the Devil's Workshop (1999) Page 3

  The taxi pulled up in front of Building 810, which was one of the old brick-faced structures. Joanne and Stacy got their bags out of the trunk.

  "Thanks," Stacy said, paying the driver, who promptly drove off. She was surprisingly calm, in what she had come to realize was one of her "disconnect" stages. During a disconnect, her mind could deal with Max's death as an abstract fact, as something that had simply happened: Max is gone. I loved Max. He was my reason for being. I'll deal with it. I'm functioning. In this state, these were just thoughts, not devastating downdrafts that threatened to blow her against untenable realities. During her disconnects, she was strangely detached from all of it. Then, just as suddenly, her mind would swell with anguish and those same concepts would threaten to drive her to her knees.

  She suspected her disconnects were part of the protective mechanism built deep in her psyche that allowed her to deal with only so much grief at one interval. Then she would click into abstract mode, where, for a few minutes or an hour, she was able to break out of the black and get a few breaths of air before she would be pulled down again.

  After the cab drove off, the two of them stood uncertainly in front of Building 810. Now that she was here, looking at the huge military medical facility, her idea that she would go kick ass and find out why Max was dead seemed foolish, if not impossible. Somehow, in her mind, when she had envisioned Fort Detrick, she'd made it small and insignificant, like the wooden fort in F-Troop. The real Fort Detrick was a huge, menacing facility, with monument signs and flags, full of dedicated, bustling professionals. More than a fort, it seemed a fortress.

  "So, let's go talk to this guy," Stacy finally said, gathering her resolve as she and Joanne picked up their overnight bags and moved past the monument sign that read:

  BUILDING 810

  HEADQUARTERS AND ADMINISTRATION FORT DETRICK

  Colonel Chittick's office was on the fourth floor in the corner, and was a large, square room with wood floors, rectangular windows, and a huge desk. His assistant, an Army Captain with red hair and a mustache, showed them into the empty office. On the walls were pictures of different units that Colonel Chittick had been assigned to. In the shots, the men were arranged in rows like football teams. Under each picture were the unit designations.

  Stacy was looking at one, labeled:

  5TH MEDICAL BATTALION SAN MARCOS, PHILIPPINES, 1968

  She was wondering which of the hundred or so men in the shot was Colonel Chittick, when the door opened and a surprisingly handsome fifty-year-old man in an Army Colonel's uniform entered the office. He had silver-gray hair, a square jaw, and beautiful rows of even, white teeth. On his lapels were the winged medical insignias. He was a recruiting poster doctor, she thought, who now wore an appropriate look of troubled sympathy and grief.

  "Mrs. Richardson? I'm Colonel Chittick, and I'm so sorry to meet you under these tragic conditions," he said softly, shaking her hand.

  "Thank you," she said, and then motioned toward Joanne. "This is Max's sister, Joanne."

  The Colonel shook her hand, then nodded his head, a silent genuflection to their grief. "May I offer you a seat?" he said, and led them to the sofa on the far side of the room, which sat under a huge framed Medical Battalion flag.

  The Colonel chose an adjoining chair. "I really didn't know your husband at all," he began gently. "He was working with Dr. DeMille over in USAMRIID--that's the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. It houses the largest bio-containment lab in the U. S.," he said with a tinge of pride, as if Stacy had no understanding of Max's work. "I understood that your husband was a wonderful, dedicated scientist." He paused before heading into uncertain, potentially dangerous terrain. "I guess sometimes a high-powered mind like his can possess a strange mix of both brilliance and tortured emotions." His voice was slick and cold: Vaseline on ice.

  "I'm sorry, what?" Stacy asked, her chin coming up, thrusting forward.

  "What I meant was, a genius as complex and gifted as your husband probably found it difficult to live with both his huge intellect and his complicated inner thoughts."

  "I thought you just said you didn't know him," Stacy challenged.

  "Well, I didn't. I... what I meant was, often this is the case. With superior intellect there is sometimes also emotional instability."

