J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01

by And Then She Was Gone

  I hit the timing just perfect—one small triumph at the end of a day’s worth of frustrations. The sky was clear, and the City looked close enough to tap on the nose. The Golden Gate bridge glowed like it had decided, just for a few minutes, to catch on fire and guide the evening ships into port.

  The forty seconds at the top of the grade on 24 was worth all the mindless driving and running around the day had put me through.

  I pulled into the parking lot of the Italianate Victorian where I kept my office. The front door was still open—Angie, my downstairs neighbor, was working late, judging by the light under her door.

  Slipping up the stairs without her hearing me was its own artform—if she hijacked me I’d get a detailed report of everyone’s comings and goings for the last three days.

  A pretty good graphic designer, she fancied herself a budding Holmes, and thought my work must be unbearably sexy. Not me, mind you—just the work. She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t perpetually decked out like James Bond and seducing all my clients.

  Makes me wish I was still a cop. Nobody thought police work was sexy. In some ways it’s easier to get spit on by protesters than it is to have the same people sucking up to you because they just know you’ve got the inside dope on every local secret and scandal.

  Once safely on the second floor I snuck my keys out with barely a tinkle, unlatched the door to my three-and-a-half room suite, and tiptoed inside.

  In the main office, the bit of a bay view out the window behind my desk glowed with the last of the orange fading to deep violet. I tossed my jacket onto the couch, made myself some coffee in the kitchenette, and sat down in my rickety leather office chair.

  Gravity’s website wasn’t helpful. A big splashy page, some shots of the guy spinning records at local clubs, a gallery of him at protests and rallies—establishing his street cred for his intended audience, maybe—accompanied by a few surprisingly articulate political screeds on subjects I had very little interest in.

  Not to come off as anti-intellectual or misanthropic, but you do what I do and you don’t have a lot of time for larger issues. They’re not important to the job, and the things that are take a hell of a lot of work to keep current on.

  Credit and phone records, for example. Every year the regulations change, and we’ve gotta hop from one foot to another to keep track. My subscriber database access costs me more money than I care to count—I don’t just keep my accounting sheets encrypted to protect myself against other snoops, I do it as a mental health measure. Depression is a killer.

  In this case, it didn’t do me a damn bit of good. The cell phone account was registered to Kinksters Inc., a porn company based in the city. Gravity probably did some work for them, got the phone without a credit check as a perk. Typical.

  Their offices wouldn’t be open until Monday, so I set a tickler on my phone. If I was still on the case Monday, I’d be driving into the city to grease a few palms.

  I looked at the pendulum clock on my wall. Eleven PM. Other things being equal I’d be tempted to go out for a late night showing of something or other in Berkeley, but I needed to be up early enough tomorrow to make the symposium at Stanford.

  Five minutes to make a rogue’s gallery of all the players on the field, and then half an hour reconciling all my notes from this evening with the ones from this morning while it was all fresh in my mind.

  Then there was Nya’s phone—useless until I could charge it—and her flash cards. I took a quick look, but they were all vids. At the rate this case was going, they’d all be porn vids, and I really didn’t want to deal with that kind of nonsense right now. Into the floor with them, next to the crypto drive from earlier.

  I closed the laptop lid. One day done.

  The third room in my suite was technically the file room—and yeah, I had the backup drives and the paper files in there—but it mostly served as my crash space. It wasn’t legal, but I wasn’t about to drive all the way out to Stockton and my studio apartment when there was a case going on—particularly when I had that apartment sublet to my sister’s kid for the summer.

  Bed time. I never have to worry about insomnia when I’ve got a case. It unwinds the mind. Nice change from my regular habit of sneaking up on the sun from behind.

  I locked up, flomped down, and was asleep within five minutes, with visions of strange-faced girls dancing in my head.

  10:30 AM, Sunday

  The James H. Clark Center at Stanford claims to be one of the largest glass buildings in the entire world—it’s certainly one of the more shocking pieces of architecture I’ve ever seen. Four stories tall, big as a full city block, it houses labs, restaurants, a hotel, and god knows what else. The satellite photos make it look like something out of a sex-ed handbook drawn by that guy that does Dilbert.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Crossing the green where the protestors roamed—what few of them there were—I found the place hopping with grad students who were all happy to give me directions to the symposium in terms like: “Oh, sure, go in through the vagina. Turn right at the cervix when you get to the end of the grass to pick up your passes at the table inside. Then go up into the uterus and down the staircase to the conference room…”

  You get the idea.

  From inside the vagina, though, the place looked like a shopping mall from a science fiction film. Huge, completely immersive. Twenty steps in and I just about forgot the rest of the world existed.

  I had to wait twenty minutes in line to get passes at the table—and then had to harangue my ass off to avoid getting kicked out on my ear. Trust someone working for scientists to be skeptical of the oldest cover story in the book.

  “I’m sorry Mister…”

  “Lantham.” I showed her my Chronicle ID again—provided for me free of charge by a lovely woman in the Chronicle’s Human Resources department who thinks I look like her son.

