Human Remains Read online

  I could practically feel the rest of the room eavesdropping. At long last, she said, "Do you know my name?"

  "No." Now that she mentioned it, her name might not even be Mrs. Acayo. Do most Ugandan women change their name after marriage? "Sorry."

  "My name is Immaculate Joan Acayo."

  Wait. Her name was Immaculate? I sometimes groaned at my parents for naming me Hope, but this was light years worse. Even Joan makes me think of Joan Rivers or Joan Crawford or some other poor, old, and perhaps deceased American celebrity with her face yanked up by plastic surgery.

  "You can call me Joan." She rubbed her belly underneath her shift dress.

  "Thanks." I didn't know if I could call her Immaculate with a straight face. I felt sorry enough for the kids from Immaculata High School. I decided to change the subject while everyone else filed out of the room past Tom, who kept an eye on us from the doorway.

  "Your name gives me great comfort. I think God is giving me a sign, Doctor Hope."

  Uh oh. I'm not religious, although Ryan is, and plenty of people have tried to convert me since 14/11. I swerved around the subject. "You can call me Hope. Unless you want me to call you Mrs. Joan?"

  It sounded silly, and we both laughed before she shook her head again. "I am a widow now. I prefer not to be reminded of my status."

  "Yes. Naturally. Of course." I'd started imitating her formal way of talking. I'd have to stop, or she might think I was making fun of her.

  "Are you Christian?"

  I'm not used to people being so up front about it, but maybe this was a cultural thing. Plus, she'd probably have been in recent touch with the clergy. I shook my head.

  "That is too bad. My church is wonderful, such a help. I can bring you on Sunday, and you can meet everyone."

  "No, thank you." This was absolutely surreal to me. Her husband died yesterday, but her first priority was to recruit me for her church?

  "Maybe next Sunday," she said.

  I stifled a laugh and shook my head again. "If I ever want to go to church, my boyfriend has me covered," I said, before I realized that it was a pretty slang-y way of putting things, and I might have to explain better. Leaving out the part that I had more than one boyfriend, and was therefore pretty much the opposite of what she was looking for.

  Her forehead crinkled. She said, "Is his church born-again?"

  "No."

  "Ah." She smiled at me and reached for my hands with both of hers. Her plump hands felt slightly damp. "You should be born again. It is not enough to go to any church. You must accept Jesus Christ into your heart, as your own personal saviour."

  OMG. I knew it was almost Christmas, and her husband had died yesterday, but this was too much. My cheeks flushed, and I knew I couldn't fake a smile for one more minute. "I'm so sorry for your loss. Please accept my condolences." I stood up and spun away from her. Everyone else had left. Even Tom had begun migrating back into the lab.

  She said, "Doctor Hope. Doctor Hope!" Joan's booming yet musical voice halted me and drowned out the buzz of the departing people's conversation.

  I locked in place, hunched over my plastic chair.

  Everyone in the doorway, including Tom, wheeled around to stare at us.

  I sank back into the chair, letting its metal legs take my weight. I couldn't abandon the grieving widow. "What is it, Joan?"

  Her grip tightened. The strength in her fingers reminded me of Lawrence's cool, stiffening hand, though, and I tried not to let my face betray me before she said, "I like you."

  "Oh." I couldn't honestly say that I liked her back. I didn't even know the woman. I struggled to come up with the correct response. Among everything else, 14/11 had destroyed any aptitude for witty banter.

  "You are different. You are supposed to cry with me, or ask me how I am going to make it back to Uganda. Instead, you are a doctor who asks me to call you by your first name, and you get angry when I offer to bring you to church to thank you. You are a very different woman, Doctor Hope."

  I could see what she meant. "Um, thank you?"

  Her smile widened. She had perfectly straight, white teeth. I bet she didn't even bleach them. Did they do bleach in Uganda? For sure they did in Miami. Distracted by her dentition, I almost missed her next pronouncement: "I am going to bring you to dinner. You and your Christian boyfriend."

  "Oh. No. Ryan doesn't want—"

  "His name is Ryan. Good. What kind of food limitations do you have?"

