Part 60 (1/2)

”Try to find a community,” Todd answered, promptly. ”Look for mentors and friends. Find places to hang out.”

”Join clubs,” Hafidha said, and felt the click. ”Don't even say it, I'm on it already. The thing is, if they'd each just joined some club before It happened to them, they might not be in the computerized members.h.i.+p lists.”

”Legwork, Hafs? My heart bleeds.”

”Hah,” she answered. ”Look, I'm going to call Lau and tell her to ask about social groups and extracurricular activities, okay?”

”Okay,” Todd said. ”I think we're here, anyway.”

”Hafidha!” Reyes' voice stopped her, finger hovering over the disconnect.

”Last time I checked.”

”Send the brain scans to Doctor Frost.”

Oh yes. That would be the logical next step, and if Hafidha didn't tend to cla.s.s Madeline Frost with the Boogeyman and the Grinch, she would have thought of it herself. She said, ”In sa'Allah, sahib,” and hit the disconnect.

And then, after a moment to compose herself, during which she put the wounded Ring Ding out of its misery, she bit her thumb in the general direction of Johns Hopkins and hit 666 on her speed dial.

Madeline Frost, M.D., Ph.D., bent over a microscope, humming Thelonious Monk to herself as she examined a slide biopsied from a forty-month-old male. Histologically, the tumor was well-circ.u.mscribed, firm, and pinkish gray. The cells demonstrated a well- defined pattern of rosettes.

She could confirm a primary diagnosis of medulloblastoma.

It was unlikely the patient would survive to his fourth birthday.

She returned the slides to their case, made a note, straightened, and stripped her gloves. She'd call the oncologist from the phone in her office. She expected the news would come as a disappointment, but not a surprise.

As she was dropping the shed blue nitrile into a red bag, what she thought of as her government phone rang. In addition to her hospital phone and pager, Frost kept a separate cell for calls from the BAU.

She did not own a personal cell phone, and never felt the desire for one. People did not call Frost to chat.

She considered that a minor personal success.

The separate cell was not because of ritual, or because she was superst.i.tious about contamination, or because she felt her work as an oncological pathologist needed psychological separation from her work as a forensic pathologist. It was because the instant the device sounded, she knew which set of rules she was meant to be operating under.

There would be a body, or perhaps several bodies, or perhaps parts of several bodies. They would be dead messily or mysteriously. They would present a perfectly intriguing puzzle, a pattern and a set of particulars to be worked out in detail and presented to the team.

It was challenging and satisfying, a welcome diversion.

Frost was fortunate that the chief pathologist was understanding of her sideline, as understanding as he was of her desire never to deal with a living patient as anything other than slides and specimens. Patients were fine, as long as they arrived in pieces.

Frost knew she was not good for living people, and she suspected that living people were not good for her.

Cancer offended her; it did not care for the rules. But it had its own rules, its own patterns. And Frost was very, very good at detecting those patterns, so others could use them to wage war.

It was not, after all, so different from what Stephen Reyes called the anomaly. That was a sort of cancer too, and it also offended her sense of the way the world ought to work.

She permitted the phone to go to voice mail, however. The call to the oncologist would not take long.

Once she had dispensed with it, leaving him to decide how to break the news and discuss treatment options with the family, she unclipped the silver phone from its hard case at her belt and hit redial without checking the time-one forty-three and seventeen seconds-or glancing at the number.

Hafidha Gates answered on the second ring. ”Madeline Frost,” Frost said.

”Check your email,” Agent Gates said, without pleasantries. Frost appreciated that about Gates' dislike for her. It kept the interactions short. ”There's a .zip file with some brain scans. Can you see what you can tell me about them?”

”I'm checking now. Living brains?”

”Those are the kind we can scan for electrical activity, aren't they?”

”Not my specialty,” Frost said. She slid behind her desk-she'd made her call from the front side-and began to type one-handed. The phone would take a Bluetooth headset. She ought to purchase one. ”But I will have a look... These are diffusion tensor images, which record electrical activity in the white matter of the brain. And Agent Gates? These are green across the frontal cortex. All five of them.”

”Green?”

”Color code. a.s.suming these are awake images, it indicates depressed levels of activity in the frontal cortex. And there are other-” She almost said anomalous, and checked herself. Clarity above convenience of speech. ”-unusual patterns of activity consistent across all five.”

”What does that mean?”

”I'm not qualified to diagnose, Agent Gates-”

”Doctor Frost,” said Gates. ”Are you qualified to speculate?”

”It's consistent with patterns of electrical activity seen in schizophrenics,” she said, a.s.sured that Gates would know a speculation from an opinion.

”Gammas?”

”Show increased frontal lobe activity, in the limited sample available. As do you and Doctor Villette, Agent Gates. It's unmistakable, and this isn't it.”

”Thank you,” said Agent Gates.

”You are welcome,” said Madeline Frost, because that was what one said to conclude a transaction, and severed the connection.

Act III As they sat in a cramped observation room in the first of three mental inst.i.tutions on their schedule for today, Todd flipped his phone closed. ”Well, if he's trying to make gammas, he's doing it wrong.”

”Small mercies,” Reyes answered, without moving his eyes from the one-way gla.s.s they sat behind. Beyond it, curled in an armchair in an interview room, sat Melanie Wosczyna.

She was a tall young woman, hunched now into a spasmed curve, her elbows cramped against her ribcage. She had a long neck and a long nose and a long jaw. The strong architecture of her face made her slack disaffected expression more terrible. Todd thought she should have been working on smile lines by thirty. Over her pallor, her complexion was olive. Fluffy-curly brown hair was matted flat on one side, and her right hand twitched convulsively, first two fingers and thumb pressed together and jerking like the beak of a hungry bird.

Todd would have touched Reyes' elbow, but Reyes had already seen it. ”Come on,” he said, standing, and Todd fell in behind him, making his sure his footsteps didn't fall in the same rhythm. A whole different playbook with a victim than with a suspect. Here, they came as potential rescuers. As friends. Not to intimidate.

Melanie was medicated. She didn't look up as they entered, but her hand jittered faster. Todd knew his part in the scenario; he was the supportive observer. 'Deferential, glad to be of use, politic, cautious, and meticulous.' A battered couch stood against the wall, perpendicular to the desk and armchair. Todd a.s.sumed it, while Reyes moved across the small room silently to the knotted-up girl in the battered, burnt-orange chair.

Todd found himself wondering, as he often did, if inst.i.tutions such as this one chose their furnis.h.i.+ngs with an eye towards repeat business. He had an uneasy Socialist inkling that when they reached the private inst.i.tution where Hanson Cape was being cared for, they would find more appealing surroundings.

Reyes, with every appearance of unselfconsciousness, dropped a knee and crouched beside the victim's chair. ”Hey, Melanie,” he said, in conversational tones. ”I'm Stephen. How are you?”

Not Agent Reyes. Not Doctor Reyes. No, softer and more oblique, an avuncular approach. This was the girl whose father was a likely-abusive binge drunk; Todd watched with respect as Reyes made himself seem small and soft and positioned himself so she had an escape, if she wanted it.