Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [135]
“Stop it.”
I’d noticed industrial eyewash stations in the hallways. Also, Marge DiMaggio’s shower was no ordinary shower facility. There were three stalls, each separated by a berm and a wall, so that an individual could step from one to the next, working his or her way down the line. At the end of the row there was a stack of operating-room blues, face masks, and a box of latex gloves. It was the same type of wash-down arrangement the fire department would construct to run people through after a hazardous materials exposure.
“Check this out,” Stephanie said, calling me into the main room. Near the office door, she switched on an ultraviolet lamp. The room lit up, but not by much. “Remember black lights? What do you think this is for?”
“So they can paint each other with phosphorescent finger paints and run around in the dark nude?”
Stephanie was not amused. I was getting goosey. My time was running out, and instead of becoming more and more nervous, I was looser than I’d ever been. Almost slap-happy. It was as if I were inebriated.
Downstairs, we found enough eyewash fountains and shower facilities to clean up a rugby team. We broke into three more offices and found work areas—labs, chemicals, machinery, spectrographs, a miniature smelter in a room with concrete walls. All of it was tidy. All of it was ready for a white-glove inspection by a prospective buyer.
Stephanie found the labs fascinating, flipping through notebooks she found and examining the high-tech equipment. We broke into several locked cabinets, but they contained nothing but standard lab supplies.
If we were right, these bastards had infected innocent people from Tennessee to Washington State and now were covering their tracks like a blind cat burying shit. Ironically, there were SAFETY FIRST signs in every corridor.
Stephanie had turned on the lights and was peering into a microscope. I could tell by the way she gripped the dustcover, she was nervous as hell.
I said, “Let’s go back to your aunt’s office.”
“I want to look around here. This is where they work. There’s got to be something.”
Somewhere in the building a telephone rang. We looked at each other, and Stephanie stopped breathing. The phone rang eight times before it stopped. “A telemarketer,” I said.
“At eleven o’clock at night?”
I shrugged. “I’ll be upstairs. Somebody shows up, you scream. I’ll do the same.”
“Sure you will.”
Upstairs in DiMaggio’s office, I circled the room trying to figure out what was bothering me. They had to be keeping it on the premises, in either this building or the one we’d bypassed outside. They had to have a substance that turned people into zombies. A product potent enough that they maintained shower facilities on all three floors. A product that might be neutralized with something as simple as soap and water—for I’d found nothing else in any of the showers. Where would they keep this product? Better yet, where would they keep an antidote for it?
Sitting with my feet on DiMaggio’s desk, I paged through the letters Stephanie had unearthed. I’d been there a few minutes when visions of Achara’s charred corpse popped into my head. It was hard to put something like that completely out of mind, particularly if the victim was someone you’d known and liked. Achara had taken a risk giving me those numbers. The first series had been the combination to the keypad on the downstairs door, but what about the second series?
Without consciously thinking about it, I walked across the room to the liquor cabinet, went into the bathroom behind the wall, and found a void behind the cabinet. I’d seen it earlier but hadn’t guessed the significance.
It took a few minutes to figure out that the liquor cabinet was on wheels and that moving it to one side would expose a tall gray door to a hidden vault. Somehow Achara had known I might be here before the week was out.
In giving me the combination to this vault, if indeed that’s what the numbers were,