  It took me a second to realize that she meant food allergies or preferences. "Well, I'm sort of vegetarian right now."

  Joan raised her eyebrows at me. I realized that was a wussy way of putting it, so I said, more loudly, "I'm vegetarian."

  "Is he vegetarian also?"

  "Ryan? No."

  "Good. I will make a variety of foods. It is no problem. In Uganda, many people eat a vegetable diet, and I know many tasty dishes."

  "No, Joan, I don't want you cooking for us. Your husband passed away. I want you to rest and … " What the hell are you supposed to do when your husband dies? Wear black, veil optional, and weep a lot over the flowers your friends send?

  Joan shook her head. "I am a woman of action, Doctor Hope. I refuse to sit idle. You and your Ryan will come to my house and eat delicious food. I can even serve drinks. I, myself, don't drink alcohol, but I have no objection to those who do."

  "I don't drink much either," I said, relieved that we had something in common.

  "Then it is settled. You will come to our apartment. It is small," she added, after a moment, "but it is comfortable. Give me your phone. I will add myself as a contact."

  Bemused, I passed over my iPhone, and she did, even adding a thumbnail selfie before handing it back.

  "Now. What is your number? I would like you to come over tomorrow evening."

  Well, I'd like to, but I'd be too busy wanting to rip my own skin off. "Won't you be busy, ah, making arrangements?"

  "Lawrence would want me to have you over. I have already spoken to the police and the funeral home. We will be having a ceremony on Sunday, and I would like you to come to that, too, with your Ryan."

  My Ryan. I liked the sound of that, even as I protested. "Oh, but you'll be so busy. You'll want to be with your friends, perhaps go to church, getting ready for the … memorial."

  Her face burned with some sort of emotion that made me take a step back, but soon she was smiling again so brightly that I must've been mistaken. She said, "One way I keep my sanity is through cooking, Doctor Hope. I want to cook for you and Ryan."

  "You want me to make something? Or bring drinks?"

  She shook her head. "If I am too tired to cook, I will serve casseroles. People are bringing casseroles that are—" She shook her head, and I laughed in recognition. I ate a lot of cafeteria casseroles when I was a student.

  It was official. Ryan and I had a date with Lawrence's widow tomorrow night.

  Chapter 10

  "Do you know what CRISPR is?" said Tom, once we'd returned to his office. He had the biggest, U-shaped desk I'd ever seen. The side closest to him was stacked in papers, but the visitor's side was completely clean. I perched in the visitor's chair. "Yes. At least I understand the concept of cutting genetic code with 'scissors' made of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats."

  "And do you know how CRISPR is revolutionizing research?"

  Not much. "I know that this technique is a faster, cheaper, and more precise way to cut a gene sequence than we've ever had before. I know that once you cut out the sequence you don't want, all you have to do is plant another sequence you do want, and the bacteria will help mend it by replacing the bad sequence."

  "That's fair. What articles have you read?"

  "Some basic ones." I wondered if I should admit that I'd mostly listened to a Radiolab podcast about CRISPR, pronounced crisper. They'd explained how bacteria used CRISPR like a mug shot of their enemy viruses, and now humans were using CRISPR for their own needs.

  "
I'll send you some links. You're going to fit in fine." Tom stood and reached for the doorknob of the pale wooden door behind his desk. It opened directly into his lab, a large room filled with black lab benches. He waited for me to enter, so I did, and he said to my back, "Next time, you'll have to tell me about finding Lawrence, though."

  I whirled around, my mouth gaping.

  He gave me a slight smile and closed the door.

  My heart still beating erratically, I checked out my surroundings. Like my high school chem lab, it had black lab benches made out of some sort of plastic-y material that resists chemical spills, set up in rows for people to work on.

  But the room was a lot bigger than my high school's. Like the size of a big swimming pool—not an Olympic pool, but a nice, big rectangular pool that you could swim decent-sized laps in. And the whole wall on the left was made up of windows, which meant everyone had a window office, and was significantly nicer than working in the fluorescent-only dungeons of an emergency department.

