Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  "Have you analyzed the retrovirus' RNA? How about the host chromosomes, specifically the third, eleventh, and twelfth?"

  Manning was silent for a moment, mulling over the implications of his questions. She had known they were withholding information, but until that moment she hadn't understood just how much.

  "It would help to know what I'm looking for," she finally said. "I have a field full of haystacks. You want me to find a needle? You'd better tell me which haystack it's hidden in."

  "I'm specifically looking for matches at certain loci."

  "Between the victims?"

  "Yes, but also interspecific."

  "Interspecific? You mean matches with different species?"

  There was only silence in response.

  "You're kidding, right?"

  "I wish I were."

  "I need to know everything you do. No holding back. I mean absolutely everything."

  "Have an email address?"

  Manning rattled it off and made sure her laptop was connected. She didn't know what she was preparing to download, but it couldn't possibly be what Carver claimed. That would suggest genetic manipulation on a scope beyond anything she had ever seen, not the mutation of a virus spreading from one species to another. As far as she knew, they weren't even attempting anything that ambitious in Europe, where they'd clone small pox just to say they could.

  She opened the file the moment it came through and perused a series of documents. It took blobs of color crossing her vision to let her know she wasn't breathing. She scrutinized the data, evaluating genomes and chromosomes with as much skepticism as she could muster until she had no choice but to accept what she was seeing.

  Suddenly she was very warm and needed to get some fresh air. Stop her world from spinning.

  She burst out into the night, struggling to wrap her brain around what she had learned, and failing miserably. This was more than a serial killer they were tracking. Something different entirely.

  Taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly, the wind stealing the cloud of steam from her lips. The sandstorm obscured everything beyond fifty yards, but for a moment she thought she saw the flash of a coyote's eyes at the furthest reaches of the camp's light.

  VI

  Verde River Reservation

  Arizona

  It was nearly two in the morning when the twin sedans stopped silently in front of the trailer. The interior lights still glowed through the drawn blinds. Carver saw the curtains part momentarily at the sound of their closing doors. Kajika was waiting on the porch by the time they all reached it. He looked haggard and drawn, his nose and cheeks flushed. His eyelids were pink and swollen.

  "Brought the whole entourage this time I see," Kajika said, stepping aside and holding the screen door open in invitation.

  Carver had half-expected to find the trailer abandoned and the man long gone.

  Inside, the main room was exactly as it had been before, save the recent addition of a trio of empty bottles on the end table by the loveseat. There were no indications of an imminent, hurried departure.

  Kajika closed the door behind them and wasted no time.

  "Thanks for coming out so quickly."

  "What?" Carver asked.

  "I only called maybe forty minutes ago."

  "Called who?"

  "You guys. The FBI."

  "Right," Carver said, glancing at the other men. None of them had been notified of the man's call. "What did you want to talk about?"

  "Didn't they tell you? I received a message from Tobin."

  "Tobin Schwartz?" Carver made no attempt to hide his incredulity. He looked pointedly at the bottles. "I don't think he'll be contacting anyone anytime soon."

  "It was a video recording. He hid it on the web where only I would find it."

  "Only you?" Wolfe asked.

  Kajika's expression registered the suspicion in their voices and flared momentarily with anger. He stormed across the room to his computer and turned on the monitor.

  "He sent me an email from a public library in Denver. My SPAM filter weeded it out and I didn't find it until earlier tonight." He opened the message and stood back, gesturing to the screen.

  "I don't get it," Carver said. "What's the significance? This is just an admission of guilt."

  "There's more to it than that," Kajika said, for the first time noticing Ellie. With a confused expression, he turned back to the monitor. "It's a code. Jesus was the name of our first successfully engineered salmon. Kind of an inside joke."

  Ellie sat down on the couch behind them. Hawthorne and Locke inspected the large cage. The day lamps were now off, leaving the cage in darkness. The Quetzalcoatl was coiled beneath the lip of a flat piece of granite under an infrared ceramic heating element, tongue flicking lazily. Neither of the men appeared to be paying much attention to the conversation across the room, but Carver knew otherwise.

  "This is from eight days ago," Wolfe said.

  "Four days after Jasmine Rivers was abducted," Carver said. "And you only now saw this?"

  Kajika's eyes glistened, but he didn't reply. Instead, he resumed his story, detailing how he had searched for various combinations of "Jesus" and "salmon" and ultimately found the cloaked site. He walked them through it on the screen as he spoke, until he finally brought up the picture of the fish-headed old maid.

  "That's funny," Wolfe said. "Someone told her to 'go fish.' Classic."

  Carver glared at him.

  "I guess I'm the only one with a sense of humor."

  "If you click on the broach, it gives you this message," Kajika said. "Click here and it leads you to the page where he hid the video." He tapped the mouse and the screen changed, but there was no QuickTime logo or video screen. Kajika clicked the refresh button. Still nothing. "It was here. I swear. I just watched it for Christ's sake."

  "Who did you call?" Carver asked.

  "You. I called you. Special Agent Carver of the Denver branch of the FBI."

  "The main number."

