The Lethal Helix

by Don Donaldson

  Curious about the rest of the animals, she found a distinctive black neck spot on one of the remaining cows, then searched the pile until she found a match. Here again, the other spots on both animals also matched.

  Entering into this exercise in earnest, Holly spent the next twenty minutes sorting the pictures into piles of similarly spotted animals. When she was finished, her thirty-six photos lay in twelve stacks—two of them containing five animals each, six with three animals, and four with two animals. She remembered Gene, the dairy hand, saying that he was having a hard time learning to recognize individual cows in the herd. Was this why? If it was, that meant in other Holstein herds the spotting patterns were more variable.

  How could she find out about that?

  She got up from her chair, went to the cupboard, and took out the heavy ceramic mug she favored. She spooned some powdered hot chocolate mix into the mug and filled it with hot water. After stirring it, she put it in the microwave for twenty seconds. When the timer went off, she retrieved the cup and went back to the computer in her study. There, she sat down, logged on to the Internet, and initiated a search for Holsteins.

  The search produced 12,179 hits. She scanned the first group and clicked on “Absher Holsteins.” The first page that came up gave her a variety of choices: Bulls, Heifers, Embryos, Cows, Contact Us. She chose Cows.

  This called up a table listing the names of twenty-three cows along with the name of the bulls that sired them. For each animal there was also a pedigree number, some pregnancy information she didn’t understand, and a link to a picture.

  She clicked the picture link for Maria.

  An image unrolled itself down the screen, showing a mostly white cow with a black Rorschach spot on its side and some black spatter on its rump.

  Would the image print?

  She called up the print control panel and clicked the command.

  In about a minute, her printer delivered a beautiful picture of the cow on her screen. Over the next half hour, she printed all twenty-three pictures.

  The spotting pattern on some of the animals was wildly individual. A few had a pattern that was superficially similar to another animal in the group, but there were always some distinctive differences. She returned to the list her search had produced and chose another entry.

  By eight-thirty, she had pictures of ninety-seven cows from five different herds. In all those animals there were no two as similar as the groups she’d found in her own photos.

  What was the deal with those cows at the Midland dairy?

  Then she had an idea that would explain things. But how could she know if she was right? Returning to the search engine, she typed “veterinary schools” in the blank.

  For the next forty-five minutes she explored vet school home pages, from which she extracted the names of four experts in cow genetics. Figuring that she ought to be able to contact at least one of them in the morning, she shut off the computer and went back into the kitchen to make herself something to eat.

  “SUSAN . . . HOLLY AGAIN. I’ve learned something. I didn’t tell you this in our last conversation, but when I was in Wisconsin, I took some pictures of the cows from that dairy to see if I could determine why they were so special that the new owners replaced the whole herd when they took over.

  “Well, I discovered that the pigmentation pattern on those animals falls into twelve groups, at least I found twelve on my set of pictures. In every group, the pattern is almost identical. And in looking at nearly a hundred photos of Holsteins that I printed from the Internet, I saw no such similarity.”

  “So the animals in each set of your pictures must be genetically more closely related than those in the other herds,” Susan said.

  “Much closer. I faxed copies of my photos to a bovine geneticist at the University of Texas and he said that the animals in each set had either been bred for many generations to have similar spotting patterns, or to possess some trait that sits very close to the genes that regulate spotting pattern. Or each set of similar animals is a clone.”

  “Which explanation did he favor?”

  “Because the spotting patterns were so similar, he thought they were likely clones.”

  “How many animals does that dairy have?”

  “Seventeen hundred.”

  “If the pictures you took are representative of the entire herd, there could be at least a hundred cows in each clone. What did the geneticist think of that?”

  “We didn’t get into numbers.”

  “I could see how it’d be possible to produce a small number of identical animals by separating the first few cells of an embryo and letting them develop independently in surrogate females. That technique has been around for years. But to get a hundred identical animals, they’d have to grow a lot of cells from the desired individual in culture and, for each clone, transplant a nucleus from one of the cultured cells into an egg stripped of its own nucleus.”

  “Like those Scottish researchers made Dolly.”

  “Right. But it took nearly three hundred attempts to produce her. And the success rate for nuclear transfer is still extremely poor. So if that dairy has twelve different clones with a hundred or more animals in each clone, they either know something about the technique no one else does, or they want those clones badly enough to work like the devil to produce them. I don’t know anything about the dairy business, but maybe those animals are such superior milk producers that it’s worth the time and money to clone them.”

  “But those two dairy hands I talked with said they’re not better producers. For the entire herd, the yield is down. And they aren’t more efficient at converting food to milk either.”

  “Then why go to the trouble and expense of cloning them?” Susan asked. “And why are there twelve clones instead of just one?”

  “Vexing questions, I agree.”

