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Ross Pennie - Tampered: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

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Ross Pennie Tampered: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

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When a bout of food poisoning strikes a residence for lively seniors blessed with generous pensions and high-ranking political connections, Dr. Zol Szabo, public health doctor turned medical detective, assembles his investigative team. But the epidemics source proves elusive; the death count rises and when the scourge threatens someone close to Zol, he calls in his friend and colleague Hamish Wakefield, a microbe connoisseur with a nose for exotic diagnoses. Though Hamish uncovers other dangers, he cant crack the puzzle, and neither can the health units outbreak-hunting whiz kid. It takes the observant octogenarians to expose the deaths for what they really are: a string of murders. Fast-paced and intricately plotted, Tampered is second in a series of books to feature Dr. Zol Szabo and his quirky surrounding cast of mystery-solving public health officials.

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Tampered A Dr Zol Szabo Medical Mystery ROSS PENNIE ECW Press ECW Press - photo 1
Tampered
A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

ROSS PENNIE

ECW Press

ECW Press

Copyright Ross Pennie, 2011

Published by ECW Press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2

416.694.3348 / info@ecwpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Pennie, Ross A

Tampered : a Dr. Zol Szabo medical mystery / Ross Pennie.

ISBN 978-1-55490-959-9

also issued as:

978-1-55490-936-0 (pdf); 978-1-55022-936-3(pbk)

i. Title.

PS8631.E565T35 2011 C813.6 C2010-906697-9

Cover images: piano Ryan Lane;

background Roberto A. Sanchez (iStockPhoto.com)

Cover and text design: Tania Craan

Typesetting: Mary Bowness

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is set in Bembo and Akzidenz

The publication of Tampered has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Tampered A Dr Zol Szabo Medical Mystery - image 2
Tampered A Dr Zol Szabo Medical Mystery - image 3

This story arose from my affection for two people now well past eighty: Luise Denman, my godmother, and Reg Blundell, a longtime friend. Full of sparkle, Luise quotes Homer and Virgil, is still taking university courses, and is a whiz on the World Wide Web. Reg Blundell is a gentleman of the highest order. He is an accomplished artist who fought in the Second World War, helped build the telephone industry, and plays the piano with unabashed joy. I dedicate this book to all those who see the wonder in long lives well lived.

Although I wrote most of this book alone in the pre-dawn darkness when everyone else was still asleep, I had lots of help from the people I love and respect. Jack David at ECW Press continued his trust and mentorship. Peter Harcourt, Larry Kramer, Bob Nosal, Ken Stead, and Mark Walma critiqued my early drafts. Bev Haun came up with the title. Edna Barker guided me to the finish line with her unerring editorial insights. And every day Lorna was at my side, sharing the journey and making life worth living.

CHAPTER 1

Zol Szabo peered across the sea of silvery heads bobbing in the buffet line at Camelot Lodge. Usually, he looked forward to these monthly Sunday brunches with Art Greenwood, his ex-wifes granddad. Art, the only member of Francines family who hadnt smoked himself into an early grave, sparkled with wisdom and wit in defiance of his age and physical restrictions. Best of all, Art and his tablemates never let political correctness get in the way of a candid opinion or a good story.

But today, Zol saw only clinical diagnoses smouldering through the retirement residence: the wobbly knees of rheumatoid arthritis, the stooped backs of osteoporosis, the trembling hands of Parkinsons, the vacant eyes of macular degeneration.

Zol forced another smile at Art, who was taking his place at the piano in the sitting room on the other side of the archway. Zol hoped Art was well enough to play. Hed looked pale and drawn when hed greeted Zol a few minutes ago and confessed hed been hit by another bout of fever and the runs earlier in the week. That made it his third bout in the past couple of months. And he wasnt the only one. Dozens of others had been hit with the same bug. Art denied any headache, thank goodness. When headache compounded the fever and diarrhea, the result was lethal. In the past month alone, two of the converted mansions thirty-eight residents had died within hours of a blinding headache compounding their explosive stools.

Art warmed up with a few bars of Bicycle Built For Two. His chording was tentative, not as sharp as usual. He switched to an improvised version of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata. Art played everything by ear. He couldnt read a note, but if he heard something once, he could play it forever. Despite the advancing muscle disease that had forced him into an electric scooter, he still glimmered with the genius that had made him an engineering whiz-kid in the telephone industry fifty years ago.

The understated elegance of the dining rooms caramel walls and burgundy accents reminded Zol of a caf in one of Hamiltons nicer hotels, except the bucolic vista through Camelots windows was considerably more handsome than any view of the citys down-at-the- heels central core. Here on an elegant cul-de-sac a few blocks from downtown, stately homes abutted the woodlands at the foot of the Niagara Escarpment. Known locally as the Mountain, the imposing ribbon of limestone and old-growth forest snaked through the city like a giants doorstep, its flora and fauna protected by the United Nations as a World Biosphere Reserve. Zol thought of his own renovated house a couple of kilometres above as the seagulls flew, perched on a generous treed lot on the Escarpments edge. He was thankful once again for the two million in lottery winnings that had sent him to medical school and bought him such a gorgeous piece of real estate with its jetliner view. He could cope with Hamiltons overgenerous share of shysters and gangsters if, at the end of the day, he could tuck Max safely in bed, then sip a Glenfarclas while watching Lake Ontario shimmer in the ever-changing light.

Camelots dining tables boasted smooth white linens, shiny cutlery, and imitation crystal that sparkled as brightly as the stuff his mother reserved for special occasions. Todays spread of poached salmon, eggs, bacon, French toast, salads, and gooey desserts looked a treat. As a former professional chef himself, Zol respected the care and effort that went into every dish. But as a public-health doctor, the table seemed to him less a chefs delight than a minefield.

Something nasty and undetectable a microbe or a toxin was poisoning the food. But intermittently. Not every dish and not every meal. As the Associate Medical Officer of Health for Hamilton-Lakeshore, second-in-command at the regions health unit, Zols job was to quash epidemics, not wallow in them during Sunday brunch. Twice hed sent his inspectors into Camelot. Theyd examined every centimetre of the place with a magnifying glass. Theyd collected scores of samples from the kitchen and dozens of specimens from afflicted residents. But theyd come up empty. The kitchen met all the health codes, and the laboratory detected no disease-causing pathogens.

Zols friend and medical-school classmate, Dr. Hamish Wakefield, a savant in the field of infectious diseases, had raised the possibility of epidemic Norovirus. But even Hamish, an assistant professor at the citys Caledonian University Medical Centre, was stumped; he conceded there was no indication that anything as simple as the cruise-ship virus was the culprit here.

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