Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  Something the Colonel had said during their last conversation played in his head on a continuous loop. So suspicious, my boy. You have an incoming file. Open it when you hang up. How many times had Jack called him "my boy"?

  Jack had been in the army prior to joining the Bureau, but had never directly spoken of it to him. Carver had always assumed it was because of some traumatic event Jack didn't wish to discuss. After all, he had lived through several tours of Vietnam. Was it possible he had risen to the rank of Colonel?

  Suddenly Carver realized he didn't know Jack at all. The visits and vacations had always been about him. About important moments in his life, about taking him fishing or to places to enrich him. He and his mother had never toured Jack around Phoenix to show him the sights like they would have any other out-of-state guest. Come to think of it, Jack had always known his way around the city. He had never consulted a map or asked his mother for directions. And how much time had Jack really spent alone with his mother, his lifelong friend? Only after he had gone to bed or out with his friends. Even when Jack had called, the conversations with his mother had always been short and conducted in whispers or in another room entirely. Carver had always ended up talking even longer, about nothing in particular. Now that he truly analyzed it, the only times his mother and Jack had talked about "old times," their shared memories had seemed more like recitations. Remember so-and-so from Thomas Jefferson High School or remember when we used to eat at such-and-such in our home town of Lincoln, Nebraska? They never cracked open any yearbooks, flipped through stacks of fading photographs, or watched any reel-to-reel movies. There were only pictures of the three of them.

  Only pictures of lies he now suspected to be truth. His father hadn't died in a car accident. His father had been watching over him the entire time, and his mother hadn't been widowed, but had been entrusted with a child not her own. A child, who somewhere out there, had an identical twin. A twin like Edward Ross or Charles Grady, a monster with the genes of an animal.

  He heard Hawthorne's words from their conversation in the car outside Mondragon's house. For now, you need only understand that there is more transpiring around you than you can see, and even if you could, you have yet to learn enough to truly comprehend.

  And then he saw a mirror in a dank cellar painted in crimson arcs, his own reflection staring back at him from beneath a single word smeared in blood. Killer. A word he would see again on the side mirror of an outdated police cruiser across his forehead, a reflection he had been led to see by a carefully placed handprint on the driver's side door. The true killer had wanted him to know his face from the very start, had reveled in the prospect of taunting a man who had no idea of his real heritage. A killer with his same blood capable of exsanguinating and butchering countless innocent people. A killer who looked exactly like him.

  Manning had been right on both counts. The scalpel had been left with the killer's DNA to set him up, not to take the fall for murder, but, like the mirrors, to show him who was doing the killing. To torment him, to tell him there was nothing he could do to stop the killing. That the last thing four young girls and countless other people saw before they died was his face.

  The thought sickened him. He wanted to lash out, to scream, to hurt someone, to cry. His entire world was crumbling around him, built on a foundation of rapidly unraveling lies. And then there was the question he tried not to ask, even of himself. Edgar Ross had been infected with the genes of a Kodiak bear, Candace Thompson those of an elephant. DNA he knew they shared with their siblings. What kind of animal had been bred into his murderous twin?

  What kind of animal had been bred into him?

  Carver watched the sign welcoming them to Oregon pass by on the right in great white letters on a manmade island of spruces and firs set into a field of grass.

  Wolfe still glanced at him every few seconds, and Hawthorne had yet to resume his internet perusal. It was almost as though they were patiently waiting for him to mentally reach the conclusion he had just made, knowing how difficult it would be to comprehend. They had gone through the same process, hadn't they?

  You can't run without learning how to walk first, Wolfe had said.

  "Tell me about your twin, Wolfe," Carver finally said.

  Wolfe's stare lingered in the rear view mirror for a long moment before turning back to the road. Carver knew the agent had never formally said he had a twin.

  "His name was Darren Covington," Wolfe said softly. "The La Brea Killer. He picked out the wanna-be starlets arriving in Hollywood the moment they climbed off the bus, as far as we can tell. Eighteen to twenty-two year-old girls following their dreams while he was following them. Runaways, castoffs trying to find their big breaks, but instead finding only a man in an alley who cut them to pieces, their screams unheard over the loud rock music blaring from the clubs and the sound of their dreams shattering. We found four bodies wrapped in cellophane in his apartment waiting to be crammed down into the sewers with the other twelve the Department of Water and Power had been pulling out from under La Brea Boulevard for more than six months. All bound in plastic wrap, all missing their eyes. We found those in jars at his house."

  "Why the eyes?" Carver asked.

  Wolfe removed his shades and looked into the mirror, blinking repeatedly, and Carver knew.

  "As you can see, there's something wrong with them. The color of the irises is too bright, too memorable. And they're too sensitive to light. Of course, they work perfectly at night. After all, they are the eyes of a wolf." He shook his head sadly. "I think Covington was trying to figure out how to fix them. Could have bought cow eyes from a butcher, but where's the fun in that?"

  "What's wrong with these people that they need to kill?"

