All Basilisks Wild & Sparking, page 12
"I have to go," I announced to everyone from the hallway. Since Waterfall was the only one not doing anything, I handed Fiona to her. She looked at the baby as if she were one more incomprehensible thing in a strange universe. A part of me could relate.
I left before I could find any more things we had in common.
TWENTY-ONE
When I arrived at the emergency clinic, their tiny parking lot — barely adequate at the best of times — was pure chaos. The police had dealt with the lack of available spaces by leaving their SUV in the narrow lane between cars. That left half the vehicles blocked in and the other half unable to maneuver enough to get out. I drove down the street, left my car in the tax preparer's lot, and walked back.
Clumps of people stood around in the lobby, murmuring about the death and the police response.
"… never can tell with those xenotic animals. You just sign your own death warrant."
As much as I wished people would be a little more cautious when they came across new animals, the other extreme wasn't good either. But I wasn't going to stop and argue with a stranger.
Throughout it all, the receptionists continued answering phones and putting people in rooms, proving what I'd already known: veterinary receptionists would be able to work through an apocalypse because it wouldn't be that much different from their usual working day. I waved and they buzzed me through.
Brittany stood in the corner of the treatment room, a plastic carrier on the floor behind her, with two male cops looming over her. I couldn't tell if they were trying to be intimidating or if it was a result of the cramped space. The opening bars of a children's musical came out of the first operating room, a beeping pulse oximeter providing a separate rhythm. Another technician and doctor pair were shaving the side of a Siberian husky who seemed to be howling along with the music. The shorter cop looked back with a quick frown, as if he was irritated by all the noise.
It wasn't until I was five feet away that I could hear Brittany's voice. "They. Don't. Have. Poison. Glands." She emphasized each word, as if she'd repeated this multiple times.
Tempted as I was to watch what looked to be an admirable performance, I thought it might be time to intervene. "Can I help?"
They all turned to face me. The shorter cop frowned. "And you are?"
"Dr. Cunningham. I'm Dr. Lee's boss." I made a conscious effort not to smile or do any of the other behaviors women learn in order to de-escalate situations — I could already tell it would make them take me less seriously.
The shorter man looked even more sour, but his partner nodded. "As I was explaining to your colleague, the doctor who examined Mr. Ramirez thinks it is likely he died from the scratches on his arm. We're here to seize the animal so it can be quarantined and destroyed for public safety reasons."
Brittany folded her arms. "Ocicats cannot —"
I held up a hand to stop her, then spoke to the more reasonable cop. "To drop off at animal services?"
"Yes."
I could imagine the chain of events that had led to this. The human doctor had seen something they attributed to an animal and notified the police. The task should have been routed to animal services, but there weren't any animal services officers on duty this late on Saturday and the county didn't want to pay overtime. So they'd passed it along to patrol officers who were supposed to transport the ocicat to the shelter lobby, where it would sit without food or water until the shelter personnel came by in the morning.
Or possibly, the cops would take it outside the city limits and shoot it, figuring they were saving everyone time and money and keeping the public safe. I was pretty sure the shorter cop would have — he had the attitude of someone who didn't let rules get in the way of solving problems. His partner had taken the lead in the conversation, though, so maybe I was worried about nothing.
With my phone on speaker, I called Jeanette and let her speak for the county's animal services department. Or rather, shout, because the room was so noisy we could just barely hear her. When she confirmed ocicats indeed had no poison glands and they would just be making work for her because she'd be forced to drive the sick animal over to my hospital later, the cops left.
I made a mental note to be sure to drive the speed limit for the next few weeks.
Once they'd gone, I took stock of the situation. Brittany had the glazed look I associated with animals who had just been captured, when a flood of epinephrine left them too shaky to think. Behind us, the husky still sang along with the soundtrack.
John would be better at helping Brittany. He was good at relating to people. I considered calling him, then decided I was being a coward. "Let's move someplace a little more quiet."
Nobody was using the second operating room, so we hauled the carrier inside and closed the door. Within the carrier, the fifty-pound ocicat crouched in no immediate distress. The instant drop in the noise level soothed my nerves. Sliding the anesthetist's chair over to Brittany, I said, "Deep breath. How are you doing?"
"He just dropped dead right in front of me."
"Sorry. That doesn't usually happen." It was such an inane response, I nearly slapped my forehead, Brittany smiled weakly.
"That's good, I guess." She sat down. "It was just really weird."
"I can imagine." I hopped onto the surgery table and leaned my elbows on my thighs. "How far did you get in the history before he collapsed?"
"Not far. He might have talked to Dr…" She stopped, looking confused. "I can't remember his name. The guy with red hair and the goatee."
"Sean Turner," I supplied. "That's who saw him initially?" Sean was a good surgeon, but had no patience for xenotics. It didn't surprise me he'd brought in the xenotics doctor on call.
"Yeah. He might have gotten more information, but he's been in with another client since…"
Since his original client dropped dead, she meant. "Okay, we'll talk to him in a bit. Do you have the chart?" Before we did anything with the ocicat, I'd have to figure out what we were allowed to do. I'd had clients die before, but never in front of me, and never before they'd signed an estimate and consent for treatment.
