CHAPTER ONE

      The Ghost of Bruce Ivins

      A PERFECT FALL GUY

      Bruce Ivins wanted no grave and perhaps not even the notoriety that his death generated. In his will he asked simply for his ashes to be scattered. And so, for weeks after he died in the summer of 2008, with his body cremated but not immediately disposed of, Bruce Ivins was in limbo. Reduced to ash, his body languished in a Maryland funeral parlor for more than a month as his wife, a devout Catholic, came to terms with his final request. His will stated that only with “documented proof” that his wishes had been granted would his wife receive her dead spouse’s modest bequeathment. It was strangely, morbidly appropriate that Ivins, an anthrax expert, had been reduced to powder.

      Dr. Bruce Ivins was a civilian researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick—the government’s leading biological defense lab. He was a church-going, piano-playing husband and father, a sixty-two-year-old microbiologist from Lebanon, Ohio, and an accomplished amateur juggler. He spent most of his adult life in the Fort Detrick facility or in his modest house just outside its gates. The Ivinses raised two children in that house. Once they were grown, Ivins’ wife ran a daycare center there; Ivins cultivated an extravagant garden in the backyard.

      But Ivins messed with scary stuff: cholera, plague and then, for the last two decades of his thirty-year career, with anthrax. Scarier than the germs he worked with was the state of his mind as he worked on them. “I’m a little dream-self, short and stout, I’m the other half of Bruce—when he lets me out,” he wrote during breaks between composing scientific papers on peritoneal macro-phages and antibiotic post-exposure prophylaxis. There were other “eccentricities.” There was a secret personal post office box. There were threats to his therapist. There was an unhealthy fixation on the star of a reality TV show and with the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, whom Ivins considered “lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders,” who had nonetheless issued a “fatwa” on their adoring fan. There were the multiple e-mail identities: kingbadger, goldenphoenix, jimmyflathead, prunetacos. And there was that spiteful condition in the will—have me cremated or fifty grand goes to Planned Parenthood, he instructed his wife, a former president of the local Right to Life chapter in Frederick, Maryland. Years before his suicide, Ivins confided to friends that he suffered paranoid delusions and schizophrenic symptoms.

      Then on July 27, 2008, Ivins is said to have taken a heavy dose of prescription Tylenol with codeine and collapsed