Children of The Night

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.”

The coroner had been irritated but had complied. On Wednesday, October 2, Kate brought the thick report out to Alan Stevens at the CDC imaging lab. Everyone there was pleased to see her, but she had no time for pleasantries. She barely glanced at the sealedoff ClassVI biolabs where Chandra and Tate had died, and had not even sat down in her own office after confirming that the floppy disks, files, and project reports were indeed gone. She met Alan in a basement conference room that had just been repainted but still smelled ` of smoke.

“Kate, I'm so terribly sorry . . .” began the redhaired technician.

“Thank you, Alan. “ She slid the report across to him. “This was done by the county coroner. Do we need to do it over?”

Alan bit his lip as he flipped through the stapled pages. “No,” he said at last, “the conclusions are sloppily written up, but the data looks solid enough.”

“And could that child be Joshua?”

The technician settled his glasses higher on his snub nose. “This baby is the right gender, the right age, approximately the right size, and there's no reason for another child to have been in the house . . .”

“Could it be Joshua, Alan? Look at the section under `blood samples.' “

He nodded. “Kate, it's not unusual in fires and massive trauma cases like this that there is little blood left in the body.”

“Yes, I know,” Kate said as patiently as she could. She did not mention her emergency room residency or her training with one of the country's finest pathologists before choosing hematology. “But all of the blood missing or boiled away, Alan?”

“It's unusual, I admit,” said the technician. “But not unheard of.”

“All right,” said Kate. She handed him the extra folder with the X ray and MRI hard copy. “Is this Joshua?”

Alan spent almost thirty minutes studying the stills and comparing them to hard copy and stored computer visuals in the imaging control room. When he was finished; they returned to the conference room. “Well?” said Kate.

Her young friend's face was almost forlorn. “I can't find the stomachwall abnormality for certain, Kate . . . but you can see the extent of the internal damage from whatever fell on the child. A support beam perhaps. But the actual tissue samples support the identification. I mean, the cellular pathology is similar.”

“Similar,” said Kate, standing. “But not necessarily the same as Joshua's?”

Alan. took his glasses off and squinted at her. His face looked very vulnerable and very sad. “Not necessarily . . . there's no way to be sure with this postmortem data . . . you must know that. But the chances of an infant of similar size, with such an unusual cell pathology, being found in the same house . . . “

Kate walked to the door. “It just means that they sacrificed one of their own,” she said.

Alan frowned at her. “One of whose own?”

“Nothing,” said Kate and opened the door.

Alan rose with the files. “Don't you want these?”

Kate shook her head and left.

The infant was buried in a lovely cemetery near Lyons, a small foothills community where Kate and Tom had sometimes walked. When she had requested a headstone, the salesman had gone into the back room for a minute and brought out a photocopy of an elaborate stone with an infant's cherubic face, a lamb, and a curling flower.

Kate shook her head. “A plain stone. No ornamentation whatsoever. “

The salesman nodded enthusiastically. “And the deceased's name to be inscribed . . . ah, yes . . . Joshua Neuman,” he said and cleared his throat. “I . . . ah . . . have read the newspaper accounts of the tragedy, Doctor Neuman. My deepest sympathies.”

“No,” said Kate, and the flatness in her tone made the man glance up over his bifocals. “No name,” she said. “Just inscribe the stoneUnknown Romanian Infant.”

On Friday, October 4, Kate withdrew a total of $15,830 from her savings account, another $2,200 from her checking account, put most of the cash in folders with other loose papers that went into her carryon bag, stuffed the rest of the bills in her purse, took the shuttle limousine to Stapleton International Airport, and boarded a United flight to New York with tickets in her purse for a connecting PanAm flight to Vienna.

The plane had moved away from the gate when a man dressed all in black dropped into the empty seat next to her.

“You're late,” said Kate. “I thought you'd changed your mind. “

“No,” said O'Rourke. “I promised, didn't I?”

Kate chewed on her lip. Her headache, although much improved over the migraineintensity a few days earlier, still roared through her skull like a rasping wind. She found, it hard to concentrate, but did so anyway. “Did your senator friend get through to the man at the embassy in Bucharest?”

O'Rourke nodded. The bearded priest looked tired.

“And is the embassy guy going to contact Lucian?”

“Yes,” said O'Rourke. “It will be done. They chose someone who is . . . ah . . . not unused to delicate assignments.”

“CIA,” said Kate. She rubbed her forehead with her good hand. “I keep thinking that I've forgotten something.”

O'Rourke seemed to be studying her face. “The travel arrangements you requested have been made. Lucian will know where and when to meet us. My friends at Matthias Church in Budapest have made the contacts with the Gypsies. Everything we discussed is in place.”

Kate continued to rub her forehead without being aware of doing so. “Still . . . it feels like I've forgotten something. “

O'Rourke leaned closer. “Perhaps you've forgotten you need time to mourn. “

Kate pulled back suddenly, turned away as if looking out the window during the takeoff, and then turned her gaze back on the priest. “No . . . I feel it . . . I mean, Tom and Julie's and Chandra's deaths are in me like a pain more real than this concussion or this arm . . . but I can't take time to feel it all yet. Not yet.”

O'Rourke's gray eyes studied her. “And Joshua?”

Kate's lips grew tight. “Joshua is alive.”

The priest nodded almost imperceptibly. “But if we can't find him?”

Kate's thin smile held no warmth, no humor, only resolve. “We'll find him. I swear on the graves of the friends I just buried and the eyes of the God you believe in that we'll find Joshua. And bring him home.”

Kate turned away to watch out the window as the plains of Colorado fell behind as they flew east, but for the longest time she could feel O'Rourke's gaze on her.