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—
The PPE suitswere made of what looked like a combination of plastic and paper and were white and crinkly. Lucas and Moscowitz got some privacy behind the house, got down to their boxer shorts, and pulled the suits on. In the three minutes they were dressing, Lucas was already getting hot.
“No air conditioners on the house, that we could see,” Lucas said.
“Good. They haven’t been blowing the interior air outside,” Underwood said.
Lucas asked Moscowitz: “Do you do this a lot?”
Moscowitz: “This is my eighth or tenth time. Of course, the others were simulations.”
“So…”
“Yeah. We’re both virgins.”
“Ah, man.”
Lucas’s suit had a hood with a face plate that slid over the respirator mask. Moscowitz and Underwood showed him how the respirator mask fit, and how the hood sealed. They turned on the air, Moscowitzgot several of the transparent dry-bag look-alikes and asked, “You ready?”
“Yeah, and I’m hot. Let’s go.”
—
Letty and Raecame around the house, Letty gave Lucas a squeeze and said, “Try not to breathe in.” And, “When you talk, you sound like Darth Vader.”
The back door was locked. They walked slowly around to the front, keeping the suits clear of anything that might snag them. They tried the front door and it opened. With the others standing well back, Lucas and Moscowitz stepped inside and shut the door behind them.
They were in an entry with knotty pine paneling on the walls and a closet to their left. Lucas led the way out of the entry into the living room, where they found eight single mattresses on the floor, all of them with saline bag hangers next to them. Several of the mattresses were stained with what Lucas thought might be body fluids, including blood.
Moscowitz: “Stay back from all of that and do what you need to do. I’ll start taking my samples here.”
He began unpacking his dry-bags. Lucas watched for a moment, then crossed the living room to the kitchen, called back to Moscowitz, “Nothing here except dishes, but some of them haven’t been washed if you need samples.”
Moscowitz: “Probably won’t be necessary.”
Lucas walked out of the kitchen and down a hallway, opened a closet, found both men’s and women’s clothing, then moved on to a recreation room with an oversized television, the floor crowded with couches and easy chairs, and three wheelchairs. A mountain bike wasleaning against a wall. One of the wheelchairs showed a stain that could be blood. Lucas passed that on to Moscowitz and continued through a doorway to a smaller room fitted as a home office, with a gas fireplace in the corner. The fireplace shouldn’t have had ashes but did: a lot of paper had been burned in it.
He probed through it with a barbeque fork and found nothing but the burned corner of a passport, but all the personal information it had contained was gone.
A desktop computer sat on a table with an office chair in front of it. The back of the computer had been opened, and where there should have been a hard drive, there was an empty space with a dangling connector. Scott and whoever he was with had apparently been torching evidence, although the most damning stuff—the mattresses—had been too big to burn, or they hadn’t had time.
A spiral stair went up to a second level, and when Lucas got to the top of the stairs, he found the trashed remnants of a cheap flip phone. The phone, he thought, was almost certainly a burner, and probably the phone that the security service called when he and Rae went into Catton’s house in Santa Fe.
The top floor consisted of four bedrooms and a bathroom, and two of the bedrooms had saline stands. The stands had been pushed into corners, as though they’d been finished using them.
The house, Lucas thought, was distinguished by one thing: there was almost no paper with writing on it. No notes on refrigerators, no matchbooks with the name of a bar, no photos with revealing scenes in the background, nothing. It must have all gone in the fireplace, or it had been taken by the fugitives.
He went back downstairs, and walked through the bathroom, found nothing of interest, walked out to the single-car garage, sawnothing of interest until he opened a trash can and saw glass at the bottom. There was a garbage bag sitting on top of the glass, and he carefully lifted the bag out, and looked at the glass more closely. It didn’t look like ordinary glass, it was heavier and curved.
Moscowitz was sealing samples into the transparent dry-bags, and Lucas called, “When you got a minute?”
“Be right there.”
Moscowitz came lumbering out of the living room, said, “We’ve got another ten or twelve minutes.”
“Look in the garbage can.”
Moscowitz looked, and said, “Okay, those are sealable media vials, sort of like old test tubes but with secure seals on top. If you’re going to move virus samples, you put them in those tubes, then you’d put those tubes in a secure container to move them.”
