned that very few of the villagers in Kigoma had ever seen a dentist. In fact, there was only one dentist in town. A search of his records revealed no matches with any of the hospital patients. Identification of the remains without dental records was going to be more difficult. The morning after the CDC team had shown up in Kigoma, an FBI Arson Team and a Crime Scene Forensic Team showed up on site. With help from the Italians and some of the villagers, the team set up a series of tents about a half mile from the bomb site. In one of these tents, which they dubbed the “Coroner’s Tent,” the FBI team set up a series of long foldout tables. They carried the bodies from the Kigoma Boathouse to the Coroner’s tent and set each body on a separate table. Alice Strong, the six-foot tall, red-haired FBI Forensic Coroner and Pathologist, had flown in last night on very little sleep and very little advance notice to examine the bodies. While she was on the FBI Gulfstream Jet, she had reviewed the patient records which had been uploaded to her laptop from the servers at Dar es Salaam. She had reviewed the information on the plane. She had begun her examination at about 8:00 a.m.
At 1:00 p.m., Agent Pond walked over to the Coroner’s Tent. It had drawings of skull and cross-bones in fluorescent orange paint and warnings in several languages to keep out. The coroner’s tent was covered in plastic. Pond suited up to pay Strong a visit in the tent. He wore an orange RACAL suit and several layers of latex gloves. As he entered the tent, Strong, wearing her own RACAL suit, heard Pond approach from behind and spun toward him, gesturing for him quickly to get out of the tent. The two exited the tent and went outside, walking fifty feet away into another tent. Both Strong and Pond took off the top of their suits and immediately put on cotton surgical masks.
“I’m Agent Pond,” he said. “I am working with the team from the CDC.”
“I don’t care if you are the President of the United States. Do not sneak up on me like that when I am in the quarantine tent. I am working with scalpels and blood in there. We have a Level 4 biohazard in that tent, and I do not want to cut my suit. You scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry, Doc. Didn’t mean to scare you. We’re trying to get an update. How’s it going?”
“Slow,” said Strong. She shook his hand, “Alice Strong, by the way.” She grabbed a bottle of water from a table and drained it. “It feels like I am working at the center of the earth, it is so damned hot in there.”
“Have you had any luck identifying the bodies?”
Strong shook her head. “Without dental records, this is a challenge. But we have made some progress. We have identified three bodies which had portions of their RACAL suits and oxygen tanks attached. Those are obviously the Italian doctors from the Instituto Nationale. Next, I tried to find the Kigoma hospital medical doctors. There were supposed to be two doctors, according to the list I got. One of the two doctors had the remains of a stethoscope around his neck, so he was easy to identify. I did not find the other one. We have sixteen patients. Each had a plastic patient identification wristband. I found fused plastic on the wrists of sixteen cadavers. Two of those were the remains of children, so I am guessing those are the two who started the virus. There were three adult bodies on top of the children’s bodies. One female and two males. Two of the three—one male and one female—had wristbands of their own on. The third body, a male, did not have a wristband. I am making an educated guess that the two with their own wristbands were the parents. The third body located near the children was probably either the second doctor, or the children’s uncle. Once we eliminate all of those, we found four other bodies, all female. I am assuming those were the nurses. We can also separate them out a little better by height and blood type, but I have not had time to do that yet.”
Pond got out a pad. “OK, so three Italians, sixteen patients, four nurses, one doctor with a stethoscope. That makes twenty-four. And then we have one more body, who is either the other doctor or the children’s uncle? Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Hey, doc, is it possible that a body could just get incinerated and leave no trace, no bones, no nothin’?”
“It’s possible, but not likely. Bones are very strong. Usually, you will find some remains of a skeleton in an explosion like this, unless the person was literally standing at ground zero. Of course, you have a big mess down there at the site. They are still sifting through the rubble. Who knows what body remnants are still at the site.”
“OK, doc, let me know what else you find. I am really interested in that last body, the one that could be the doctor or the uncle. If the uncle was infected, and left the hospital, he could be walking around Kigoma right now, infecting everyone in sight. It is important to get a lead on that right away.”
“I am goin’ as fast as I can, Agent. You don’t want to rush when you are putting your hands into a Level 4 biohazard.” She downed another water bottle, put on her suit helmet, and went back into the tent to investigate the dead bodies.
As Alice Strong went back in the tent, she breathed deeply at the threshhold. She eyed the bodies of the two small children laid over on tables near a corner. Those were undoubtedly the most dangerous of the corpses in the tent. Strong knew that just under the surface of the black skin of those children could be a microorganism waiting to feast on her flesh and kill her from the inside out. Maybe the explosion had killed all the viruses in these dead bodies, but maybe it hadn’t. Strong was receiving hazard pay for this assignment, but no amount of pay would be worth having her body devastated by disease. She shuddered for a moment, then realized that her suit protected her, that there was nothing to fear as long as she worked slowly and meticulously and did not cut her suit. She went back over the bodies again, this time starting with the nurses, then the doctor with the stethoscope, then the sixteen patients, then the unidentified body, and finally the three Italians. She looked at the Italians grimly. They had been in space suits just like hers only a few weeks ago, assuring themselves that nothing would go wrong, and here they were. Corpses on a table. Long skeletons with just fragments of remaining flesh. Alice Strong wondered for a minute what her own skeleton would look like. She pictured her own femur bones, her hip bones, the ribcage, and her skull—all laid out on a table like these bodies. What would her skull look like? As she passed by the three bodies of the fallen Italians, thinking of the shape of her own skull, she had a troubling thought. She looked at the three Italian corpses again. Wait a minute, she thought. Something didn’t look right.