  “Lantham, right. I’m sorry, but with the threat of violence against some of the speakers, we can’t let anybody in who doesn’t already hold a conference pass.”

  “Please, Miss,” I made a show of squinting over my false glasses at her name tag, “Milton, if I don’t get in there, the Chron’s got no story, and I’ve got no job. You can call up my manager if you like.”

  “Excuse me, sir?” A wild-haired Indian guy with a British accent behind me—looked vaguely familiar. I’d probably seen him on PBS at one point. “Would you mind terribly hurrying up? You’re holding up the line.”

  “Moving as fast as I can.”

  “Thank you very much.” He returned his attention to his companion and started using words like ‘corpus callosum’ and ‘phantom pain.’

  “Miss Milton, do you have a supervisor I might speak to?”

  “Be my guest.” She threw her hands up and swung them both over to a booth marked “Security.”

  “Thanks.”

  The head of security was much more helpful. A retired street cop, when I showed her my retirement shield she treated me like family—in the metaphorical sense. If she’d treated me like real family, she’d have thrown me out on the street and followed me with dishes and screaming, but that’s a whole other story. Professional courtesy among cops, when it works, is better than any so-called family I’ve ever run in to.

  The conference room must’ve been the biggest one in the complex. Easily four hundred people between the ones in the cushy seats and the schleps like me who got standing room only because we didn’t get into the room early enough.

  The speaker I failed to interrupt—good job the doors were well lubricated—was talking about genetically-tailored medicines for cancer treatments, something I’d heard enough about on the news that I wasn’t completely lost.

  The kind of stuff she was talking about was hard to swallow—cancer drugs customized to every patient? Please. But she claimed she was reporting on research, not making prognostications.

  I wasn’t actually intending to pay attention, but her manner was electric, an
d I found myself completely sucked in to her story of molecules and cells and miracle healing. I probably retained about 3% of it, and I figured I’d never have a use for even that.

  As she was wrapping it up I looked around the room for Doctor Sternwood, but if he was here, probably all I’d be able to see was the back of his head anyway. The only good pic I had of him was the one in the program, and judging by the style of tie it was at least fifteen years out of date.

  Lunch break gave my brain a rest, but did nothing to further my goals. Sternwood wasn’t mixing with the hoi polloi for lunch, and no one I talked to had seen him yet today.

  I wound up buying a smoothie at the overpriced Nexus cafe on the grounds that the heat was making me more thirsty than hungry, tried and failed to engage in any fruitful conversations, and managed to return to the lecture hall in time to catch the last available nosebleed seat.

  For this guy, they lowered the lights. A balding British fellow took the podium, trumpeted his own credentials and the Salk Institute—which I could only assume was another research center—then started in on the introductions.

  “Doctor Richard Sternwood is a legend in the field of biotechnology. Co-inventor of multi-embryo IVF and pioneer of embryo testing and selection techniques still in use today. An early pioneer into hominid genomics, he’s been widely published…” and on and on. I mostly tuned out the credentials list—I didn’t come here for the institutional prick waving.

  “Thanks, Roger,” a man built like an out-of-shape basketball player with thinning hair and a dark brush-style mustache took the podium, “I’ll be quick so we can get on into the questions.

  “Outside we have a lot of ornery people, angry at science for the havoc technology wrought over the last two hundred years. Maybe that’s fair, maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

  “Dr. Wilson talked yesterday about the current biodiversity crisis, and it’s something we should all be very concerned about.

  “We’ve heard a lot of people, such as Dr. Enriquez, who are using this new field of research to address the causes of species lost through energy cultivation and increasing crop yields.

  “I’m here to talk about the other half of the equation.

  “Everybody already agrees about preserving nature through arresting and reversing the decline of endangered species. I’m going to argue that, as our civilizations allow more room for nature, we have a moral obligation to restore nature as best we can.

  “Thanks to the work of Craig Venter and others, we’re acquiring more gene sequences every year from species common and endangered. We now have the ability to create artificial life using DNA printed out on a computer and injected into pluripotent stem cells. We can use this technology to go beyond preservation and actually resurrect extinct species.”

  He clicked his remote, and a banner reading “Species Revivification” appeared behind him.

  “There are three phases to this program.” He progressively revealed each point on the slide. “First, recently extinct species and practically extinct species—both the ones that are dying off completely every day, and those such as the Barbary Lion which are extinct in the wild or don’t have a large enough surviving population to breed in a sustainable fashion.

  “Second, extinctions since the age of discovery. Species such as the Dodo, the Stephen’s Island Wren, and the Chinese River Dolphin, where preserved skeletal remains give us enough surviving DNA to work with.

  “Third, ancient species whose genetic material we have fortuitously recovered intact or nearly intact, which we know or suspect our ancestors drove to extinction. These would include Wooly Mammoths, Giant Ground Sloths, Homo neanderthalensis, et cetera.”

  He continued on with a lengthy catalog of the various species he considered good first string candidates for this program, and the potential ethical and ecological objections. To tell the truth he lost me pretty soon after that—enough words with more than four syllables and my eyes glazed over, no matter how much I tried to pay attention.

