“I called the head nurse on duty. She brought Alice Beaumont a coffee around four and they spoke for over twenty minutes. There’s no way she could’ve made it up here, tasered the park ranger, tasered Dana, and attacked me by four-thirty.”
Sayer reached for the table to lean against, exhaustion and confusion knocking her off-kilter. “But we know for sure that Beaumont is Cricket, and we got Cricket’s DNA off a sample that you scraped off her as she attacked you. Literally her blood and skin.”
“We’re sure it’s real blood?” Max asked.
“Yes, dammit. They double-check that now,” Sayer said.
“So, maybe someone planted her blood to frame her?” Max offered.
“How? There’s no way they could’ve counted on planting blood under Ezra’s nails. If you want to frame Beaumont, why not plant it somewhere less risky? That just doesn’t make sense. Hang on.”
Sayer dialed the hospital. “I need someone to confirm signs of an existing injury on Alice Beaumont. She should have scratch marks along one of her lower legs.”
The doctor put her on hold for a long moment before returning. “Sorry, Agent Altair, we’re not seeing any leg scratches on Alice Beaumont.”
Sayer hung up with a sick knot in her stomach.
They were missing something big. And Sam was still out there somewhere.
“Okay, time to brainstorm our way out of this. We know based on facial recognition that Alice Beaumont is Cricket Nelson. We know based on DNA evidence from Ezra’s nails that Cricket Nelson was here this morning attacking Ezra. And now we have an eyewitness that places her somewhere else at the same time. How is it possible that her DNA was here, but she wasn’t?” Sayer asked.
No one said anything.
“Fuck,” Sayer said. “Any ideas?”
“No, but I also got a report from Quantico,” Ezra said. “They were able to lift some stuff from the journal Dana’s team found in the cave. I was so busy following up on the whole DNA thing I haven’t had a chance to look that over yet. Maybe there’s something there?”
“Fine, lets see what it says,” Sayer snapped.
“Okay, let me see. Looks like most of the ink was too blurred, so they were only able to lift some snippets from the journal. The first fragment they found is just a date. February 1987.” Ezra looked up, calculating in his head. “That’s when Kyle was born.”
He looked back down at the snippets from the journal. “What the hell,” he whispered as he began to read.
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
Hannah Valdez sat wide awake in her hospital bed. Fear held her in its grip. All she could think of was Sam down in the pit. Was her daughter terrified? Was she crying out for her mommy and wondering why Mommy wasn’t there?
The hospital was quiet except for soft voices and shuffling feet occasionally moving down the hallway past her room. Zoe had agreed to go home and get a few hours of sleep with Hannah’s promise that she would do the same, but Hannah knew she would never be able to fall asleep.
She looked down at her wife’s cell phone in her hand. Zoe had left it in case she wanted to play a silly game to take her mind off everything. But that was a ridiculous thought. How could she ignore the dread consuming her? Her daughter had been kidnapped by a monster.
Hannah jumped when the old-fashioned phone on her bedside table chirped with a brisk ring.
Something about the ringing made her heart skip a beat.
The phone chirped again.
Hannah lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Are you alone, Hannah?”
She recognized the voice from the pit.
“Yes,” she hissed. “What have you done with Sam?”
She looked at the closed door. Two uniformed officers sat just outside. Should she get them?
“Don’t even think about telling anyone I’m on the phone … or Sam will die. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Hannah managed to say softly despite her need to scream. “I understand.”
“Good. You know that I keep my promises, correct?”
“I do.”
“Very good. Then you have a choice. You can stay there, in which case I will kill Sam now. Or you can come back to the pit and finish what you started. If you come with me, there’s at least a chance you can save her.…”
Tears pressed from her eyes as Hannah whispered, “What do you want me to do?”