Jacob Roessler, the dark-haired Italian-looking C.D.C. scientist, and his boss, the blonde long-haired Swede Bjorn Jendel, were busy calming the nerves of a line of Kigoma villagers which stretched over a half mile down the main road out of town. Since 9:00 a.m., the two had begun giving blood tests to everyone in the village. The encouraging news so far was that no one seemed to be infected with the new virus. Even relatives of patients and medical personnel at the hospital were showing up clean. Roessler and Jendel gave each person in line a leaflet containing information about the virus, symptoms to look for, and messages to contact their team if they saw anyone who might be infected or who appeared to be very sick. Both men wore surgical scrubs, multiple pairs of latex gloves and cotton masks. As Roessler swabbed a patient’s arm and began to take a syringe of blood, he asked Jendel whether they should be wearing RACAL suits.
“No, I don’t think so, Jacob. We know this thing has an incubation period of around a week during which time the patient is not contagious. All of these patients here look fine to me, so they are either not infected or they are in the incubation period. What we have to worry about is if we see anyone in these lines who looks very sick or who has the classic symptoms of the virus. If I look down the line and see that coming at me, believe me, I will be in a RACAL suit faster than you.”
“Do you think the virus got out past the hospital?” asked Roessler.
“The patients were quarantined by Doctor Beladar and one nurse as soon as they came to the hospital according to the reports we have, so I do not think the other nurses or the other patients became infected. Then we have an explosion which nuked everything, so it is pretty unlikely, but you never know. I would think if the virus got outside the hospital, we would be seeing more villagers infected, and so far we have not seen that.”
“I hope we can contain this thing,” said Roessler.
“Me too,” said Jendel, swabbing another patient’s arm.
“That explosion seemed a little convenient to me,” said Roessler. “Any chance it was one of our people, like CIA or something?”
Jendel eyed Roessler. He liked the young scientist. Jendel had to admit that he too had thought the timing rather convenient. “I suppose it is possible. That’s a lot of people to kill. I don’t know. I would like to have more faith in my government than that.” Jendel looked up at the large, fat, black woman in front of him. He was having trouble finding a vein. After the third try, he got it and plunged in the needle.
Roessler seemed convinced of his government conspiracy theory. “Have you talked to Tsung? He has been gone a while and I have heard nothing back from him.”
“He’s military,” said Jendel. “You know how they are. They report to their chain of command and we civilians often get left out of the loop.” Jendel looked up and saw Alice Strong coming toward him wearing blue surgical scrubs, wearing a mask around her neck but not tied over her mouth, and carrying several 8 x 10 glossy photos. Roessler tried to see what was on the photos but he could not make it out.
Strong motioned for Jendel to come over to her. Jendel got up from his folding chair and walked to Strong. “We need to talk privately,” said Strong. Jendel turned back to Roessler.
“Jacob, can you handle this alone for a moment?”
“Sure, Dr. Jendel, no problem.” Strong and Jendel walked into another tent where they could have privacy. Strong trusted Jendel more than anyone else on this assignment. They were both experienced government scientists. Strong felt more comfortable talking with him than the CIA and military agents swarming the compound. When they were alone, Strong showed Strong the photographs.
“Bjorn, we have a problem,” said Strong.
“What is it?”
“Take a look at these photographs. These are photographs of the skulls of the three Italians from the Instituto Nationale. We had thought that these were the Italians because the bodies were found in remnants of RACAL suits with the remains of oxygen tanks on their backs.” Three photographs of skulls were spread out on the table. “The first photograph is Skull #1, which I will call Larry. The second is Skull #2, which I will call Curly. The third photograph is of Skull #3, which I will call Moe.”
“I didn’t know any women liked the Three Stooges,” smiled Jendel.
“I am one of the few,” deadpanned Strong. “Notice anything different about these three photographs?”
Jendel looked at all three. They just looked like skulls to him. “No, I don’t notice anything unusual. What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“The first two skulls, Larry and Curly, have skulls with a flat profile on top. The jaw is prognathic, which means it sticks out a little. Look at the nasal cavity on the two skulls—a narrow triangle. In this area between the eyes, which we call the nuchal ridge, the space is long and thin. The nasal aperture is silled. The eye orbits are angular and sloping. These are the classic signs of a Caucasian skull. Now look at Moe. The top of the skull is more pointed instead of flat. There are no nasal sills. There is a broad, round nasal cavity. The nuchal ridge space is wider. The palate is horseshoe-shaped. The eye orbits are rounded and non-sloping. Moe has an African skull.”
