No Immunity

couldn’t.” He swallowed again harder and turned directly toward Kiernan. “Do you know the last thing she said? She could barely get the words out. Each one was agony. I was so afraid I wouldn’t understand, her voice was so thick. She said, ‘Jeff, when I’m dead, don’t kiss me.’ ”
    She glanced around the makeshift morgue, through the window that led to nothing but an air shaft between buildings, at the door—looking anywhere but at Jeff Tremaine. She couldn’t believe that sharp, lively Hope Mkema could have been involved with... him. On the plane ride back to India with her, he must have hinted at it; all those hours he had talked of nothing but Hope. But she’d never imagined them as lovers. What could Hope Mkema, whom she’d liked so much, have seen in Jeff Tremaine?
    Or had Jeff dreamed the whole thing? She could imagine him settling into this drab life sparked only by hidden mourning for a dead love from the other side of the world.
    Now, five years later, did the truth make any difference? To his wife, it would. “Does your wife know about Hope?”
    “No. I never mentioned Hope to her at all. There was no point. I loved Hope so.” The words gushed out. “Every moment with her was exciting. Everything was bright, fresh, alive, important, possible. She was a miracle that comes once in a lifetime. She came and was gone. It sounds trite to say, but when I was with her, I was alive in a way so different that it was like I had been dead before. And after.” A shiver electrified his body. “What kind of jerk would come back and tell that to his wife? Since I left you in Bombay, I have never spoken Hope Mkema’s name.”
    She reached toward him to put a comforting hand on his arm but caught herself before she touched him with her gloves. Jeff gave no indication of noticing.
    “I’ve ‘seen’ her every day. I’ve thought about what we might have had so often, it’s as if that life exists.” He snapped his head to the side. “It’s a self-obsessed, maudlin, stupid indulgence. Easier out here where the highway is narrow and the side roads few, as they say. But that’s no excuse. I’m sorry, really sorry, Kiernan.”
    Kiernan let a moment pass and then pulled open the freezer door and signaled Jeff to push the gurney in.
    “Hey, what are you doing?” His hands were on the gurney, but he wasn’t moving it. He was leaning on it, his eyes unfocused, mouth half opened but not speaking.
    “Jeff, pull yourself together. What we’ve got here is possibly the beginning of an epidemic worse than anything either of us has seen. We won’t know for sure till there are lab tests. This woman could be the index case of a hemorrhagic fever that could wipe out half of Nevada.”
    “Take her to Vegas. You could leave her at the coroner’s department there, and catch your flight. Kiernan, please.” She stared at him. “You want me to put a highly contagious corpse in a rental car with me and drive her through the desert for three hours? Should I strap her in the passenger’s seat so the microbes don’t have too far to travel to me?” Had Jeff Tremaine lost it entirely over this case? He had had spurts of irrationality in Africa, but this was way beyond that. “Jeff, don’t dig yourself in any deeper than you already are. Nothing you can do about this anonymous woman is going to bring Hope Mkema back from the dead. And I’ll tell you what you ought to know already: Nobody’s going to thank you for finding this case.
    “I’m taking off my gloves, then I’m calling the health department. They’ve got to get this woman in a Level Four room and—”
    He turned back to the gurney and stood as he bad been before she spoke, hands braced on the rim. She couldn’t tell from his blank gaze if he was staring at the corpse, the picture of Hope Mkema framed inside his head, or the awful possibilities in the near future. Finally he nodded toward the freezer door, waited for her to open it, and slid the gurney inside. “Of course you’re right, Kiernan. I don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve got a buddy in the health department—Wilson Brede, you know him? I’ll call him.”
    “I’ll use the bathroom while you call.”
    “Last door on the left.”
    She forced herself to wash with scrupulous care, begrudging each moment it kept her in the tiny gray room. The rental car, which had seemed tiny and slow, dull and awkward, compared with her Jeep Cherokee in her driveway and her TR-3 in the