Bloodletting (20 page)

"Any earlier and that could have been you down there by the house. Us, Paxton."

"I'm sure that was the plan."

He looked downhill at the porch, which was now a frenzy of activity. Officers performed an orchestrated dance, studying the bodies without touching them, standing aside for the photographs of the crime scene and ducking back in. Hawthorne was nowhere in sight, but the interior lights glowed through the curtains inside the house.

Carver led Ellie down the path, skirting the scene on the porch to enter through the open rear door into the kitchen. Carver heard the flies first, and was transported. The sink was overflowing with filthy dishes, a cloud of bloated black insects fighting over the dried and stinking chunks of crusted food, furry with white and green mold. Dried blood was smeared all over the counter, the gas stove dotted with gobs of shriveled meat. The smell struck him and he had to cover his mouth and nose.

Passing from the kitchen into the main room, he was finally able to take a shallow breath. More flies spun lazily over the nearly barren room, alighting on the lone threadbare couch, food-crusted coffee table, and the pile of clothing in the corner, before rising again. There was a television in the corner, the screen showing the extended coverage of the exhumations in the desert without the benefit of sound. Light flashed through the curtains beside the front door. The hallway to the right led to a bathroom and what could only be a bedroom at the end, from which he heard muffled voices.

Ellie's hand found his, their fingers lacing. It was a small comfort he pretended was for her benefit.

The bathroom housed a rust-rimmed claw-foot tub. A plastic hose had been run from the spigot to a white showerhead clipped into a mount on the wall above. More angry flies swarmed the pink-tinged water. The drain was clogged with a massive clump of hair.

None of the other agents acknowledged him when he stepped into the bedroom. They were too busy scrutinizing the contents of the room, which had been converted into something more reminiscent of a surgical suite. There was no bed, in its stead a long silver table with drains dividing the uneven surface into thirds. It was the only thing in the house that shined, polished to the point it reflected the lamp suspended over it on a retractable arm. There was a machine attached to an IV stand beside it, a boxy unit with pressure gauges and flow rate monitors, from which various tubes dangled to the floor. The label on its face was still intact: FMS 2000 Rapid Infuser. The carpet had been ripped from the floor, the concrete foundation treated with a non-porous coating to make it smooth, easily scrubbed. There were empty IV bags on a shelf beside small vials of the blood-thinner Heparin. A wire basket held an array of surgical implements: scalpels, forceps, clamps, spreaders. There was an autoclave perched beside it. On the shelf beneath were boxes of sterile syringes and needles of varying gauge and length, bottles of iodine and alcohol, surgical thread and suturing needles, size eight sterile gloves, gauze, and other items Carver didn't recognize. There was a stack of Styrofoam coolers in the corner and a case of liquid-cooled silver canisters with LED temperature readouts.

"They're siphoning the blood and shipping it somewhere else," Carver said.

"You think?" Wolfe said. "Now I'm really glad you're on board. We never would have figured that out without you."

"Enough," Hawthorne snapped. "Just do your job."

Wolfe removed his glasses and turned a slow circle, surveying the room. Carver flinched when those unnervingly blue eyes passed over him, and understood why Wolfe never removed the glasses. It was almost as though they were outside the normal range of human iris color.

Carver's breath caught. He turned around so as not to betray his thoughts with his expression. Wolfe's eyes looked like those of a Siberian husky. Locke was unnaturally hairy, his teeth just a little too large for his mouth. The twin to a man who had killed twenty-two indigents with similar jaws. What in God's name was going on here? He pretended to study the drainage pipes retrofitted from the table to the wall and the hose mount a moment longer before again facing the others, his face a blank mask.

He hoped Jack had learned something new and useful. A quick glance at his phone revealed he had two new messages, but no signal with which to retrieve them. He pocketed it again and looked at Hawthorne. Unlike the others, he had no abnormal physical traits outside of the scars.

"So what now?" Carver asked. "The killer's probably two states away by now."

Hawthorne abruptly turned to face him. Their eyes locked. "Don't pretend to be stupid. You know exactly what we need to do."

