Bloodletting (32 page)

His brow furrowed. Something about that last sentence set off bells in his head, but he couldn't quite grasp why.

"I don't understand that either. I mean, I haven't gone to a doctor's office in years. I take vitamins, but no prescription medications. Surely there are millions of people just like me."

"I wouldn't imagine they're as concerned with infecting adults like us as they are with getting the virus into children, who are still developing, still growing. We're talking about initiating changes that need to develop inside the body, with the body, changes in structure and function, in hormones and pheromones. And children get shots all the time. There are inoculations for everything now: polio, rubella, measles, mumps. Heck, how long will it be before they have a cure for the common cold?"

And there it was.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

"What?" Ellie asked. "What is it?"

His own words echoed in his head.
And it isn't like you'll be able to find people willing to line up for their injection of some nasty virus they know absolutely nothing about
.

But you could, couldn't you? You could find millions of people willing to do just that.

IV

Washington

Carver disconnected the call and stared ahead in silence. He couldn't breathe. Wolfe glanced back at him in the rear view mirror, or so it appeared. Once. Then again. The sound of keystrokes was conspicuously absent from the passenger seat. He thought Hawthorne might have tilted the laptop screen just enough to possibly see into the back seat were there a reflection. The world blew past in blurs of greens and golds, separating itself from Carver, who no longer felt as though he was a part of it. His arms and legs were heavy, the Beretta under his arm even more so.

He watched the men in front of him, waiting for one of them to speak, but neither said a word.

Manning's news made his head feel light, disconnected. She was right. If the results were accurate, then he was definitely being victimized by an elaborate ploy to frame him, perhaps to get him out of the way. Had he come too close to the truth? Did they need him otherwise occupied or incarcerated to buy themselves just a little more time? He secretly hoped that was the case. The alternative was more than he could bear. He couldn't have a twin. It was simply impossible. He loved and trusted his mother, the life she had created for him. There was no way his entire life could have been a lie. He thought of what Hawthorne had said. The twins had been placed with new parents sympathetic to their plight, their unique heritage, often with single mothers. Most of the children had been too young to remember their abduction or the deaths of their biological parents. They had been raised in the southwest where they could be closely monitored to ensure their safety. Like Ellie, who had lived mere miles from him, whose twin had been exhumed only yesterday. There had been six pairs of twins: Hawthorne, Locke, Ellie, Schwartz, and he could only assume Wolfe. All of whom had been drawn together into this nightmare. Was it so hard to believe he could be the sixth?

And he thought of Jack, whose DNA matched his as a father's might. Jack, who had been there for every important moment in his life, whom he had grown to think of as a surrogate father. The man who had watched over him as his mother's oldest and dearest friend for longer than he could remember, a man who had lived and worked more than a thousand miles away, but had made the trip to see them at least six times each and every year. The man who had brought him into the FBI and to the brink of this revelation, who had fed him just enough information about the other agents to allow him to make the next leaps of logic on his own.

All of the parents of the twins had been killed during the abductions in 1979, the year he was born, with the exception of one. The man he knew as the Colonel. The mysterious superior on the other end of the company phone, whose voice had been deliberately modified. Why? It was a secure connection and they used scramblers to mask the signal. No one could have eavesdropped. The clandestine charade was for his benefit. So he wouldn't recognize the voice on the phone.

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, office 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.