No Immunity Read Online Free PDF

Right.
    “I’ll catch the ten o’clock flight and be at your office before noon.” He broke the connection, paused, and dialed the woman who took Ezra in emergencies. There was no telling how long he’d be gone.

CHAPTER 7
    T HE AUTOPSY ROOM IN the Constant Mortuary was suitable for its main purpose, embalming a body for a quick good-bye. On a scale of one to ten, San Francisco ranked about eight, the makeshift facility in Africa one, and this place about three. It didn’t have a dirt floor, and Kiernan felt obliged to give it a point for that. But even the smaller county where she had worked as the forensic pathologist provided a room three times this size, with a fridge room double this, and the freezer where “long-term residents” were kept at ten degrees was as big as this space. Here there was one troughed gurney, one set of sinks, a fluorescent tube on the ceiling, and a rattling exhaust fan that would render the autopsy tape almost inaudible.
    She shook out her mask, a plastic apparatus akin to a tent covering face and neck, pulled it and the gloves on, opened the fridge door, and hauled out the gurney. The dead woman lay ashen and half draped on the cold metal.
    Unwillingly, Kiernan stepped back against the support of the wall. She wrapped her arms around her ribs as if that could ward off the chill she felt. Ashes to ashes. Cold ashes when the fire is dead.
    She clasped her arms tighter, but the shaking wouldn’t stop. The cold. She pushed the gurney back in the fridge, stepped into the hall, and ripped off her gear. She hadn’t felt like this in five years.
    The dead woman was nothing like Hope Mkema. The dead woman looked Hispanic; Hope had been African. Here the winter air seemed to float in currents of its own will, circling legs, icing neck, licking her spine. When she had stood over Hope’s body five years ago, in the brick-and-tin hospital in Takema, the West African focal point of the Lassa fever epidemic, her shirt had stuck clammily to her back and sweat rolled so relentlessly down her forehead, she’d given up attempts to wipe it away. Hope Mkema’s skin had been a vibrant brown. She had had huge elfin eyes, high cheekbones in a heart-shaped face, and a wide smile so engaging people smiled back before words were spoken.
    The first time Kiernan saw her was at the clearing that served as an airport for the brave. Hope was laughing then. “I understand you are here in spite of the Church. Perhaps I will take your place in Catholic heaven.”
    “Not too soon, I hope,” Kiernan had said.
    “I’d better not. My country can’t afford to lose one of its women doctors. We’re a rare, if not delicate commodity.” Her cadence suggested schooling in England. It was only later that Kiernan learned how much the village, her family, and Hope herself had mortgaged for her to become a doctor.
    Still smiling, Hope had led her to a vehicle that had been rebuilt so often, it was no longer recognizable as a specific make of car. “I won’t ask how many hours you’ve been in transit from India. When you wake up, we’ll talk about that.” She hadn’t asked and Kiernan hadn’t told her why an American doctor who had been fired from the coroner’s office in northern California had gone to India nearly two years earlier, or what she had done before she volunteered at a clinic run by nuns in Maharashta. Or why, when word came of the need for doctors in the Lassa fever epidemic, she had volunteered to fly to West Africa. That day she had been too tired to formulate any answers, and later was thankful not to have to corral her muddled emotions into a manageable line of thought. And even now, years later, she couldn’t have said exactly what drove her toward a project on which three of the ten workers had died. Perhaps after two years of wandering in a strange country trying to banish memories of a life that was no longer possible, the idea of doing something vital, all-encompassing, was worth the chance