  "Well, if you didn't know him, Colonel, why don't you keep those opinions to yourself. Max was very squared-away. He was not some geek scientist, lost in the intellectual ozone."

  "All I meant..." He stopped and nodded. "I'm sorry, I take your point."

  He was now obviously humoring her. Stacy Richardson was beginning to take a giant dislike to Colonel Laurence Chittick.

  They all sat looking at each other, searching for the right thing to say next. Stacy had an uncontrollable urge to get away. "We're here to make arrangements to take Max's body back to California," she said.

  Colonel Chittick subtly replaced his expression of gentle concern with a look of mild consternation.

  "Is that a problem?" Stacy asked.

  "Well, no ... It's just... you mean his remains, I think?"

  "I mean his body," she corrected.

  "You know, of course, he was cremated?"

  "He was what?" She looked at Colonel Chittick, her mouth slightly ajar, staring in abject disbelief.

  "He was cremated yesterday."

  "Who gave you permission to cremate him?" Her voice was ringing against the white walls in the large office.

  "He did."

  "He did?"

  "It was in his medical folder, under 'death requests.' Everybody stationed here, both civilian as well as military personnel, fills one out."

  "Colonel, he did not want to be cremated. I know, because we discussed it. He bought several plots next to his mom and dad at Forest Lawn when they both died. He wanted the whole family to be buried there, with them."

  "He must have changed his mind."

  "What the hell's going on here?" she suddenly said, rising off the sofa.

  "Maybe you need to tell me, Mrs. Richardson."

  Stacy turned to Joanne, who was sitting up straight, her knees tight together, hands folded in her lap like a good girl waiting outside the principal's office. "Joanne, did your brother want to be cremated?"

  "No. Like you said, we bought all the graves side by side, next to Mom and Dad. There's six of them."

  Colonel Chittick got up from the occasional chair and moved around to his desk, opened a folder, rummaged in it for a second, found a sheet of paper, and handed it to Stacy. "Here's his death request sheet."

  "It's not signed, Colonel," she said, looking at it.

  "It wasn't the last page of the medical form. I have that here, with his signature." He again rummaged around for a paper and found it, holding it out to her.

  Stacy didn't take it. She was reading the death request sheet. "Under 'Religion' you list seven denominations, and there's just a check next to Catholic. 'Have you had any of the following diseases?' Check, check, check. These are just check marks. Anybody could have filled this out, put this sheet in there."

  "And now you're making some sort of accusation?" Colonel Chittick no longer looked like Ward Baxter. Now his skin was stretched tight across his jaw, his eyes were piercing and dangerous.

  "Colonel Chittick, my husband did not commit suicide. He had no suicidal tendencies."

  "I don't know that you're in a position to judge that, Mrs. Richardson."

  "And you are? Some guy with a buncha fruit salad on his coat, who never even met him?"

  Colonel Chittick moved away from his desk and stood directly before her. Although he towered over Stacy, she held her ground. "You are forcing me to take this into areas I would rather not go."

  "Help yourself. If you've got something, let's hear it!"

  "Your husband seemed to some of the people he was working with here to have an overly volatile personality. He was subject to huge mood swings."

  "That's absurd."

&nb
sp; Chittick moved back to the desk, pulled a few official forms out of the folder, and handed them to her. "These are, for want of a better term, colleague complaints, filed by his co-workers here. There were even some suggestions that Max was a possible substance abuser."

  "Go fuck yourself!" Stacy said.

  Colonel Chittick was unprepared for this. Finally, he recovered and said, "That would seem to bring this interview to a close."

  "Substance abuse? Of course we'll never know, because you burned up his body!"

  "We complied with your husband's stated requests."

  "I don't know what happened here, Colonel, but my husband didn't commit suicide. He didn't use drugs! He wasn't depressed, and he never asked you to cremate him! I think this is some kind of giant cover-up, and I'm gonna find out why!"

  "Of course, you're welcome to pursue any legal avenue of redress you find worthwhile. And now ... I have his ashes, if you'd like to take them, or we can send them to any address you leave with my secretary."

