The metallic stench of raw meat surrounded them.
Wolfe inclined his head sharply to the right to signal his intent and darted up the stairs, leaving Carver to clear the kitchen. Carver hit the light switch with his left elbow, and scanned the room along the barrel of the pistol. Modern, stainless steel appliances. Eating bar, upon which sat a bottle and a glass. Keys on the counter. Half wall, over which he could see the family room through the beveled rails. Couches and projection TV beyond. He spun around the wall and cleared the room before heading back to the living room.
Wolfe's footsteps drummed down the stairs behind him as Carver approached the corner, weakly illuminated by the rolling images on the computer screen. He recognized Mondragon in the pictures first, and then on the floor, crumpled under the desk, partially hidden by the chair.
The smell was overwhelming now, like tearing the butcher's paper from a slab of venison that had been sitting out to thaw for too long.
Carver tasted copper dripping onto his tongue from his sinuses. He carefully rolled the chair away from the desk with his foot.
The carpet made a wet slapping sound under Wolfe's advance.
"He's quite photogenic," Wolfe said, nodding to the monitor.
"How thoughtful of the killer to clearly display his motive for us."
"Too easy?"
"And then some."
Carver crouched in front of Mondragon's corpse, balancing like a catcher, careful not to touch anything. The professor's knees were drawn to his chest, the crown of his head between them, arms pinned by his thighs in the same compressed fetal position as the bundled mummies.
Wolfe directed a pen light at the body. "Defensive wounds on the palms," he said, highlighting deep lacerations across the middle of the upturned hands. "Straight, clean cuts. A razor or similar thin blade. Not a knife. Too clean."
"He saw his killer," Carver said, glancing back over his shoulder. The living room was a cluttered mess, but there was no apparent sign of a struggle. "But not soon enough. All of the blood's confined to this corner."
"And there's a lot of it," Wolfe said, shifting his weight to illustrate the slosh of fluid in the carpet. "Too much for just the hand wounds."
Carver tilted Mondragon's head back with the Beretta, propping it up for Wolfe to examine with the thin beam of light. Half-lidded, milky brown eyes already recessed into bruises. Straight-set nose; no sign of fracture. The lips had begun to gray, parted from a slightly open mouth with no evidence of chipped or broken teeth.
"Can you lean his head back a little farther?" Wolfe asked.
Carver applied more pressure and the head tilted backwards. The vertex struck the wall and rolled into the corner, where it wedged against the right shoulder.
"That would explain the inordinate amount of blood," Carver said, watching the light focus on the stump of the neck: cleanly sliced muscles and tendons, the white ring of the trachea, the more ragged cut exposing the cervical vertebra. The vessels and esophagus had shrunken away. All of it beneath a layer of clotting blood.
"Think our guy did this?"
"It doesn't fit. All of the blood is still here."
"Sure it's human?"
"It's still coming out of the neck, for Christ's sake. And aren't those the same clothes he was wearing earlier?"
"Without a doubt."
There was a soft slosh on the carpet behind him. Carver turned to find Ellie standing a foot away, now clearly able to see the cubby beneath the desk that he'd been blocking from view.
Her face registered shock. She clapped her hands over her open mouth, and pinched her eyes shut before turning away.
"Oh God," she moaned, and started to cry.
"Ellie..." Carver said, rising.
"Hold up," Wolfe said, summoning Carver's attention again to Mondragon's corpse. He had parted the legs just enough to perform a cursory inspection of the abdominal region. "Would you look at that?"
Carver crouched again and leaned to the side to gain a better vantage. The object was long and thin, wider than a pen. Only one half reflected the light as the other end was black with blood. At the tip was the surgical arch of a scalpel.
"He wanted it to be found," Wolfe said, his brows arching above his sunglasses.
"Yeah," Carver said. "But why?"
He looked again at Ellie, who now stood in the doorway, fighting hyperventilation with fresh air. The ritual Inca mummification of the victims, the facial reconstruction of the first unearthed remains, and now Mondragon. Whatever was going on here, it all came back to the girl in the doorway, whom he had once loved and allowed to vanish from his life.
Until today.
But the MO of Mondragon's killer was different. The body hadn't been prepared per se, but displayed. There was also the presence of the blood, of course.
And then there was Tobin Schwartz, a separate species of monster entirely.
He jumped to his feet at the sudden, shrill tone of the phone ringing beneath his jacket.
II
Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory
Centennial, Colorado
"Jesus, Carver," Marshall said. "Took you long enough to answer."
He switched to the hands-free unit so he could continue to manipulate the computer unencumbered.
"This isn't the best time," Carver said. The irritation in his voice was palpable. "Let me call you back in--"
"Would you just shut up and listen for once?"
There was a brief pause.
"That good, huh?"
"Blow your mind good," Marshall said. He grabbed his mug from the ground. The handle had broken off, but it was still serviceable. He waved to one of the nameless interns and raised the mug for her. A moment later, and with a look of contempt, she was walking down the hallway toward the break room and what he hoped would be a fresh pot of coffee.
