These particles contain less than 80,000 nucleotides of single-stranded RNA. They all are associated with an unidentified 12,000+ kilodalton protein complex in the host cell nucleus. The viral genome demonstrates substantial homology with SHEVA. Talk to my office. I’d like to obtain fresher samples for accurate PCR and sequencing.

“Well?” Scarry persisted. “Is this caused by SHEVA or not?”

“Maybe,” Dicken said.

“Does Augustine have what he needs now?”

Word spread fast at 1600 Clifton Road.

“Not a peep to anyone, Tom,” Dicken said. “I mean it.”

“No suh, massa.” Scarry zipped his lips with a finger.

Dicken shuffled the report and the analysis into a folder and glanced at his watch. It was six o’clock. There was a possibility Augustine was still in his office.

Six more hospitals in the Atlanta area, part of Dicken’s network, were reporting high rates of miscarriage, with similar fetal remnants. More and more were testing for, and finding, SHEVA in the mothers.

That was something the surgeon general would definitely want to know.

19

Long Island, New York

A bright yellow fire truck and a red Emergency Response vehicle had parked in the gravel driveway. Their rotating red and blue lights flashed and brightened the afternoon shadows on the old house. Kaye drove past the fire truck and parked behind the ambulance, eyes wide and palms damp, her heart in her throat. She kept whispering, “God, Saul. Not now.”

Clouds blew in from the east, breaking up the afternoon sun, raising a gray wall behind the brilliant emergency lights. She opened the car door, stepped out, and stared at two firemen, who blandly returned her look. A slow and warmer breeze gently combed her hair. The air smelled damp, close; there might be thunder this evening.

A young paramedic approached. He looked professionally concerned and held a clipboard. “Mrs. Madsen?”

“Lang,” she said. “Kaye Lang. Saul’s wife.” Kaye turned to gather her wits and saw for the first time the police car parked on the other side of the fire truck.

“Mrs. Lang, we received a call from a Miss Caddy Wilson—”

Caddy pushed open the front screen door and stood on the porch, followed by a police officer. The door slammed wood-enly behind them, a familiar, friendly sound suddenly made ominous.

“Caddy!” Kaye waved. Caddy made a little run down the steps, clutching her light cotton skirt in front of her, wisps of pale blond hair flying. She was in her late forties, thin, with strong wiry forearms and manly hands, a handsome stalwart face, large brown eyes that now looked both concerned for Kaye and a little panicked, like a horse about to bolt.

“Kaye! I came to the house this afternoon, like always—”

The paramedic interrupted her. “Mrs. Lang, your husband is not in the house. We haven’t found him.”

Caddy stared at the medic resentfully, as if, of all people, this was without a doubt her story to tell. “The house is an incredible sight, Kaye. There’s blood—”

“Mrs. Lang, perhaps you should talk to the police first—”

“Please!” Caddy shrieked at the paramedic. “Can’t you see she’s scared?”

Kaye took Caddy’s hand and made a small shushing noise. Caddy wiped her eyes with her wrist and nodded, swallowing twice. The police officer joined them, tall and bull-bellied, skin deep black, hair swept neatly back above a high forehead and a patrician face; wise, tired eyes with golden sclera. She thought he was really quite striking, much more prepossessing than the others in the yard.

“Missus…” The officer began.

“Lang,” the paramedic offered.

“Missus Lang, your house is in something of a state—”

Kaye started up the porch steps. Let them work out the jurisdiction and procedure. She had to see what Saul had done before she could have any idea as to where Saul might be, what he might have done since…Might be doing even now.

The police officer followed. “Does your husband have a history of self-mutilation, Missus Lang?”

“No,” Kaye said through clenched teeth. “He bites his fingernails.”

The house was quiet but for the tread of another police officer descending the stairs. Someone had opened the living room windows. White curtains billowed over the overstuffed couch. The second officer, in his fifties, thin and pale, slouched at the shoulders, his face seamed with perpetual worry, looked more like a mortician or a coroner. He started to talk, his words distant and liquid, but Kaye pushed up the stairs past him. The bull-bellied man followed.

Saul had hit their bedroom hard. The drawers had been pulled out and his clothes were scattered everywhere. She knew without really thinking that he had been searching for the right piece of underwear, the right pair of socks, appropriate to some special occasion.

An ashtray on the window sill was filled with cigarette butts. Camels, unfiltered. The hard stuff. Kaye hated the smell of tobacco.

The bathroom had been lightly sprayed with blood. The tub was half-filled with pinkish water, and bloody footprints went from the yellow bath mat across the black and white checkerboard tile to the old teak floor and then into the bedroom, where they stopped showing traces of blood.

“Theatrical,” she murmured, glancing up at the mirror, the thin spray of blood over the glass and across the sink. “God. Not now, Saul.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” the bull-bellied officer asked. “Did he do this to himself, or is there someone else involved?”

This was certainly the worst she had seen. He must have been concealing the worst of his mood, or the break had come with vicious speed, occluding every bit of sense and responsibility. He had once described the arrival of an intense depression as long dark blankets of shadow dragged by slack-faced devils in rumpled clothing.

“It’s just him, just him,” she said, and coughed into her fist. Surprisingly, she did not feel sick. She saw the bed, neatly made, white cover drawn up and folded precisely under the pillows, Saul trying to make order and sense out of this darkened world, and she stopped by a small circle of splatted drops of blood on the wood beside her nightstand. “Just him.”

“Mr. Madsen can be quite sad at times,” Caddy said from the bedroom door, long-fingered hand pressed flat and white against the dark maple jamb.

“Does your husband have a history of suicide attempts?” the medic asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Never this bad.”

“Looks like he cut his wrists in the tub,” said the sad thin police officer. He nodded sagely. Kaye decided she would call him Mr. Death, and the other Mr. Bull. Mr. Bull and Mr. Death could tell just as much about the house as she could, possibly more.

“He got out of the tub,” Mr. Bull said, “and…”

“Bound his wrists again, like a Roman, trying to draw out his time on Earth,” Mr. Death said. He smiled apologetically at Kaye. “Sorry, ma’am.”

“And then he must have gotten dressed and left the house.”

Just so, Kaye thought. They were so right.

Kaye sat on the bed, wishing she were the fainting type, blank this scene here and now, let others take charge.

“Mrs. Lang, we might be able to find your husband—”

“He did not kill himself,” she said. She waved her hand at the blood, pointed loosely toward the hall and the bathroom. She was looking for a tiny shred of hope, thought for a moment she had grasped it. “This was bad, but he…as you said, he stopped himself.”

“Missus Lang—” Mr. Bull began.

“We should find him and get him to the hospital,” she said, and with this sudden possibility, that he might still be saved, her voice broke and she began to quietly weep.

“The boat’s gone,” Caddy said. Kaye stood up abruptly and walked to the window. She knelt on the window seat and looked down on the small dock thrusting from the rocky sea wall into the gray-green water of the sound. The small sailboat was not at its moorage.