“Check MCV, see if Phyllis has gotten in,” I said to Rose. “Tell her the sample I sent on Saturday can’t wait.”

Within the hour, Rose had dropped me off at Eleventh and Marshall streets, at the Medical College of Virginia, or MCV, where I had done my forensic pathology residency when I wasn’t much older than the students I now advised and presented gross conferences to throughout the year. Sanger Hall was sixties architecture, with a facade of garish bright blue tiles that could be spotted for miles. I got on an elevator packed with other doctors I knew, and students who feared them.

“Good morning.”

“You, too. Teaching a class?”

I shook my head, surrounded by lab coats. “Need to borrow your TEM.”

“You hear about the autopsy we had downstairs the other day?” a pulmonary specialist said to me as doors parted. “Mineral dust pneumoconiosis. Berylliosis, specifically. How often you ever see that around here?”

On the fifth floor, I walked quickly to the Pathology Electron Microscopy Lab, which housed the only transmission electron microscope, or TEM, in the city. Typically, carts and countertops had not an inch of room to spare, crowded with photo and light microscopes, and other esoteric instruments for analyzing cell sizes, and coating specimens with carbon for X-ray microanalysis.

As a rule, TEM was reserved for the living, most often used in renal biopsies and specific tumors, and viruses rarely, and autopsy specimens almost never. In terms of my ongoing needs and patients already dead, it was difficult to get scientists and physicians very excited when hospital beds were filled with people awaiting word that might grant them a reprieve from a tragic end. So I never prodded microbiologist Dr. Phyllis Crowder into instant action on the occasions I had needed her in the past. She knew this was different.

From the hall, I recognized her British accent as she talked on the phone.

“I know. I understand that,” she was saying as I knocked on the open door. “But you’re either going to have to reschedule or go on without me. Something else has come up.” She smiled, motioning me in.

I had known her during my residency days, and had always believed that kind words from faculty like her had everything to do with why I had come to mind when the chief’s position had opened in Virginia. She was close to my age and had never married, her short hair the same dark gray as her eyes, and she always wore the same gold cross necklace that looked antique. Her parents were American, but she had been born in England, which was where she had trained and worked in her first lab.

“Bloody meetings,” she complained as she got off the phone. “There’s nothing I hate more. People sitting around talking instead of doing.”

She pulled gloves from a box and handed a pair to me. This was followed by a mask.

“There’s an extra lab coat on the back of the door,” she added.