"We follow the blood, find out where it was shipped. Figure out why."

"You already know why."

"But we don't know the purpose. Somebody's covering his tracks, cleaning up after some bizarre experimentation, but there has to be more to it than that. He isn't just hiding the blood. He's harvesting it. He could have just let it run down the drain and we'd have never been able to trace it. Something about it makes it valuable. This isn't just about preventing us from finding the retrovirus. Somebody's still working on it, fine-tuning it, making whatever microscopic changes need to be made for it to produce the desired result."

"And what do you think the end result might be?"

Carver was struck by a bolt of comprehension. He now understood that this was far bigger than a string of murders spread across the country.

"He's creating a new race."

III

Verde River Reservation

Arizona

Kajika could only stare at the monitor, watching his friend from beyond the grave, a man he had never truly known. He felt a twinge of pity, sorrow, but mostly he felt numb. Hollow. There was dampness on his cheeks before he knew he was going to cry.

"They offered me the opportunity of a lifetime," Tobin said, his voice quavering. "Not just fish, Dodge. Humans. You know that's what I wanted all along. To make a difference. Cure cancer. End birth defects. I knew it was illegal, but I couldn't help myself."

Tobin looked over his shoulder again as though expecting someone to be there, then turned back. He was jittery, twitchy, lending the impression of someone strung out on possibly more than sleep deprivation and caffeine.

"There's not much time, so you have to listen. These people...they're dangerous. And they're everywhere. There's no one I can trust. You don't understand. They're everywhere, everywhere."

He's lost it
, Kajika thought, not without remorse. This was his fault. He hadn't been there when Tobin had needed him.

"They used to bring me blood. From it, I'd harvest the retrovirus. I'd evaluate the host chromosomes for the proper patterns and mutations, send the results back, and wait for them to tell me what modifications needed to be made to the virus. Believe me, there were very few. They already knew what they were doing.

"At first, I couldn't figure out why they needed me. All I was doing was verifying their results, but I finally figured it out. What kind of idiot am I?" He pounded his palm against his forehead, hard. "But by then it was too late. There was no turning back."

There was a long moment of silence, punctuated by the sound of Tobin's sniffing. Kajika found himself glancing back over his shoulder toward the front door. The wind had risen, tossing grains of sand against the shell of the house, making the front porch squeak as though beneath carefully transferred weight.

"They told me the retrovirus was going to be used to correct aberrant chromosomes. That they'd isolated the factor that produced the dramatically lower incidence of cancer in patients with Down's syndrome, and were just looking for a way to deliver it. I believed them. God help me. I believed them."

His words trailed into a sob. Mucus rolled down over his glistening lips.

"The virus was changing the chromosomes at all the wrong loci. I thought I could fix it, but that wasn't what they wanted. That wasn't what they wanted at all. They already had it the way they wanted it. They only needed me for the protein coat. Our protein coat."

Kajika furrowed his brow and shook his head. They had developed the CV-IIIp protein coat solely as a means for the virus they used to alter the salmon fry to survive in the colder temperatures of an aqueous, saline substrate. It was a complicated arrangement of icosahedrons, a twenty-sided shape composed of triangles that approximates a sphere. A standard virus has one icosahedral protein envelope that encloses the genetic material, but they developed a way to enclose one such protein coat inside another, and inside another still. Even the minimal amount of friction between the envelopes generated enough heat to allow the virus to survive in temperatures as low as forty degrees for nearly seventy-two hours before degradation occurred, and more than a full week at room temperature. If whoever this cryptic "they" was wanted to deliver the retrovirus, they had no reason to look beyond a simple syringe and needle. There was no benefit to cold aqueous delivery for humans. It risked compromising the virus and potentially killing it altogether.

He studied his old friend's nervous features, and understood now that despite his most vehement insistence to the contrary, Tobin had indeed snapped.

