Monster (19 page)

She lifted her eyes to Jacob, who was settling down in the grass for a much-needed rest. Then Beck scanned all around as if she might catch a glimpse, a clue, a hint of where Jacob had been.

Wherever he’d been, people had to have been nearby. It had to have been a farm, a homestead, an orchard, something owned and operated by people with roads, houses, and telephones.

She examined the apple again.
What kind was it? Was this kind of apple ripe in July, or did someone buy this at a grocery store? Where did—

She didn’t hear or see Reuben coming until his big, filthy fist appeared over her shoulder and grabbed the apple.

“Nooo!” Instinctively, in desperation, Beck clamped her hands around the apple, clutched it close to her body, and held on for sheer survival.

Reuben’s grip was like an iron vise, and Beck’s body was a feather as he flipped her on her back and tried to pry the apple from her hands. Screaming, hoping for help, wondering where in the world Rachel was, she slipped from his muddy grip, then wriggled and squirmed until she was on her belly, the apple under her.

Through the blades of grass, she saw Rachel come running, screaming and displaying, until Leah, growling and showing her teeth, tackled her to the ground and pummeled her.

Reuben clearly felt no qualms. He took Beck by the hair and yanked her off the ground. She was twisting, dangling by her scalp, which brought a roar of pain from where she’d hit her head, but she didn’t let go. Reuben groped for the apple, and Beck turned, holding it from him. She saw an opportunity and kicked him in the stomach with her good foot. The stomach didn’t even give. Reuben dropped her, then grabbed at the apple with both hands. Beck tried to run.

One step and her ankle punished her. She screamed in pain, nearly fell, then recovered her balance—

So suddenly she scarcely saw it happening, the apple was gone. She yelped at the sight of her empty hands, and her eyes went immediately to the ground, searching, searching, darting everywhere.

But Reuben had left her, and she could easily see why. He walked away with a triumphant, head-high gait, his hand to his mouth. She heard the apple’s flesh snapping and crunching deliciously between his teeth.

Leah punished Rachel with one more slap across her shoulders, and then she retreated, gathering up her thieving son.

Oh God, where are you?
Beck cried.
How could you leave me like this?

She collapsed to the ground, whimpering. It just wasn’t fair!

She heard a familiar pig grunt above her, and for a moment a huge silhouette blocked the sun. Rachel sat beside her, sniffing, panting, and moaning little sounds of comfort. Leaning so close Beck could smell her breath—a scent of pear still lingered— she gently groomed the hair that fell across Beck’s face and then, leaning back, offered Beck the only consolation she had: a cattail.

One chain saw was noisy. Four chain saws were very noisy. Four chain saws, a bulldozer, and an occasionally falling tree were more than enough to make conversation difficult. The clear-cut on Road 27 was going to be a noisy place, at least until the six-man crew quit for the day. Reed, wearing the required hard hat, felt a little silly yelling at the man who stood only a few feet away, but the new foreman, a beer-bellied man in his forties, yelled as if he was used to yelling, so yelling had to be okay.

“So where was the truck?” Reed asked.

A huge fir came down right on top of his question, and the foreman shouted, “What?”

“The truck! Where was the truck parked?”

The foreman turned his head to look toward the clearing, and that’s where most of his answer went. “Oh, I theeni was ritovther supplace!” He was pointing to the center of the clearing, now a field of stumps, slash, dozer ruts, and sawdust.

Reed pointed to where the bulldozer was piling up a fresh batch of logs. “Was that where you found him?”

The foreman pointed at the pile and hollered something. Reed caught the words “Found . . . under there . . . morning . . . flat like a bug.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Duz mega bitta sense.” The foreman finally turned and shouted in his face. “Those logs don’t dump over that way, not without some real help. But you oughta think about this: that dozer had an extra tenth of an hour on it when we got here.”

Another tree came down like an avalanche, sending a cloud of dust, pollen, and needles into the air. Reed waited for things to settle before asking, “Another tenth? Uh, could you explain that?”