  Joanne started crying softly on the sofa. Stacy became aware of her sobbing and turned to her. "It's okay, honey. Let's just get out of here." She helped her sister-in-law off the sofa, and they moved to the door.

  "Mrs. Richardson," Colonel Chittick said.

  Stacy turned and glowered at him.

  "It is very hard to lose a loved one." The recruiting poster guy was back. "Anger is the shadow that always follows death, and it is not uncommon for people to have an urge to strike back."

  "Colonel, you haven't seen anything yet," she promised.

  Chapter 3

  DR. DUC

  They were standing in front of Building 810 with their luggage, a cold wind whipping the hems of their dresses. Joanne was still sobbing and Stacy still burning mad.

  "That fucking guy ... who does he think he is?" she said. "A drug user? Max with mood swings? He was the steadiest guy on the planet. He ran the microbiology program at USC. He got that job because he was calm and organized, as well as brilliant. He wasn't some X-over-Y geek head case."

  Joanne continued to cry and made no response. Her shoulders were down, her chin on her chest.

  "Honey," Stacy said firmly, "I know you're torn up. So am I. But these people are lying. They're lying about Max, and if they're lying, the next question is 'Why?' And why did they burn his body? Were they trying to destroy evidence? What the hell happened here?"

  Joanne looked up, tears still wet on her cheeks. Stacy reached into her purse, pulled a fresh tissue out of a travel pack, and handed it to her sister-in-law. "I want to find out what's going on, and I may need your help, but you can't help me if you don't pull yourself together."

  Joanne wiped her eyes, sniffed, then blew. "How are you going to find out what went on? They're not going to tell you anything," she said.

  "I don't know how Army docs are, but I know how civilian medical people think. It's standard procedure on a suicide to do an autopsy. I suppose the same holds true on a military base. If I ask Colonel Chittick for a copy of the autopsy, I'll probably just get ten pages of creative writing. So, I'm going to get Max's autopsy report myself."

  "And they're just going to give it to you?"

  "Let's go find out."

  They went into the Base Information Center and got the Fort Detrick phone book. They took it to one of the long wooden tables at the far end of the room and sat there under the stare of a grandmotherly civilian volunteer in a brown wool suit.

  "What are we looking for?" Joanne asked.

  "Just a minute," Stacy said, as she paged through the book index. "Under 'Scientific Disciplines,' we have Microbiology, Aerobiology--that's wind, or insects usually. If this is a defense facility, I wonder why they're screwing around with that?" She shook her head in confusion, and kept going. "Then we have Immunology, Biotechnology ... Chemical, Industrial. Nothing there. Next section is Plant Sciences and Entomology. Forget that. Here we go... 'Medical and Veterinary Sciences.' That's in USAMRIID. Okay, could be there," she said, and flipped to that section in the book.

  "What?" Joanne asked.

  But Stacy was scanning, muttering department names as she went. "Biometrics, Clinical Investigations, Bacteriology, Diagnostic Systems, Virology, and, bingo, Pathology. ." She flipped the book to and started looking. Then she stabbed the page with her index finger. "We're headed to Building 1666, Experimental Pathology, Labs A through H, first floor."

  They moved out of the building, still carrying their overnight bags and the Information Center map of the base. They headed toward Building 1666 along the manicured walkways.

  Fort Detrick was beautiful in late April, with flowerbeds blooming spring colors. There were elm trees lining the streets and old Civil War cannons. It was a twenty-minute walk across the Fort on the strangely named Ditto Avenue. They were chilled by the brisk weather, but they found the building on the comer of Potter Street and Randall Drive. It was a huge gray concrete-and-steel structure, an eighties or nineties addition. The sign out front read:

  SCIENCE BUILDING 1666 USAMRIID

  They stood in front of it and looked at the imposing architecture.

  "What now?" Joanne asked. Her voice seemed small, blown away in the brisk wind. "What do you want me to do?"

