by Jack Kerley
It hadn’t escaped me that Fossie seemed to know the senator on a first-name basis. Not what I’d expect from a guy who presented himself as a part-time purveyor of vitamins and herbs and low-fat diets.
“So why did Custis visit?”
“The only way he stayed in office was the votes provided by Richard’s flock of robots. When the great Richard Scaler said, ‘Vote for my buddy Hampton Custis,’ they voted in lockstep. Patti probably told Hampton if he stopped fucking her, she’d tell Richard he was fucking her.” Fossie gurgled with mirth.
“I take it Scaler didn’t know of the affair?”
“If he knew, Richard was probably happy it kept her away from him.”
I said, “You must have been close to hear all this, Doctor.”
“I’ve known Patti for decades.”
Decades? I filed that fact alongside the first-name familiarity with the senator.
“No, I mean today, Mr Fossie. To hear everything that was happening between the pair.”
Fossie frowned through the substances in his head. “Oh. I was working on her meds.”
“Medicines?”
“Uh, vitamins. She needed them to help her through what she said would be a busy day. She said she wanted her head to sparkle. I did an injection, headed downstairs. I stopped to fix a drink and get a few sparklies in my own head. A few minutes later the front door opened. I…” he paused, mouth open, like his engine was sputtering. It seemed my nutritionist had other medications in his bag.
“Keep going, Mr Fossie.”
“I heard Hampton call for Patti and I hid in the gym, figuring they’d go upstairs and knock out a quick fuck and I could leave. I heard talk, then angry talk, then it turned real bad: Patti yelling and breaking things. Hampton was yelling, too, like with Richard gone he was telling her how it really was. Then I heard the…” he blew out a long breath.
“Boom,” I finished.
“Hampton started screaming like nothing I’ve ever heard. It was like he was being eaten alive. I was too terrified to move.”
Fossie made a noise like a deflating cushion. I looked at Harry, then at the closed door at the top of the stairs.
Harry said, “You want to wait for a team?”
“Miz Scaler and I have a history,” I said. “Watch my back.”
I climbed the stairs, stood to the side of the door. Knocked gently. “Mrs Scaler? Patricia? It’s Detective Ryder.”
“It’s not a good time, sir.” Her voice sounded distracted, as if she was nearing deadline on a project and I was interrupting.
“I need to come in, ma’am. Are you decent?”
“I’m a beautiful and desirous woman.”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re a lovely woman. May I come in?”
“Oh, I suppose.”
I said, “You don’t have a gun or anything, do you?”
“I put it back in the locker. I was finished with it.”
I took a deep breath and pushed open the door to see Patricia Scaler’s slender back across the wide room. She was looking out the window, framed in light, her black spaghetti-strap dress cut low and hemmed high. It was an amazing body for a woman nearing fifty. She wore sling-back high heels. Scarlet smudges had followed her across the carpet.
I moved closer. Her hands were touching at her face.
“Ma’am? Are you all right?”
She made a mewing sound and I advanced another few steps, eyes adjusting to the light. Her hand was at her face, elbow jerking back and forth, like a fiddler.
Or a butcher cutting meat.
She turned and stopped my heart. The right side of her face was missing. She threw something my way. It landed on the carpet at my feet. A rag of severed flesh.
“I won’t be needing that any more,” she said, her open teeth and gums glistening with blood, one eye revealed almost fully. “I’m getting a new one.”
She started to laugh, a wet sound.
Tom Mason rolled up at the scene. He’d been working the political side, keeping the brass clued in, getting timelines down. Mrs Scaler had been transported to the hospital forty minutes ago. There were no flashing lights on the vehicles out front, kept to a minimum while things were being sorted out.
Tom held his hat low in respect as the senator’s body was rolled out the door on a gurney. He turned back to us.
“The senator’s aides say he received a call two hours back, looked frightened, jumped in his car.”
“How’s Mrs Scaler?” I asked. “Have you heard?”
Tom shot a glance at his watch. “Sedated. She was screaming when she arrived at the hospital, trying to tear the rest of her face off. A shrink at the hospital thinks she’s gone fully round the bend.”
“She’s always been at the turn in the bend, Tom,” I said, unable to shake the image of Patti Scaler turning to me with half a face. “Today she had the current behind her.”
Tom shot a look at the techs, busy photo-graphing and cataloging the bizarre scene. He took my elbow and pulled me to a corner.
“What’s behind all this, Carson? Scaler. Tutweiler. Meltzer. A US senator, for crying out loud. What’s going on?”
I could only offer my shaking head as an answer.
“I have no idea, Tom. We’re sure it started in the way-back. Unfortunately, we may have run out of people who can tell us anything.”
Tom sighed, nodded, walked over to Clair. She was directing her tech staff, displaying her typical calm in the middle of chaos. Watching Clair’s serene command I felt a convergence of emotions, then a sense of relaxation; strange feelings to have arise in that troubled house.
“Hello?” said a voice from behind me.
I turned to the open front door and saw a small man in his sixties, suited, his sharp face like an anxious hawk. A neighbor, I thought, drawn by the commotion.
“Yes, sir?” I said.