  21

  JESSIE WASN’T ABLE to check on the mice she’d injected until ten-fifteen the next morning. Looking into the cage containing the first two that had received the suspect extract, she saw a pair of mice that looked active and well, no signs of neurologic problems. She hadn’t expected any effects to show up this early, but she was still disappointed. The pair in the second cage were apparently just as healthy. But in the third cage, the wound on one of the pair was gaping, probably the result of a nocturnal scrap with his cagemate. She didn’t have time today to fool with this, but that wound had to be closed.

  After checking the six control animals, which were all doing fine, she loaded a 1-cc disposable syringe with Ketamine and gave the animal needing repair enough anesthetic to knock him out. While waiting for the anesthetic to take effect, she got everything ready for regluing the incision, then took a break for a pit stop.

  When she returned, she found the injected animal lying motionless on the bottom of his cage. Donning the jeweler’s magnifiers, she carried him to the hood, where she flicked off the sterilizing UV light, placed the animal inside on his belly, and sat down.

  Before applying the glue, she had to appose the edges of the wound. As she leaned over and focused on the incision, she saw something inexplicable.

  There was no bone wax on this animal’s skull. And no hole.

  How could that be? She couldn’t have neglected to drill this animal. She’d done them one after the other, and there were only twelve. It just couldn’t happen.

  Wondering now about the rest, she got up and went for the Ketamine.

  Ten minutes later, she cursed under her breath as she opened the incision of a second mouse and found, like the first, no hole in the skull. She looked at one more, then began to pace the floor, wondering what to do.

  Finally, she reglued the incisions on all the mice she’d examined and put them back in their cages. She returned to her primary lab, grabbed her coat, and told her techs she had to run an errand.r />
  She drove to Richard’s office and burst into the waiting room. “Is my brother available?”

  “He’s with a patient,” Connie said. “Why don’t you go back and wait in his office, and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  Jessie quickly found that she was too keyed up to sit, so while she waited for Richard, she paced. Then she scanned his bookshelves, so distracted that none of the titles there made it to her brain. She could hear the murmur of Richard’s voice in the examining room next door, but couldn’t understand what he was saying. The murmuring stopped.

  Was that it? Was he finished?

  It began again. She picked a book from the shelf and flipped through it looking for pictures. After a minute or so, she heard the examining room door open and Richard say, “If that persists, you let me know.”

  Finally, he came into his office. “What’s going on?” he said. “You can’t have results this soon.”

  Jessie shut the door behind him. “While I was looking at the animals this morning, I noticed that the incision on one had come open. When I tried to seal it, I discovered there was no hole in the skull.”

  “What do you mean no hole?”

  “I drilled a small hole in each animal’s skull so I could inject the extract into the brain. It’s the best way. But this animal’s skull was intact. And so were the skulls of two other animals I checked. Someone replaced my animals with shams.”

  “Who?”

  “I have to believe it was Bruxton. Not him directly, but on his orders.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  “Who else could it be? He’s the only one there who knows what I’m doing. He forbade me to mention it to anyone.”

  “It’s possible he let it slip.”

  “I don’t think he ever says anything he doesn’t intend to. But okay, let’s say he did. What’s the point of the switch?”

  “It’d be a good way to make us think that dead cow was harmless. You get no results, we give up the idea. Who has something to lose if that cow is the cause?”

  “The dairy where it died,” Jessie said. “If that cow was sick, others in the herd might be as well. People hear about that, nobody will buy their milk.”

  “Does this mean that whoever did it knows the cow carried the disease that killed my patients?”

  “Or they’re just afraid it might have.”

  “On the other hand, maybe this is just a malicious prank by someone at work who doesn’t like you.”

  “I can’t imagine who that would be.”

  “We don’t always know who dislikes us.”

  “I don’t think it’s that. But right now it’s irrelevant. We have to redo the test . . . somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  Jessie thought a moment. “I can prepare the samples at work, but I’ll do the injections and keep the animals in the apartment over my garage. It’s empty now.”

  “What’s to keep whoever interfered with the experiment at work from doing the same thing again?”

  “I’ll put Fitzie on a long chain by the apartment stairs and I’ll rig some tricks in the apartment so I’ll know if anyone altered anything. I’m going to pretend that I think the replaced animals at work are the ones I started with, so Bruxton won’t know I found out. And we’re not going to tell anyone about the new tests.”

  “Not that I think he’d spread it around, but it might be hard to keep it from Artie.”

  “I can do it.”

  “Where’s the meat we got from Dennis?”

  “In my freezer at work.”

  Richard frowned and shook his head. “We can’t use that.”

  “Oh, right. It might have been replaced too. We’ll have to get another sample.”

  “I’ve got a patient waiting, but if you want to pick it up, I’ll see if Dennis is home.”

