Sam and her father examined a male bull terrier, one of the new deliveries to the isolation room. They were making such an extraordinary effort to avoid any subject that might call for anything other than a clinical response that their conversation sounded like something out of a vet school lab practical. Sam’s emotional guard—well trained to protect her around anything to do with her father—was up so high at this point that she couldn’t see where it ended.
Daniel’s expert hands felt the dog’s abdomen. The dog winced and snarled. “Tenderness,” he said.
“Same as the others,” Sam replied.
He pulled down the dog’s lower lip and touched his gums. “Dehydration.”
“Same as the others.”
He checked the dog’s chart. “Fever.”
“Same as the others.”
Daniel slid his hands along the dog’s spine. “Lipoma on the left side. Do any of the other dogs have it?”
“Not that I noticed. But my hands have been pretty full.”
“I’m not judging, just asking. How many dogs have you seen since the virus was first reported?” he asked.
“I’ll need to check the records. We have over eighty new ones with us now, so maybe another twenty-five on top of that. A hundred and ten would be a good guess.”
“And these were the only ones that were symptomatic, of all the ones you saw?”
“Yes.”
“Show me the dogs that have been in the isolation room the longest.”
Sam led her father to the cages.
“How do they seem as compared to when they first came in?” he questioned. “Any worse?”
“No. Actually a bit brighter. The blood in the diarrhea appears to be resolving.”
“What are they on?”
“Flagyl.”
“You didn’t keep a comparison group?”
“No.”
“Then I guess we don’t know if that worked or they’re just getting better on their own.”
“I was trying to cure them, Dad, not test a hypothesis,” she snapped.
“Asking. Not judging,” Daniel repeated. “It is odd, though.”
“What?”
Daniel turned to his daughter. “All of it, actually. The fact that the disease is self-limiting, that more dogs are not ill despite the close proximity, the sudden onset, the absence of an obvious vector. This is atypical for contagion. I’ll need to review all the lab results.”
“Be my guest.”
“And I’d also like to run some additional tests—a few pathogen screens we developed at Cornell for emerging viruses. What kind of equipment do you have in your lab? I’ll need to recalibrate.”
“My lab?” Sam laughed at him. “You’re not in Cornell anymore, Toto.”
“You need to send everything out?” Daniel asked. “How do you function?”
Sam despised that all-too-familiar tone. “You’re forgetting that I run a shelter. All I’ve got is a crappy little microscope set up to do fecals and basic blood smears, chem strips, and an old X-ray machine.”
“This won’t be enough.”
“I know, Dad. That’s why I was seconds away from calling the CDC.”
“Really?”
“This is way out of my league. I don’t want to do anything that might make more kids sick.”
“But this,” Daniel said, pointing to the cages, “obviously isn’t rabies. I can tell you that without running a single test.” Daniel took a bowl of water and placed it before the dog he had been examining. The dog took several laps and then rested his head near the bowl. “No hydrophobia, no evidence of painful swallowing.”
“Then how do we explain this otherwise impossible coincidence?”
“I don’t know yet. But if you want all the dogs in this shelter kept alive, I would delay that call to Atlanta and get us some access to appropriate equipment.”
Sid jumped into the room, his shirt soaking wet. “We need more towels,” he said.
“What happened now?” Sam asked.
“A little problem with a water pipe in the basement. I’m taking care of it.”
“There’s a box of rags in the storage area in the back,” Sam said. Armed with that information, Sid jumped back out.
“What equipment specifically?” Sam asked her father.
“Cellular-level magnification, gas chromatography.”
“That’s all? Well, I’ll just pull all that out of my ass.”
He waved the comment away. “So where can we go?”
“What about Cornell?”
“Too far,” he said. “And given how I left things, it’s not like I can just waltz in there and borrow a million-dollar machine.”
Sid entered again. “Sorry. I checked. No rags there.”
“Hold on a sec,” she told Sid, and turned back to her father. “Even if I convinced the dean, I guess he’d need to tell the CDC what we’re doing.”
“And that would be the end of this little project,” Daniel confirmed. “How about someplace else in the city?”
Sid raised his hand like a schoolboy asking to go to the bathroom. “Excuse me, but I could really use those towels.”
“Morgan’s place is the only one I know with that level of equipment and she’s not about to let us use it,” Sam said.
Sid tried to interrupt. “Samantha?”
“What if I ask her?” Daniel suggested. “Tell her it’s an emergency?”
“Are you kidding? There’s only one person she hates more than me—and I’m looking at him. What the hell did you really do to her anyway?”
“I tried to help her. She didn’t see it that way.”
“You do have an odd effect on people.”
Daniel shrugged. “You asked. What did you do to her?”
“I wasted years of her precious training when I declined her offer of employment after Mom died. Oh, and then I started giving away free vet care to her clients.”
Daniel nodded. “That would do it. So she’s off the list.”
“The only way would be to get the mayor to order it and Morgan would just get her lawyers to stop us. And we’d still need to disclose to the mayor what we’re doing. That’s a dead end. You’ll need to find another way.”
“Samantha…,” Sid tried again.
“In a minute, Sid!”
“There is no other way,” Daniel argued. “You said I can’t go to the city. We certainly can’t go to the CDC. And if they find out that the dogs are ill, regardless of whether it’s related, they’ll start the cull and these dogs—including Nick—will be on the first truck out, euthanized and on a necropsy table an hour later.”
“But Samantha…,” Sid interrupted.
“I know, Sid, I know! The towels!”
“No, no,” Sid started, the excitement making his voice squeak. “I think I can get you in.”
“What?” Daniel and Sam asked at the same time.
“Morgan’s place. I can get you in. I’ve done work there. I know her security system.”
It took a moment for Sam to get her mind around Sid’s proposal. “You’d risk that?” Sam asked finally.
“For you, Samantha? The world.”
“But if she finds us in there…” She didn’t finish.
“There is no ‘us,’” her father said. “Only me. If I get caught, you had nothing to do with this.”
“I’m already in this. Don’t start trying to protect me now. Besides, you’re going to need another pair of hands.”
“No,” Daniel said. “If you get involved in this, it will destroy everything for you. You’ll have no future. I won’t allow that.”
She moved to within an inch of her father’s face. “I’m in,” she said. “They’re my dogs. You owe me this.” At this truth Daniel’s shoulders slumped forward in defeat. “I’ll let the others know,” Sam said. “You start drawing new bloods.”