“I wanted to speak to Richard Scaler. I work for him.”
The man looked guileless, as if he really expected the Reverend. I said, “You haven’t been watching the news, I take it?”
“I’ve been out of the country. Often in isolated places. I’m not big on news anyway.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name is Dr Kurt Matthias. I’ve been doing research for Reverend Scaler.”
I saw a name scrawled on a property transfer. Kurt…Not Matthews, Masters, Mathers… Matthias. Was this also the man who’d swabbed the Q-tip through Shanelle’s mouth?
My heart started beating hard against my ribs. I gestured for him to step over the threshold, enter.
I said, “What’s your connection to a house below Coden, Doctor? A place near the Gulf in an abandoned shrimping village. There is a connection, right?”
A sharp frown. “Excuse me, but how do you know about –”
“Please answer my question, sir.”
“I used the Reverend’s money to purchase the property. I needed an isolated place to house a young couple and their child until finding better accommodations in the city.”
Dr Matthias’s eyes strayed to the threshold of the study, saw the dark swashes of red.
“Something terrible has happened, hasn’t it?” he said.
Chapter 47
Harry and I took Matthias to a sunroom at the back of the house, far from the din of the investigation. It was bright and cheerful and at odds with everything the house had come to represent. We told Matthias we suspected his young couple – Anak and Rebecca – were dead, but were clinging to hope that the child had survived.
The news hit him like a falling wall. Matthias needed several moments to gather himself, seeming to drag his emotions into a box, storing them for later. He switched into a scientific mode, calm and clinical. He sat in a chair beside a potted fern, tented his fingers beneath his lips, and frowned.
I said, “The residents of that house, Doctor…what was so special about them?”
“Anak and Rebecca? They were simply two young people who, by nothing more than c
hance, carried a wide variety of genetic material from around the world.”
“What were you using them for?” Harry said.
“Study. Trying to advance a theory.”
“Some people think you were playing God,” I said. “Breeding people. Creating Frankensteins. What’s your answer to that?”
Matthias looked at me like I had started clucking like a chicken.
“Breeding? Playing God? Making Frankensteins? My God, man, what are you talking about?”
“Cloning a new race,” I said, stealing from Spider’s addled jargon. “Creating super-humans.”
Matthias closed his eyes and his face fell into his hands. He muttered about ignorance. He stood wearily, his shoulders slumped, and turned to Harry.
“You know people with sickle-cell anemia, Detective. Is that not so?”
“I do.”
“All are of African-American descent, right?”
Harry nodded.
“People of Jewish descent are prone to Tay-Sachs disease. Many Asians have difficulty digesting milk. Some populations have long life spans. Others are prone to schizophrenia. Some resist cardiomyopathy better than others. Every disparate population has a multiplicity of positive and negative genetic dispositions. I’m talking statistics, here. The actual differences are miniscule.”
Harry said, “What’s this have to do with…”
“Hear me out. What would happen if you ate little more than fatty meat, with vegetables almost unheard-of in your diet?”
“My arteries would clog and I’d tip over dead.”
“The Inuit and Laplanders eat vast amounts of meat and blubber and suffer no deleterious effects. Why?”
Harry said, “It’s not something I think about.”
“It’s what I’ve been thinking about all my life,” Matthias said. “I developed a theory, and I’m doing research. That’s all.”
“Further research into what?”
“Into where the finger of God is pushing us.”
“Pardon?” Harry said. “The finger of God?”
“Reverend Scaler preferred that phrase, which was fine. I lean toward a more historical perspective.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
Matthias walked across the room to a spreading areca palm. He touched the fronds, as if inspecting them.
“Near its beginning, the human race split into various tribes and went separate ways, geographically speaking. Over time, genetic positives and negatives arose in these separate populations. When disparate populations combine, it appears that the remediating, or, if you wish, the good genes, eventually triumph over the misfires.” He paused, showed a sad smile. “We are, in many ways, the cure for what ails us.”
“You’re saying that intermingling of these genetic pools results in…”
“Superior resistance to disease, which translates to better health and longer lives. Higher overall intelligence might result, and perhaps even more benefits. With the world shrinking, these tribes are coming together. Take a genetic union – marriage – between European and African genes; rare in this country until recently. But now?”
I shrugged. “No big deal, especially to younger folks.”
“The same applies on the West Coast, but, from a statistical point of view, more Asian genes are entering the gene-pool stew. A person from Japan or China might marry a person with a black father and a white mother. Or someone from Mexico or Central America. The offspring move to Minneapolis, marry Swedish-Germans. In human genetics, this is climbing toward betterment.”
I thought of a line from the poet Theodore Roethke about a lowly worm making its way up a winding staircase. Had Roethke been analogizing Humankind crawling up the spiraling staircase of DNA?
I said, “But there’s still much more to combine, right?”
“Polynesian genes, genotypes from the Indian subcontinent, Siberia, tribes along the Amazon, genes from peoples in Andean countries…the list goes on and on.”
“Tell me more about the couple and their child,” Harry said.
“I discovered them in Vancouver, a wide-stanced pair, genetically speaking. She’s Jewish and Oriental with significant ties to South American genetics. His lineage is Inuit and Scandinavian, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan African just at the parent level. The child is a rainbow of genetic input.”