  "Straight off the internet. I didn't have your direct number."

  "And you told them you had this message from Schwartz?"

  Kajika nodded.

  This only confirmed Carver's suspicions of a leak in the Schwartz case. He was going to have to be exceedingly careful with whom he shared any information. He trusted Marshall implicitly and Manning didn't seem corruptible, but he couldn't read his three new compatriots, and obviously his branch office was no longer secure.

  "What did Schwartz say in the video?" Wolfe asked.

  Kajika relayed what he remembered, never making direct eye contact with either of them. He alternated staring blankly into space and then at his hands in his lap. His voice trembled, but he swiped away the tears before they could form. The emotions were genuine. Carver had seen enough liars to know when he was being played. If he had toyed with the idea of Kajika as a suspect, he no longer did. The man was obviously integral to the case, but whatever Kajika knew, even he wasn't privy to it.

  Carver listened while Kajika told him what he already knew. The bloodletting, the testing, the retrovirus. The details of the protein coat and its ability to protect the virus outside its ideal environment were new. He filed them away to pass along to Manning. It wasn't until Kajika reached the point where he described what Schwartz had said about watching the girl attack the rat that he truly understood Marshall's theory. The girl biting the rat. The twitching of the dying animal. The absolute darkness. The savage consumption of the rodent. They were subjecting these children to the worst possible conditions in hopes of encouraging the physical manifestation of the mutations. Girls at the age of menarche, surging with hormones, expressing changes in their very nature. Being bled to death, their fluids saved as part of an experiment, their lives cast aside as refuse. Potentially visibly altered body parts destroyed and only normal pieces left to be found.

  Carver's blood boiled. They had made these little girls into monsters and then slaughtered them. But there was more to it
than that. Had he killed Schwartz in cold blood? The man hadn't been innocent by anyone's definition of the word, but if his story could be believed, then it was possible Schwartz had come to his house seeking help, breaking in so as not to be seen, wielding a gun under the assumption that there was no one he could trust. Carver's stomach churned and he wished he could throw up. He noticed he was scrubbing his hands on his pants again and forced himself to stop.

  Schwartz had been nervous, jittery. Pointing a loaded weapon into his face. Reeking of death. A man so far over the edge there had been no turning back. He had wanted to show Carver the girl so he could save her, but he hadn't known it was already too late. Whoever had really butchered the girls had set them both up, and they had played their roles to perfection. The leak at the FBI had given Schwartz his address knowing what he would do when he found an intruder in his house.

  Tobin Schwartz was now his cross to bear, and there would be ample time for him to nail himself to it later. For now, he had an investigation to conduct. He'd be damned if he allowed anyone else to die. He would find whoever had done this and he would see them held accountable. All of them.

  Wolfe nudged his leg and gave a single nod when Carver looked up, a gesture of support, indicating that he too had made the same connection.

  "I would have done the same," he whispered.

  Carver had to look away. A light flared from the corner of his eye and he turned to see Locke adjusting the lamp on the cage to spotlight the Quetzalcoatl. Ellie rose from the couch so she could see what they were doing. The snake opened its eyes and tried to wriggle deeper into the stone enclave.

  "Let's talk about retroviruses," Carver said, turning back to Kajika. "Specifically a type of epsilonretrovirus..."

  Their eyes locked.

  Carver heard a rattle of warning from the room behind him.

  "The snakehead virus."

  VII

  Kajika's eyes met Carver's, the surrounding world ceasing to exist in that eternal moment. Finally, the corners of his lips started to curl upward, and before he knew it was going to happen, he was laughing. Maybe it was the beer, or perhaps the ridiculous way Carver had stated it so ominously. The snakehead virus. Duh duh dah. He couldn't control himself. All eyes in the room were on him. When he finally composed himself, he realized no one else found it remotely amusing.

  "You're serious, aren't you?" he said.

  "What's so funny?" Wolfe asked.

  Kajika recognized the insinuation of the question. They knew nothing about the retrovirus itself beyond the name. And here he had the Quetzalcoatl, with the engineered snake head. He nearly started laughing again, but knew it was never in his best interests to mock a group of high-strung men with guns.

  "The snakehead is a fish, gentlemen. A long, brown freshwater fish native to China and Indonesia. It looks like a snake with a rigid dorsal fin. Hence the name. This is a virus that has never been contracted by a human being. It's extremely virulent and contagious, but only to other fish. It causes epizootic ulcerative syndrome with weeping lesions. We used its second cousin, the walleye dermal sarcoma retrovirus, to engineer our salmon and trout. In nature it produces tumors in walleye exclusively, little pink growths that look like grapes. People can even eat an infected walleye without adverse effects so long as they skin them first. All we had to do was clip that portion of the RNA and it became essentially harmless. The snakehead retrovirus is every bit as benign."

  "So there's no way it can perform reverse transcription on human chromosomes?" Carver asked.

  "Maybe if you're a mermaid." As soon as Kajika said it, he thought of the picture Schwartz had used as the entry to the hidden website and every trace of levity vanished.

