Free Tainted by Ross Pennie

emphatically, not a single piece of chicken.
    After a thorough tour of the mansion, Natasha put on her coat in the front hall as Ermalinda descended the stairs with a gorgeous leather handbag. Natasha recognized it instantly from its shape and design: Louis Vuitton. In spite of herself, she was awed.
    The bag rattled as Ermalinda held it up. “I think maybe Dr. Zol he should see this.”
    “Dr. Zol?” Natasha asked. “Why? Is there something in it?”
    Ermalinda glanced at Letty, as though confirming it was okay to continue. “Mrs. V.’s medicines,” she said. “And it quite heavy.”
    Letty stiffened. “She try many doctors but no one say what wrong — why she cry so much — why she forget everything.”
    “Letty help her put the pills in one of those special boxes,” Ermalinda explained. “You know, to keep them straight, after Mrs. V. get things mixed up.”
    Letty, her eyes pleading, took the bag from Ermalinda and held it out to Natasha.
    “And Letty hear them fighting,” Ermalinda added.
    Letty nodded, still holding the bag with both hands. “He say she visit too many doctors. That she not sick, she just lazy. So she hide the medicines.”
    Ermalinda pulled on her mittens, then put her arm around Letty and held her tightly. “Letty keep the medicines in her own room after Mrs. V. died,” she said. “You the first one to see them.”
    If Joanna had a problem with her medications, it wasn’t a matter for the health unit. Natasha lifted her hand to push the bag away but caught the look of desperation in both women’s eyes. Standing side by side, Letty and Ermalinda seemed small and vulnerable. They’d been so helpful, how could she refuse them? “Sure,” she said, taking the bag’s handles. “Dr. Zol may know what to do with this.”

CHAPTER 7
    At eleven o’clock that Thursday morning Hamish hunched in his laboratory at Caledonian Medical Centre. It was impossible to put the CJD business out of his mind, but he had to review the results of the latest batch of research experiments performed by his technician. He could save scores of lives every day, but if he didn’t get his research published in the right journals every year, his career would be toast. The dean would see to that.
    He was working on one of those ironies that added to the complexities of medical practice: antibiotics, the drugs meant to kill bacteria, sometimes had the opposite effect. In the presence of antibiotics, a species of bacteria called
C. difficile
released toxins that torched the lining of the bowels. Elderly patients often died within hours, their dignity stolen and their beds soaked in blood and excrement. No one knew where the bacteria came from or how antibiotics incited such a storm of inflammation. As Hamish saw it, the key to the puzzle lay in locating the exact source of the offending
C. difficile
. During an epidemic, when the disease marched along the corridors of a hospital from patient to patient, the source seemed obvious. But where did the first person in an outbreak pick up the
C. difficile
? Hamish reckoned the microbes must lurk somewherein the food chain, in the form of barely detectable spores. He proposed to develop a reliable method of finding those spores.
    Several papers in the food-science journals had captured his imagination. While searching the Internet one evening, he’d discovered that scholars were abuzz with a new approach to identifying specific animal DNA in food. They’d commercialized a test that could detect chicken, beef, pork, horse, sheep, and even cat in any food sample. Using a polymerase chain reaction — the technique for determining which culprit’s blood was on the murder weapon, made famous on television crime shows — food scientists could identify what they called “species-specific mitochondrial DNA .” They admitted the name was a mouthful but claimed the method was so accurate that Jewish and Muslim caterers could test all-beef sausages to be certain they were