wept silently, holding on to the hope of a heartbeat. I couldn’t make myself stay any longer.
I passed Robinelle Langer, standing at the closed glass door inside her brother’s room, dressed in hospital blue, her eyes on the family in the hallway. There was an expression of horror in her eyes and she met mine, hers pleading.
A coward, I looked away. There would be no questioning Connelly or her family right now, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak to the others who had been admitted. Their families were standing like Robinelle, watching the shadows on the glass wall. I left the paranormal unit.
Stopping a security guard in the hallway, I asked directions to the medical university’s pathology department and got into my car, following the hastily scripted directions. I parked and found the weekend pathologist just leaving. I identified myself and said, “I hate to bother you, but—”
“Then don’t,” she said, sounding tired and taciturn. Her name tag identified her as Dr. Gomez, her accent placed her as a Tennessee native, and her expression said she had worked a long shift and was mighty unhappy. She was a take-charge, no-nonsense woman with very dark copper skin tones and a curly Afro that sprang around her face when she released it from a clip. “You can walk out with me. But I can’t talk to you. HIPAA laws make all patient matters confidential.”
She might not have meant it to hit me the way it did, but anger shot all through me. “Murder investigations precede HIPAA,” I said, “especially since a subpoena was delivered to your department at seven a.m. While I appreciate you being in a hurry and your desire to protect patients, you can talk to me now or I can have a marked car show up at your home and bring you in to PsyLED for a more formal discussion.”
Gomez stopped and swiveled to me. “I don’t like being threatened.”
I blew out a breath as the anger dissipated. I had no idea where my attitude had come from, except from the vision of Connelly Darrow dying and being brought back behind the curtain. “People are dying. I need information,” I said. “Please. Tell me what you know about the body.”
Gomez frowned. “We received jars of sludge from a crime scene, and I thought it was a joke. Seems it wasn’t. The preliminary reports from the early samples show nothing of substance. So far nothing is growing on the plates or the broth. Today I received four fingers from the paranormal unit from two different patients. They dissolved before I could do more than measure and weigh them. I sent parts of the remains to the clinical lab for chemistries, to mycobacteriology for cultures, and to CDC for virology and infectious disease testing, and my tech worked up what he could in histo.”
“What is histo?”
“Histology. He put a few small scraps of flesh into the histology tissue processor. If the tissue survives the dehydration and paraffin processes, it’ll be cut into slices of point five to point one micrometers and mounted on a slide, stained, and read under a microscope. Then I might—might—have an idea what’s killing the patients. Your people say it’s a curse, but even curses have a cause—bacterial, viral, prion-based—something has to cause the tissue breakdown and total organ failure. And heat, bacteria, and moisture are usually responsible for decomposition, regardless of magical energies.”
I frowned. “Radiation doesn’t involve those things. Magic is energy, just like radiation is energy. And we’ve already speculated that this could be a . . .” I tried to think of a way to say this that might be medically helpful instead of investigatively helpful. I went on. “Call it a nonwitchy time curse, speeding up death and decay rather than causing them, because death and decay happen to all of us.”
Gomez crossed her arms, her scrubs swishing, her eyes narrow in thought. “Keep talking.”
“You might not have anything except a magically accelerated natural progression. And because the patients were deprived of early access to a null chamber, which would halt the energies and the progression of the patients’ decomp, then the energies might have taken hold and done their damage. Once the patients did get access to a null unit, it could have been too little, too late. All the affected people at the farm were put inside a null chamber and they got better. Accelerated decomposition of inanimate objects stopped. We might have . . .” My words ground to