"Oh. Hang on." Brittany jumped up and ran out of the room. She came back ten seconds later.
I opened the thin folder. On the left was the client information, filled out in a shaky hand. On the right was a sheet of lined paper. A masculine scrawl noted Possible toxin exposure per client. Free access to yard. No C/S/V/D. Client bathed. It didn't sound like the owner had noticed any signs of illness, and Sean hadn't gotten as far as a physical exam. The case wasn't surgical, so he'd tapped out early.
Below Sean's writing, another hand had written Diet: raw. The last letter ended in a line that went off the page, as if the writer had been interrupted.
Putting the file down between us, I said, "Okay, Beni is a three-year-old female intact ocicat with a history of exposure to some unknown substance. She has access to the yard, so presumably not always monitored."
Brittany nodded, and I could see her regain her focus. "He — the owner — had a big bandage on his arm." She rubbed her right forearm from wrist to elbow. "He said she had come inside covered with a bright blue liquid. He didn't say what it was, just said it was really bad. Like maybe he thought he'd get in trouble for keeping it on the property. Then he said there was netting over the yard to keep her from getting out, but it hadn't worked. When I asked if she'd eaten any of it, he said he thought maybe she was grooming it off her coat, so he bathed her this morning. While he was doing that, she clawed him."
Something about bright blue fluid triggered a memory. I frowned at the ceiling, trying to figure out what it was. Surely I would remember if someone had brought in a bright blue animal recently.
No. Wait. Martin's basilisks. That was it. I'd examined their stomach contents during the necropsies, and the fluid in the stomach had been bright blue. "Did he say anything about portals in the yard?"
"No. But I didn't ask." Her voice had taken on that hint of uncertainty that was so unlike her.
"Entirely reasonable. Why would you?" Looking back at the folder, I said, "I had another case recently with some dead basilisks that had something blue in the stomach contents, and they came from the other side of a portal. If the ocicat really couldn't get over the fence, maybe there's a portal near the house." Then I shrugged. "But that's neither here nor there. We'll have to work without the rest of the history. What are your rule-outs for an ocicat with the history we have?"
We talked through the case, then performed the physical exam together. Brittany could have done this on her own, but she'd had a big shock and I didn't want to abandon her. My only other concession to the owner's death was insisting we both wore gloves and disposable gowns during the exam, in case there was something harmful on her coat. Ocicats that had been hand-raised were generally easy to handle, and Beni was no exception, at least when she wasn't being bathed. She purred and head butted us, nearly knocking me over a few times. I could still see patches of blue hair where her owner hadn't rinsed off whatever she'd gotten into. It was the same color as the fluid I'd seen in the basilisks' stomachs.
Once Beni was back in her carrier, I called Christopher. "Hey, you're on speaker with Brittany, one of my interns," I warned when he answered. "You know that app on your phone that keeps track of portal destinations?" Christopher had used it multiple times during the hike when we'd met. The app used the phone's camera to catalog emissions from the portal, allowing the user to know if the destination was a place previously explored.
"You have a portal that needs to be checked?"
"Maybe. I have a patient with some sort of blue residue on her coat, and supposedly the yard was escape-proof. There's a chance there's a portal there, and this stuff is the same color as what was inside those basilisks. Plus, the owner died of unknown causes, and there's a possibility it's related." Maybe I was jumping the gun in looking for this link, but if whatever was in that water had killed a person, I wanted Christopher and Fred to take extra precautions.
"Is tomorrow morning early enough? I need to make some calls to escalate the sample analysis." He paused, then added. "Are you guys watching musicals over there?"
Brittany snorted. Her shock was wearing off.
I smiled. "Tomorrow's fine. Are you still at my place, or did you run away to your vintage trailer?"
"Still here. We're making dinner."
"Save me a plate." After I'd hung up, I looked at Brittany. "Let's go find out how much we can do for Beni tonight."
TWENTY-TWO
The cops' attempt to seize the ocicat had one positive result — we were able to get Beni transferred over to the animal services account, which gave us some leeway in treating her. My hospital could end up paying for the blood work I'd ordered, but the DPAS might chip in if animal services balked.
We'd sedated the ocicat, bathed her twice, loaded her up with subcutaneous fluids, and then set her up in the largest cage in the emergency clinic's isolation ward. Until we found out what had killed her owner, we needed to protect the staff here, which meant keeping her treatments as hands-off as possible. Beni was rubbing her face along the front of the cage, begging for us to rub her ears when we left.
"I'm sorry for calling you in," Brittany said as we left the building. "I should have been able to handle that, but I couldn't…"
"You did the right thing." Goosebumps pebbled my arms as the icy wind sliced through the parking lot. I hadn't remembered to bring a sweatshirt. "Look, we both know that if the same case had presented itself at our hospital during the daytime and the owner had been fine, you would have had no trouble with it. And five years from now, watching someone die would be traumatic, but you'd probably be able to treat the ocicat without thinking about it too much. But tonight, you were in a new job, working in a strange facility, with a new species, and then the emotional component got thrown in. It all adds up. Cut yourself some slack."