SOUTHERN RANGER STATION, SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, VA
“Okay, here’s the first journal entry.” Ezra read aloud, “There’s something wrong with him but no one will tell me what it is. My body is buzzing with some strange power! Perhaps I should just storm the hospital and take Kyle home.…”
“Didn’t Kyle say that he was in and out of the hospital as an infant?” Max asked.
“He did. And if this journal was written by his mom, that would make Mrs. Nelson our Ekhidna,” Sayer said. “Keep going, Ez.”
“Yeah. Listen to this. He’s recovering … some stuff too blurry to read … they want to hurt him.… I’m his mother. I know what he needs. They are just jealous and want to keep his special power for themselves. If I have to kill to protect … That’s it for that entry.” Ezra scrolled down.
“She thought Kyle had some kind of special power and that people were trying to hurt him?” Max asked. “That sounds pretty delusional to me.”
“Maybe postpartum psychosis?” Dana asked. “I mean, paranoia, self-aggrandizing delusions…”
“Sure sounds like it could be. Keep going, Ezra.”
“Okay, it skips way ahead to 1989. I’ve figured out how to fool them. I can wear my maiden mask, convince everyone that I am nothing but a meek housewife. They can never know how powerful we are or they will come to kill us all.”
“Holy shit,” Max said. “So, she decided to pretend to be some kind of perfect housewife … which explains why my impression of her was PTA mom.”
“Right,” Sayer said. “Ekhidna was half serpent but also half fair maiden. So she was pretending to be exactly that.”
“That entry is two years after Kyle was born. Could postpartum psychosis last that long?” Ezra asked.
Dana shrugged. “Not on its own, but, untreated, it could definitely trigger a larger psychotic episode. Especially in someone with a history of psychosis.”
“Since she was murdered, I didn’t seriously consider the idea that Mrs. Nelson could be our original killer. Ezra, do we have any background on her?”
“Give me a sec.” His hands flew. “Uh, let me see … Abigail Nelson went to college at the University of Florida. Here we go! While there, she was temporarily remanded to a mental health facility for her own protection. I don’t know what the details are, but she was released a week later and there’s no other record of anything else. Oh! She was a classics major … with a focus on Greek mythology. And she spent a semester in Greece!”
“Which is why her psychotic delusions would’ve taken on the form of Ekhidna,” Sayer said.
“And the trip to Greece is probably where she got the kopis,” Dana added.
“So,” Sayer said, “her son is sick and she is suffering from postpartum psychosis. She becomes convinced people are trying to hurt him and that it’s her job to protect Kyle. Okay.…”
“Where is Mr. Nelson during all this?” Max asked.
“I imagine he had no idea how far off the rails she was. She even said she was wearing her maiden mask. Maybe she managed to fool Kyle and his dad along with everyone else. Or maybe, as long as she was putting up a good front, he didn’t really care?”
Ezra let out a disgusted sound. “You think he let his poor wife spiral into psychosis rather than get her help?”
“Who knows?”
“Ugh, okay, the next entry has a date in 1996. The beginning of the sentence is illegible something … has angered them and they are punishing us with this flood. If the people here realize that he’s to blame, they will want to kill him. We are all in danger now
.… Sacrifice to appease.…”
“Hey, Max, remember how Piper mentioned a flood in ’96?” Sayer asked.
“Yeah, the whole valley flooded.”
“Sounds like that might have been the trigger for the first murder. She thought it was caused by angry gods or something and that she needed to make a sacrifice to appease them.… Keep going.”
“Only two readable fragments left.” Ezra continued to read, “… mask is so effective, he suspected nothing when I asked for help back at my car. He saw me as nothing more than a middle-aged housewife with car trouble. The taser worked well to subdue him. I’ll put him in the shed until he’s weak with hunger. Getting him to the pit for the ritual should be easy.”
Dana looked slightly sick. “That is horrific. But this sure sounds like confirmation that she was the original killer.”
Sayer let out a grunt of agreement.