  Hell, I wasn’t here to for the lecture anyway—I was just here to hijack him after the show. I’d figured by coming early I’d get better access, and maybe pick up enough of the jargon to talk to him coherently, then grab him during lunch before he gave his talk. It was a great idea—which gives you an idea of the way my luck runs.

  Damn shame I hadn’t brought my No-Doze.

  “Now, what does my own specialty of embryology and fertility research, have to do with any of this? At the intersection of genetics and embryology we begin to learn the ideal conditions for interspecies surrogacy.” And there’s where he really lost me.

  Anyone who pays a slight bit of attention to the news or had seen that movie about the dinosaurs could follow the rest of it in broad strokes, but when he got into the artificial uteruses and showing the pictures of dissected reproductive tracts I just about lost my smoothie. Too much like that one knife murder scene I ran into my first year as a street cop.

  The talk ran the better part of an hour. The panel discussion between Sternwood and the four bioethicists ran for another ninety minutes, two of them eviscerating Sternwood’s premise, one of them extolling his virtues, and the fourth attempting—largely unsuccessfully, to broker a compromise by contending that most of the program would be impossible for at least another decade.

  Sometime during my third nap, the room erupted in applause. I’d half-slept through three or four waves of applause before—this one was sharp and spontaneous. Wishing I had brought toothpicks to prop my eyes open, I sat up and attempted to look around. The houselights were up, and the English guy was back at the podium.

  “Now, I’m sure you’re all desperate for a break, so if you’ll make your way out to the courtyard you’ll find sunshine and refreshments and probably in a moment our panelists, I think.” He lifted his eyebrows and turned off his mic, and everybody clapped again.

  As the crowd started to break up, a vaguely familiar-looking young man in a smart charcoal sportcoat and pony tail sporting a cold, angry face bounded past my seat, taking the wide stairs two at a time, and pushed through the exit. I didn’t have time to figure out why I recognized him before the exiting crowd started buffeting me every which way.

  It took me another five minutes to negotiate crowd etiquette between my seat and the aisle, and another couple moments to find my way out into the lobby.

  2:45 PM, Sunday

  Twenty minutes later, Dr. Sternwood hadn’t made it out of the auditorium yet. A peek back inside convinced me that he hadn’t snuck out a back door. He leaned against the panel table at the front, holding forth for a dozen or so excitable students and colleagues. At this rate I was going to have to hijack him.

  “No,” Sternwood shouted as I approached, “It’s impossible. You can’t get beyond third-level differentiation in vitro. The program depends on the ability to closely replicate the uterine environment. We have to start with living analogues and work backward from there.” He checked his wristwatch. “I’m sorry, but we really need to move this outside.”

  The clump didn’t really break up, but it loosened a bit so the professor could sling a satchel over his shoulder and lead the way up the stairs. I waited a quarter of the way up and fell in step as he past.

  “Doctor Sternwood,” I handed him my investigator’s license. “Clarke Lantham, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  He squinted at me like I’d just lost about thirty IQ points in his estimation. “I’m rather busy today. Call my assistant and set up an appointment.”

  “It won’t take a minute,” we hit the top of the stairs and plunged through the small lobby to the spiral staircase leading up to ground level, “Doctor Warner at Children’s Hospital Oakland sent me.”

  He grunted something that might have been “Oh.” It might also have been nausea at the thought of an old student. I gambled on the “Oh” and handed him the phone, tapping the screen to wake it up as the sunlight hit me from above.

  “What’s this?�
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  “Birth defect.”

  “That’s a barber’s problem.”

  He handed it back to me as we hit the top of the stairs in the middle of the uterus. It had been Gravity’s headshot.

  “Sorry.” I flipped to Nya’s picture and handed it back to him. “My mistake. I’m trying to find out what this is. Doctor Warner told me she hadn’t seen it before, but if it existed you’d be the man to ask about it.”

  Sternwood slowed. He held his hand up to shield the phone from the glare off the south spur of the building. I thought his eyebrows were going to crawl up to his hairline. Surprise? Apparently.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Sorry, that’s confidential.”

  Sternwood turned to the throng following us. “I’m sorry, something’s come up. I’ll be at the reception at five. We’ll continue this discussion then.”

  He didn’t talk to me all the way up to the fourth floor Starbuck’s. It seemed that it took coffee to unlock his tongue again. Guy was probably a cop in a former life.

  “So, are you working for a lawyer?” He leaned up against a frame beam on the floor to ceiling windows, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand holding the coffee. If he’d been rattled before—which I wasn’t convinced of—he wasn’t now.

  “No. Private party.”

  “And this doesn’t have anything to do with Antony’s Syndrome?”

  “What’s that?”

  That seemed to satisfy him. “That girl,” he nodded at the phone, “Has what looks like Antony’s Syndrome.”

  “Never heard of it. Rare?”

  “Very.” He took a sip of his cappuccino.

  “How do you diagnose it?”

  “Look at the face.” He shrugged and grunted.