Hemlock Grove (12 page)

“We’re strangers on a train.”

He smiled at the unusual prospect of play in the middle of a working day.

“I’m the director of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies.”

“Whoa, Nellie, that sounds fancy. What do you do there?”

“The gamut. We design diagnostic equipment, prostheses, artificial organs, etc., and stand at the vanguard in pharmaceuticals, genetic manipulation, and nanotechnology today. We’re about to roll out a series of biosynthetic masks for burn victims that will convey human empathy via facial expression mirroring.”

“Does that explain your receptionist?” she said.

He was confused at first, then realized it was another attempt at humor, and again attempted to appear like he went in for that sort of thing. “No, we can’t take credit for Cesar. Actually, if you’d like to know a trade secret, all nonspecialist personnel are hired largely on the basis of an obvious disinclination toward natural curiosity.”

“You don’t want anyone asking questions.”

“We certainly don’t.”

“What kind of genetics experiments are you doing?”

“Principally gene therapy,” he said. “JR Godfrey foresaw, correctly, that while the malleability of material properties was what defined the crucial advances of the nineteenth century, it is the malleability of life itself that will define the twenty-first. And so his mandate was that the name come to mean for healing backs what it once did for breaking them, which happily aligned with my own inclinations. I can’t really discuss much of it, but then you would probably only be so interested in the treatment of vein graft stenosis in adult dogs anyway.”

“You do animal testing?”

“I respect you’re asking out of diligence, but do I really need to answer that?”

“How exactly did you get this job?”

“Because there is no one in my field working at a remotely comparable level.”

“But your own area of specialization is one of contention,” she said. “Exobiology, a highly speculative field dealing with possible nonterrestrial systems of life. In fact, I had some difficulty following the premise behind your first published and highly controversial paper. I found no shortage of … interpretations, but if you wouldn’t mind walking me through it.”

Pryce nodded. “You mean the one that has become popularly called ‘Better Reincarnation Through Chemistry.’ Certainly. In theory, if one took an existing but inanimate carbon-based structure—”

“A corpse,” she said.

“—that was still in a relatively labile situation—”

“A baby’s corpse,” she said.

“—one might weave into the existing structure the element phosphorus, which is capable of forming chain molecules of sufficient length and complexity to support life, new life. But phosphorus alone is dangerously unstable. However—in theory—a stable bond can be achieved in combination with nitrogen. Though we’re not quite out of the woods: molecular nitrogen is practically inert and very difficult to convert into energy—a necessity to an organism constituted of the stuff. But a rather dynamic solution could be found, of all places, in the bean world. Legumes host within their roots bacteria that fix soil nitrogen in exchange for resources from the host. So a subject as described might survive by hosting these bacteria in, say, for the sake of argument, the feet, requiring simply a ready supply of dirt. In theory.”

“A theory that discredited you in the eyes of many of your peers before your career even started. You were, if I might speak candidly, a provocative choice for one of the most competitive posts to open in your field.”

“An infuriating one!” said Pryce. “Oh, the shoes that were eaten that day. But just as Westinghouse patronized the future in alternating current, JR was a man more concerned with what lay past the horizon than with clinging with both hands to the sagging teat of orthodoxy. He was not, to use the vernacular, a complete fuckwit. Which cannot be said of many of my contemporaries.”

She noted he did not echo her use of the word
peer.

“Do you mind,” said Chasseur, “if I ask you a personal question?”

“Insofar as we’ve been discussing my work, you have been all along.”

She nodded as one who could relate. “What attracted you to such a controversial discipline in the first place?”

His expression drifted and subtly dulled as though animating energies were absorbed for internal distribution, and studying this void it occurred to her she was seeing him for the first time fully inhabit his natural character. And as someone uniquely adept at not showcasing her emotions she realized that this subject accomplished the reverse trick in animating his face at all.

“Shortly into my eighth year I read for the first time the most important book ever written,
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
,” said Pryce.

Chasseur nodded that that was indeed a dandy.

“I was enthralled,” said Pryce, “and yet troubled at the same time in a way I couldn’t identify, until I sat down and made a simple calculation.” He gestured at her as a for instance. “There is an exponential increase in system complexity through the upward progress of levels of organization. So I calculated the statistical probability of a system as stupefyingly complex as human consciousness arising from random mutation in the geologic age of the Earth. And I concluded that it is not. Probable. Or, for that matter, possible. By random mutation. Draw your own conclusions.”

By now she had quite an inventory.

“Now do you mind if I ask a question of my own?” said Dr. Pryce.

She made a hand gesture:
Go ahead.

“You completed a doctorate in predator ethology at the University of Texas in 2004,” he said.

She did not reply. This was not a question, and he would not have chosen his words casually.

“How is this of any possible interest to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service?” he said.

She looked down. There was a glass top over the table that reflected the skylight above in such a way that it contained her doppelgänger peering back at her from within a lighted shaft. She looked back at Pryce with amiable surrender.

“You got me,” she said. “It’s not, I suppose. They just give me a lot of rope to do my job, and I have my own method. It’s a little elliptical.”

“If I’m not mistaken, to complement your training in sociobiology you have some experience with the Reid technique of interrogation and have been asking tangential questions to establish a rapport with the suspect as well as elicit behavior symptoms of truth and deception preparatory to a more direct confrontation.”

“Johann, is there any chance one of your test animals could have gotten loose?”

“No.”

“What about a test subject?”

“You mean a person?”

“Yes.”

“None whatsoever.”

She regarded him. And if moments before, the vacuum of basic human vitality in his face had been a momentary lapse, it was now strategically deployed: he had become such a blank that he could have been napping right there with his eyes open, or breathing dead. She had never before looked into another living person’s eyes and not found incontrovertible evidence of the human soul. She had never seen anything more terrifying.

