Carter didn’t know what to say. “Coincidence?” he finally offered.
The detective pulled the car over at the corner and stopped. “Maybe,” he said. “But it sure is an awful big one.”
You could say that again, Carter thought, though he kept it to himself. “Thanks for the ride,” Carter said, trying not to look too hasty getting out.
The detective waited until Carter had crossed the street in front of him and then pulled away.
Carter took a deep breath, the first one since getting into Finley’s car. He had the terrible feeling that he’d be seeing him again.
When he got to Dr. Permut’s lab, Ezra was already there—punctuality, Carter was learning, was not one of Ezra’s problems—but Carter would hardly have recognized his faculty colleague. Last time, when he’d stopped in to leave the scrap of Ezra’s scroll for analysis, Permut had been as neat as a pin, not a hair out of place, his white lab coat spotless and buttoned from top to bottom.
But now he looked like he hadn’t slept in days; his hair wasn’t brushed, his lab coat was rumpled and dingy, and even behind his glasses Carter could see dark rings under his eyes.
“Glad you could make it today,” Dr. Permut said, conspicuously locking the door behind them. No one else was there. “I didn’t want this to wait any longer.”
“Neither did we,” said Carter. “Ezra here, in case he hasn’t told you, is the owner of the scroll you’ve been analyzing.”
“Yes, he had mentioned it,” Dr. Permut said, quickly turning toward a lab counter. “I’m going to walk you through the results, such as they are,” he said, “and you are welcome to make of them what you will.”
Carter and Ezra exchanged a look, then followed the clearly perturbed scientist to the counter, where wide data sheets with dense sequences of numbers and letters on them were spread out. Even though he couldn’t decipher them any better than he had the first time, Carter again recognized them for what they were. So, apparently, did Ezra.
“These are DNA readouts,” Ezra said. “I’ve seen them before.”
“Good,” Dr. Permut said, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out a roll of Tums. “That’s one less thing I have to explain.” With one finger, he jabbed at the printout on the right and said to Carter, “These are the results I showed you last time, from the fossil fragment.”
“Okay,” Carter said. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“They’re what I referred to as theoretical DNA,” he explained to Ezra. “Most of it we were able to piece together, but at a few critical junctures we had to make educated guesses to fill in and bridge the gaps.”
Ezra nodded as Permut popped a Tums into his mouth, then stuck the roll back into his pocket.
“We did that through a process called PCR, or polymerase chain reaction.”
“Meaning?” Ezra asked.
“Meaning, we ground the sample into a powder—then added silica to the powder because it binds to any residual traces of DNA left there. Then, by using PCR, we were able to amplify the fragments of DNA, making over a million copies, for example, of a single molecule.”
“So you can read it more clearly?” Carter said.
“So we can read it at all,” Permut replied.
“But I already know that you don’t know what to make of it,” Carter said. “We went through that last time.”
“That was before you brought me the scroll fragment. Look at this,” he said, poking his finger now at the data sheet on the left. “See how similar the sequences are?”
Carter glanced at the sheets, as did Ezra, and yes, he could sort of see how alike some of the patterns and sequences were. But why would that be? What would one of these things have had to do with the other? When he looked up, he could see that Permut was reading his mind.
“Odd, isn’t it?” he said, with a slightly off-kilter smile. “A bit of bone, and a scrap of parchment, fitting together so neatly?”
“Yes, it is odd,” Carter agreed.
“In fact, if you compare the two closely—and believe me, I have—the DNA strands we were able to isolate from the parchment perfectly complete the gaps in the fossil genome.”
Permut rocked on his heels, letting this sink in. The only sound in the room was his rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum floor.
“You are saying,” Ezra hazarded, “that the two specimens are drawn from the same . . . source?”
Permut pursed his lips, and tilted his head to one side. To Carter, it seemed as if he’d come a little unhinged.
“I can do better than that,” Permut said. “I can show you something that will really open your eyes.”