"They relocated me to a private lab in Sterling, Colorado, but they still only brought me the samples. I thought I would be working with the patients. It didn't make sense. I demanded to see the source of the blood." He checked behind him again, the microphone picking up his increasingly ragged breathing. "So they showed me."

Kajika grabbed the empty bottle of beer and tried to drain even a single drop, but his hand was shaking so badly it clattered against his teeth. He needed another beer, but couldn't avert his eyes from the screen.

"They were keeping this little girl in a cellar. Not a lab or a hospital. A cellar beneath an old barn in the middle of nowhere. She was chained to the wall, crawling in her own excrement. They beat her, tortured her. Starved her. I was mortified, but they forced me to watch. Physically restrained me. I was so scared I couldn't have run if I tried. We watched her on a monitor outside the room. Greenish-gray images. Night vision cameras recording live on a secure IP address. They threw a rat on the floor in front of her. A rat for Christ's sake. She was so hungry she pounced on it and brought it right to her mouth. When she bit it, the thing screeched and went into spasms. It wrenched out of her grasp and flopped on the ground like it was being electrocuted. She waited until it was still. This little girl waited until it was dead and then carefully peeled its fur away from the muscle and consumed it. And the room was dark. Not so much as a window or a crack under the door. There was no way she could have even seen her hand in front of her face."

"Dear God," Kajika whispered.

"I didn't realize it at first, but they were subjecting her to such abuse, physical and emotional trauma, to force her genes to express themselves. Like tapping into her primitive fight-or-flight reflex. She didn't make a conscious decision to tear that rat apart, her body made it for her. They turned this little girl into a monster, and to make sure I would continue to do my job, they made sure I knew it was inside me too."

Tobin picked up a flashlight from off camera and shined it across his face. His eyes flashed like the reflectors on the side of a highway. He clicked off the light and hurled it across the room with a cross between a roar and a sob.

"I don't know how they infected me...but they did." He shook his head furiously. "I can't do this, Dodge. I can't, I can't, I can't. I can't be a part of something so...evil. And it's not just these little girls either. There are others. I've seen them. They made sure I saw them. There's no one who can help me, no one I can turn to. Except for you. Hopefully.

"That girl. She's still alive. But she won't be for long. They're bleeding her dry. I don't know what I'll do if you can't help me, what I can do. I can feel it inside me. The blackness. The rage. I want her to die. I need her to die. Why do I feel like this?"

Kajika realized he was holding his breath, but couldn't force himself to breathe.

"If I can't save that girl, I deserve to die. Maybe I'm dead already," Tobin said. He turned away from the camera, his shoulders heaving, and then the screen went dark.

Kajika stared at the black rectangle and debated playing the recording again, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he rose and went straight into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, cracked it, and downed half the bottle. He returned to the living room and paced from one side of the room to the other, pounding the Coors without tasting it, mentally replaying his friend's bizarre ravings. Tobin had gone mad. Surely that was the case. There was no other explanation but to take the insane story as truth. Either way, people had died, including the man whose voice still echoed in his head.

They only needed me for the protein coat. Our protein coat.

Who needed the CV-IIIp, and for what reason? How had Tobin been drawn into this mess from the start? How did any of this pertain to the corpses they were pulling out of the desert like ticks from a deer's hide?

He walked over to the window by the front door and pulled back the curtain.

In his mind he saw images of a girl alone in the darkness, attacking a rat in a desperate act of survival, peeling its filthy coat from its carcass before gnawing away its wet muscles. Watched on a computer monitor by men whose eyes reflected its light like so many coyotes under a full moon.

He thought of a retrovirus rife with twisted mutations traveling through the blood from one person to the next, and imagined the myriad other ways the infection could be spread with the right protein coat.

IV

Flagstaff, Arizona

Carver was in the back seat, staring out the window at the open desert, wondering if anyone was staring back. Ellie sat beside him, alternately watching the landscape fly past and closing her eyes, only to pry them back open as soon as her head started to nod. He could only imagine what kind of terrors lurked behind her closed lids. His own demons waited behind his, but he had grown accustomed to them, for whether he liked it or not, he had chosen them.