  "It's a biological imperative," Hawthorne said. "The experiments didn't stop after Heidlmann took them. We have no idea what they might have been subjected to, but like the girls in Colorado, we suspect they were tortured in various ways to see how the changes in their genes would manifest, and what triggers it took to make them do so. We're the second phase, the F2 generation. Our parents were the original subjects infected with animal genes, and for each set of twins there was a control and an experimental. We're the control group of the F2 lot, our twins the experimental. Postmortem testing on Ross, Grady, and Covington confirmed they had been exposed to a retrovirus that the rest of us hadn't. The genetic changes were seemingly random, yet confined to the same chromosomes, as though trying to pinpoint certain loci through trial and error. They appear to have solved that problem if the data on the little girls is correct. Changing the DNA at nonspecific loci led to aberrant behavior, we believe. Ross and Grady were more animal than man. They killed for fun, for sport...for food. Covington was a step above them. He was a sociopath, but he could still function in the real world and had enough of an understanding of how things worked to try to cure what he perceived to be a physical shortcoming. We speculate Ellie's twin, Candace, was the success of the batch. She carried the mutations, but expressed them in less visible ways. Her mind remained intact, capable of delineating right from wrong. That's also what made her a failure. They wanted more aggression, more physical improvement. Maybe Schwartz's twin was the same way. Through Candace, we think they determined how to select the loci they wanted to replace. If we're right, the girls you found back in Colorado were the final stage in the testing phase, and we're quite confident they finally have the recipe they want."

  "That accounts for five experimental twins," Carver said. "You told me there were six."

  Hawthorne and Wolfe shared a knowing glance Carver would have missed if he'd blinked.

  "What are you really trying to ask?" Hawthorne said. He turned around in the seat just far enough that their eyes met. There was something behind the man's stare that Carver hadn't seen there before, something that might even have passed for compassion in someone else's eyes.

  Carver had to look away. Buildings now passed to either side: gas stations, fast food restaurants, of
fice buildings, strip malls, a veritable showcase of the normalcy he had taken for granted. Soon enough they would reach their destination. He turned back to Hawthorne and steadied his voice in preparation of speaking the words aloud.

  "Tell me about my twin, about my...brother."

  V

  Monroe, Washington

  Ellie stared at Kajika, waiting for him to elaborate. He sat silently, his face contorting into a series of strange expressions. She couldn't tell where his thoughts were leading, but obviously he had made some significant breakthrough she hadn't. She tried to remember exactly what he had said, to follow his trail of logic, yet there was no spark of revelation.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  He held up a finger to signify he needed another moment. His lips moved with his internal voice and his brows lowered.

  "I need some more coffee," Locke said, rising from the chair. "Anyone else?"

  "Yeah," Elliot said. "I think we could all use another cup."

  Locke walked past them with hardly a sideways glance. He leaned against the door and peered through the peephole. His gun was in his hand. She hadn't noticed him draw it.

  "It's ingenious," Kajika said. "I never would have thought of it."

  "What?" Ellie asked again. She took his hand to try to bring him back to the here and now.

  There was a thud of the deadbolt disengaging, the click of the turning handle.

  "The protein coat would remain intact, even directly exposed to air, for several minutes," Kajika said. "They would just need to keep it packaged for under seventy-two hours. Maybe even more. That's plenty of time to distribute it. My God."

  Ellie glanced to her left as Locke opened the door. He looked back over his shoulder to check on them one final time before exiting. A shadow passed across the open doorway ahead of him. Locke raised his sidearm, but he was too slow. She heard a snap and then a sizzle of current that sounded like high-tension wires. Locke stiffened. His whole body twitched and she saw faint ribbons of smoke rise over his shoulder a moment before she smelled something burning. He tried to say something, but only ropes of saliva slipped from his mouth.

  Ellie jerked on Kajika's hand, pulling him off the bed. She was already running toward the adjoining room when she heard Locke's body hit the ground. She blew through the doorway into the other room and felt a moment of indecision. The bathroom door was closer than the front. They could barricade themselves inside and hope someone had heard the commotion, but if no one had, the thin door and pathetic lock wouldn't hold for long. She gambled and led Kajika straight for the front door, snapping the deadbolt and yanking the handle in one motion. She saw the man a heartbeat before she darted out. A black hooded sweatshirt cast shadows over his eyes, leaving only his grin and stubbled chin exposed. Even from so little, she recognized him immediately. She threw her body against the door to close it, but the man had already crossed the threshold. Kajika shouldered the door beside her. The man on the other side was too strong and he had leverage. His right arm was through the doorway. Ellie felt a sharp tug on her hair and cried out. She jerked her head away until she freed it.

  "We can't hold him out!" Kajika said.

  The door bucked against them and Ellie could see the man was nearly through. His entire right leg and shoulder were in the room. It wouldn't be long before the rest of him followed.

  "Make a run for the bathroom and scream as loud as you can," Kajika said. "See if you can squeeze through the window."

  "We're three stories up," she sobbed.

  "Just go!"

  Ellie saw the strain on his face. They were fighting a losing battle. Much as she hated to abandon him, it might be the only chance for both of them.

  She turned from the door and ran.