  The lab wall on the right had two doors that led to the hallway, both locked with card-scanners, which was higher-tech than my high school. They also seemed to have significantly more storage. Every lab bench was stacked with open shelving that could be accessed by people working on either side of the bench, and seemed to hold a lot of glass flasks, labeled boxes, and other equipment I couldn't identify, although the person with the closest lab bench had a Domo-kun stuffed animal on an upper shelf and a name plate that said Summer.

  The wall behind me, the one shared with Tom's office, was covered by a fume hood and some refrigerators. The far wall opposite us opened into another, smaller room, and I could make out another fume hood, refrigerator-like things with electrical panels, and freezers along the most distant wall.

  So, my high school chem lab, but with a ton more equipment, and people who actually knew what they were doing. Nice.

  One of the hallway sensors flicked green. A door was cracking open. A man's voice drifted in.

  "He made a lot of enemies."

  "Enemies is a strong word." Another guy's voice. Lower. More controlled.

  Interesting. But probably something they didn't want overheard. Where should I go? The lab was filled with rows of black benches, yet I belatedly realized that Tom hadn't assigned me one. He'd quizzed me on CRISPR and drop-kicked me into this gigantic room.

  Susan had handed me a folder on lab safety and told me to run some computer modules on the subject for the next two days, but she hadn't shown me which computer to use before she'd gone to lunch.

  "Come on. You know he did." The first guy raised his voice. "No—"

  I was standing a metre away from the door into Tom's office, between the glass-fronted fume hood and the first lab bench. I took two steps forward, beside a white refrigerator, and then Pothead and Jesus spotted me from the closest hallway door.

  Jesus, the one with the long hair and the softer voice, immediately shut his mouth. His real name was Chris, which was pretty easy to remember because it was so close to Christ. Jesus Chris shot off to the other end of the lab, furthest from Tom's office, without another word.

  Pothead stood in the doorway, studying me from underneath his long eyebrows. His rumpled appearance didn't mean he was dumb. As a matter of fact, it probably meant he was one of the smarter people here, because he didn't have to prove himself. His badge said Mitch Lubian.

  I stared back, trying to look professional and aloof. "What's your name again?"

  "I'm Hope Sze, a resident in family medicine from Montreal. You can pronounce it like the letter C—"

  "Sze," he said, with a pretty good inflection. "I know who you are."

  I tried not to take a step back, but I blinked.

  "You're the doctor who found Lawrence and messed up the crime scene."

  Now my face was flaming, and I was on the defensive. "I was trying to save his life. One of the causes of pulselessness is hypothermia, and you have to do CPR until you know that he's warm and dead. So I started CPR. I wasn't trying to mess up the crime scene."

  He held up his palms at me. "Hey, I'm not a medical doctor. I'm not going to tell you how to do your job."

  Like hell. I switched subjects. "And how do you know all that, anyway?"

  "I know a lot of things," he said, and smirked.

  The smirk did it. He was a pretty good-looking guy, but a know-it-all sets me off. "Yeah? Like the fact that Lawrence had a lot of enemies?"

  His turn to draw back. The calculating look returned. His brown eyes were intense under a heavy forehead. The fact that he had a little stubble growing on his face, and heavy sideburns, didn't endear him to me. "I could have been talking about anyone."

  "Give me a break. He died under bizarre circumstances. Of course you're talking about him."

  After a second, he walked forward and clapped his hand on my shoulder.

  His hand felt like warm meat through the thin cotton of my shirt. My brain jumped back to the memory of another sweaty, unwanted hand on me, circa 14/11, and bared my teeth like a wolverine before stepping away so that his hand fell toward the ground and off my shoulder.

  He said, "You're strange. I like you."

  Right. "Thanks," I said. I could have told him likewise, but I try not to lie, and I definitely felt lukewarm about him. "Did you know Lawrence pretty well, then?"

  He said, "Hey, who didn't know Lawrence?" His voice was much lighter, and louder, like he wanted Chris to hear. "Dr. Hay considered it an honour that Dr. Acayo made it to our humble town. He could have stayed in Miami, 'making important contributions to the body of knowledge about the Influenza A virus, or embarking on a new course with the Zisa virus.'"

