“It works?”
“Last year, some archaeologists in London found an ancient grave. They did a spectrographic analysis of the victims’ teeth and proved the skeletons were Vikings. No other artifacts in the grave, just the bones. These guys were herded naked to the edge of the pit. Then beheaded.”
“Without that, the stable isotope whatnot, would there’ve been a way to tell they weren’t English?”
“Assuming there was enough preserved DNA, maybe. But preservation of DNA in a bone over ten centuries isn’t very likely. And there’s been genetic intermixing between the English and the Scandinavians—even back then. Stable isotope hydrology can give proof of where someone actually lived, not where his ancestors came from.”
Chris thought about it. Even if the chances of it working were one in a hundred, he thought it might be worthwhile. He imagined how much easier it would be if they could limit their search area to the cities served by one aquifer.
“I won’t get my hopes up, but give it a try. Assuming you isolate anything that’s his and not hers.”
“We’ve got saliva and not bone, so it’ll be different. We’ll know where he’s been getting his drinking water in the last couple months. If he’s been traveling, it might show something different than what his bones would say,” Chevalier said. “Anyway, I haven’t bought time on a mass spectrometer since I was in graduate school. I don’t know what it’ll run you.”
“You get enough spit to run the test, find out how much it is. I can add it to escrow. If it’s less than twenty thousand dollars, and they’ll do it without a deposit, just go for it.”
“Deal.”
“Email is the best way to contact me from here on,” Chris said. They finished their drinks and Chris left a fifty dollar bill on the table to cover the tab. He shook Chevalier’s hand, went back upstairs to his room, and booked the first flight to Honolulu.
Chapter Thirteen
Intelligene started in lab space leased from Harvard, moved to its first independent office after two years of drawn-out wrangling with the intellectual property division of the university’s legal department, and finally settled into a newly built lab in the woods outside Foxborough a few months after its successful initial public offering. Dr. Chevalier had twenty-three employees, none of whom were in the lab after eleven at night. The parking lot was empty when he pulled into it, having driven to Foxborough directly after his meeting with Chris Wilcox. It didn’t matter that none of the money was in escrow yet; it didn’t matter that he had already put in an eighteen-hour day. He was too curious to see what he could do for Chris Wilcox.
Chevalier stepped out of his car, crossed the rain-slick asphalt, and stood with his back to Intelligene’s entrance, looking at the woods behind his BMW. The summer crickets must have all taken to their burrows in the downpour. The only sound was the wind moving through the wet boughs. He placed his index finger on the print reader next to the door, waited for the light to turn green, and then keyed his personal pass code. The door silently swung open and he stepped into the reception area. Moving behind the desk, he used the control panel to lock the external doors and arm all the building’s alarms except the internal motion sensors. His largest investors—the new fifty-one-percent owners of Intelligene—had insisted on this security system, and now Chevalier was glad for it. He checked the monitors and saw the entire building was empty. The receptionist’s third computer monitor showed that every authorized employee had checked out of the building, the last one leaving at 8:39 p.m. Chevalier went to the break room and made a pot of coffee, then went into the main lab. Three video cameras connected to the new security system tracked him as he walked.
At midnight, Chevalier turned the fork over and refocused the microscope. He zoomed in just behind the tip of the second tine. Without magnification, the back of the fork looked almost clean. Under the microscope, it was another story. There were individual blood cells suspended in a thin film of liquid that had dried at the edges, leaving a crust of crystallized minerals, desiccated cells, and microscopic globules of oils. Under the microscope it looked like sand at the high tide line. Spread on a slide with further magnification, there would be bacteria, some still active, some dead or dormant. The portion that had not yet dried was frothed at the edges with tiny air bubbles and had a viscous sheen to its surface. Dr. Chevalier wasn’t positive, but he’d have bet Chris’s escrow deposit this was the killer’s saliva.
After that, it didn’t take long to find a cell. The epithelial lining of the mouth ages and sloughs off constantly; saliva is a DNA jackpot. Using a microscopic glass pipette, he transferred the cell to a slide, stained it, and put it under a higher power microscope.
The cell was in the early stages of mitosis, its chromosomes bunched together in preparation for cellular division. As such, they were a visible chain of rough Xs across the center of the cell’s nucleus. He saw the obvious male Y sex chromosome—it really looked more like an apostrophe than the letter Y—and assumed he’d found cells belonging to the killer and not to the victim. Then he saw something that stopped him short.
The cell he was looking at could not have come from a human.
It had too many chromosomes.
He set aside the slide he’d been studying and prepared a new slide using a tiny sample of the bloody tissue from the other side of the fork. He spent forty-five minutes preparing the sample, staining it, and searching for a cell in mitosis. He counted the chromosomes twice and came up with a total of forty-six chromosomes. Human. The sex chromosomes were a woman’s double-x. Chris Wilcox was not joking. The cells on Dr. Chevalier’s slide almost certainly belonged to a human female. He could prove that one way or another with simple tests. But first he wanted to go back to the cells he’d discovered in the saliva.