“Last entry.” Ezra swallowed hard. “How beautiful he was, bleating like a lamb as I bound him. He wriggled and bucked but was too weak to escape. The blade was so sharp it easily slid across his throat. The blood felt so warm I had to take a drink straight from his neck. So full of power. Cricket cried and fought the feeding, but I convinced her.…” Ezra looked up at the team. “That’s all the lab could get from the journal.”
“Jesus Mother Mary,” Max whispered.
“Wow,” Ezra said. “She made Cricket watch her murder someone and then forced her to drink his blood?”
They all stared at the computer as though the words on the screen were leaking evil into the room.
Finally Max spoke up. “That’s messed up and all, but knowing that Mrs. Nelson was the original killer doesn’t help us explain how Cricket’s DNA showed up here while she was at the hospital. Or what the hell Piper has to do with any of this. Or where Kyle and Sam are now.”
Sayer closed her eyes. Max was right.
She let her thoughts unfurl, and an idea began to form along the edges of her mind. Just a faint glimmer of a thought, like an amorphous blob on the periphery of her consciousness.
“You all need to give me a minute to think.” She began pacing, rubbing her thumb against her worry beads, unable to hold her body still. Thoughts buzzed along her limbs, up her neck, crackling inside her skull like an electric current.
Max opened his mouth to say something but stopped himself, giving Sayer some space to think.
Feeling penned in by the small conference room, she went out into the hall so she could take long fast strides all the way to the entry and back.
She thought about the nightmarish implications of the journal.
Subject 037 suggesting she apply her own research on successful psychopaths to everyone who inserted themselves into the investigation.
The DNA results placing Cricket in two places at once.
Cricket, all grown up, donating her blood to a bone marrow transplant list and volunteering at the Children’s Hospital cancer ward.
Kyle horribly sick as an infant.
His mash-up drawings.
Mrs. Nelson convinced she was Ekhidna, mother of monsters.
The list of Ekhidna’s children that Adi had just sent.
Adi translating the second word on the stone table as mirage.
As she paced, a dark certainty blossomed in Sayer’s gut like a wraith.
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
Hannah Valdez stared down at the phone, unable to process everything.
Sneak out? Return to the pit?
Should she call Sayer?
But they had no idea where Sam even was. And doing that could get Sam killed.
She got up from the hospital bed with a groan. Her broken finger was set in a splint. Her shoulder was held against her body in a sling, her sliced palm wrapped with clean gauze.
Hannah could feel none of those injuries as she stood beside her bed. She was beyond simple pain.
She had no choice.
She quietly shoved pillows into a body shape and pulled the covers over the mound.
He’d said to make sure no one followed.
How to get past the two officers at her door?
Hannah walked over to the window. Second story. But she had seen a fire ladder stored in a cabinet in the bathroom.
Not giving herself time to think, she scrawled Zoe a quick note and then tucked the cell phone into the band of her underwear.
As quietly as she could, she slid open the window and lowered the clunky ladder.
With breath held, Hannah lowered herself down in the light rain.
SOUTHERN RANGER STATION, SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK, VA
Sayer made three more circuits pacing along the hallway before she strode back to the head of the table. Max, Ezra, and Dana waited with anxious expressions.
She looked back, heart pounding. “Chimera,” she half whispered.
“What?” Ezra said.
“When Hannah was in the pit, she saw two words carved around the stone table there. One said Ekhidna. The second one Adi translated as mirage. But mirage can also be translated as chimera.”
“Like the Greek monster with a lion head, goat body, and serpent tail?” Max asked.
“Exactly, though chimera can actually be used to describe any creature with parts from multiple animals.”
Max leaned back in his chair, confusion on his face. “Just like Kyle’s mash-up drawings as a kid. Those were all chimeras?”
“Exactly right. And that explains how Cricket’s blood could show up somewhere she wasn’t.…”
“Of course!” Dana said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Ezra looked back and forth between Sayer and Dana.
“I think Kyle Nelson is a chimera.” As Sayer said it out loud she became even more certain.
