Nocturnal (44 page)

“Me too,” John said. “More than a little, actually.”

Robin sighed. Responsibility and immaturity were not mutually exclusive traits, it seemed. She slid the magazine home, racked the slide to chamber a round, then put the P-3 back in her purse.

“There will be no repeat of the daddy incident,” she said. “I’ve got some mind-blowing stuff to show you, and it might impact what you decide to do next. Mind if I go first?”

All three men nodded. Robin walked to a cabinet drawer and grabbed a pad of paper and a black pen. She sat back down at the table.

“I’ve been trying to process all the weird genetic info we’ve found so far,” she said. “First off, the guy we had in the morgue today, that was Bobby Pigeon’s killer. So where were the wounds from Bobby’s gun? They were there, two small scars on his chest — I think the bullet wounds healed.”

“Hold on,” John said. “Maybe I’m late to the party, but you can’t heal a bullet wound in a few hours. Trust me, I know.”

“We’re dealing with something new,” Robin said. “Blackbeard had the Zed chromosome. We have no idea what that chromosome is or what it codes for. We already know we’re dealing with people who are strong, have abnormal muscles, abnormal bones, may have abnormal mouths,
and
have an internal organ no one has seen before. Based on the observed data, I have to make the hypothesis that the Zed chromosome also allows people to heal very fast.”

Bryan’s fingers drifted to his forehead, fingertips tracing the line of three black stitches.

“There’s more,” Pookie said. “Tonight I saw a guy jump from a ten-story building to a four-story roof, and that jump was across a street. Two lanes, plus parking, plus sidewalks. Sixty feet at least. I saw him land, roll, and he was fine. Oh, and he carried a bow and was wearing a cloak like Robin Hood or something.”

That was impossible, yet Pookie clearly believed what he was saying. Bryan believed it as well.

John looked at Pookie, then at Bryan, then at Robin. “If the three of you are messing with my head, just tell me now. You win, I lose. A new chromosome? A guy who can jump across a street?”

“In a cloak,” Bryan said.

“Like Robin Hood,” Pookie said.

John rubbed his face. “Yeah, sure. In a cloak. Like Robin Hood.” He tapped the table twice with his finger. “From this moment on out, if you
say
ha-ha, we punked you
, I will probably shoot someone in the face.” He turned to Bryan. “And yes,
Daddy
, I’m definitely packing.”

Bryan leaned back and laughed. “Shit, Black Mister Burns, maybe you’re not so bad after all.”

“It happened,” Pookie said. “John, you and I go way back. You’d know if I was bullshitting. Am I bullshitting?”

John stared at Pookie. Robin waited and watched. She couldn’t believe the story, but why would they lie? Pookie must have misinterpreted what he’d seen.

John sighed and sagged. “You’re not BS-ing, Pooks,” he said. “At least that much is true.” John turned to Robin. “Well, keep going. Might as well let me hear all of it.”

She could try to explain physics to Pookie later. For now, she had real information to share.

“I’ve got a theory,” she said. “The fact that Blackbeard had no testicles got me thinking.”

She drew a box on the pad, then a vertical and horizontal line through it, making four smaller squares. Across the top, she put an X above one column, a Y above the other.

“A Punnett square?” John said.

Robin nodded. “You use this to predict the outcome of a breeding experiment. Men and women have two sex chromosomes. A sperm or egg cell, known as a
gamete
, gets just one of those chromosomes. Bryan, know what this XY represents?”

“A man,” Bryan said. “He can give an X, or a Y.”

“That’s right.” She drew an X on the outside of each of the two left-hand boxes. “Pooks? Know what the XX represents?”

“A woman,” he said. “With gigantic hooters and questionable moral judgment. Oh yeah, I took Biology 101, girlie.”

Robin laughed and shook her head. “Sure, Pooks, sure. It’s a female, so her gamete can only carry an X.”

She put the letter from each column header into the boxes below it, then added the letter from each row header, “So we wind up with two possible combinations of XY, two of XX. On average, half the kids will be male, half will be female. Got me so far?”

All three men nodded.

“Now we saw that the Blackbeard was just that, a
guy
. His sex chromosomes were Zed-X. Normally, the Y chromosome codes for male, but testicles or no testicles Blackbeard had a beard and a penis, so he’s a guy.
That means the Zed chromosome has to have some elements of the Y chromosome.”

