Bloodletting (19 page)

Carver took a deep breath of the fresh air to combat the revolt in his stomach and blew it out slowly. Willing his heart to slow, his brain to concentrate, he noticed more footprints in the dirt, leading away from the building. He followed them over a small rise capped with junipers into a shallow arroyo, the limestone descent sheer and rugged. At the bottom, an antique police cruiser had been shoved nose-down into a dry creek bed. Its fender pointed into the air.

He slid down a zigzagging trail of loose gravel, maintaining his tenuous balance on outcroppings with heavily needled things he couldn't see in the dark, until he reached the bottom, where the footprints resumed in the sand. Fresh tire tracks, wide and deep, had torn up the ground. Made by a truck he could only assume the murderer had already had waiting for him.

Wolfe was right. The man was long gone.

Carver bellowed in frustration. His voice echoed back at him from the canyon walls, the harbinger of the sound of sirens.

He walked over to the abandoned Chevrolet Caprice and balanced on the edge of the dry bank to inspect the vehicle. A crimson handprint was smeared on the driver's side door as though someone had leaned against it, but for what purpose? Carver imagined himself doing the same, bracing himself on the door where the smudge was so he could lean farther out over the barren creek, reaching out with his left hand to--

More smeared prints on the side mirror, carefully painted with the smallest fingertip into a single word he recognized with a gasp. He saw his own angled face in the mirror, haggard and shadowed, captured in a moment of surprise. Six letters across his forehead, obscuring his eyes.

Killer
.

Chapter Four

The very essence of instinct is that it's

followed independently of reason.

--Charles Darwin

I

Verde River Reservation

Arizona

Kajika momentarily considered exchanging the beer for coffee, and ultimately decided on both in a two-pronged assault on his liver and kidneys. He was physically tired enough to sleep, but couldn't seem to shut down his brain. Thoughts raced through his head at a million miles an hour, some related, others completely random. He figured he might as well strap in and see where they led him.

He'd been aimlessly cruising the internet for more than an hour, unsure of exactly what he was hoping to find. He needed to approach this scientifically, form a concise question and from it generate a hypothesis, only his experience was in the physical and not the theoretical. He felt like he was hunting a ghost with a net, and perhaps that was precisely what he was doing.

Every thought led back to Tobin. What had happened to his old friend in the months they had been apart? The Tobin Schwartz he knew was incapable of perpetrating the atrocities of which he was accused, a gentle man who had undoubtedly prayed for the souls of the animals he dissected in school, an empathetic man who made the pain of those around him his own. He hadn't been a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but neither had he been a monster. Maybe his libido had led him into trouble--Lord knows it wouldn't have been the first time--but the man he had known for what seemed like forever never would have been party to a situation involving the imprisonment and abuse of children in a cold, dank cell.

And yet all signs pointed to the fact that this was exactly what he had done.

No, Kajika simply refused to believe it. There had to be something, no matter how well hidden, in this unlimited bank of information to exonerate his friend, or possibly at least explain how he had ended up on the path to his own violent destruction.

First things first, what did he know? Tobin had been a world-class geneticist; maybe not a genius, but certainly close. He had known the genome of the
Oncorhynchus tshawytscha
, the Chinook salmon, like the back of his hand. Precisely where to modify the growth patterns and with which combination of genes. While others treated the minnows with hormones, Tobin found a way to make the fish produce the hormones themselves. It was the same template Kajika had used to create the Quetzalcoatl, but Tobin had always dreamed of a grander design. He had envisioned replacing the damaged and mutated chromosomes responsible for birth defects with normal sections of DNA, of modifying the charted loci responsible for certain cancers. They were the dreams of a beneficent god.

So how had everything fallen apart?

Kajika could no longer access the HydroGen database, and a cursory perusal of the public site had revealed nothing of significance. Searching the web by name produced tens of thousands of websites, nearly all of them relating to the carnage in Colorado. It was as though everything good Tobin had done had been shoved aside to make room for the demon he had become, a man the world found infinitely more fascinating than the man who had helped protect the wild population of salmon and taken a notable step toward ending world hunger. But that wasn't what people wanted to hear. Mankind was a runaway train to oblivion, its passengers trampling each other in the aisle.

This was getting him nowhere.

He ran through his email inbox for the tenth time, then checked the deleted messages file in case he had accidentally sent it through by mistake. Nothing. He scrolled through his old work file, which he hadn't been able to bring himself to expunge, and smiled when he opened the last email he had received from Tobin. It contained a picture of beautiful people raising their glasses in celebration around a champagne fountain; congratulations of sorts for his early retirement, well-wishes for the life to come in Arizona. Tobin had inserted text beneath the revelry to read:
don't become a drunk
. Kajika laughed, a bittersweet sound. That was Tobin's sense of humor, and, God help him, Kajika loved him for it.

Swiping a tear from his eye, he opened his
spam
folder in the hope that his computer had seen fit to file anything from Tobin with the mess of discount prescription, fake Rolex, and penis enlargement offers. There were journal renewal reminders, invitations to join friends at various networking sites, and all kinds of inconsequential garbage. He was going to have to set the box to purge more frequently. It wasn't as though he was stupid enough to click the link in a PayPal scam or confirm his credit card number and expiration date with Amazon dot com, but still he felt violated. There was even an email from the Denver Public Library, in a state he had only visited at cruising altitude. Denver, Colorado. It was dated eight days prior. He clicked on the email.

The body of the message was a form overdue reminder, signed by Frances McCarty, Senior Librarian, but above it were three brief sentences. No salutation and no separate signature. Just thirteen words.

I didn't know. Not until it was too late. Tell Jesus I'm sorry.