  “Call him. Then we have to figure out where to get some test animals and cages. I don’t want to take anything obvious from work.”

  By now, Richard had committed the Johannsons’ number to memory. On the third ring, he looked at Jessie. “He may be back at the . . . Dennis, this is Doctor Heflin. Are you going to be there for a few minutes? My sister would like to come by and pick up another package of that meat if it’s okay.”

  Jessie saw Richard’s mouth gape in a look of surprise.

  “What?” she said.

  He put his hand over the receiver’s mouthpiece. “Dennis had a burglary. They took the VCR and a radio and emptied the freezer.” Removing his hand, he said, “Okay Dennis, thanks. Sorry about your losses.” He hung up and looked at Jessie. “Considering what happened to your animals, it’s pretty obvious the VCR and the radio were just to cover what they really wanted.”

  “So now they’ve got us,” Jessie said, glumly.

  “It doesn’t look good. But I wonder . . .” He drifted away for a few seconds, staring at air. “After a cow is butchered, there’s a lot left. I wonder where the remains of the Johannson animal are?”

  “Richard, it’s been over two months.”

  “I agree, if we find it, it won’t be pretty, but if there were any pions in the carcass, chances are they’ll still be active.”

  “Oh, we’re gonna need a lot of luck on this one.”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  Jessie turned her palms up and shrugged. “So call the butcher.”

  “I think we should talk to him personally. He might need his memory jogged. We can do that better if we’re there with him. I can probably go in twenty or thirty minutes. Want to hang around?”

  “Hope you’ve got some good magazines out there.”

  BUCK LUNDVAL, THE retired butcher, lived outside of town in a mobile home on a hundred-acre hobby farm on which he raised pigs. The smell from these creatures was so strong, Richard could almost see it enveloping the farm like a giant dome. They found Lundval loading ears of corn from a small picker into a conveyor that carried it up to the top of his corn crib and dumped it inside.

  “Mr. Lundval, how are you?” Richard said loudly, extending his hand.

  Lundval turned off the conveyor and stiffly shook Richard’s hand. Thin and rangy like a mountain spruce growing out of a rock, he was at least sixty with long windblown silvery hair. “I’d be better if I could get my work done.”

  “This is my sister, Jessie.”

  Lundval tilted his head. “Ma’am.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you again,” Richard said. “But I’ve got an important question to ask.”

  “Could have already done it,” Lundval said.

  “What happened to the carcass of the cow you butchered for Ronnie Johannson?”

  Lundval’s already grim face darkened. “If I’da known that animal was gonna lead to this much trouble, I wouldn’t have touched it. Hasn’t been two hours ago the health department was here asking the same thing.”

  His hopes of finding the carcass even dimmer now than when they’d come up the driveway, Richard looked at Jessie. “I didn’t tell the health department who butchered the animal, and my full report is still on my desk. I was going to go over it one more time before sending it today.” He turned to Lundval. “What did these people look like?”

  “A woman and two men. She was thin and dark-haired. Had it pulled back in a bun. Kind of a snotty attitude, like I was something she stepped in.”

  Despite this rudimentary description, Richard looked at Jessie to see if she might know the woman, but she merely shrugged. He turned again to Lundval. “What about the men?”

  “I dunno. She did the talking. Didn’t pay much attention to anybody else.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I’d buried it out back.” He turned and pointed to a scrubby field beyond the pigsty. “Next t
o those two big oaks.”

  “They took it?”

  “Had me show ‘em the exact spot, and then they dug it up. Wore rubber gloves and a mask like they were operating on somebody. Put it all in heavy black plastic bags, packed ’em in the trunk of their car and drove off without even thanking me.”

  “What did you do with the animal’s blood?”

  “Poured it into the hole before I threw the carcass in.”

  Afraid to hear the answer, Richard asked, “Did they also take the blood-soaked dirt?”

  “Every bit of it.”

  So that was it. Without the carcass, there was no way to prove it was infectious. The best Richard could do was describe in his report how someone had interfered with his investigation and hope the real health department would find that sufficient cause to inspect the dairy’s animals. Knowing how bureaucracies function, he had strong doubts they’d move on such circumstantial evidence.

  “Well, Mr. Lundval, thanks for letting us interrupt your work. We’ll leave and let you get back to it.”

  “See now, if that woman had been as civil as you are, I might not have let her take the wrong carcass.”

  22

  “ARE YOU SAYING the remains of the animal you butchered for Ronnie Johannson are still here?” Richard said.

  “About thirty yards from where those other people dug,” Lundval replied.

  “Will you show us the spot?”

  “No point in my saying what I did if I wouldn’t. You want to dig it up, I’ll lend you some shovels.”

  “Did you leave the brain?” Jessie asked.

  “Not many folks around here eat brains. Don’t care for ‘em myself.”