She drew a new four-squared box. She drew XZ across the top, then on the left she drew two Xs. She filled in the squares, resulting in two with XX and two with XZ. “So, if Blackbeard had functional sperm — which he could
not
have had without testicles — he would produce these possible offspring. You guys see the problem with this?”

Bryan pulled the pad in front of him. “There’s no YZ,” he said. “Oscar Woody’s killer was YZ.”

“Bingo,” she said. He’d always been so good at putting pieces together. “To get a Y-Zed, we
have
to have a female who can provide a Zed chromosome.”

Pookie reached out and tapped the pad. “Couldn’t the YZ — Oscar’s killer — couldn’t that be a female?”

Robin shook her head. “In primates,
every instance
of a Y chromosome means
male
. This includes XXY, which is Klinefelter’s and for the sake of argument is always male, and XYY syndrome, which also results in a male. We have to assume that Oscar’s killer is male,
not
female.”

Robin drew a third Punnett square, this time with three columns and two rows to make a total of six squares instead of four. “That brings us to Rex, who is X-Y-Zed. Every one of his sperm cells had what is called
non-disjunction
, which means they had
two
sex chromosomes. Primate sperm cells are supposed to have just
one
.”

Above the columns, she wrote XY, XZ and YZ. On the left side, she drew Xs next to the rows. She turned it so the boys could see.

Bryan leaned in for a closer look. “If someone like Rex had a child, the child gets … what … one chromosome from the mother, two from the father? The mother would always provide an X, and all his children would have three sex chromosomes instead of two, right?”

Robin nodded. “That’s right. Three sex chromosomes is called
trisomy
.”

Bryan again pulled the pad in front of him. “Well, since the only other two Zed examples we have are
not
trisomal, that means someone like Rex couldn’t be their father.”

“You got it,” she said. “So, if Rex mates with a woman …” She pulled the pad back in front of her and she filled in the six boxes: two XXYs, two XXZs, two XYZs. “The XXY is Klinefelter’s. I have no idea what an X-X-Zed would be, but maybe it’s a female version of Rex. We know Rex was an X-Y-Zed, so at least in Rex’s case, X-Y-Zeds appear to be normal people.”

Bryan stood and walked to the kitchen. “So Rex could make more Rexes,” he said as he pulled four fresh beers from the fridge. “But someone like Rex
can’t
make an XZ or a YZ.” He opened all four bottles and passed them out before he sat. “So what makes those combinations?”

“Now for the really crazy part,” Robin said. She’d walked them through the other Punnett squares to introduce the basic concepts. Now they were ready for the bomb to be dropped.

She turned to a fresh piece of paper and drew a box with two columns and three rows. She put an X and a Y above the columns. To the left of the three rows, she drew an X, a Z and then a second Z.

Pookie rolled his eyes. “Sorry to be a downer, Robin, but this is kind of boring. Can you get to the point?”

“I’m almost there,” she said. “Just bear with me. Say the father is a normal male” — she circled the XY — “and the mother is X-Zed-Zed” — she circled the XZZ. “Let’s say that — unlike Rex — this X-Zed-Zed mother can give only a
single
chromosome to her gamete” — Robin filled in the squares as she talked — “
then
you can get the X-Zed combination of the Blackbeard
and
the Y-Zed combination that killed Oscar Woody.”

“Ewww, that’s
nasty
,” Pookie said. “You’re saying the two killers we know about, they have a mutant-Zed-chromosome mommy who is getting it on with regular dudes?”

Robin nodded as she finished the Punnett Square: two XZs, two YZs, an XX and an XY. “You could even wind up with normal boys and girls. But what you
couldn’t
get is another X-Zed-Zed. There’s only one way to get that. Now, at the Oscar Woody killing, someone painted
Long Live the King
on the walls, right?”

Bryan nodded. “Yeah, and I think Rex is the king in question.”

She looked at John. “You were waiting for a punch line? Here it is, but I don’t think it’s all that funny — if you have a
king
, maybe you also have a
queen
.”

Robin flipped to a new page and drew — three columns and three rows for nine squares total. “So, you take a king” — she marked the columns XY, XZ and YZ — “and a queen” — on the left side, she marked the first row X, the second and third each with a Z — “and something interesting comes up.” She filled in the boxes, making an alphabet soup of combinations: two XZZs, two YZZs, three XYZs, an XXZ and an XXY.