He stepped to one side, revealing a sleek white microscope with a trinocular head on the lab table behind him. Carter recognized it as a Meiji ML 2700, a piece of equipment he’d have killed to have in his own lab. “Take a look through this,” Permut said. “The slide’s already mounted.”
Ezra, who stood closer, stepped up first. As he bent down over the eyepieces, Permut said, “You’re looking at a portion of the scroll.”
Ezra remained motionless another few seconds, then straightened up.
“Carter, why don’t you take a look now?” Permut said.
Ezra stepped aside, with a strange look on his face—was it a look, Carter thought, of odd vindication?
Carter put his head down, and after adjusting the built-in Kohler illuminator he saw what looked, at first, like one of those blowups of the surface of Mars. There was a bumpy, yellow plain of pits and craters, bisected here and there by narrow, twisting channels—only these channels were not empty and dry. They were filled with a purplish-red liquid, which was coursing through them, rhythmically pulsing, like blood.
“What did you add to the specimen?” Carter said, without looking up. “A dye or something?”
“No, that’s what we mistook for the ink,” Permut said. “In fact, it’s blood.”
Carter straightened up and away from the microscope. “But what’s making it move? It’s clearly motile.”
Dr. Permut rubbed at his head, agitatedly. “Why wouldn’t it be? The tissue is alive.”
Ezra’s eyes closed, as if he wished to absorb the news in private.
Permut was sucking his Tums like there was no tomorrow.
When Ezra opened his eyes again, he looked straight at Carter. “It looks to me as if I had the skin, Carter, and you had the bone.” He turned toward Permut. “Wouldn’t you agree, that these are two ends of the same stick?”
Permut nodded his head, vigorously.
Carter was struggling to hold it all in his head, to make any sense of everything he had just been told.
As if Ezra had intuited as much, he recited aloud, “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
Dr. Permut stepped to the microscope and removed the slide. He slipped it into a glassine envelope, took another identical envelope off the lab counter, and stuffed them both into the side pocket of Carter’s leather jacket. “I don’t want these specimens in my lab anymore,” he said, stepping away again, as if Carter had a cold he didn’t want to catch. “You can take them with you when you go.”
“Sure, of course,” Carter said. He’d never seen Permut, or any scientist he ever knew, so clearly spooked by something. “And thanks for doing the work.” He glanced over at Ezra, who looked as if he understood perfectly why Permut was behaving this way.
“What do we owe you?” Ezra said, taking out a blank check and a pen. “The lab tests alone must have—”
“Nothing,” Permut said.
Ezra’s pen hovered in midair, above the check he’d placed on the counter beside the microscope. “Nothing? I know from experience that DNA tests—”
“I want no further part in this,” Permut said.
“But this must have run you a few thousand dollars at the very least,” Carter put in.
“That’s my problem. I’ll spread it out over some other projects. Let
me worry about it.” His foot tapped impatiently on the linoleum floor. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do have some other work to do.”
Carter shrugged, and nodded at Ezra. “I think we’re done here.” Leaving the lab with Ezra, he heard the door close and latch the moment they were back in the hall.
Outside, Ezra paged his driver. “I’m going uptown to see my stepmother at the hospital. Can I drop you somewhere?”
“No, that’s fine,” Carter said. “I probably just need to walk a while and clear my head.”
The Lincoln town car, with his Uncle Maury behind the wheel, came around the corner and double-parked in the busy street.
“It’ll take more than a walk,” Ezra said, holding out his hand with the palm open. Carter didn’t know what he wanted. “The scroll specimen?” he said.
Carter fished in his pocket, found the slides, and gave Ezra what he’d asked for.
“Thank you,” Ezra said, opening the back door of the car. “We’ll have to get together tomorrow and compare notes.”
