Silent Assassin(78)

The guests were mostly in their late thirties to mid-forties, Morgan noticed. Almost all the men lacked wedding rings. “This here was a party of playboy heirs and trophy wives,” Conley told him.

Outside on the terrace, there was a pool where a thin waterfall went right over the edge of the building, caught by a gutter about two feet down, producing the effect of a pool that ended in nothingness. The water had turned a deep crimson with blood. There was a body floating in it, facedown. One man was halfway through a door to the terrace, impaled on stalagmites of tempered glass. Blood had pooled on the floor all around him. Three more bodies lay on the ground, one of them on an upholstered chaise longue that had once been white. His eyes had been gouged out, and his face looked torn, as if it had been bitten or clawed. Another looked as if his trachea had been torn clean out.

It had been less than twenty-four hours since this had transpired. Bodies would decompose quickly in this heat, but the air-conditioning had been cranked up all the way, and it chilled Morgan through the thick plastic of his suit.

Morgan saw the remnants of cocaine on the glass of the coffee table.

“Peter!” he said. “Take a look at this.”

Conley walked over and examined the table. “Cocaine? Not exactly a surprise, in this kind of party.”

“No,” said Morgan. “Look. Apparently they all started suffering the effects at about the same time. It’s unlikely that one infected person would have spread the fungus so quickly. There has to be a vector, a means of delivery. And I think this is it.”

“Cocaine? To spread the fungus?”

“Think about it. Pope, back when we interviewed him, said that the fungus survives in dry media, like, say a powder. It’s already subject to traffic and smuggling. They can use the existing supply chains to get it into the U.S. Plus, it will have hordes of people infecting themselves as they get their rush.”

“Besides, it doesn’t make sense for this to be a targeted killing,” said Morgan. “These people were rich, but not important. Relative unknowns who only spend money and don’t make any. Who could care enough to use a stolen biological weapon to kill them? Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“This wasn’t deliberate,” said Morgan. “Someone sold them this cocaine without knowing what it contained.”

Morgan saw a shiny metal object, half-obscured by a fallen body. He bent down to pick it up. It was a digital camera, lightly smudged with blood. He fumbled with the thick rubber gloves, but managed to turn the gadget on and open the saved pictures. There were a number of photographs that had plainly been taken in that same apartment, in the nighttime. Pictures of the party.

“Hey, Peter,” he said. “Help me out with this.”

Together, they identified each body with the picture. They had to use the clothing in a lot of cases, because the faces had been so badly scratched that they couldn’t make out any of the features.

“We’re missing this guy,” said Morgan, pointing at a picture of a man who looked to be in his late thirties, wearing a popped collar and making a party face.

“Are you sure?” asked Conley.

“He’s not here,” said Morgan. “Check for yourself.” Conley examined each of the corpses carefully. “You’re right,” he said. “No sign of him.” He turned to one of the Brazilian investigators and had a quick exchange. “He says there was no one else,” Conley told Morgan. “They combed the entire building for stragglers. If he left this apartment, it was before the carnage.”

“Well, we got our lead,” said Morgan.

They went back down to the lower floor. With difficulty, Morgan removed the tiny memory chip from the camera and set it apart to be sterilized. Then, dripping sweat, Morgan removed the biohazard suit. He got the clean chip and pulled out the tablet he’d brought with him, then inserted the chip.

“Now we only need to find this guy in a city of six million. Do they have any kind of image database? Drivers’ licenses, something like that?”

“I was actually thinking something a little lower tech.”

“What?” Morgan asked, pulling on his shirt.

“You’d be surprised at what doormen know about the people who live in and frequent their buildings.”

They went down to the lobby together. The doorman was being kept in quarantine in a rec room. He looked pale and on edge, but he seemed friendly enough when Conley approached him. Conley showed him the image of the missing guest on the tablet, and they had a quick exchange. Then Conley walked back to Morgan.

“I have a name. Rodrigo Bezerra. I’m calling it in. We should have an address in a few minutes.”