She circled the two XZZs.

Bryan looked up, the expression on his face one of shocked realization. “If the XZZ is a
queen
, then the only way to make a new queen is for her to mate with a king.”

“Ex
actly
,” Robin said. “If this is the way it works, then you have a eusocial structure with a breeding pair.”

John shook his head in annoyed denial. “Wait a minute. Kings?
Queens?
Not like English royalty kings and queens but like … 
termites?
Eusocial means one breeding pair producing all the offspring for an entire colony, like ants and bees, right?”

Robin nodded.

“Rex and the others are
people
, which means they’re mammals,” John said. “Eusocial creatures are insects.”

“There’s at least two species of eusocial mammals,” Robin said. “The naked mole rat and the desert rat. They have a single queen, breeding males, and the rest of the colony are sterile workers.”

Pookie pulled the pad in front of him. “I could live with fleshy-headed mutants, I really could, but come on … a king? A
queen
? Besides, ant colonies have more than just kings or queens, they have workers and drones, right?”

“Right,” Robin said. “Those are called
castes
. There’s one more caste you didn’t mention. Blackbeard had no testicles. He was
sterile
, couldn’t have passed on his genes to a new generation. But he was strong, he was dangerous, and he could heal fast, which would let him recover from damage. Guess which caste is most likely to get damaged?”

Bryan stared at her. His eyes widened. He leaned back. “Holy shit.”

Pookie looked back and forth from Robin to Bryan. “What? Come on, tell me.”

Bryan sagged in his chair. “She’s saying Blackbeard is like a soldier ant,” he said. “Soldier ants
can’t
breed — they just live to protect the colony.”

They all sat in silence. Robin felt better for having shared the strange hypothesis. It was the only thing she could find to explain the limited data they had.

Pookie took a long drink of beer, then let out a belch. “Attack of the ant-people,” he said. “Awesome. Just
awesome
. But then what’s with the costumes?”

Robin picked up the pen, started making a random, back-and-forth doodle on the pad. “The costumes
might
be there to hide physical
deformities. We really have no idea what we’re dealing with. The thing is, I think those teeth marks on Oscar Woody were exactly that —
teeth marks
. Not some tool designed to look like teeth. If that’s true, we’d be talking about someone with a wide mouth and two big incisors, so big you’d see it instantly. Maybe the masks and blankets hide more physical abnormalities?”

Bryan shook his head, so slightly Robin wasn’t even sure if he knew he was doing it.

John drained his beer in a long pull, then set the bottle on the table. “This new chromosome means we’re talking about a specific
people
, a genetic and possibly ethnic minority. As far as we know, someone is wiping out that minority —
genocide —
and Amy Zou is complicit in that act. Maybe there’s a damn good reason these ant-people have stayed hidden.”

John brought up a good point. Technically, the Zeds weren’t a separate species, not as long as a queen could breed with normal men, or a king could breed with normal women. They were human … sort of. But what if they were
all
killers?

“We don’t know enough,” she said. “We need to find that vigilante. Zou won’t give us information, maybe he will.”

Bryan pulled out his phone, tapped it a few times, then held it out so everyone could see — it was a picture of the bloody arrowhead. “I watched Metz clear out the computer system. All of that data is gone. I’m betting they won’t let any of us anywhere near the bodies of Blackbeard, Oscar Woody or Jay Parlar. We won’t be able to search Rex’s house. That means this arrow is our only lead. Pooks, I think we have to go back and talk to the guy who literally wrote the book on the subject.”

Pookie nodded. He reached into his wallet and pulled out a white business card. There was nothing on it but a phone number. He called, then waited for someone to answer.

“Biz, this is Pookie. Sorry to clog your booty-call phone with a non-booty-call message, but we need to see you. Call me back ASAP.”

Pookie put the phone away.

“Who was that?” Robin asked.

“Mister Biz-Nass,” Pookie said. “Your friendly neighborhood Tourette-syndrome-afflicted, throat-cancer-surving fortune-teller who speaks with a voice box.”

Maybe he wasn’t making up the thing about the guy jumping across the street, but she knew damn well
that
one was bullshit.