“So you are telling me that two of the Italians were white and one was black?” asked Jendel.
“Probably so. Now this is not an exact science, of course, but if I had to put money on it, I would say that Moe was black. According to representatives of the Instituto Nationale, who I just called, all three Italians were white.”
Jendel stared at the photographs. He looked up at Strong, confused by the implications of her findings. Jendel adjusted his eyeglasses. “If Moe is not an Italian scientist, who is he and what was he doing in the RACAL suit? And where is the missing Italian?”
“Right,” said Strong. “All good questions.”
“Who have you told about this?” asked Jendel.
“Just you so far. Why, do you want me to keep a lid on this?”
“For now. Let me talk to my superiors back at Washington and see how they want to proceed.”
“OK,” said Strong. “But if you learn anything important on your end, let me know.”
“Sure,” said Jendel.
Strong took her photographs and walked back to the Coroner’s Tent to do more work. Half an hour later, working in her space suit, Strong had taken blood samples from Larry and Curly, the two bodies of the men Strong believed were white Italian scientists. Strong put the specimens under a microscope on a glass slide. After running several antigen tests, she determined that the blood type of Larry was Type A+. The blood type of Curly was Type AB-. The blood type of Moe was Type B+. She then returned to her own tent and began sending e-mails to her contact at the Instituto Nationale. She needed to know the blood type of all three Italian scientists. After two hours, Strong received a response e-mail from her contact. Guido Macchione was Type A+. Antonio Paciello was Type AB-. Matteo Graciano was Type A-. That meant that Guido Macchione, deceased, was the body identified as Larry; Antonio Paciello, deceased, was the body identified as Curly. Whoever Moe was, he certainly was not Matteo Graciano. Moe was probably the second Kigoma hospital doctor. Why the hospital doctor was in the Italian’s RACAL suit, Strong didn’t know. But one thing was certain. Matteo Graciano, Italian Level 4 Biohazard Scientist, was not among the dead. He was Missing in Action.
While Strong was in her own personal tent checking e-mails, a person dressed in a RACAL suit silently snuck into the Coroner’s tent. Pulling out a hand-held bone saw, the stranger walked over to the table where the body known as Moe was lying. Moments later, Moe’s skull was sawed off and placed in a nylon bag. The stranger quickly exited the Coroner’s tent, placed the RACAL suit back on the hanger, and walked out.
Two hundred feet away, in her own tent, Dr. Alice Strong took another sip from her Aquafina water bottle. After a few minutes, she suddenly felt a tightening in her chest. What was that, she wondered. Then it got worse. She felt as if she were going into cardiac arrest. She desperately ran for her book bag, hoping to find baby aspirin or something to stop the grip on her heart. She lunged out in one final desperate grab, but found nothing, her mouth wide open in surprise. Knocking the small foldout table over, she collapsed onto the dirt floor in silence. Ten minutes later, a head peeked into Strong’s tent. Seeing Strong on the ground, the stranger ran to her body and felt her pulse. She was gone. Regrettable, the stranger thought, but necessary. The stranger looked for the Aquafina water bottle, pocketed it, and then replaced it with a half-empty bottle the stranger had brought into the tent. The stranger did a quick scan on Strong’s laptop. Scanning for dangerous e-mails, the stranger found nothing that worrisome. Two e-mails relating to blood types were deleted from the laptop, however. Taking one more quick look around the tent, the stranger was satisfied and left into the humid night air.
The next morning, a young, black Army soldier yelled from the direction of Strong’s tent that there was an emergency. Strong’s body had been discovered. It appeared that she had suffered a heart attack. But there was no other medical examiner here in Kigoma. One would have to be sent for from the United States. That would take at least a day or two. The soldiers gathering in the tent agreed the best course was to leave Strong’s body in the exact position they found it, without disturbing it until a new medical examiner could be summoned.
Jendel was anxious to begin the lab work on the blood samples they had collected from the cadavers in Kigoma. He decided to take his CDC crew, including Jacob Roessler and Murielle Winston, back to Atlanta to begin their work. They could train other Army doctors to administer the remaining blood tests to the villagers. Jimmy Pond from the CDC and Agent Tsung from USAMRIID would remain behind in Kigoma to make sure the disease had not spread. If they reported back a spread of the disease, Jendel and his team would be back.
Murielle Winston and Jacob Roessler were happy to go home. As they boarded the Chinook, they began speculating among themselves regarding possible reasons for Strong’s sudden death. Murielle texted her husband Charlie, letting him know she would be home soon. Roessler lived alone, so he had no family to call. He was happy to take a bunk on the helicopter for some shut-eye. It had been a long week. Jendel was the last to board. Before he got on the Chinook, he paused to give a text message to Roger Tsung:
Roger, watch yourself. One of 3 bodies in RACAL suits was black man. All three Italian scientists white. Fear Dr. S death not an accident. Keep me posted. BJ.