Read Online Tampered by Ross Pennie - Free Book Online

support of your participation in solving what he calls
our situation
.” His boss had even told him to offer the team a light supper at the health unit’s expense. Nothing like the Prime Minister breathing down the old guy’s neck to get Trinnock to loosen the purse strings.
    “Don’t tell me he approves of my involvement,” said Colleen brightly, her hazel eyes dancing along with the glass-bead earrings she’d worn the first time he realized he was falling in love with her.
    “Does he know she’s a —” Hamish coughed, and his voice descended into the raspy whisper that appeared whenever he was anxious. “— you know, a private investigator?”
    “Geez, Hamish,” said Zol. “Colleen has professional skills just like the rest of us.” He gave Colleen a reassuring smile. “And they come in very handy.” Trinnock had no idea that Colleen was a private eye. She was on the books as a consultant to the health unit and that was good enough.
    “Okay,” Zol began. “Natasha is going to give us an update. Thanks to Hamish, we got the microbiology lab at Caledonian University Medical Centre to process our samples in record time.” Normally, public-health specimens had to be sent to the government laboratory in Toronto. The people there worked at their own glacial pace, then reported their results by pony express. “What about the soup? Did it give us our pathogen?”
    Natasha bit her lip and shook her head. “Afraid not, Dr. Zol.”
    He was disappointed but not surprised. Things never came that easily. “Oh well,” he told her, “carry on.”
    Natasha had her clipboard and scribbler at the ready, but she didn’t need them for reference. She kept everything in her head. “As of today, we’ve had thirty-five cases of gastro reported to us from Camelot Lodge since the outbreak began two months ago on January eleventh.”
    “That’s an awful lot of diarrhea,” Colleen said. “How many residents live at Camelot?”
    “Thirty-eight,” Natasha said.
    “So all but three have had diarrhea?” Colleen asked.
    “Natasha can give us the exact numbers,” Zol said. “But I know that Art and Betty and Earl have had it two or three times. Which means that more than just three of the residents haven’t been affected yet.”
    “Forgive me for stating the obvious,” Colleen said, “but if residents are getting gastro more than once, the offending microbe isn’t stimulating the immune system to protect the body from further infections.”
    Again, Zol was impressed how quickly Colleen caught on to the medical stuff. Without any formal training, she’d run her late husband’s internal-medicine practice when they’d emigrated from South Africa. After his death, she’d not had the heart to cancel his weekly subscription to the
New England Journal of Medicine
. She read the editorials every week, filing the issues meticulously.
    “That’s what’s got everyone at Camelot spooked,” Zol told her. “They recover, think they’re in the clear, then get sick with the same thing again. Or see their friends recover only to succumb the next time it hits them.”
    “Succumb as in . . . you know?” Colleen asked. She was a strong, practical woman, but she never used the words
death
or
dying
. Not even
passed away
. She’d been touched too many times by violent death. Her only sibling was killed on his motorcycle at age eighteen. And her parents were bludgeoned by burglars in Cape Town, murdered in their own home for a television set and the equivalent of fifty dollars cash. Then, after she’d started life over as a newlywed in the promised safety of Canada, her husband perished when Swissair flight III caught fire and came down off the Nova Scotia coast. She hadn’t dated again until she and Zol met late last year.
    “The outbreak is intensifying,” Natasha said. “Four of the six deaths have occurred in the past five days. We’re seeing a very high case fatality rate overall.” She glanced at her