  "If I get stopped or it gets goofy, start flirting, distract somebody."

  She smiled reproachfully. "Flirting. At last, a job I'm qualified for."

  The building's lobby was large, with a tile floor and a huge personnel directory along one wall. A half-dozen more flags hung from pole stands. What they stood for Stacy didn't know, and couldn't care less. She looked at the directory board.

  "What're we looking for?" Joanne asked.

  "A secure pathology lab where they would most likely do an autopsy. They usually keep the paperwork in the O. R. till the body is released in case they need to check for other possibilities. I'm hoping it's still there. If they were hiding something I think they'd do it here, and not take Max to a regular county morgue. They have a secure primate bio-operating room and lab in the basement. That's where I'd do it. Let's start there and work our way up."

  "You sure you know what you're doing?"

  "If I knew what I was doing I would have talked Max out of coming to this godforsaken base." Then she turned away and walked to the staircase.

  The door leading downstairs was open, so they walked into the basement. The smell that greeted their noses was one Stacy was very familiar with, but Joanne wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Yuck."

  The smell was a common toxic lab smell caused by the occasional broken bottle of chemicals and preserving fluids. Over it all was the stringent reek of formaldehyde. A man in a Naval Captain's uniform was approaching. He hesitated as they passed.

  "Excuse me," he said.

  Stacy and Joanne turned.

  "You don't have a pass. You can't be down here without a pass."

  "I'm from Colonel Chittick's office. I'm looking for the on-duty pathologist."

  "You'd better go back and get your pass, first," he said.

  Now Joanne looked at him and put her hand to her mouth, "I'm feeling sort of green," she said, batting long lashes. "These smells down here ..."

  "She's our new computer programmer. I was just showing her around. Would you mind taking her out? I'll only be a second. Wait for me outside, hon."

  Concerned, the Naval Captain looked at Stacy.

  "Please," Stacy added, smiling helplessly. "I haven't got time to go all the way back to the fourth floor of Building 810 and get that damn pass off my overcoat. The Colonel is on a tear this morning."

  Her mention of the right floor and building seemed to ease the Captain's concerns. He took Joanne's arm and led her to a door in the center of the hall and then out.

  As soon as they left, Stacy was off, down the hall. She approached a desk with a nurse in a civilian smock.

  "Who's got the duty down here this morning?"

  "Dr. Due," the nurse said.

  "I'm sorry, who?"

&nb
sp; "Dr. Martin Due. And he's heard all the jokes. He's Vietnamese, good guy."

  "Which way?"

  "Down that corridor, to the right. Through the second set of swinging doors."

  "Thanks."

  She was gone again, moving fast, bustling now like all the other people at Fort Detrick. Her leather-soled shoes beat a rhythm on the basement linoleum. She passed a medical closet, put on the brakes, backed up, and opened the closet door.

  Inside were mops, pails, and cleaning solvents. Then she saw what she had been hoping for: Folded neatly on a shelf were green medical smocks. She put one on, pulled the tie around her slender waist, and grabbed a hair cap off the shelf, pulling it over her head. Then she saw a clipboard for ordering detergents and cleaning fluids. She took it. Why does a clipboard instantly make you a person in authority? she wondered.

  She reentered the corridor and went down the hall, found the double swinging doors, and went into the lab area. She passed a woman rolling a medical tray full of instruments.

  "Looking for Doc Due," she said breezily.

  "Lab B. He's doing a chimp post-mortem."

  "Thanks." She pushed into Lab B and saw a tall Asian man in scrubs working over a metal drainage table with a chain-mail autopsy glove on his left hand and a rubber surgical glove on his right. He had a small, dead female chimpanzee opened, with a Y-cut from her sternum to her crotch. He was weighing organs as Stacy came into the lab.

  "Who are you?" he said, glancing up.

  "Dr. Courtney Smith," she lied. "I'm doing the integrated pathology report on Max Richardson for Colonel Chittick's office, and we didn't get our final copy of the organ recital."