The foreman turned his head to look and point at the bulldozer as it came by, the stack rumbling, the treads rattling and shrieking. “ . . . ev day we ridown thours . . .”

Reed hurried around to yell into his face. “You keep track of the hours on the bulldozer?”

The foreman looked at him as if he were dense. “Yeah, that’s what I said. Clocked it out when we left Friday night, and when we came back Monday morning, Al was squished and the dozer had an extra tenth of an hour on the clock.”

“So how do you explain that?”

The foreman shook his head. “Can’t—’cept, if I wanted to dump over a pile of logs, I’d need a bulldozer to do it.”

“You mean somebody could have purposely dumped the logs on him?”

“I dunno. None of us do.”

“Well, if they did, how’d they get him to hold still?”

The foreman arched an eyebrow under his hard hat. “So
now
the police are interested, is that it?” He signaled Reed to follow and walked toward the road where the crew’s vehicles were parked.

Reed came alongside him, relieved to get farther from the noise. When the foreman reached his old pickup, he reached through the window and brought out a jagged metal object.

It was a thermos, crushed and bearing a familiar pattern of teeth marks.

“Found that behind a stump near the truck, not too far from Allen’s hard hat. Allen always liked to come up on Sunday night and stand by his truck, have a little coffee, plan out the week. And he always wore his hard hat. Whatever got him, got him over there. He wasn’t anywhere near the logs.”

Sing was only half her calm self. “We were looking for a pattern in the animal’s behavior, but we weren’t expecting
this
!”

Cap was listening over his cell phone while seated at a computer station in the University Research Library. From this spot in the library’s Internet Center, he could see most of the main floor; if he slouched enough, the computer’s screen hid most of his face. “Why would the perp dump all those logs but leave the thermos for somebody to find?”

“He didn’t see it. It was thrown behind a stump.”

“What about fingerprints on the dozer?”

“Obliterated. The dozer was handled and operated for two days after the incident.”

“Sounds to me like you’d better be careful.”

“
You’d
better be careful!” Sing said.

He smiled wryly. “Hey, I’m at an institute of higher learning, surrounded by knowledge’s elite. What’s to be afraid of?”

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s incisive and satirical.”

She chuckled. “We’ll both be careful, won’t we?”

“We will.”

He said good-bye and folded his cell phone, feeling
careful
. Discreetly, he rotated his head and got a visual on who might be working—or lurking—at the other computer stations, and then eyed the flow of patrons on the main floor. Absolutely nothing appeared out of the ordinary, and he’d worked on this campus long enough to recognize ordinary when he saw it.

The University Research Library was a modern, inexhaustible depository of knowledge, six floors, miles of stacks, and millions of bound volumes. It was the haunt, the second home, of graduate students and doctoral candidates who created their own offices in the study booths along the walls and maintained a steady flow of traffic in the elevators. It was a quiet, somber place where great minds could meet and challenge new frontiers—as long as they did it quietly and brought in no food or drinks. There hadn’t been any murders here lately—maybe a flasher or two up in the stacks, but certainly no spies or killers.

Cap relaxed and smiled to himself.
Okay,
he thought,
I’ve been careful.

He directed his attention back to the computer screen, trying to sort out, make sense of, and interpret the “inconclusive” findings Nick had brought back from the Judy Lab—the campus nickname for the Judith Fairfax DNA Sequencing Core Facility. The files on the CD Nick had given him were burgeoned with row upon row of the same four letters—A, C, T, and G—in a myriad of combinations, all representing specific strands of DNA from the hair, stool, and saliva samples. These were the clues, the indicators that would tell him what creature the samples came from, if the specific strands could be matched with those of a known creature.

Fortunately, DNA sequencing had reached such a level of sophistication that, using Internet resources such as GenBank and the calculating power of a high-speed computer, Cap could access vast archives of known strands, request comparisons, and find a match.

At least, that was the way it was supposed to work. So far he’d found plenty of matches but plenty of confusion as well. To most anyone, including the folks at the Judy Lab, the data would have to be ruled inconclusive; Cap’s samples had to have been contaminated.

