“You get all the proof you need,” Bree said, “but I’m going to figure out what made these marks on the bog body. Someone murdered this man and I want to know how.”
Chapter Eighteen
The morning bustle in the lab settled into mid-day quiet. There was no talking, or music, or clicking of fingers against laptop keyboards, only the steady hum of the air exchanger. “I guess everyone’s still at lunch,” Bree said as she looked around.
“We were only gone twenty-five minutes,” Liam said.
They looked at Bree’s dad.
“What can I say? I’m eager to extract the DNA from the hand.”
Conor turned to Bree. “You better find something to keep your da busy over the next three to four days.”
“Why’s that?”
“It takes two days to purify the DNA and another day or two to sequence it. You know how impatient he can get when waiting for results.”
Boy did she ever know. He once threatened to drive all the way to Florida and drag her mom’s doctor home from vacation if someone didn’t immediately tell them her mom’s scan results and whether the tumors had responded to chemo.
Her dad cleared his throat loudly. “First of all, I’m right here, so stop talking about me like I’m not. And second, there’s plenty to do to keep me busy. Or did you forget we still have the bog body?”
Conor smiled. “Sorry about that, Dr. Sunderland. It’s just…well, you know how you get when you’re excited about something.”
“True. And I must admit this is all pretty darn exciting.”
They took the stairs to the second floor and entered the changing area of the laboratory dedicated to ancient DNA, where they removed their street clothes and donned sterile scrubs, gloves, caps, and face masks. Once suited up Bree and Liam followed her dad and Conor into the airlock connecting the changing room to the lab. After the door closed fully behind her, Bree signaled her dad and he opened the door to the lab, which had its own airflow and specialized filters to further remove contaminants. Positive air pressure prevented anything from getting into the lab from outside.
They proceeded to the table and her dad set down the hand he had brought with him. Liam slid two tall stools next to the table and held one for Bree as she sat. Her thighs brushed against his hands, sending a pleasant chill through her body.
She forced her attention away from Liam and onto her dad. “So how do we extract the DNA?” she said, eager to get started.
“First thing is to cut out a piece of bone from the hand,” her dad said. “Then we drill into the bone to produce bone powder. We treat the powder with chemicals and enzymes to digest the cellular components and proteins. Once that’s finished, we add silica. The DNA binds to it. Then we wash everything else away and we have pure DNA, which we then remove from the silica for further analysis.”
Bree’s eyes narrowed. “Sounds complicated.”
Conor stabilized the bone. “Not really, once you know what you’re doing.”
Bree was both fascinated and grossed out. What did it feel like to cut into bone? Was it easy or hard? Why did the inside of bone look like it did? But she didn’t ask for fear she’d mess up her dad’s concentration and he’d ruin the hand.
Her dad turned on the Dremel and cut a section from the bone; it sounded like drilling a tooth. He looked up from the table and said, “That should do it. Let’s get the rest of the process started. Then it’s just a painful matter of waiting for the results.” He shook his head. “When I came here to study bog bodies, I never, ever, expected something like this. If this really is a lycanthrope hand…” He smiled and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. “I can’t even begin to imagine the possibilities of what this discovery would mean for the scientific community, let alone my career.”
Conor pushed off the stool and shot her dad a look; it was part amusement and part disbelief. “Since when are you worried about beefing up your career? You’re one of the most respected forensic geneticists in the world, and the only one with a duel specialty in forensic anthropology.”
“Your career?” Bree said. “This would look great on my college applications.”
“And it would definitely get me some scholarship money,” Liam said. “Or at least a paid research position at university.”
Her dad shrugged. “What really concerns me is that if this turns out to be what we suspect, it’s going to turn into a circus around here—and Kelsi was just the beginning. We need to keep this under wraps. Only when we have evidence to present will our findings leave this room.” He looked at Conor. “I assume you told your wife.”
“Yup, but she knows how important it is to keep it quiet. And I won’t tell her anything more.”
“And you,” her dad said, turning to Bree and Liam, “you can’t tell any of your other friends. Not a word. You understand?”
“You got it,” Liam said.
Bree nodded, although she hated keeping secrets, especially good ones.
And this was a biggie.
But her dad was right. If word got out, they’d have a lot more than Kelsi to deal with; and worrying about Kelsi and whoever was following her was hard enough.
Chapter Nineteen
Craic Carnival, Largheal, Ireland
A dizzying display of colored lights surrounded Bree and Liam. Joyful screams mixed with laughter. Rides clanked and clanged. The sugary smell of candy floss and greasy burgers filled the air.
They squeezed through the crowds past the Ferris wheel, skirted the bumper car line, and crossed the gaming section to a row of five tents. Mylar streamers fluttered atop the tent poles.
“It’s over here,” Liam said as he led Bree to the right.
She parted the canvas flaps and entered the tent. The carnival faded to the background. The air felt thicker inside: dim lights, strange music, and, near the door, a huge bucket of teeth.
“There used to be a couple of gold ones in there, but you can’t trust carnie folk.”
Liam turned. “Seamus?”