  From his mocking tone of voice, I could tell Pothead was probably quoting Dr. Hay.

  Chris made a sound from the back that was somewhere between a laugh, a snort, and a grunt.

  "The Zisa virus?" I said, because that was the new bit I hadn't heard about. "I thought he was working with Dr. Kanade on influenza and bird flu."

  "He was, as far as I know," said Mitch, "but he wrote new proposals about Zisa, too. Judith thought his ideas were 'magnificent.'"

  Yep, bitterness. Something I'd have to unpack later. "Well, Zisa is the next big thing, right? I can understand wanting to work on that right now." The Zisa virus hardly causes any symptoms in 80 percent of infected people, who bop around, spreading the infection, mostly via the Aedes aegypti mosquito, but occasionally through intercourse or non-sexual close contact, since there was a case in Nevada over the summer where an elderly man with a high viral load spread it to his son, possibly through sweat or tears. The other 20 percent of people think they've got the regular flu's fever and achiness, with the extra bonus of a rash and conjunctivitis, and may not think to wear mosquito repellent before they act as a food source for more hungry mosquitoes.

  Mitch looked sour. "Yeah, but why work on it here? All the resources are further south. If you want to be cutting edge, you either have to go to a big centre—John's Hopkins proved the link to Guillain-Barré—or you head right to Brazil or Columbia, where they don't have the funding, but they do have the patients."

  "You'd go to Brazil if you wanted to study the children with microcephaly," I said. The true tragedy is that pregnant women pass Zisa on to their babies, who then go on to develop microcephaly, joint problems, and other congenital defects. "That's the sort of clinical study that I would do." Clinical basically means "study on people" as opposed to working with cells like they do here. Both of them are important. You have to start off with molecular genetics to figure out what works and how to do it, and then you move on to animal studies (I know, not my favourite thing, either, but a necessary evil) before testing it on humans. Doctors tend to do the clinical trials that are at the tip of the iceberg, as opposed to stem cells, unless they're M.D./Ph.D.'s.

  I added, "Like you said, though, the money is in North America. What little money there is." The U.S. government balked at approving emergency Zisa funding, even t
hough Puerto Rico, supposedly part of the U.S., was already hard-hit. Like George Orwell pointed out, some animals are more equal than others.

  Pothead's eyes narrowed. "Don't kid yourself. The money is always in the U.S."

  That, I couldn't argue with. As our former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau pointed out, when the U.S. sneezes, Canada catches a cold. The reverse is true as well: when money boomed, it was in the States; when the oil wells dried up, Canada started crying first. And since Miami was ground zero for Zisa's entry into the continental United States, you'd think Lawrence would have stayed.

  One of the hall doors beeped. DemiAsian pushed it open. Her eyes immediately met mine, then Pothead's, before flicking back to my own. She marched up to me and held out her hand. "We haven't officially met. I'm Summer Holdt, Tom's research assistant."

  Holdt, huh? So her mom was Asian and her dad was white. "Nice to meet you. I'm Hope Sze." I didn't bother explaining the pronunciation. She'd probably heard the name before.

  "Welcome. If you have any questions about the lab safety training, let me know. We don't want you spilling DMSO everywhere. You'll be shadowing me for most of the first week." She turned to Pothead. "Mitch, are you harassing Hope already?"

  Mitch shrugged. "Just saying hi." Chris snorted again.

  I was still trying to figure out what DMSO was. Something bad, obviously.

  "I thought so," said Summer, putting her hands on her hips. She turned to me. "Have you been able to log onto the computers to figure out the lab safety courses? Or have you been too busy getting set up with payroll and your lab access card?"

  "I haven't done any of that yet," I said.

  "Time to get started." She gestured for me to move further into the lab, and I realized that she was a mother hen sort. This might come in handy in trying to figure out what was going on. Mitch/Pothead was a prickly guy, Chris didn't seem to interact much with people, and Tom was busy doing whatever a lab head does. Probably writing grants.

  I needed someone who would talk, and Summer was her name-o.

  I all but batted my eyelashes when I said, "Could you point me in the right direction? That would be awesome."