Contamination was the classic “wrench in the works” as far as DNA sequencing was concerned. Even though much of the sequencing was now automated, eliminating most of the usual errors, contamination was one determined little gremlin, constantly waiting for a chance to mess things up. The field was full of stories of misidentification due to foreign DNA somehow getting into the mix. DNA from a triceratops was once found to be 100 percent identical to DNA from a turkey, but the researchers could never be sure whether the dinosaur was really identical to turkeys or whether someone eating a turkey sandwich during the sequencing contaminated the sample.

To most anyone, Cap’s samples indicated that kind of contamination, foreign DNA somehow mixed in with known DNA.

To most anyone, that was the end of the matter.

For Cap, it didn’t end there. Of course, he wished that it did. It would have been so much better than having to deal with another possible explanation and what that could mean.

Cap leaned back in his chair, hands interlocked in his lap, as he stared at the screen.
What now?

Well. A paunchy man in a sagging wool sweater walked into the library’s comfortable, chair-and-sofa study lounge.

Dr. Mort Eisenbaum, just the man Cap needed to see.

Eisenbaum was an unmarried, socially inept genius who preferred huddling and communing with organic molecules, amino acids, and proteins to living in the complicated world of people. He and Cap weren’t close, but they’d often consulted on projects and compared notes on particular students. This man was a pioneer in DNA sequencing and usually liked being consulted about it. Cap had all the data laid out systematically on the computer. It wouldn’t take much of Eisenbaum’s time.

Cap ventured out of hiding and into the study lounge. Eisenbaum had settled into a favorite spot at a large oak table and was leafing through a stack of research volumes, obviously on the trail of something.

“Excuse me. Mort?”

Eisenbaum looked up over his reading glasses. A cloud fell over his face. “Dr. Capella. How are you?”

“Pretty good, pretty good. I was working on something when I saw you come in. It’s got me a little baffled.”

Eisenbaum closed the volume he was reading, stacked it on top of the others, and rose from his chair. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

Cap groped for some words as Eisenbaum brushed past him. “Um, well, it’s just over here on the computer. It would only take a moment, I’m sure.”

Eisenbaum kept walking, not looking back.

“Well, what about—we don’t have to meet
here
. What if we went someplace private, had some coffee or something?” Cap followed him, trying not to look desperate. “The agreement doesn’t say we can’t talk to each other, just outsiders—” He stopped.
I
am
an outsider.

Eisenbaum went out the door as if he and Cap had never met.

Cap was disappointed. Eisenbaum had always struck him as a lone eccentric, not affected that much by department politics.

Back to square one. Cap returned to his computer station and slouched in his chair, staring at the computer screen in case God might send a revelation. Did these results really make sense in their own bizarre way?

Many of the sequences from the stool, hair, and saliva samples matched chimpanzee DNA, but there were just as many sequences that matched up with human DNA. At first glance, one would think that either the chimp DNA was contaminated with human DNA, or the other way around—except for an entirely distinct third group that seemed to be an odd hybrid of both. It closely matched chimp, and where it didn’t match chimp
,
it closely matched human. Contamination couldn’t have caused that.

To make matters worse, mixed in through it all were weird sequences that didn’t match up with anything; they were “junk” DNA, unidentified contaminants with no explanation for how they got there.

Unless . . .

Cap saved all his findings to a fresh CD and tucked the disk away in his pocket with the CD he’d gotten from Nick. He had a hunch, but he needed someone to test it and hopefully tell him he was wrong. He needed someone who loved to tell him how wrong he was about virtually everything, someone who would pull no punches.

He immediately thought of just the person. Judging from the cold reception Cap got from Eisenbaum, it might be tough getting through to him, but no matter. Cap was desperate enough.

Pete set down his rifle, shed his tracking gear, and dropped onto a bench on the porch of the Tall Pine with a deep, tired sigh. He removed his hat, ran his fingers over his scalp, and allowed himself a moment of staring at the plank floor with his mind a blank.

Tyler had set his gear down near the porch rail. For some reason the young flank man still had enough energy to remain standing. “You guys want something to drink?”