Kajika stared at the single line, reading it and rereading it, shaking his head.

He had no doubt Tobin had sent it, but what was it supposed to mean? Was it an admission of guilt, a cry for help that had come far too late? A spiritual reconciliation, the acceptance of his fate in hell? It was disjointed, cryptic, not at all like the ordinarily eloquent Tobin. And he definitely hadn't known his friend to be religious in the slightest. In fact, quite the contrary. Tobin had believed they held power over the notion of God, stripping away His "magic" with each gene they improved, each phenotype they successfully amended. He had even gone so far as to name their first genetically engineered Chinook salmon--

"Jesus," Kajika whispered. Tobin had named the largest fish from their first project Jesus, a product of his dry sense of humor. But why would Kajika tell a dead fish--? Maybe everything he had read was true. Maybe somewhere along the line, Tobin had snapped and become what the world believed him to be.

Kajika minimized the email window and stared blankly at the search prompt on his home page before finally typing "Jesus" and initiating the search. There were more than five hundred thirteen million matches, and "Jesus Fish" barely narrowed the field. "Jesus Salmon" still left him more than three and a half million sites he could never hope to scour in his lifetime.

He leaned back, pounded the last of the beer, and chased it with coffee now only a few degrees warmer.

He searched "Jesus Chinook Salmon." Fifty-seven thousand sites, none of them a direct match. He was grasping at straws now, trying to vindicate a friend whom he now feared might have been subjected to the kind of mental deterioration that would have led him into a bloodstained cellar with a circular saw in his hand.

Jesus had been from batch A, female twenty-six. The fry had been tagged as soon as they were large enough. Jesus had been test subject A26-016. He typed it into the search box. There was a direct match at www.a26dash-016.freenet.com, so he clicked through. The right third of the screen was filled with Google ads, the larger portion to the left with a single picture. There were no clickable links. The picture was of an old lady holding a hand of cards in her knobby claws. Her face had been replaced by that of a grouper, its floppy mouth hanging open. The caption read:
no, you go
!

Kajika dragged the scroll bar on the right side up and down, but there was only the image. No other writing of any kind. He moved the pointer across the screen over and over, looking for anything he might be able to click to unlock some sort of hidden function. Surely the picture wasn't the only thing there. The arrow became a finger for a split-second before reverting to form. He moved it more slowly through that section of the image, until the tip of the arrow pointed at the broach at the woman's breast and became a little hand with the index finger extended. With a left click, the screen dissolved, and was replaced by a plain black page with a single sentence in white.

Please forgive me, old friend.

He clicked the words and the frame became white. The QuickTime logo flashed in the center before opening a small window, beneath which were the controls to play a video.

Kajika's hand shook. The cursor shivered in response as he lined it up with the triangular
play
button. He drew a deep breath, and started the recording.

Tobin's face appeared, shadowed, the room behind him pitch black. His old friend looked like death: his cheeks patchy with untrimmed growth, the whites of his eyes solid red, the bags beneath so heavy his whole face appeared to droop. His bangs stood up in front from repeatedly running his fingers through them. He grimaced as though passing a stone and ran the back of a trembling hand under his glistening nose.

"Hey, Dodge," he said, glancing back over his shoulder into the darkness, a horrible snapping motion. "I need your help. What else is new, huh?"

Tobin chuckled, the pitch too high, sharp-edged. His right eye twitched.

"There's no one else I can trust. No one."

He looked over his shoulder again, then leaned forward toward the camera so that all Kajika could see were his eyes, nose, and mouth, all washed out and distorted by the lens. Tobin continued in a whisper that crackled with static.

"I messed up, man. I messed up bad."

Tears streamed down his cheeks and his lips quivered.

"I didn't know they were going to die."

II

28 Miles East-northeast of

Flagstaff, Arizona

Killer.

Seeing the same word painted in blood on a mirror hundreds of miles from the original had shaken him. Carver had dabbed his finger into the word to convince himself he wasn't imagining it, and had drawn his fingertip away damp. Fresh. There wasn't a doubt in his mind. The letters appeared to have been written by the same hand, but that couldn't be possible. Could it? Schwartz was dead. Carver had never been more certain of anything in his life. The man had died in his arms, dribbling blood onto his back, whispering a vicious epithet before slumping to the floor. It hadn't been a ghost that had smeared blood on the abandoned police car and driven off in the waiting truck. That was an act of the flesh, but if Schwartz hadn't risen from the dead, then what did this mean?

The same man who had been in the room where four children were slaughtered had been responsible for the bodies hanging in the smokehouse and sprawled across the porch. Carver had always sensed the connection between the two crimes, but had suspected two distinct killers. Now he was staring at the possibility they might be one and the same, brutal killings enacted in entirely different manners, against all the conventional rules. What then did that imply about Schwartz? Had they been partners? Carver's mind was reeling and the few pieces of the puzzle formerly in place were now scattered.

He returned to the house on the road, limping with the cactus needles in his socks. His pants and jacket were brown with dust. Even now he was sure he felt worse than he looked.

Ellie opened the door when she saw him approaching and climbed out of the sedan to wait, crossing her arms over her chest. A bitter chill had descended upon the formerly sweltering desert, creating an altogether different world. The clamor of voices had silenced the coyotes and owls, and the dust stirred by their arrival had settled again.

White light flashed like strobes of lightning at the front of the house, through the open door of the smokehouse, and between the side boards of the weathered building as cameras made permanent the nightmare, memorializing it from every possible angle. Carver had seen it once, and that was more than enough. He wouldn't soon forget.

"What's happening?" Ellie asked, turning toward the smokehouse.

"We were too late. He had a truck waiting in the wash. Probably drove right past us on our way in."