A scrawny man threw a tattooed arm around Liam’s shoulder and hugged him hard. “Got another inch or two on ya, I see.”
“And you’re as scrawny as ever. You fall asleep under a steamroller?”
The man smiled and said to Bree, “The name’s Seamus, but ya can call me Seamus. All my friends do.” He chuckled at his joke. “Take a look around. I bet ya ain’t seen nothing like it.”
Bree nodded. She wanted to get down to business, but Seamus obviously had something else in mind, so she strolled around to take in the tent’s other oddities. More than a dozen wax eyeballs surrounded a shrunken head with foot-long black hair. A vampire killing kit containing stakes, a gun with silver bullets, a mirror, and other items that looked hundreds of years old took up most of a table. Blood-red felt lined the inside of the wooden box.
“Ya interested in vampires?” Seamus asked as he came up behind her.
“No, not really.” Bree sidestepped to an animatronic dummy. The face was cartoon-like, but the eyes looked real. The dummy’s jaw dropped open, and it bellowed a noise like something out of a horror movie. Bree jumped at the sudden outburst.
“He scares a lot of folks, especially kids,” Seamus said. “Yet they keep coming back for more.”
“People are drawn to odd things,” Liam said. “And you’re the king of odd.”
Seamus beamed with pride. “Always looking for something new, so if ya come across anything ya let me know.”
Across the tent Bree spied a gravestone, a battering ram, a miniature skeleton, and a bunch of glass cages with what looked to be snakes. Most of it was probably fake, but the shrunken head she had spotted earlier looked awfully real. She had her doubts that Seamus knew anything that could help her, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to try. She really wished she could ask him about the monstrous hand, but she had promised her dad she’d keep it under wraps. Instead, she took her cell phone from her pocket and brought up a phot
o of the object Conor had found. “You have any idea what this is? We found it under a bog body.”
Liam scooped up two of the wax eyeballs and rolled them in his hand like a pair of dice.
“It looks familiar,” Seamus said.
“Really?” Bree refrained from getting her hopes up. If Seamus recognized it that fast, how unusual or important could it be?
“Hang on.” Seamus crossed to a table next to the glass tanks, slid out a box from underneath, and rummaged through it. “I thought it was here…” He dragged out another box and piled the contents on the floor. Once the box was empty he said, “I remember it well. It was shorter and not as thick, but just as sharp at the end. Looked almost exactly like that one. Don’t know for sure what it is, but I can tell ya it’s like nothing I ever seen. Maybe part of some prehistoric animal or something?”
“Where’d you get it?” Liam asked.
“It came in with a bunch of other stuff, maybe two, three years ago. Some guy cleaning out his da’s collection after he died. Couldn’t wait to get rid of the stuff. The da was some kind of digger. Always searching for buried treasures and such. If I remember right, that’s also where the shrunken head came from.”
Although Seamus had no idea what the object was, Bree was excited. There was more out there. A world of buried things not yet discovered. Things that would further reinforce her belief about the bog body and prove she was right.
A young couple entered the tent. “Come in. Come in,” Seamus said, waving them further inside.
“Thanks for the help,” Liam said.
“Ya sure there’s nothing else I can do for ya mate?”
Liam shook his head.
“I’ll text ya before we leave town. Maybe we can get together for a bit. It’s been a while. We’re heading out to Dublin day after tomorrow and then a half dozen cities after that. Won’t be back for weeks.”
“That’d be great,” Liam said. “And thanks again.”
“Any time, mate. Ya know I’m here for ya.”
Bree and Liam left the tent and Liam said, “Come on. Let’s go have some fun. We can worry about the bog body later.”
He pulled her by the arm, and they headed over to the haunted house. Moans and groans piped through the outdoor speakers. They pushed through the door and were met with cackles, and laughs, and screams. Fog everywhere. Dim yellow lights leading the way.
Three steps in, a bloodied zombie popped up from behind a gravestone on Bree’s right; another quickly followed on the left; two more behind her. The zombies shuffled closer and closer, forcing Bree and Liam to move farther into the haunted house.
At the end of the passageway, the zombies dropped out of sight, and a door slammed shut behind Bree and Liam, plunging them into darkness. Far ahead a faint red glow was the only source of light. From out of the near pitch black, sets of bright yellow eyes appeared and then disappeared. Dozens of them. First on one side and then the other. They were all around her. The eyes kept moving, appearing and disappearing, never revealing their positions for longer than a second or two.
To Bree the eyes didn’t feel like any simple haunted house effect. It was as if the eyes belonged to Kelsi. The bog body. The mysterious woman at the bog. And the person in green outside Doolin’s. Unknown eyes demanding so much of her.
A sick wail pierced the air, shot through her, and whisked away her power to speak. She fished for Liam’s hand and laced her fingers through his. Holding on tightly, Bree took a tentative step and then another. The eyes moved closer and closer together until they formed a wall around Bree and Liam. Bree moved a few paces forward and the eyes moved with her, narrowing the space between them.