  There was a crashing sound behind her as the door exploded inward, the thud of Kajika slamming into the wall behind.

  Ellie focused on the bathroom and the ten feet separating them.

  She opened her mouth to scream and felt twin serpents strike her back, the fangs looping under her skin. Her legs locked, but her momentum carried her forward. The bathroom swung upward and out of sight, replaced by the beige carpet a split-second before her head hit the ground. Vision black, marred by white sparkles at the periphery, she tried to crawl, but her body was unresponsive. She felt like she was on fire, could smell something burning. Voltage crackled from the wires attached to her back, her prone form snapping in whip fashion.

  There was another thud from behind her. Kajika shouted something, but his words were abruptly silenced by a sharp crack.

  The electricity coursing through her finally abated. She still twitched and smoldered. She tried to scream, tried to grab hold of the carpet to pull herself forward. Her arms barely moved and her vision returned as only a blur of colors. She thought she saw Locke crawling toward her through the doorway to her right, saw him struggling to hold his gun out in front of him.

  An astringent scent cut through the smell of smoke.

  A pair of legs blocked her view of Locke, who made a muffled grunting sound before collapsing to the floor.

  Feeling slowly returned to her extremities and she pushed herself up on trembling arms, zeroing in on the bathroom.

  She heard footsteps behind her, but didn't turn.

  All she could do was struggle forward, knowing her only hope was to lock herself inside and pray someone had heard the ruckus.

  The chemical smell returned full force, reminiscent of ether, bringing tears to her eyes. A hand closed over her mouth and nose, and she tasted the wet fabric, felt the sting of the vapors in her nostrils. She knew not to breathe, but in her panic, she was already hyperventilating.

  "Shh," a voice whispered from behind her. "It will all be over soon."

  Darkness rose from somewhere inside her, dragging her down into its cold black depths.

  VI

  Portland, Oregon

  The silence that followed was more than Carver could bear. Surely they'd heard him. Wolfe and Hawthorne looked at each other, and then back at the road. Carver was about to demand an answer when Hawthorne finally spoke.

  "We know nothing about him beyond the murders."

  "I don't believe you."

  "It doesn't matter what you believe. These people just pop up out of nowhere. No one knew a thing about Ross until the campers went missing and we tracked him to his basement. You can imagine my surprise when I saw his face. Prior to that, best we can tell, he didn't even exist. No past of any kind. Nothing. All of a sudden he just appeared. Same with Covington. Rent paid in cash, suitcases filled with it in a bedroom closet. We don't know where they got the money and weren't able to trace it by the serial numbers. The only way we knew about your brother was because of a random speed trap, one of those automated units that takes pictures of the speeders from the side of the road. The plates matched a Dodge Intrepid reported missing from long-term parking at DIA. It was later found in a cornfield outside Fort Morgan, Colorado, abandoned for several days by the time it was found. There were several hairs in the trunk, strands belonging to the as-of-then unidentified Jasmine Rivers. As soon as you discovered her body, we made the connection and tracked down the photograph."

  "What happened to the car? The evidence?"

  "Evidence? There were fingerprints, but none we could trace. No DNA. Nothing but a picture. A picture that for all intents and purposes showed you, Special Agent Carver, driving the stolen vehicle used to abduct a dead little girl. What do you think would have happened if anyone saw the picture?"

  Carver was silent. He knew exactly what would have happened.

  "The picture no longer exists, and neither does the car. I understand the owner was so pleased with the settlement that he'd never even think of mentioning it again."

  "Why didn't you just tell me?"

  It was Wolfe who answered.

  "This isn't the kind of thing you can just accept at someone's word. You have to do the legwork, learn for yourself. That's just the way it is, the way it
was for all of us. What would you have said yesterday morning if one of us came to you out of the blue and said it was your genetically-altered twin who was responsible for the killings?"

  Carver nodded. He would have told them in no uncertain terms that they were out of their minds and never would have considered flying down to Arizona.

  "How did you know the murders down there were related?" Carver asked.

  "We didn't at first, not for sure anyway, until Ellie's passport was stamped in Mexico City and we determined her ultimate destination. And it looked as though she was in a big hurry to get there."

  "We had also lost track of Schwartz for more than two months when he moved to Colorado," Hawthorne said. "They did a remarkable job of concealing his whereabouts until he turned up in your house. Within hours we were able to ascertain his address and that he had taken overnight delivery of several packages, two of which were sent via DHL Worldwide Express from Phoenix. We never found any trace of the blood, but the same silver canisters we found in the bedroom of that old house in the valley were tucked away in his closet. They could only have been used to ship biological samples."

  "The little ranch with the smokehouse was purchased with cash," Wolfe said. "The name on the title is Winn Darby. There's no record of him anywhere at all prior to the purchase in January 2001, and nothing at all afterwards either."

  "So someone out there is financing them," Carver said. "Setting them up with money and new lives to see what they're going to do."

  "Or maybe setting them up with new lives every so often when they start getting themselves into trouble," Hawthorne said. "Four years before we tracked down Ross, three families vanished from KOA Campgrounds in West Virginia over a six month span. None of them were ever found."