She didn't look entirely convinced, but at least she didn't argue.
I crossed my arms and bounced on the balls of my feet, trying to keep warm. "I'd rather you call too often than not often enough. Besides, this may tie into something the DPAS is working on, so I'm extra glad you called." I waved her into her car. "I'm freezing. Go home. Relax. Call me if you need anything. You did good work today."
As soon as she slid into the seat, I hurried down the block to where I'd parked, feeling the bruises on my feet with each step. Once inside, I turned on the car and called John while I waited for the heater to warm up. I told him what had happened with the client. "Can you check on Brittany tomorrow? You're better at all that emotional crap than I am."
"Don't sell yourself short," John replied with a laugh. "I saw you pushing Andrew back into the room with a box of tissues."
Andrew had survived his first experience of having a client break down in tears on Friday. "I don't think I'm really prepared for this internship. Why did I let you talk me into this?"
"Because you're good at it. And we need the help. I'll give Brittany a call tomorrow to see how she's handling everything. How's Fiona?"
"Less jaundiced after a day of fluids, but there have been more complications." I told him about thwarting the stranger's attempt to abduct the baby, and the tiny portals she had made. "If it wasn't because she was excited about the portal storm, we might need to talk to the staff about what verdirans can do." With Fiona creating tiny portals in the air, I didn't see how we could keep it a secret.
"Never a dull day around here."
"No." The first hint of warmth came from my car's vents. "Oh, and remind me to talk to you about how to fix the drug log on Monday. It's all messed up now."
"It's good you're thinking about the important things," John laughed. "Drive safely."
Gabriel Ramirez, the ocicat's owner, had lived alone in one half of a duplex on the other side of town. "Just him and that big cat thing," said the elderly man who emerged from the other half to investigate when Christopher and I knocked on Gabriel's door at eight the next morning. The old man owned the duplex and allowed that Gabriel had been a good enough tenant, which probably meant he paid his rent on time.
In his dark blue windbreaker with DPAS in large yellow letters on the back, Christopher looked very official. I hung back a little so the man wouldn't notice my jeans and sweatshirt.
Antonia had taken Fred and Fiona with her to her quilting meeting at the senior center, which seemed nonsensical at first glance, but really wasn't. Grandchildren were always shown off at the quilting meetings, and Fiona was the closest thing Antonia had to a grandchild. Plus, the verdirans thought Fiona might be harder to find there. Fred had gone along to guard the baby, while Waterfall had left to talk to the ambassador about getting additional protection.
I'd tagged along with Christopher because searching for the source of Beni's contamination sounded more interesting than doing my laundry. Plus, I'd get to spend some time with him.
Christopher edged away from the old man, who showed no signs of going back inside. "Do you mind if we look around in the yard?"
The man shrugged. "There's nothing back there."
"Great, thanks."
Two steps toward the gate, I stopped and turned around. "Do you know where he got the ocicat?"
The man stopped on the verge of stepping over the doorsill. "What? Oh, the cat thing? He got it at his job a couple years ago." Before I could ask, he answered my next question. "Worked out at that old mutant plant lab outside of town. He went remote when they closed it down last month."
"Thanks." I waited until Christopher and I were out of earshot before I spoke in a low voice. "He has to be talking about Paladin Research, right? But Paladin shut down completely. And what would he have been doing for them remotely?"
Before it had shut down, the Paladin Research greenhouses had held the endpoints of Xavier's new anchors. After Xavier's death, Fred had destroyed all the anchors there and started the long process of stabilizing everything. Now the only things left at the abandoned genetically modified plant research facility were empty greenhouses and a host of bugs that had come through from other worlds.
Christopher tugged at the latch. "Maybe he lied to his landlord so he wouldn't get evicted?" The gate sagged and scraped along the concrete sidewalk as he pulled it open. "Though I can't imagine there wouldn't be better places to live."
The backyard of the duplex was divided by a six-foot pine fence, giving each half a modicum of privacy. But instead of the dead grass and weeds I'd been expecting, the entire thing was paved with concrete. Whoever had put it in hadn't done a very good job — the slab was cracked in multiple places, and ovals of moss and dirt showed where water collected. Netting stretched from the eaves of the house to the fence, keeping birds out and the ocicat in.
Gabriel, or someone who had lived there before him, had offset all the concrete by adding dozens of planters, growing everything from an avocado tree to begonias. Lemon, orange, and lime trees provided shade around an Adirondack chair that looked well used. In the back corner, partially screened by a hedge of bamboo, were two marijuana plants.
Behind a second wall of bamboo shimmered a portal.
Camouflage netting of the sort I'd only seen in war movies covered a frame of two by fours that enclosed the portal. Though it didn't conceal the portal from anyone in the yard, it was probably good enough for casual glances over the fence.
Blue-tinged paw prints led away from one side.
I crouched to straighten out the netting, revealing a large hole. "That explains how Beni got exposed." Dropping the netting, I wiped my hand off on my pants and stood again. "Is it going to the same place as the olive grove?"
Christopher held up his phone and waited until it buzzed. "Same world." He put his phone away. "I'd assumed we would find a naturally occurring portal that we could dig under and close down."