"You want a drum roll? Let me have it already."
"I found the connection between Schwartz's victims. See, the problem was I wasn't utilizing the whole database. I was only comparing the girls' RFLP DNA profiles against human samples."
"I'm not following. Did you say only human samples?"
"Look, every organism leaves a kind of DNA fingerprint, each one individual. Different to some degree, yet species-specific in others. For example, all human DNA codes for eye color reside at two distinct loci on the fifteenth and nineteenth chromosomes, and hair color on the sixteenth chromosome. Everybody has these same alleles on the same chromosomes, but with different combinations to create the physical expression. Many of the loci we know, but the vast majority we don't. Everything in between, the billions of base pairs with unknown functions, we refer to as 'junk.'"
"I don't have time for a biology lecture, Marshall. Get to the point."
"If you'd just let me finish, I'd be happy to."
"So...junk?"
"Oh, yeah. So we can only assume some of this junk has an actual function without being able to clearly map it. And generally when we compare individuals side by side, they only match in random sections, if at all. Well, when I widened the database search, I found direct matches within the seemingly useless junk of each of the girls. Jasmine Rivers? She shares two loci on the eleventh chromosome with the American black bear, Ursus americanus. Keep in mind, it only takes two loci to physically express eye color."
"Did you say bear? Like Yogi?"
"You need a Q-tip? Yeah, I said bear. Now let me finish. She also matched at two separate loci on the third and twelfth chromosomes, with the timber wolf, Canis lupus, and the northern short-tailed shrew, Blarina brevicauda, respectively."
"That makes no sense."
"You're telling me! But the evidence is incontrovertible."
"Is it possible your samples were contaminated or the database compromised?"
"I prepared the samples myself. There's absolutely no way. And it isn't as though there's just one sample of a species in the database. Hundreds of samples of any given species are spread across a
dozen different databases and uploaded from all around the world."
"And the other girls?"
"The same. They don't match each other, but in each case the same loci have been altered on the same chromosomes. So each of the girls differs from the next, yet all have been affected at the exact same points in their DNA. And all of them reflect different animals, Carver."
"How could someone do this?"
"There are a couple of ways, I suppose, but the only one that makes any kind of sense would be a retrovirus."
"A virus?"
"A retrovirus. Just listen. A retrovirus is a really nasty kind of virus. In a nutshell, it infects the host, essentially 'cuts' out a section of the host's DNA, and uses the process of reverse transcription to insert a segment of its own. So when the host's cells replicate, they copy the new, modified DNA instead of the old, altering the physical composition of the host. AIDS is a classic example. The human immunodeficiency virus enters the blood and is transported throughout the body, where it reaches every cell via the T-cells. Like all retroviruses, it's incredibly aggressive and specifically targeted, attacking the nucleus of each cell. In doing so, it inserts its DNA into the host's chromosomes. Remember, cells are in a constant state of renewal, continually dividing into new cells. So when they split, they copy their DNA precisely into two daughter cells, thus passing along not only the individual's genetic code, but the virus's as well."
"So each of the girls would have had to come into contact with this retrovirus at some point."
"If my theory's correct."
"Then there had to be a specific source of exposure. How could it be transmitted? Is it contagious?"
"It's not the kind of thing you can catch like a cold, if that's what you're asking. There had to be direct exposure to bodily fluids."
"Like blood."
"Like blood. Without which we don't stand a chance of getting our hands on the live virus to see how this bugger really works. All we can really state with any authority is that the chromosomes have been definitively altered."
"But why?" Carver asked. "What would be the purpose of switching out human DNA for that of an animal?"
"Now that's the real question, isn't it? If all four girls had the same combinations in their DNA, then you could suspect a single source of exposure, but with each being different..."
"What?"
"Viruses can mutate to some degree, but not like this. What we're dealing with here is something someone cooked up in a lab. This retrovirus has been engineered."
"But you could isolate it if you had the blood?"
"Bingo. I could probably identify the strain with a tissue sample and a PCR test, but if you want to take a closer look at this bad boy, we're going to need the blood."
"Jesus."
"Yeah." Marshall was startled by a tap on his shoulder. It was the intern, who, judging by the look on her face, had been standing beside him for quite a while. He accepted the mug with a nod and took a scalding sip with a slurp. She probably spat in it for all he knew, but with the temperature and acidic content of the coffee, at worst it was flavoring he couldn't taste.
"So why hide the virus?" Carver asked.
"Either because you don't want it found, or it can be traced." He took another sip and set the mug down, shaking his burning hand and wishing he hadn't broken the stupid handle. "I favor the former. Someone invested a tremendous amount of time and resources into creating and modifying this bugger. You ask me, someone's performing some unsanctioned experiments on unsuspecting patients."
"To what end?"
"I'm not sure, but definitely for more than idle curiosity."
Silence from the other end.
"I need another favor," Carver said.
"You sound like a broken record."
"Can you find out if any of the girls ever shared the same doctor or were ever hospitalized at the same facility in their medical records?"
