Scully said. “The man couldn’t still be alive. Even if the plague put him in some kind of extreme coma, I’d already performed an autopsy.” The ME said, “I know Edmund, and he’s not the skittish sort. A little bit of a pest sometimes, but this isn’t the kind of story he would make up. I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt, but . . .” Quinton hesitated again, and Scully pressed the phone closer to her ear, straining to hear the undertone in his voice. “Unfortunately, before I could check it out myself, some gentlemen from the Centers for Disease Control came in and sterilized everything. As a precaution, they took the entire refrigerator drawer.” “From the CDC?” Scully said in disbelief. She had worked many times with the CDC, and they were always consummate professionals, following official procedures rigorously. This sounded like something else entirely, some one else. Now she was even more concerned about what she had learned earlier that morning when she called Atlanta to check on the status of the sample she had personally sent in.