“You discovered this by cruising for hookers?” Harry asked.
Matthias sighed. “I seek out all manner of people for genetic samples. I swab mouths for DNA. It’s one metric to determine rapidity of genetic mingling. Port-city prostitutes mingle more widely than most.”
“Sailors from everywhere.”
“I saw Anak and Rebecca at a park, with the child. They looked interesting so I swabbed. When testing revealed the breadth of their genetic experience, I paid them to come here. I plan to put them to work in my new genetics lab. It was Reverend Scaler’s suggestion to keep the couple isolated for a few weeks.”
Just in case someone pried into the story before he told it his way, I figured.
“New lab in Mobile?”
“Part of a huge grant from Reverend Scaler – his generosity has been boundless. He called his sponsorship of my work part of his penance. I’d do the research and he’d explain it to people.”
“That project’s dead now, I take it?”
“Goodness, no. The money is in place. We met quite privately at an attorney’s office for the arrangements some weeks back. Not the usual attorney, I gathered, from all the secrecy.”
Carleton was cut out. Scaler was stepping fully away from his past. Carleton had felt Scaler slipping away, had high anxiety at losing a major client.
“How did you hook up with Richard Scaler?” I asked.
Matthias looked uncomfortable, cleared his throat. “Eight years back I did prototype research. I suggested if pure African genetics were bred out of existence, it would be a good thing. I was leading to the positives of broader genetic stances and could have said the same about Caucasians, Asians, Australian Aborigines…” Matthias looked disgusted and threw his hands in the air.
“You stirred up a hornet’s nest,” Harry said.
“People concentrated on the math, ignored the bottom line: When races disappear into one all-consuming genetic pool, we’re an improved evolutionary product. Instead, I got an immediate reputation as a racist, sentences from my paper used out of context. Drooling white-supremacist morons began quoting me.”
“Scaler called you to confirm his views on racial superiority?”
“Obviously his intent, to affirm life-long tenets. I said my research was in a final phase, that I’d send synopses in layman’s language. He asked for the scientific research as well.”
“What was his initial response to your research, given that it was the opposite of what he’d expected?”
“His first instinct was falling into rhetorical evasions, rationalizations, denials.”
“Just what I’d expect,” I said.
“But in the end, Detective, Richard was smart enough to realize he was wrong. I think he found great strength in order to face the mirror and declare himself incorrect. Mr Scaler was far smarter than people gave him credit for, by the way. A more enlightened upbringing might have given us a scientist.”
I looked at Harry. He’d suspected Scaler had more depth than the man presented. I’d viewed the Reverend almost as simplistically as Scaler had viewed the world for most of his life.
Matthias said, “My travels and sampling show a world moving rather well toward assimilation, my terms. Richard spoke of the finger of God. Of lost tribes gathering. To each his own.”
“How long will this assimilation take, Doctor?” Harry said.
“At current rates of genetic transfer? Thirty or forty generations. A thousand years or so.”
“Answer me this, Doc,” Harry said. “The child. Is she different than the rest of us?”
Matthias smiled. “The child is a single instance, and statistically insignifi
cant, but I hope to find her discrete genetic strains have canceled certain harmful genes in favor of positive ones. She should be a rather healthy child. That’s about all.”
I thought of all the doctors and nurses amazed by Noelle’s resistance to infection. Then I thought of Mr Mix-up, Ms Best’s poor doomed pooch.
I said, “Noelle’s as healthy as a mongrel dog.”
“Odd analogy,” Matthias said. “But it has merit.”
We arranged to meet with Matthias in the morning when things were less chaotic. Harry and I returned to the car. He put the car in gear and pulled away, shaking his head in disbelief.
“It appears that instead of fighting, your average warring tribes should be…”
I held up my hands, making an O with my left thumb and forefinger, poking through with my right forefinger.
“Make Love, Not War,” I said. “The hippies were right.”
“Imagine what Meltzer thought when he heard of Matthias’s research via the ever-vigilant Patricia Scaler.”
“Race mixing is good? In an eye-blink, everything the white supremacists ever stood for is wrong. It would cost him adoration. He didn’t give a damn about anything but the symbolic kid. So he went after her. Twice.”
Harry thought about my words for a couple of miles.
“It doesn’t fit, Carson. Why not use Douthitt again? He hadn’t been compromised by Bailes. Why didn’t Meltzer keep using Douthitt as his eyes in the hospital?”
I shook my head, perplexed. Harry drove a mile. I saw his hand tighten on the wheel. “Jesus, Carson, what if two camps were trying to grab Noelle?”
My turn to think away a couple of miles. Two separate entities trying to grab Noelle explained a lot.
“I like it,” I said. “It works.”
“What we do know is that white-power bikers are in the mix, and that leads to Meltzer and Baker. Let’s aim a hard eye that direction.”
Chapter 48
Thirty minutes later we were a half-block away from Baker’s house in a 1991 Dodge Caravan with rust holes in the paint, giving it a speckled look. The left front tire was flat. The seats had springs poking through.