“You think Kyle is a mythological monster?” Ezra said gently.
“No.” Sayer shot him a look. “I think he’s what’s called a genetic chimera.”
“Back up, please. A genetic chimera?” Max asked.
Sayer fidgeted with her worry beads to calm her excitement. “We like to imagine that our DNA is stable and unique to each individual. But in reality, a significant percentage of the population is what’s called a genetic chimera.”
“Right, I’ve heard of that. It’s when a single person has two different sets of genes,” Max said.
“Exactly. Some people become genetic chimeras in the womb, but mothers also absorb DNA from their infant in utero, and there are medical procedures that can cause a person’s DNA to mix. For example, after a bone marrow transplant, the host’s DNA is often completely replaced by the donor’s DNA.”
“So the person who got the bone marrow transplant will change their actual DNA?” Max asked.
“Yes. It’s also possible that a person can end up having different parts of their body display completely different DNA. A chimera’s blood and skin can have one set of DNA while their organs and saliva might have an entirely different genetic code.” Dana bounced on her feet with excitement.
“There’s a really famous case of a woman who took a DNA test for a paternity lawsuit,” Sayer said. “The results showed that the woman wasn’t actually the mother of her three children. But of course she knew that was impossible, since she had physically given birth to them. She was charged with fraud and it wasn’t until they did an actual DNA test of her uterus that they realized she was a genetic chimera. So her blood wasn’t a DNA match to her own children. But her uterus did match, because her uterus was made up of entirely different cells.”
“Other than him drawing chimeras as a kid, what makes you think Kyle is a genetic chimera?” Ezra asked.
“We know Kyle was very sick as a child. His mother’s delusions about being Ekhidna began while he was in the hospital. We’ve also got evidence that Cricket has some kind of connection to a bone marrow transplant since she’s on the donor list. One of the signs of a successful marrow transplant is the host becoming a full-blood chimera. Which means that the hos
t’s blood cells are completely replaced by the donor’s DNA. They use that exact terminology in hospitals. If Kyle needed a bone marrow transplant, the doctors would have all wanted Kyle to become a chimera. And I’ll give you one guess which Greek monster was Ekhidna’s child.…”
“Chimera! So that’s what triggered her delusion that she was Chimera’s mother,” Max said.
“And, when someone becomes a blood chimera after a bone marrow transplant, their blood would give a positive DNA match to whoever donated the bone marrow,” Dana said.
“Exactly!” Sayer continued, “And the most common bone marrow donor match is a full sibling.…”
“So, if Kyle needed a bone marrow transplant, Cricket would’ve been the most likely donor,” Max said, finishing her thought.
“Exactly,” Sayer repeated. “And if Kyle got a bone marrow transplant from Cricket…” Sayer let that comment hang.
“Then, if we tested Kyle’s blood, the DNA would come back as a match to Cricket?” Ezra asked. “That is wild!”
“And I’m guessing his skin would also match Cricket’s DNA. Which explains how her DNA showed up under your nails. It wasn’t Cricket who attacked us, it was Kyle,” Max said, voice rising.
“I think he must’ve broken in to take his mom’s skeleton back,” Sayer said.
“Hang on,” Ezra said. “Kyle’s a law enforcement officer. We’ve got his DNA on file.”
“From a cheek swab.” Dana flashed her narrow pixie smile. “Unlike blood, DNA in saliva can remain the host’s original DNA. His saliva matches his own DNA, his blood and skin matches Cricket’s.”
Sayer could feel all of the strands of evidence twining together into a coherent picture. She closed her eyes, letting the pieces fall into place. The image finally clarified and Sayer could see how everything fit together. “Kyle is our UNSUB. And has been all along.”
“Uh, then who tried to kill Kyle at the archives? Obviously he didn’t shoot himself,” Ezra said.
“We’ve been assuming that our attackers were the same person, but I think it was actually Cricket who shot Kyle—”
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