No Immunity

garage, now beckoned like a Maserati on the fast road to freedom.
    “Did you get him?” she asked as she walked back into the morgue.
    “Yeah. He’s on his way.” Tremaine rolled the gurney back into the freezer. “Kiernan, listen, I really appreciate your coming. I know this sent me over the edge, and I asked a lot of you. But listen, I did not mention your name to Wilson. No need for you to be held up.”
    Kiernan nodded. “Thanks. I have a five o’clock plane.” She didn’t offer her hand to shake, and Tremaine made no move toward her.
    The rental car coughed. She should have warmed the engine. She let it cough its way to the highway. Better to call AAA from the side of the road than spend another minute in Gattozzi.
    She tried her cell phone, but it was out of range. Radio stations grew and faded, and it wasn’t till she’d been on the road an hour that she got a new s magazine on a station out of Las Vegas, reporting on Las Vegas. She’d had enough of Las Vegas and its surroundings. She put the radio on Scan, but nothing else came in. There was a time for the comfort of silence, but this wasn’t it. Her consciousness was flooding with visions of people dying from symptoms worse than Lassa, more violently than from Ebola, and she needed the sounds of normality just so she could keep focusing on the road. She listened to the reports of phenomenal growth on the Las Vegas Strip, of large casino hotels being demolished to be replaced by even larger ones, of gaudy facades giving way to mini theme parks. The Hacienda’s eleven hundred rooms had bitten the dust—literally—to be replaced by Circus Circus Enterprises’s four thousand. The MGM Grand, Harrah’s, and Circus Circus were metamorphosing into dreamscapes more unescapable. Thirty thousand rooms in all had been added. And more were planned. A whole new gambling city on a man-made lake was in the works. “Success here builds on itself. As long as the excitement keeps up, the city’ll keep booming, and construction will keep constructing. Over seven billion dollars have been spent already. So, folks, keep those quarters dropping in the slots. The city’s counting on you.”
    Kiernan pressed down on the accelerator. If Tchernak was here, she thought, he’d be seeing highway patrol cars behind every hillock, cocking his neck to check for traffic spotters in the sky. She smiled. And she’d be saying, “Do you really think the Nevada Highway Patrol is going to pull me over when I’m heading to Las Vegas? I don’t think so. They’re not going to settle for a fifty- or sixty-buck ticket and keep me from an hour’s fleecing at the craps table.”
    Rounding a curve, she came into a wide plateau. Maybe the emptiness would save them here in Nevada. Maybe the dead woman had not been in contact with anyone, except the person who brought her to Jeff Tremaine. Maybe that person... Maybe. Maybe. Maybe whatever she had was not contagious at all. Maybe a hundred other Nevadans were just beginning to feel feverish. Maybe one of them was driving to Las Vegas, heading for a plane to L.A. or Chicago.
    In the midst of awful possibilities she felt a rush of pity for Jeff Tremaine. He had loved Hope Mkema and she had died, and now’ this. The dead woman in Gattozzi could be the index case of an epidemic, and Jeff Tremaine would be the index doctor. Once the woman’s body was dumped on Jeff Tremaine, he might as well have climbed onto the gurney with her. She knew that, and once he thought about it, Jeff would realize it too. Could she count on Jeff reporting the body?
    She wouldn’t of course. “Never count on anyone” was a rule she’d mastered early. And with this case she wouldn’t have trusted Mother Teresa. As soon as she got to the airport, she’d call the health department herself.

CHAPTER 11

    Brad Tchernak stood on the second-story landing outside Grady Hummacher’s door. His first search. Every time Kiernan came bursting into the duplex at home, high from penetrating some guy’s space, Tchernak felt like he’d been sidelined in a play-off game. Kiernan liked searches, but she loved breaking and entering. She was his quarterback, she kept reminding him, and he was just waiting till she was thrown out of the game. Or carried off. And when she told him in indecent detail how she’d stood stock-still in the dark beside the door listening to voices outside, footsteps on the stairs, herself ready to bolt out the door if the intruder didn’t