Kate waited. He would never cry over vandalism.

“Chandra . . .” he began.

“They killed her,” said Kate. It was not a question.

Mauberly nodded and removed his glasses. “The FBI . . . oh, God, Kate, I'm sorry. The doctor and the staff psychologist said it was way too early to tell you and“

“Who else?” demanded Kate. Her hand was on his forearm.

Mauberly took a breath. “Charlie Tate. He and Susan were working late when the intruders got in past security.”

“Jvirus cultures?” asked Kate, wincing at the extra pain the “J” caused her. “Joshua's blood samples?”

“Destroyed,” said Mauberly. “The FBI thinks that they were flushed down the disposal sink before the fire began.”

“Cloned copies?” said Kate. Her eyes were closed and she could see Susan McKay Chandra bent over an electron microscope eyepiece, Charlie Tate saying something with a laugh behind her. “Did they get the cloned copies in the ClassVI lab?”

“They're all gone,” said Mauberly. “No one thought of sending cultures out of the building at this stage. If I'd only . . .” His voice caught on a high note of anguish. He touched Kate's good arm with his soft fingers. “Kate, I'm sorry. You've been through hell and this is only making it worse. Concentrate on getting better. The FBI will find these people . . . whoever did this, the FBI will find them . . .” a

“No,” whispered Kate.

“What was that?” Mauberly scooted closer with a screech of chair legs on tile. “What, Kate?”

But she had closed her eyes and pretended to be gone.

The FBI had come and gone, the two doctors and half a dozen friends and another halfdozen coworkers had arrived and been shooed out by the redhaired nurse, and only Father O'Rourke was there when the last bands of lateSeptember light painted the east wall orange. Kate opened her eyes and looked out the window past the silhouette of the priest. He seemed lost in thought as he leaned on the radiator at the window. The sunset was sending low bands of light directly down Sunshine Canyon into the west wing of the hospital. It was not, quite seven P.m. and the hospital had a Sunday evening quiet to it.

“O'Rourke?”

The priest turned away from the window and came to the chair by her bedside.

“Will you, do something for me?” she whispered.

“Yes.

“Help me find the people who killed Tom and Julie. . .”

Blackened corpses, flesh scaled like the ashes of a log. Their bodies smaller, shrunken by flame. Brittle arms raised in a boxer's stance. The gleam of teeth in a lipless smile.

“Yes,” said O'Rourke.

“More,” whispered Kate, grasping his large hand with her good right hand and the cast of her left hand. “Help me find Joshua.”

She felt his hesitation.

“No,” she said, her voice rising above a whisper but still in control, not hysterical. “The burned baby corpse wasn't Josh's . . . too big. Believe me. Will you help me find him?”

The priest hesitated only another few seconds before squeezing her. hand again. “Yes,” he said. And then, after a minute when the sunlight faded from the east wall and the view outside the window, grew suddenly darker, “Yes, I'll help.”

Kate fell asleep holding his hand.

Chapter Twenty

Kate, left the hospital on Monday, September 30, although her head still ached abominably, her left arm was in a temporary cast, and the doctors wanted her to stay at least another twenty-four hours. She did not feel that she had another twenty-four hours to spend in bed.

Because the part of the house that had not burned had been damaged by smoke and water, and because she would not have returned to that house under any circumstances, Kate took a room at the Harvest House hotel, not far from CDC. O'Rourke and other friends had retrieved some of her clothes from the undamaged bedroom of the house and Kate's secretary, Arleen, had bought some new things for her. Kate wore the new things.

Julie Strickland's remains, after an autopsy and positive identification through dental records, had been flown home for burial in Milwaukee. Kate had talked to Julie's parents by telephone on Monday evening and had lain in the darkness of the hotel room for an hour afterward, wanting to cry, needing to cry, but unable to cry.,

Tom's body was cremated on Tuesday, October 1. He'd once told friends that he wanted his ashes tossed to the winds along the Continental Divide in the center of the state, and after the packed memorial ceremony at a Boulder mortuary, a caravan of almost forty vehicles, most of them fourwheel drive, left for Buena Vista to carry out his wishes. Kate was not feeling well enough to go along. Father O'Rourke drove her back to the hotel. The FBI continued to file through the hotel lobby to question her over and over about details. As though believing her story about men in black, probably Romanians trying to kidnap the Romanian orphan for reasons unknown, they promised her that all U.S. passport control stations had been alerted. They could not tell her for whom they had been alerted.

Kate talked to Ken Mauberly on Tuesday night and learned that Chandra's body had been returned to her husband and family in Atlanta. He also told her the details of virology researcher Charlie Tate's funeral in Denver.

“It turns out that Charlie was a passionate amateur astronomer,” said Mauberly, his voice soft over the phone line. “I went to his memorial service Sunday evening in the planetarium down at the Denver Historical Museum. The whole serviceshort eulogies by friends, a brief talk by his Unitarian ministerwas held in the star chamber with only the constellations overhead for illumination. When the eulogies were finished, a star suddenly brightened in the sky. Charlie's widowyou remember Donna, don't you, Kate?well, Donna stood up and explained that the light from that star was forty-two lightyears from Earth and had begun its journey in the year that Charlie had been born in 1949 . . . perhaps even the day of his birth . . . only to arrive this week. Anyway, the star grew brighter and brighter until the dome was this bright, milky color . . . sort of like just before sunrise . . . and we all filed out under this magnificent light. And the headstone that they're having carved . . . well, the epitaph is very touching.” Mauberly paused.

“What does it say, Ken?” asked Kate.

Mauberly cleared his throat. “Charlie wrote his own epitaph years ago. It reads`I have loved the stars far too fondly ever to fear the night.' “ There was silence a moment. “Kate,, are you still there?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm still here. Ken, I'll talk to you tomorrow. “

Kate had requested a second and more thorough autopsy be done on the body of the infant found in the burned house, and at first the county coroner had balked. The child's corpse had been recovered in the collapsed section of the house only when the flames there had burned themselves almost out. Kate discovered that she had spent almost an hour and a half crawling up the steep slope with her broken arm and concussion, being found only as the bodies were being discoveredand there was little left of the infant's corpse to analyze: no teeth for dental records, no dental records in any case, and no way to determine the cause of death because of the severity of the burns to the small body and the massive internal damage done by collapsing walls and masonry. After an initial inspection, the cause of death had been established as Death from Burns and Other Injuries Related to the Fire and the coroner had got on with the other autopsies relating to the case.

“Do it over and do it more carefully,” Kate had said to the startled coroner. “Or I will. We need a blood sample, a full Xray series, magnetic resonance images of the internal organs, and actual samples of the stomach lining and upper intestinal tract: It's crucial to both the FBI's investigation and the CDC's search for a possible plague virus . . . if you drop the ball the second time, both organizations will be on your neck. Do it again and do it carefully.”