Carter simply nodded as the car drove off. And though he seemed as if he were rooted in place, his mind was racing at a mile a minute. None of this made any sense, and it was ridiculous to keep pretending that it did. The fossil, the parchment—the bone, the skin—somehow it all had to be part of an elaborate ruse, a bizarre scheme of some kind, a prank. It had to be. If Bill Mitchell weren’t dead, he’d have been the first person Carter thought was behind it. But Mitchell was dead—and that was part of no prank. The stakes were already too high. Russo was burnt almost beyond recognition.
It couldn’t be a game, or a scheme of any kind.
Which meant it had to be something real.
Something had to be going on, some terrible drama unfolding, and Carter feared that whether he liked it or not, he was destined to play a leading role.
THIRTY-TWO
Ezra’s spirits were oddly buoyed; he knew now that his suspicions, even his fears, were at last gaining evidentiary support. For a man who knew that madness was never far from his door, it was strangely comforting to find that even the most impossible thoughts he had entertained were, perhaps, quite possible after all.
He wasn’t insane, though the universe, disconcertingly, might be.
Looking out the back window of the car, he mulled over what he had just learned in Permut’s lab. The scroll was a piece of living tissue, from a creature of indeterminate origin. The fossil fragment was bone, from the same unidentified source.
But was this creature what he thought? And who—or what—could have skinned it alive?
“Kimberly’s still in trouble,” Maury said from the front seat, interrupting his thoughts. “And they’re damned if they can figure out what’s going on.”
Ezra wasn’t surprised. If his own hunch was true—that it had something to do with her last-minute party guest—they never would figure it out.
“Your dad’s up there with her now.”
Ezra had assumed as much; it was why he was making this visit. It was a chance to mend the fence. And the right thing to do, he reminded himself, under any circumstances.
Though the hospital was an exclusive one to begin with, Kimberly’s suite was in an even more private wing, where the floors were expensively carpeted, the walls were decorated with colorful prints, the doors were polished mahogany. To Ezra, it felt more like a small European hotel than a hospital, which was undoubtedly the point. His father was sitting in the anteroom when Ezra arrived, just turning off his cell phone.
“I was telling Maury not to wait for us,” he said to Ezra, “but of course he was giving me an argument.” He dropped the phone on the sofa cushions.
“How is Kimberly doing?”
“She got hysterical a half hour ago, ripped out all her tubes, started raving.”
“What about?”
“What about?” His father looked at him with puzzlement. “It was raving, it’s not supposed to make sense.”
“Humor me.”
“About birds and fire. She was being attacked by birds with wings made out of fire. Satisfied?”
Ezra stored the information away, to share it the next day with Carter and Russo. Who knew what clue would turn out to be something important?
A nurse wearing a white uniform with navy blue piping, designed to look more nautical than medical, came out of the bedroom holding a tray with a syringe and other paraphernalia on it. “She’s heavily sedated now, and she’ll sleep straight through until the operation tomorrow morning.” She smiled at Sam and Ezra, and left.
“What operation?” Ezra asked his father. “They’ve decided what’s wrong?”
“Not entirely,” His father had laid his suit jacket on the sofa, and he slumped back now in just his shirtsleeves—with a monogrammed pocket, of course—and gleaming cufflinks. “A blood infection. Organ shutdowns. The one thing we do know for sure is that she’s pregnant.”
Ezra wasn’t completely surprised, and his father noticed. “You knew?” he asked.
“I knew she wanted to redo my rooms and turn them into a nursery.”
“It wasn’t going to happen.”
For a moment, Ezra took heart; was it possible his father had never intended to replace him with a newer and younger model, after all? Then he realized what was really being said.
“I had a vasectomy years ago,” his father confessed. “Back when you were a teenager.”
A silence fell. Sam realized how it had come out, but it was too late to take it back, and Ezra just had to absorb the blow. “I didn’t tell her at first,” his father explained, “because what would have been the point? And then when I figured out what she wanted, what she was planning, I didn’t want her to know that I couldn’t give it to her.”
It would have been about the only thing he couldn’t give her, Ezra thought.