  "Then can you explain why the bodies we're pulling out of the ground less than twenty miles from here are infected with this supposedly harmless fish virus?" Carver asked.

  "You are the one who modified an epsilonretrovirus to genetically engineer fish, correct?" the man with the scars across his eye asked. It was the first time Kajika had heard him speak since their arrival. The man's face was expressionless, but what Kajika saw behind the man's eyes made him uncomfortable. He absorbed the question as a thinly-veiled accusation.

  "I've never designed anything for use on humans. Period. It may be a fine moral line I walked professionally, but I believe in the concept of the human soul. Call it the work of God or the cosmos, or simply the result of a biological process, but I consider it to be sacred. I support stem cell research and gene therapy in order to cure sickness and disease, as a means of ending unendurable months and years of suffering leading ultimately to a painful death. My mother has Parkinson's disease for crying out loud. Do you think I built this lab here just to play with snakes? And I also believe the human body to be a sacred vessel, the Ming vase of creation. I'm talking about patching the cracks, not shattering it and rebuilding it into something it was never meant to be. If you change the body, what happens to the soul?"

  "That's precisely what we're dealing with here," Carver said. "This virus has been created to modify specific loci on human chromosomes."

  "Nearly the entire protein structure of the retrovirus would have to be altered for it to even potentially infect a mammalian host, let a lone a human being."

  "What if the structure of the Gag had been reformed to appear like the HIV virus?"

  "The Gag couldn't have been changed. It would have had to be replaced entirely, and something like that is beyond my ability. The two viruses are similar at the Env domain, which is another structural protein, but HIV is a scary virus, my friend. The planet has never seen anything as lethal or contagious. I wouldn't mess with it for all the money in the world and a harem of supermodels."

  "Too skinny for my tastes," Wolfe said. "I need a little meat on the bones."

  "But it is possible?" Carver asked.

  "Anything is now possible," Kajika said. "God is the man with the needle. If you can dream it, someone can find a way to create it. It won't be long before we have zoos filled with mythological creatures and everyone has blonde hair and blue eyes."

  The scarred agent looked at him intently. Kajika shifted in his seat.

  "Let me spell this out for you," Carver said. "You used to work in genetic engineering. You modified a similar retrovirus to alter species of fish. You were friends with a man, who either directly or indirectly, was responsible for the deaths of four children. You just received the only communication, as far as we can tell, from a dead man. You discovered the first body, which just happens to be infected with a fish retrovirus, just down the road from your home, from where you grew up. I can't chalk any of this up to chance. Can you?"

  "No," Kajika said. He had been pussyfooting around phrasing it as such, but there was no denying it.

  "Good. We're on the same page. That's a start. Now, I'm inclined to think that if you were involved with any of this, you would have been long gone by the time we arrived, and I can't think of any reason why it would have benefited you to discover the corpses if you had anything to do with their deaths. What I do know is that you being here at this point in time is no mistake. Perhaps you stumbling upon the bundled remains was a stroke of luck, but someone else would have soon enough. They're within two miles of a national monument and barely more than half a foot under the sand. So my question would be, why you? Why would someone go to such lengths to possibly implicate you, to potentially make it look as though you set this whole thing up?"

  Kajika shook his head. He had no answer. He had no real enemies, at least of which he was aware. Through his formal education he had outpaced his classmates through hard work and desire alone. Even in the cutthroat business world, he had gone out of his way to ensure that HydroGen was built on a solid foundation of innovation and integrity. He hadn't borrowed anyone else's research or capitalized on pre-existing work. Maybe he had hurt some feelings when he originally left the reservation, creating the impression of discarding his heritage, but his culture had roots in directnes
s. Whatever his blood on the Rez believed, they made no bones about sharing it. Besides, they had barely been a year into their salmon program when the first corpse had been theoretically interred.

  "You're a wealthy man, Mr. Dodge," Carver said. "You had a good life in Washington. Why did you come back...here?" The agent gestured to the room around him.

  "My father died," Kajika said. "I already told you."

  "Car accident. I know."

  "So why are you asking me again?"

  The silence was poignant.

  "You don't think...?" Kajika whispered.

  "Why did you come back?" Carver asked again.

  "Because it's my duty as a son to settle my father's affairs, to make sure my mother is cared for in the manner in which she's accustomed. Because I felt guilty that I wasn't here, that I never made things right with my father. That maybe it wasn't too late to be the man he hoped I would be."

  "You never considered staying in Seattle?"

  "Not for a second," Kajika whispered.

  "Tell me about the accident."

  Kajika smiled faintly and looked around the room. They were all watching him, waiting for him to make the connection they had all already made, or perhaps they knew he had and were waiting for him to accept it. Their expressions were not without compassion, especially the woman, whose eyes shimmered.

  "My father held a seat on the tribal council. They were meeting to discuss land usage or a viaduct off the Little Colorado or something that meant the future to him and nothing to me. He stormed out, and to this day I don't know whether he was for or against whatever they were debating, but knowing how stubborn my father was, I don't think it really mattered. He was walking home. My father only drove if he was hauling more than he could physically carry. He was just walking like he always did. Just walking..."