The Last Widow (Will Trent 9)

In Faith’s experience, if you were going to successfully lie, you’d better have a few more truths to throw around in case you were called on your bullshit.

Van finally sat down at the table. He sipped his coffee. Faith waited for some roundabout story, but for once, he got straight to the point. “Last September, Beau was admitted to Emory Hospital with a case of wound botulism.”

Faith understood the individual words, but they made no sense together. “Wound botulism?”

“Clostridium botulinum is a bacteria that naturally occurs in soil and water. Under certain circumstances, it turns into botulinum neurotoxin, or botulism.”

All that Faith knew about botulism was that rich women used it to freeze their faces. “What circumstances?”

“With Beau, he was muscle-popping black tar heroin that was cut with dirt. Wound botulism occurs very rarely. Maybe twenty cases are reported in the US each year. Beau presented at the ER with droopy eyelids, facial paralysis, muscle weakness, breathing complications. With the needle tracks in his arms, they assumed he’d overdosed on opiates. They shot him up with Narcan, and he got worse.”

Faith found herself in the rare position of being unable to form a question.

“Botulism is extremely difficult to diagnose. Unless the doctor is thinking botulism, it’s going to be the last thing that comes up. And the symptoms mimic a lot of things. Could be more people die from it than what’s reported.”

She still had no questions. Her phone buzzed on the table. Amanda had probably been called into the governor’s office. She wanted updates, but Faith needed more from Van before that could happen.

She said, “Keep talking.”

“The CDC is the only agency that knows how to test for botulism and who can administer HBAT, the antitoxin that stops the progression of the poison.” He rolled the coffee cup in his hands. “You can’t just give them a shot to make it all better. The drug is derived from horse serum. Initially, from a horse named First Flight, if you’re interested. The FDA black-boxed the serum. You have to cut it down with another drug, then slow infuse it through an IV in order to make sure the treatment isn’t killing the patient. And whatever state the patient is in—if they’re on a ventilator, if their limbs are paralyzed, that’s probably not going to fully reverse. Once the neurotoxin bonds to the nerve terminals, that’s it. Beau was lucky Michelle figured it out before he had lasting damage.”

Faith didn’t see any luck here. “So he paid Michelle back by putting her in Dash’s crosshairs?”

“That’s not how it happened,” Van said. “Adam Humphrey Carter was Beau’s only visitor in the ICU. We know from Michelle’s chart notations the exact times she was at the hospital. When Carter showed up, he was being his usual dick self. He made Michelle very uncomfortable. She had the staff call security. Security gave him a warning and filed an internal report.”

Now she had questions. “You didn’t think to tell me this two days ago when I asked you to cross-reference Michelle’s files with Beau Ragnersen?”

“I didn’t know two days ago. Spivey had thousands of patient files and worked on hundreds of projects, a lot of them top secret. But Ragnersen was a name that stood out. I did some digging at Emory yesterday morning, talked to the ICU staff, checked in with security. The internal report was just that—internal. I had to manually search the filing cabinets to find the actual document.”

Faith realized that Kate Murphy’s reticence to call Michelle Spivey’s abduction an IPA operation rather than a sex-trafficking case suddenly made sense. “So, did Carter kidnap and rape Michelle to pay her back for calling hospital security on him, or did he kidnap her for the IPA?”

“That was our question,” Van said. “Carter hated women. He wanted to punish them for—well, for whatever. It’s not like hating women is a crazy, new idea. If you accept that Carter took Michelle because he wanted to punish her for turning him into security, then it makes a kind of sense that he’d want to keep her alive so he could continue to torture her. Open and shut case of kidnap and rape.”

“What changed your mind?”

“The bombing. The car accident where your partner put Carter with Dash and the others. The clincher was a RISC alert I got on Sunday night. That’s—”

“The Repository for Individuals of Special Concern.”