“I didn’t want to lose her,” Sam said, and in that moment Ezra knew, perhaps for the first time, that his father really and truly loved Kimberly. That it wasn’t, as Ezra and probably everyone else in the world believed, just an old man’s infatuation with a gorgeous young thing. The fact that she was pregnant now had to have come as a mighty blow.
“I don’t even care who’s . . . responsible,” Sam said, reading Ezra’s mind. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
Ezra remembered the bruises he’d seen on her body, and he was glad to know now, for certain, that his father had had nothing to do with it.
“The whole thing’s gone so haywire,” Sam went on, “the only way to save her life is to perform an abortion tomorrow, first thing. Afterward, they tell me she’ll never be able to bear children at all.”
“After this one, I won’t have to,” Kimberly said from the bedroom doorway, where she was listing from side to side. She was wearing a long, pale rose nightgown, and the IV pole, on wheels, was still attached to her arm.
But what shocked Ezra the most was her belly—even under the nightgown he could see the swell of her lower abdomen. Just the day before, there’d been nothing to see; now she looked like she was ready to deliver any minute. When had this happened? How could it have happened?
“What are you doing out of bed?” Sam said, rising from the sofa. If he was as shocked as Ezra, his son couldn’t tell. And how, Ezra wondered, could she be standing up at all after all the sedatives she’d been given?
“I have to go to him,” she said, brushing away a strand of hair that clung wetly to her face. “He’s the only one who can make it stop.”
“Make what stop?” Sam asked, going to her side. “Ezra, call the nurse.”
“The fire.”
“There’s no fire here,” Sam said, gently holding her arm. Then, as Ezra watched, his father drew his fingers back from her arm, shaking them in the air as if they’d just been singed.
Kimberly laughed, deliriously. “I told you so.”
Ezra meant to move toward the door, he meant to shout for a nurse, but he stood transfixed. Kimberly’s eyes were flickering now,
as if a fire had been kindled inside her and was slowly growing into a full blaze.
“What the hell is . . .” Sam’s words trailed off, as he backed away and toward the door to the hall.
Kimberly doubled over, groaning and clutching her stomach. “Make it stop,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
Ezra grabbed her just before she toppled over, and their eyes met. It was as if he were looking into a volcanic caldera, just before it blew.
“Nurse! Doctor! We have an emergency!” His father was out in the hallway, shouting at the top of his lungs.
“Kill it,” Kimberly said, her breath so hot Ezra could feel it burnish his face, and then she collapsed, the IV smashing on the floor.
Ezra rolled her over—her skin was as hot as an iron—and he could swear that when he looked in her face, there was someone else, something else, looking out at him through her glowing yellow eyes.
“Move over!” a doctor said, shoving Ezra to one side.
A crash cart rattled into the room.
“Jesus Christ,” the doctor exclaimed, blowing on his scorched fingertips.
“Kill it,” Kimberly insisted, between ragged hot breaths. “I can’t stand it.”
“Ice! We’ve got to get her into an ice bath!”
The nurses scrambled.
Ezra, in shock, sat back on the floor beside her, his weight resting on his hands, as she suddenly went into a convulsion. Her hands flew to her stomach and dug into her own skin so hard it looked as if she were trying to root out the baby herself. Her knees came up toward her chest, and a tide of blood suddenly washed across the floor.
A syringe was given to the doctor, whose hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t get it in. “I can’t . . . do it!”
A nurse grabbed it away and tried herself. The needle went into the arm this time, but then, as Kimberly twisted in pain, it snapped off.
“We need a tourniquet—stat!” the nurse shouted.
Kimberly’s belly seemed to swell, like a balloon that had suddenly been given a big burst of air. “Kill me!” she screamed in agony. “Kill me!”
Her head went back and she uttered a cry of utter anguish and despair, a cry that chilled Ezra to the marrow . . . and that seemed to be joined—he could swear he’d heard it—by another voice, a muffled voice keening from within her very womb.
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