"They could have been injected or exposed anywhere."
"True, but they all lived within a hundred miles of each other in northeastern Colorado and southern Wyoming. That can't be a coincidence."
"I'll see what I can do."
"And can you send me the data?"
"Sure. Anything else? Spit-polish your shoes? Detail your car?"
"Marshall."
The serious tone in Carver's voice startled him.
"What?"
"Be careful, okay?"
"Yeah..." Marshall said. "Okay."
He hung up, suddenly well aware of the implications of his discovery. The nameless intern giggled at the back of the lab, miming to another intern what appeared to be dripping something from between her pursed lips into the invisible object she held in her hand, but he didn't care.
Marshall knew he now had much worse to fear than flavored coffee.
III
Flagstaff, Arizona
Carver didn't know what to make of Marshall's discovery. On one hand, he was thrilled there was finally a connection between Schwartz's victims, but on the other, the news only led to more questions. Why would someone create a virus that inserts animal DNA into human chromosomes? What function could these modified chromosomes possibly serve? He had studied every inch of what little remained of the four girls, and none of them had fur or any such nonsense. They had appeared to be normal little girls who had been abused and butchered in the most heinous manner. Now he knew them to have been specifically selected because of a retrovirus to which they had been exposed prior, loose ends that needed to be tied off to cover someone's tracks. Still, here he was, following those same tracks through the desert hundreds of miles from home.
Wolfe hadn't been as surprised by this most recent development as Carver would have expected. His eyes had been unreadable behind his ever-present sunglasses, but his mannerisms had suggested that he had accepted it easily enough. As though he had already anticipated that information. What did Wolfe know that he didn't? Carver felt like he was playing catch-up to the rest of the team, leading him back to even more nagging doubts. Who was Hawthorne really, and exactly what role did his new superior expect him to play?
Wolfe had extricated the scalpel from Mondragon's lap while Carver had been on the phone with Marshall, but didn't hold out much hope for extracting any viable fingerprints. Carver didn't expect to either. After all of the deception, the siphoning of the blood, and the tedious task of mummification, the killer wasn't about to slip up and leave bloody prints on the scalpel. Still, they had been supposed to find the scalpel. It had to be of some significance.
"Anything else you want to see here or are you ready to call it in?" Wolfe asked.
"We aren't going to find anything useful here. This wasn't a crime of passion as the screensaver was meant to imply. This was an execution."
Wolfe removed his cell phone from his jacket and dialed.
Carver crossed the living room, welcoming the clean air as he stepped out onto the front porch where Ellie sat with her face buried in her hands. A couple across the street tried to look busy doing nothing when Carver caught them staring. He sat beside Ellie and gave her a gentle squeeze on the shoulder.
"Are you going to be all right?" he asked.
She sniffed and nodded.
For as little sense as any of this made to him, he could only imagine how overwhelmed Ellie must have felt. Both of their jobs essentially revolved around death. Hers glorified the beauty and spirituality of it, while his exposed its bloody black soul. All he knew with any sort of certainty was that he couldn't let her out of his sight until he understood how she was involved. Beyond that, he was a blind man walking through an intricate maze. To proceed, he needed to clearly identify where he was going. He needed to find out if the DNA of the mummified corpses had been similarly altered. That would provide a direct correlation between Schwartz and Carver's current quarry. Without the blood, he wouldn't be able to isolate the virus, but perhaps more bodies would help them determine the source of exposure. From there they could hopeful
ly identify the perpetrator and maybe even his motivation.
But how did any of this relate back to Ellie?
And then there was Kajika Dodge. What were the odds of the geneticist who had formerly employed one of the killers discovering the potentially genetically-modified, mummified remains in the middle of the desert? Dodge had to know more than he was letting on, or at least more than he thought he did.
"Mondragon notified you of the discovery near the ruins," Carver said, a statement more than a question.
Ellie smeared the tears from her cheeks with her palms and looked him in the eyes. He'd forgotten how intelligent she was. The pain of comprehension was etched into her face.
"And now he's dead," she said.
Carver had to turn away. He looked to the street, where a black sedan coasted to a halt against the curb behind theirs. A slender man climbed out of the driver's seat. Black suit and tie, black sunglasses. His hair wasn't necessarily long, but longer than that of any other Special Agent Carver knew. The man smiled in recognition, leaving Carver at a disadvantage as he was sure he'd never seen this man before in his life. Another agent exited the passenger side and it took all of Carver's concentration not to betray his astonishment with even a flinch of his eyebrows.
Closely-cropped silver hair. Four diagonal scars across his forehead.
"Ahh, the golden boy," the driver said, striding up the path to the porch. He offered his hand. "Locke."
Carver shook Locke's uncomfortably hairy hand. "Carver."
Locke bared a wide smile full of teeth, the expression amiable enough, yet somehow condescending.
"Special Agent Hawthorne," Carver said, turning to the other man. "I didn't expect to see you down here. This is Dr. Elliot Archer."
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