The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (5 page)

Just then, Malecki’s assistant signaled her that Phil Lee from the Jacksonville lab was on the other line. She excused herself to take his call. When she returned to the conference call, she mentioned that she had just heard from Lee and dryly added, “Well, it’s positive, Steve.” Wiersma responded, “I gotta get off the phone. I gotta get down there.”

The implications of the anthrax confirmation were not lost on anyone. Calls went quickly back and forth among state, federal, and local officials. Dr. Tanja Popovic, a leading laboratory investigator at the CDC, had trained Lee to do the tests and felt a personal sense of satisfaction about his performance. “Philip,” she told him, “your testing was perfectly accurate.”

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement arranged to fly Wiersma and another health officer from Tallahassee to Palm Beach. They arrived about 11 a.m., rented a car, and drove to Jean Malecki’s office. By then the CDC in Atlanta was also organizing a team to fly down later in the afternoon.

As soon as Wiersma arrived at the Palm Beach County office, he and Malecki reviewed copies of Bob Stevens’s medical records. After that he asked members of his staff to start looking for additional cases and to “design a surveillance strategy.” He went to the hospital to meet Dr. Bush and to talk to Maureen Stevens and other family members, including Casey, who by then were at Bob’s bedside. Later, after leaving the hospital, Wiersma was just as puzzled as before about how Stevens could have become infected.

Still later in the afternoon, the CDC team arrived and met with Wiersma’s and Malecki’s staff in a conference room down the hall from Malecki’s office. Dr. Bradley Perkins led the CDC group. His position as chief of CDC’s branch on meningitis and special pathogens was aptly named for this mission. Mr. Stevens had meningitis, and the bug they were dealing with
, Bacillus anthracis
, was surely special. “We all agreed on two priorities,” he recalls. “First, to determine how the exposure occurred, and second to identify other possible cases.” They organized investigation teams each with representatives from the three agencies—federal, state, and local. On Friday morning the teams began to sweep through the places where Stevens lived, worked, ate, shopped, fished, hiked, biked, and visited. The CDC had also dispatched a group to cover his trail in North Carolina the week before. Everywhere they went the public health teams sought leads about how Stevens became infected. They interviewed people, swabbed surfaces, and collected samples for testing.

Previously, the last recorded domestic case of inhalation anthrax had been in 1976, when a California weaver was infected by spores in yarn made from Pakistani wool. Still, officials publicly minimized the possibility of a deliberate attack. “We have no reason to believe at this time this was an attack at all,” Steve Wiersma told the
Palm Beach Post
that Friday. “There is no evidence of terrorism,” announced U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson from Washington. “It appears that this is just an isolated case.” He mentioned that Stevens “drank water out of a stream when he was traveling through North Carolina.” Speaking about the incident, coming so soon as it had after September 11, Florida Governor Jeb Bush was emphatic: “People don’t have any reason to be concerned,” he told reporters. “This is a cruel coincidence. That’s all it is.”

Brad Perkins was determined to try to find a natural cause. He acknowledged that such a case so soon after 9/11 and in a state where the hijackers had lived and trained at flight school was “slightly chilling.” But he would not let that influence the manner of the search:

The fact that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were part of the investigation teams was downplayed to the public. The agents were going along “just in case anything is found,” said Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the bureau.

Brad Perkins was on the team investigating Stevens’s residence and workplace. When they got to his house, Perkins and the other team members pulled on latex gloves and swiped surfaces with moist sterile cotton swabs. They then inserted each swab into an individual container marked with the time and location. At the house they took samples from indoors and outdoors—swipes from the kitchen counter and the bathroom sink, yard soil, snippets from the small vegetable garden. The samples were delivered to the state laboratory in Miami for analysis. Miami was closer than Jacksonville, only an hour south of the investigation area on Interstate 95. The lab there could also accommodate the beefed-up numbers of technicians that CDC was sending down to facilitate testing.

Before starting the field tests on Friday morning, Perkins stopped at the hospital to obtain permission from Maureen Stevens to enter her house. She impressed him deeply: “I mean, given the situation, she was extremely gracious and composed.” Her demeanor was all the more impressive considering what she was enduring beyond having a gravely ill husband. By then word about her husband’s diagnosis had been flashed around the world.

Larry Bush had not shared his early suspicions with Mrs. Stevens. She didn’t learn until Thursday that Bob had anthrax, after confirmation from the state laboratory. But as early as Tuesday, Bush’s questions were suggestive. Not that Maureen was likely to understand their implications. Those could only have occurred to someone unusually attentive to the occasional news stories about anthrax threats and hoaxes sent through the mail. Dr. Bush, however,
was
aware of them, which helped him frame his questions:

On Thursday around 1 p.m., Maureen Stevens was ushered into a hospital conference room where for the first time she was told that her husband had anthrax. Dr. Bush was present along with Steve Wiersma, hospital staff, and an FBI agent. Bush sensed she was disappointed that he hadn’t discussed the possibility with her earlier. He thought to himself about the past 3 days, what he could have said, when he could have said it. He just wasn’t sure. “It was hard,” he recalled. “Truthfully, I didn’t use the word ‘anthrax’ because I didn’t think it would mean much to her.” He was also afraid that if word got out it could cause “a whole public event here at the hospital.”

An hour after Maureen learned that her husband had anthrax, there was indeed a public event. The hospital held a press conference, and Bush felt even sorrier for her.

If Maureen felt overwhelmed at the press conference, it was worse when she went home that evening. By then Jean Malecki had spent many hours with Maureen. “She is a beautiful woman,” Malecki says, “and I became very close to her and the family.” Dr. Malecki sounded pained when she recalled what happened after the press conference:

Public health officials do not normally cite patients by name out of respect for their personal and family privacy. Months after Bob Stevens’s illness, CDC and state health officials continued to refer to him as an “anthrax case” or, because he was the first, “the index case.” But for Jean Malecki, once a patient’s name has been broadcast widely and is part of the public conversation, it seems cold and unfeeling to maintain that convention. “It’s true that CDC people and others are trained to do that,” Malecki says, “but I don’t.” She underscored her point by affirming Bob’s humanity:

That Friday afternoon, October 5, after investigators finished at the Stevens’s home, they went to his place of work. In the midst of taking samples at American Media, Inc., Perkins’s cell phone rang. The caller informed him that Bob Stevens had just died. Perkins was taken aback. He had seen Stevens hours earlier and though he knew Stevens was critically ill, he had seen no indications that death was imminent. Perkins told the rest of the team, and after a brief pause they resumed swabbing and sampling. Their quest for answers seemed to have become more urgent.

By Saturday the Miami laboratory was processing samples from North Carolina, from the docks where Stevens fished, the park where he biked, and from dozens of other spots, including his home and the AMI building. The next day, Sunday, preliminary testing indicated that
Bacillus anthracis
was present in samples taken from the AMI building mailroom and from Bob Stevens’s computer keyboard. The results would not be confirmed until additional testing was completed. But Perkins had shed his agnosticism and become a believer. “There was no reason that
Bacillus anthracis
should ever be in this workplace,” he thought to himself. “This was an intentional exposure.”