He got out of his chair. “Gentlemen. I would like to know what we should do if we start getting patients in other parts of this state. The health of Virginia, after all, is what the governor appointed me to take care of.” His face was dark red and he was sweating. “Are we supposed to just do like the Yankees and start burning down our cities and towns?”

“Should this spread,” Fujitsubo said, “clearly we’ll have to utilize our hospitals, have wards, just as we did during earlier times. CDC and my people are already alerting local medical personnel, and will work with them closely.”

“We realize that hospital personnel are at the greatest risk,” Martin added. “Sure would be nice if Congress would end this goddamn furlough so I don’t have one hand and both legs tied behind my back.”

“Believe me, the president, Congress, knows.”

“Senator Nagle assures me it will end by tomorrow morning.”

“They’re always certain, say the same thing every time.”

The swelling and itching of the revaccination site on my arm was a constant reminder that I had been inoculated with a virus probably for nothing. I complained to Wesley all the way out to the parking lot.

“I’ve been reexposed, and I’m sick with something, meaning I’m probably immunosuppressed, on top of it all.”

“How do you know you don’t have it?” he carefully asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Then you could be infectious.”

“No, I couldn’t be. A rash is the first sign of that, and I check myself daily. At the slightest hint of such a thing, I would go back into isolation. I would not come within one hundred feet of you or anybody else, Benton,” I said, my anger unreasonably spiking at his suggestion that I might risk infecting anyone with even a mundane cold.

He glanced over at me as he unlocked doors, and I knew that he was far more upset than he would let on. “What do you want me to do, Kay?”

“Take me home so I can get my car,” I said.

Daylight was fading fast as I followed miles of woods thick with pines. Fields were fallow with tufts of cotton still clinging to dead stalks, and the sky was moist and cold like thawing cake. When I had gotten home from the meeting, there had been a message from Rose. At two P.M., Keith Pleasants had called from jail, desperately requesting that I come see him, and Wingo had gone home with the flu.

I had been inside the old Sussex County Courthouse many times over the years, and had grown fond of its antebellum quaintness and inconveniences. Built in 1825 by Thomas Jefferson’s master brick mason, it was red with white trim and columns, and had survived the Civil War, although the Yankees had managed to destroy all its records first. I thought of cold winter days spent out on the lawn with detectives as I waited to be called to the witness stand. I remembered the cases by name that I had brought before this court.