Brisling sat up in his hospital bed and tossed the manila folder onto the pile with the rest.

"And just what do you think you're doing?" said his nurse, a redheaded elf in green surgical scrubs. She clucked her tongue and tapped the make-believe watch on her pale, willowy wrist. "You still have twenty minutes before you can get up." Her name was Misty, or Mindy, or maybe it was Mandy. Her damned ID badge was always flipped backward.

Precisely seven hours and forty minutes earlier, some hotshot cardiology fellow had threaded a catheter up Brisling's femoral artery and deployed two metal stents in his heart, one in the distal left anterior descending artery, the other in a diagonal branch. Brisling had watched it all on an HD monitor.

Now he slipped his left hand beneath the sheets, down through the tangle of telemetry wires to the ball of gauze wrapped against his groin. "If it hasn't bled by now, it's not going to," he said to the nurse.

"Eight hours. Those are the rules."

"It's only six where I work."

She put her tiny hands on her tiny hips. "Then have your next heart attack in Seattle."

Brisling laughed. As heart attacks went, his was puny, a lateral non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction. The only reason he lost consciousness was an arrhythmia, a brief run of atrial tachycardia. His heart had been pumping fine ever since.

Nurse Mindy-Mandy snapped her twiggy elf fingers in the air. "I mean it! Flat on your back, Doctor."

With a huff, he threw his head back against the pillow and slapped the mattress with his hands. A lance of pain shot up his right pinky finger. It was just a hairline break, a boxer's fracture, but it hurt like hell. Every little twinge reminded him of that awful moment, lying on his back beneath De Soto's hot breath, pierced by his icy words: You took her life, so I took your career. He could understand how De Soto blamed him for stealing Judith's love. But her life? The question gnawed at Brisling's bones.

The blood-pressure cuff squeezed his arm. He looked up at the monitor to check his heart rate, a cool seventy-two. Then he asked Nurse Mindy-Mandy to fetch him another folder.

"Promise to stay flat on your back?"

"Scout's honor." Brisling raised his right hand in the three-finger salute, but the splint made it four.

She handed him another manila folder from the box on the floor: data on the first one hundred JCAV victims identified by the CDC. Genevieve had brought the box early that morning, along with a jar of her honey tea, a vase of flowers, and a kiss. The tea was long gone, the flowers somewhere over by the window, but the kiss lingered sweetly on Brisling's cheek.

If they wanted to find out who made JCAV and why, they first needed to pinpoint its origin. They needed to find patient zero. They already knew that many of the cases came from the state of Oregon, too many for chance alone. But Brisling had pored over eighty charts already and found nothing—bubkes as his old army buddy used to say—not a single clue linking the cases together.

Nurse Mindy-Mandy sat at her workstation flipping through the contents of a discarded folder. "Is this some sort of research study?"

Brisling glowered at her over the rims of his glasses. "It's supposed to be confidential."

"Then maybe you shouldn't leave them all over my floor."

"Maybe you should let me out of bed so I can pick them up." He continued reading.

"The lady who brought them was wearing a CDC badge."

"So?" He looked up again.

"Well, it's weird." Nurse Mindy-Mandy held up the folder she was reading. "I think I knew this person."

"Sorry to hear that."

She nodded at the pile on the floor. "They're all dead, aren't they?"

"Pretty much." He lowered the folder he was reading. "Did you happen to know this person very well?"

"I only met her a couple times. She was my old college roommate's mother-in-law—or was supposed to be. They called it off."

"Then I'd say not so weird. If you and I wrote down every person we knew, and every person they knew, and every person they knew, the lists would almost certainly overlap. It's a statistical inevitability."

Nurse Mindy-Mandy stared off into space. "I can't believe it's been twenty-five years."

Twenty-five years. Brisling's heart rate monitor chimed once, a warning. "What's been twenty-five years?"

"Oh, sorry. College. My twenty-fifth reunion was in June. I got a bunch of emails, but I didn't go. I mean, who goes to college reunions?"

"Did you go to college here in Georgia?"

"Do I sound like I'm from Georgia? No, I went to a small liberal arts school in Oregon."

The monitor chimed again.

Brisling nodded at the folder still in Nurse Mindy-Mandy's hand. "Did she live in Oregon too?"

"Yeah. I remember my roommate's boyfriend whining about his mom blowing his inheritance on medical bills. Apparently, her third husband was in the hospital waiting for a heart transplant."

"Which hospital?" The telemetry monitor chimed repeatedly now, heart rate in the red. Nurse Mindy-Mandy hurried to Brisling's side with a small syringe in her hand.

"I said lie back down!"

He had not realized he was sitting.

"It's time for your beta-blocker."

Brisling lay back against the pillows. "Which hospital?"

She attached the syringe to the IV port. "Wherever they were doing transplants back then. University Hospital in Portland, I think."

She pushed the medicine into his veins. A coppery taste flashed in his mouth, and with it, a little twinge, a spark, a kindling fear. And in that moment, he knew. He knew exactly where JCAV had been released.

_______________

Image taken from http://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-a-telemetry-unit.htm