He returned to the first slide and looked again. This cell contained twelve chromosomes more than a human. Millions of additional genes. If the fork really had been pushed into a girl’s flesh and blood, and if the saliva on the fork came from an animal with fifty-eight chromosomes, what could he conclude?
Maybe the killer was feeding his victims to some kind of pet.
But what?
It had to be something exotic: dogs had seventy-eight chromosomes and cats had thirty-eight. The only way to know more would be to amplify the DNA, then feed it conservative primers from known organisms. Amplification would heat the long double-helices of the DNA molecules until they split. Each strand would separate into two halves like a zipper coming undone. Conservative primers were short segments of DNA known to be present in all members of a genus. If the primers bonded to the heat-split DNA from his mystery cells, he could start making inferences. He’d be able to narrow his search by amplifying the DNA with progressively more specific primers.
He looked up from the microscope. There were no windows in the lab, but he could see a bank of monitors in the glass-enclosed security booth at the far end of the room. Monitors pulling in video from outside the building showed the sunrise. His car was still alone in the lot. His employees would be arriving soon and he needed to be cleaned up and gone before they came. The next phase of the experiments would have to wait; there was no way he could do this with employees present.
It was 6:03 a.m. when he left.
The computer system recorded his exit and the cameras watched him go.
Chapter Fourteen
Julissa claimed her sister’s body by signing a sheaf of paperwork at the University of Texas Medical Branch, then authorized a funeral home to transfer the body to Austin. Her parents wanted to come to Galveston, but she’d kept them away. Ben was unaccounted for and the police were hopeless. No one who loved Allison, and who wasn’t crazy, would ever set foot in Allison’s apartment again. There was nothing to do but go back to Austin and put Allison in the ground.
She’d already signed a form declaring she would not cremate the remains. The State of Texas wanted its evidence preserved. When the paperwork was done and her parents diverted home, Ju
lissa checked out of the Galvez and started the drive back. She stopped at a branch of her bank and withdrew five thousand dollars. On her way through Houston, she pulled off at the first computer superstore she found. She paid in cash for two laptops, her face hidden from the cash register security camera by the bill of the black baseball cap she sometimes wore to the shooting range.
The rest of the drive was nothing like her trip to Galveston a week earlier. She didn’t cry or pound the steering wheel. She drove straight and fast, and felt focused. She’d read the files Chris had given her, and she compared his files to Allison’s autopsy report. If she’d ever felt any doubt, Chris’s files told her to let it go. There was one killer, and he had left his mark everywhere with the same deliberation of a lower predator that marks its kills with its own urine. Now Julissa was planning her next move.
She’d been home for two hours, had just hung up after thirty-five minutes of questions from the funeral home, and was pacing in her study when the phone rang again. She thought it would be her parents or Ben, but it was Chris.
“Where are you?” she asked when she picked up the phone.
“Kaneohe.”
“I came back to Austin for the funeral.”
“Mike told me.”
“I’ve been thinking of where I want to go for my part,” she said. She wouldn’t say the words hack or FBI on the phone. She’d designed too many chips for the National Security Agency, had read too much about warrantless wire tapping.
“Yeah?”
“I’ll give you a call when I know for sure.”
“Okay.”
“What happened in Boston?”
“I gave the evidence to Intelligene. Now we’re just waiting.”
“What about Mike and Aaron?”
“They’re still in Galveston. They talked to as many people as they could on the docks and at the marina. No luck. They thought it might be worthwhile to go back to the same places for the next few nights, see if they run into anyone new.”
They were silent awhile. Julissa could hear doves from Chris’s end of the connection. They sounded like they were right outside his window.
“When’s the funeral?” he asked.
“Tomorrow morning. Day after that, I’ll get started.”
“Are you coming here?” he asked.
He was better at reading her than she’d thought. But she still hesitated, not sure she wanted to admit her plan.
“I was thinking of it.”
“Good.”
“It’s really okay?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you then.” She hung up quickly.
After the service, they carried the coffin down the aisle of the church and across the churchyard to the adjacent cemetery. Julissa was a pall bearer, along with her father, two of Allison’s friends from high school, and Ben’s brother. Ben was still nowhere to be found. His brother never said a word. The coffin didn’t weigh much. According to the medical examiner’s report, between fifteen and twenty pounds of Allison was missing. A lot of that was probably blood, but the rest was flesh, soft organs, and huge strips of skin from her thighs. Julissa knew her sister had probably been eaten in the course of two, or maybe even three separate feedings. Her still-warm tissue had been stuffed into Tupperware containers and hidden in the back of the freezer for later. Now she was carrying what was left out of the church and into the already hot sunlight of the July morning.
Like scraping a chicken carcass off a tray and into a trash can after the guests are gone. That’s what she was doing: just cleaning up.
No one else in her family knew as much, though the look on Ben’s brother’s face made Julissa wonder. He’d probably heard the message on Ben’s voicemail. She hadn’t heard it, but Mike told her about it after Chris had flown to Boston. She pried it out of him, and then wished she could give it back.
