THREE DAYS AFTER THE MORGUE DISASTER, DR. SORENSEN had data from dozens of blood samples and urine samples, which he’d gathered to track lymphocyte levels and DNA damage in our cells. That data, combined with the incident timelines we’d compiled, helped him refine his initial estimate of our exposures. He’d been surprisingly close that evening in the ER: Emert had gotten “only” 18 to 24 rads; Miranda and I, 25 to 35 rads; and Garcia, 380 to 520 rads. The lymphocyte counts for everyone but Garcia had dropped only slightly, remaining well within the range considered normal. Garcia’s lymphocytes, however, had plummeted: at his first blood draw, his lymphocyte count was a robust 2,950, a number that corresponded to the nearly three billion white cells in every liter of his blood. Twenty-four hours later, it had fallen to 1100, and at the forty-eight-hour blood sample, it was hovering at 600. His bone marrow was dying, and his immune system was shutting down. According to Sorensen, Garcia was almost certain to develop acute radiation syndrome, probably a severe case. The unspoken subtext of “severe” was that he might not survive.
Garcia had been shifted to a reverse-isolation room—a “bubble” room, I’d heard it called—as even minor infections could prove fatal to him. The air was filtered and the room was pressurized so outside air couldn’t seep in. Still, Miranda and I made it a point to visit the hospital once or twice a day, waving to him through the glass window and talking to him on the intercom. The second morning of his ICU stay, we entered the unit and came upon Carmen Garcia, slumped in a chair in the hallway, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Miranda sat on one side of Carmen, I sat on the other, and we wrapped our arms around her as she wept. When her sobs finally stopped, she reached up and laid one hand briefly on Miranda’s cheek, the other on my cheek, and then she rose and walked toward the elevators. None of us had said a word. After she was gone, Miranda and I went to Eddie’s window. Switching on the intercom microphone and then kneeling down on the concrete floor, we put sock puppets on our hands and enacted a three-minute Punch-and-Judy routine, one that spoofed ourselves arguing in the bone lab about whether a mystery bone was from a human or a blowfly. Miranda’s sock puppet was a caricature of me, and mine was a red-haired sock version of Miranda. She dropped her voice half an octave and did her best impression of a pompous but clueless professor, while I affected a falsetto and sang the praises of Google and Wikipedia and left-wing liberalism. After it was done, and Garcia had called “bravo!” and pretended to applaud with his bandaged hands, and told us what attentive care he was receiving, we said goodbye. In the hallway, Miranda sank into a chair—the same chair we’d found Carmen in—and wept on my shoulder.
EMERT AND THORNTON had both interviewed Novak’s former wife, the woman I’d met at the funeral, and both had come away empty-handed, they reported in a three-way teleconference. Emert was of the opinion that she had Alzheimer’s disease—“She kept asking me who I was,” he said, “and then talking to me like I was her son, saying ‘Mommy this’ and ‘Mommy that.’ She said she’d never heard of anybody named Leonard Novak.” Thornton hadn’t fared much better; she’d told him she used to know someone named Lenny, but she couldn’t quite remember where or when or how.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “That woman was sharp as a tack when I talked to her at Novak’s funeral. She was lucid, she was irreverent, she was funny. She even noticed that I got spooked for a second, when I thought I saw Jess. A woman I lost.”
“I think maybe the old gal’s sweet on you,” said Emert.
“I think maybe Emert’s right,” said Thornton. “And I think maybe you should see if you can get more out of her than we did. Find out what she knows about Novak, and who might have killed him, and why.”
“And what ‘I know your secret’ meant,” added Emert.
And so it was, after that conversation and a call to the phone number Beatrice had scrawled on the funeral program, that I found myself winding up Black Oak Ridge in search of her house.
I passed the house twice before I found it. It was set back off the street and down a slight slope, tucked amid hemlock trees and rhododendron bushes. It was a low, flat-roofed house with wide, overhanging eaves; judging by the clean lines, the ample windows, and the warm redwood siding, I guessed that it dated from the 1960s. It reminded me of the houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was famous for blending houses into their natural settings.