Just when it seemed the eyes were within Bree’s reach, a blast of cold air hit the back of her neck. Bree screamed and Liam jumped. She spun around and wrenched Liam’s arm in the process, but she couldn’t see much of anything in the dark, not a hint of movement or a shadow or a zombie.
A bang at the back of the room startled Bree. She turned to see a group of rowdy kids pushing past the door and into the space. The kid in the lead must have caught sight of the yellow eyes because he froze all of a sudden, and the guy behind him plowed into his back.
Liam chuckled. “Let’s go,” he said and pulled Bree with him.
A door in front of them flew open. They stepped through it, left the kids behind, and entered a room filled with giant bloodied beasts at least twice Bree’s size. The beasts were ugly and scary and huge. They had distorted faces and long hands and held an assortment of weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie. They lumbered toward Bree and Liam like they meant business.
Laughing and holding hands, Bree raced with Liam through the rest of the haunted house. The last room was dark, empty, and silent. They passed through it without waiting to see what would happen. When they pushed back outside, the sights and sounds of the carnival assaulted Bree’s senses.
“That was fun,” Liam said. “Did you like it?”
She didn’t tell him how deeply the events of the past few days had rattled her and how creepy goings-on were becoming a bit too real in her life. Instead Bree nodded. “Yeah, it was great.”
Chapter Twenty
It took four long days to get the results they so desperately wanted. When Bree and her dad heard Conor yell that the DNA results were ready, her dad pushed off of his stool so quickly it rolled across the floor and smashed into a table behind him. He rushed out of the lab.
Bree followed her dad down the hall. He headed straight for the sequencer and studied the results without saying a word. Bree searched her dad’s face for clues, but it was as readable as a rock.
She looked over at Liam. He fiddled with a pen, and when his eyes settled on hers, she knew he was as eager to hear the results as much she was.
“Well?” Bree said, thinking it would be so cool if her dad confirmed she had discovered a lycanthrope hand. She’d go on “Good Morning America” and be in all the papers and on the news; everyone at school would be jealous.
“Now I have to compare this DNA sequence from the hand to our database to see if it matches humans or some other species.” While her dad worked, he shifted from foot to foot. It took some time to compare the sequences. When he finished, he turned to her and Conor and regarded them both in silence.
A burst of energy surged through Bree, and she struggled to stay still; it was like she had downed a six-pack of energy drinks.
Finally, her dad said, “The initial results show the hand is human.”
“What?” Bree said sharply. “How that’s possible? No human has a hand like that.”
Her dad gave her arm a squeeze. “Even if we assume lycanthropes exist, there’s no lycanthrope genome to compare it to. The good news, at least for me anyway, is that it’s obvious the hand is very strange. There’s more to this than meets the eye.”
“Like what?” Bree asked.
“I think there’s a genetic condition that may have caused the anomalies in this hand. If I’m correct, it’s some kind of mutation.”
“How could that have happened?” Liam asked as Conor leaned in to get a look at the sequence.
Her dad thought for a moment before responding. “That’s what I intend to find out. We need to sequence the entire genome to look for a mutation in some other part of the DNA, and that’s going to take time.”
“I’m confused,” Bree said. She tried to make sense of the information in front of her, but all she could see was a bunch of multi-colored wave-like lines.
Her dad smiled. “Maybe lycanthropes were really humans that carried a strange mutated gene.”
Chapter Twenty-One
After spending the whole day in the lab, Bree's dad treated them to dinner at a nearby restaurant. They were both tired of eating at the hotel all the time. During dessert, her dad received a call from the Garda, and they raced over to the lab. When they arrived, a Garda car was parked in front. Two officers Bree didn’t recognize
were on the scene, conferring with two security guards. They jotted notes in official-looking black books.
A quick flick of the wrist and her dad shut the engine. In a few strides they reached the closest officer.
“I’m Dr. Sunderland. The one you called.” His words were rushed, as if he couldn’t spit them out fast enough.
“The security guard saw two women in dark clothes running out of the building. You know anyone who would want to break into the lab?”
“Kelsi,” Bree and her dad said in unison. “Doyle,” her dad added. “Kelsi Doyle.”
“What would she want?” the officer asked.
Her dad crossed his arms. “My daughter found a hand in the bog the other day and she tried to steal it. We filed a report at the Garda Station, but as far as I know they haven’t found her.”
The officer nodded. “The black market is big for those kinds of things.”
“She’s worked with us for weeks and she came highly recommended. I still can’t believe she’d do something like this.” Her dad’s voice was quiet yet tense.
“There must be a reason,” Bree said, wishing she knew what it was.
“There always is,” the officer said. “Although it’s not often the reason we want.”
Bree eyed the security guards—both now spoke with the other officer—and then she turned her attention back to the man in front of her. “What about the other security guard? What did he see?”
“Not a thing,” the officer said. “Apparently they picked the lock and were in and out before he returned from his rounds. Only reason the other guard caught sight of them was because he left his post to, uh, use the men’s room.”
“That’s great, just great,” her dad said. “Two security guards and they’re good for nothing.”
The officer kept his voice steady. “Why don’t I take you inside so you can see what’s missing.”
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