Later, a limousine took her to her parents’ house. Aunts and uncles and cousins showed up. Friends from high school, from college. Everyone ignored the food and went directly to the liquor cabinet. Julissa poured a tumbler level-full of scotch and went to the back porch. She looked at the juniper trees and live oaks, watched the mocking birds swoop through the branches with their white-striped wings flashing.
Her father came out, but didn’t see her. He walked to a rocking chair and sat in it. For a moment he was still, and then suddenly he was pounding his fists against the side of his face and sobbing. Julissa started to go to him, but then thought better of it. He’d come to be alone, the same thing she’d done. She stood slowly and wandered off into the woods. She’d poured enough into her glass to make a real outing of it. Her feet automatically led her down the trail to the swimming hole. She sat on a shelf of limestone, her legs hanging a few feet above the clear water. Springs dripped from the fern-covered cliffs on the other side of the creek. She dropped a pebble over the edge and watched it sink to the bottom.
“I will not disappoint you, Allie,” she said.
She thought about those words for a while, the terrible necessity of what she was about to do, and then she began to cry as her father had.
The next day she flew from Austin to Dallas, head still pounding from the reception. She drank black coffee from a Starbucks kiosk in the American Airlines terminal while she waited to board her flight to Honolulu. She’d never been to Hawaii. It seemed like a strange place to attempt the crime she wanted to commit. But she wasn’t asking herself a lot of hard questions about anything. Her instinct said, Go to Hawaii and work with Chris. That was enough for now. She boarded the flight and fell asleep. When she woke, judging from the barren mountains and dry stream beds far beneath them, they were over West Texas or Southern New Mexico. Her head was feeling better and she went to the back of the plane and asked the stewardess for another cup of coffee. Then, back in her seat, she got one of the new laptops. She looked around. The man next to her was asleep. She powered up the computer, opened a Java application, and started to program her first step.
When the plane landed, her headache was gone. She had no clear plan of what to do next. She could have rented a car, but she didn’t know where to drive. Calling Chris didn’t seem right either. She wasn’t sure why she’d come and had been so busy programming her Trojan horse on the plane that she hadn’t thought about it. At the taxi stand she got into a minivan and asked the driver to take her to Waikiki. There would at least be a lot of hotels in Waikiki.
She sat in the van and looked out the window. This didn’t look like a place for a serial killer. Behind Honolulu were green mountains topped with clouds. A rainbow arched towards the ocean behind the volcanic crater she recognized as Diamond Head. But he’d been here. She saw the rain in the mountains and thought of Chris driving with the police to the scene of his wife’s slaughter. Nowhere near the ocean was safe. The map in their short-lived headquarters proved that. From the overpass where the van sat in traffic, she could see an oil tanker waiting at anchor west of the airport runway. He had to be coming on a ship. If he could swim like Aaron thought, he could easily make it ashore from a tanker a mile or two out. There’d be no record of him even entering most of the countries. She wondered what to do with the idea. He might not have any records, but the ship would.
“Here on vacation?” asked the cab driver.
“Yeah.”
“Meeting your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“What hotel?”
“The Hyatt?” she said. There had to be a Hyatt in Waikiki.
“Hyatt hotel, okay. Traffic is bad.”
She wondered what he would look like. Middle aged, probably, if he’d been killing since the seventies. Built like an athlete. But he couldn’t possibly look like an ordinary man. There would be something that marked him and set him apart. No one could do what he did and simply blend into the crowd. She was sure there’d be some kind of ugliness about him.
“Boyfriend already at the Hyatt?”
“Yeah,” she said. She wa
s getting sick of this conversation. She rested her hand on the suitcase next to her. Her Sig Sauer was packed in a locked travel case inside her checked bag. She hadn’t brought any ammunition—it was illegal to pack it.
“On the way, can you stop somewhere I can pick up a box of .45 ACP?”
The cab driver looked around. “Ma’am?”
“.45 ACP. You know, bullets?”
She paid for an ocean-view suite in the Diamond Head tower of the Waikiki Hyatt. She ignored the waterfalls and tropical birds in the open-air lobby and went directly to the elevators. She left her suitcase unopened by the door, and then went out onto the lanai with her laptop.
A little before sunset, her phone rang. It was Chris.
“You find a hotel?”
“The Hyatt, in Waikiki.”
“Want some dinner?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll call you from the lobby in about an hour.”
They walked across Kalakaua Boulevard and through the lobby of the old Moana Surfrider hotel. A banyan tree with three separate trunks spread across the patio behind the hotel and gave shade almost all the way to the beach. They took a table under the boughs at the edge of the beach. Diamond Head was to her left across the turquoise water.
“Can you explain how this works?” Chris asked.
She nodded and put down the menu.
“The program’s simple. It’s called a stack buffer overflow exploit, and it takes advantage of weaknesses in the target computer to upload executable code into the stack buffers.”
Chris looked at her as if she’d just spoken in Chinese, but before she could explain more, he asked a question.
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