“Correct. Michelle’s details were already in RISC. The network is tied to servers around the country. The updates aren’t in real-time, but we get them faster than you’d think. The RISC alert made it to my phone around six o’clock Sunday night, nine hours after the airport’s facial recognition software pinged Michelle on that service road, on that day, in that spot, in front of that building.”

Faith’s phone buzzed with another text. Amanda was probably climbing the Capitol’s marble walls.

She prompted Van, “What’s that building?”

He glanced around, then told her, “It’s a CDC Quarantine Station, part of the National Strategic Stockpile. For our purposes, think of it as an armamentarium for biological attacks. The CDC assembles what they call push packs of emergency medication that can be sent out on a moment’s notice. That includes antidotes, antitoxins and antibiotics. All your favorite antis for the coming apocalypse.”

She asked, “Is HBAT stored there?”

“Yes.”

“Was Michelle there to steal the antitoxin or to destroy it?” Faith put together the answer before Van could tell her. “Dash already had two pipe bombs wired up and ready to go when they broke Michelle out of Emory. You don’t just drive around with explosives in your trunk. He had to be planning on using the bombs to blow up the quarantine station, but then Michelle got sick and shit hit the fan, so he decided to use them on the parking deck instead.”

“I like that you think like a terrorist.”

“Couldn’t Dash stick the bombs to the outside of the building?” Again, she answered her own question. “The building is reinforced, right? All that security, the steel door. Michelle was their only way inside. They needed her biometrics to open the door.”

Van shrugged. “Did they?”

“Aren’t there other quarantine stations?”

“Yes, but—” He didn’t provide the but.

Atlanta was within a two-hour flight time of 80 percent of the US population. It made sense that the bulk of the warehousing would take place at the busiest airport in the world.

Faith asked, “How long does it take for someone to die from botulism poisoning?”

“Depends on the level of toxin. In its purest form, we’re talking seconds. Something less refined, like a naturally occurring food contaminant, could be a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. Without treatment, you’re pretty much a goner.” He explained, “The neurotoxin slowly paralyzes everything. Your eyelids, your facial muscles, even the eyeballs in your head. Usually, you’re awake, but you can’t speak, and your brain is desperately sending out signals to move your muscles, but your muscles aren’t responding. Eventually, all the mechanisms that you need to breathe are paralyzed, and you suffocate.”

Faith felt her lips part in horror.

“Animals can get it. Mostly fish or things that eat fish. There are five types of strains that infect humans. Botulism can be food-borne, inhaled through spores, injected, but thankfully not transmitted person-to-person. The toxicity has something to do with temperature and oxygen level. There’s a type of infant botulism babies get in their guts.”

Faith’s own gut clenched.

Van said, “This is a nasty, nasty bug we’re talking about, Mitchell. All it would take is one kilogram to kill the entire human population.”

Faith remembered the cardboard boxes Will had traded out at the warehouse. Two dozen thirty-by-thirty containers, two strong young men to lift each box. One kilo was a little over two pounds.

“Okay,” Faith had to talk this out. “Carter visited Beau in the hospital. He heard about the wound botulism. He knew how deadly it was. Did he know what Beau went through before he was finally diagnosed?”

“Yes.”

“So, Carter probably told Dash about the botulism, right? And instead of being freaked out, Dash got the idea to weaponize it.”

“That’s the assumption.”

She dreaded hearing the answer, but she had to ask, “Could Michelle make enough botulism for a large-scale attack?”

“The short answer is yes.”

“Give me the long answer.”

“We are hoping, in that scenario, Michelle managed to fake the science.”

“Hoping?”

“The IPA has been holding Michelle for over a month. She’s been raped and abused. We assume by her appearance that she’s being starved. She probably has sepsis from her appendix rupturing. She went berserk on Carter at the motel. We know that Carter was threatening her daughter.” He leaned his elbows on the table. “Look, I’m gonna lay it out for you. Michelle Spivey is a strong, brilliant woman, but our profilers and our psychiatrist aren’t sure that she’d be able to hold up under that kind of relentless physical and psychological torture.”