She snapped her fingers. “Rats. And here I thought I’d cracked it. You wouldn’t have any of your own ideas on our demon dog, would you?”

His point made—you will get nothing from me that I don’t give you—Pryce suffered imitation of life to reinvest his features.

“I understand the animal has left no tracks,” said Pryce.

She nodded.

“I understand canid scat was discovered in the area containing large amounts of human hair, but from an adolescent male, of which none have gone missing. Further, I understand analysis of this scat revealed abnormally low levels of adrenal glucocorticoid, indicating that the animal not only had not recently engaged in an act of aggression, but also is by nature nonaggressive.”

She did not bother to inquire how he came into possession of this information.

“Your conclusion, Johann?” she said.

“I conclude I’m glad it’s your job to make sense of it and not mine,” he said. “However, considering the parallels between both killings, I would calculate the probability that these were not premeditated acts of a pathological sexual predator at within an order of magnitude of one in ten million.”

“But a person wouldn’t possibly have the ability to do what was done to those bodies. Not bare-handed.”

Dr. Pryce nodded. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a digital voice recorder. He held it in his soft, feminine hand and, giving her a collegial smile, made a fist that he tightened and tightened until its shell ruptured and its gadget innards spilled onto the table, which he tidily swept into a napkin and set aside.

“If a problem can’t be solved within the frame it was conceived, the solution lies in reframing the problem,” he said.

Hello, Handsome

Immediately after dropping Shelley off, Roman went round to unhitch the cart. Olivia emerged on the porch and watched him. She could see that someone was sitting in the car, but she was not wearing her sunglasses and the sun’s glare reflected from the window hit her eyes and she shielded them with her hand. Roman whistled an old Rodgers and Hart standard.

“Where are you going?” said Olivia, massaging her eyelids and causing a neon flare of blood vessels.

“Nowhere,” said Roman.

“Will we be returning again at five a.m.?”

“We’ll see.” He lowered the cart and resumed whistling.

She blinked through a haze of phantom color as her son pulled from the drive but through her own galled determination made out the passenger, slouched and superstitiously averting his face from her direct gaze: Peter Rumancek. Olivia lightly traced her finger along the rail and pressed down on a knot in the wood.

She turned and was startled to find Shelley standing in the foyer studying her. Looming with nervous sensitivity to climatic shifts in her mother’s mood. Olivia made an effort to slough off some of the tension the girl tended to absorb.

“And
what
,” she said, “have we been told about how bloody
disconcerting
we are when we sneak up on people?”

She made her hands into pincers and pinchedpinchedpinched at Shelley’s sides and the house shook with thunderous laughter.

*   *   *

On the parkway, Roman said, “So was that a nice little lunch date?”

“She pities me,” Peter said. He didn’t have to put his finger to the wind to know that extreme caution was required here.

“She’s all heart,” said Roman.

They entered a tunnel.

“Can I ask you something?” said Roman.

“Go ahead.”

“What do you do when you get horny? While you’re turned?”

Peter looked up at the lines of parallel lights extending into the white vanishing point at the tunnel’s far end. He didn’t answer.

They drove to the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside, making a detour at a health food store and then arriving at a crumbling yellow brick apartment building. Peter rang a unit on the second floor and they were buzzed in and Roman followed Peter upstairs. An elderly Italian woman passed by them and, making an educated guess of their destination, cast her eyes to the carpet and fished a crucifix from her breast, muttering “
Strega
.”

Peter stopped at the predicted door and knocked and they were greeted by a young woman in her late twenties. She was brown like all Rumanceks and had on a boy child’s G.I. Joe shirt stretched over an infelicitously modest chest, in a family of epic-bosomed women, and a small pair of cotton shorts. Her lean arms and legs and exposed abdomen were tight with springy muscle indicative of a stars-defying attitude toward exercise encountered in certain young women from closely knit ethnic enclaves who have witnessed too many members of their sex undergo the near universal ballooning of hips by thirty. She pulled Peter into a hug and kissed his cheek and gave his ponytail an annoyed jerk and harangued him didn’t he have a girlfriend to make him cut his hair.

Peter introduced her to Roman as his cousin Destiny Rumancek. Roman held out his hand, which instead of shaking she held firmly palm upward and inspected with knit eyebrows and grunted speculatively and released.

“Come in,” she said. “I’m finishing up with someone, but it won’t be a sec.”

They followed her into the apartment, which in contrast with the inauspicious conditions of the rest of the building was painted in welcoming primary colors with laminate flooring and appointed with attractive and ergonomic Scandinavian furniture and the sort of tranquillity fountain you see in an airplane catalog and wonder who besides massage parlors would buy such things. Destiny went into the bedroom, where Roman caught a brief glimpse of an overweight black man lying on the bed with his pants bunched around his knees, and over his genitals there was a washcloth damp with a substance that filled even the outer room with a bitter and pungent aroma. Destiny shut the door. Peter sat down and turned on the television, skimming for a sports station. Roman cocked an ear to the closed door.

“Let’s see how we’re doing over here,” said Destiny.

There was a pause and then a gasp and whimper. Roman looked at Peter, but he was disinterestedly watching a recap of the Steelers-Colts debacle.

“Now I need you to listen to my voice and keep breathing deep deep into your diaphragm,” she said.

The whimper modulated into long, trembling breaths.

“Look how good we’re doing!” she said. “Now I need you to imagine your solar plexus as a golf ball of pale, dim light. Feel the flow of the energy and love flowing in and nourishing it, and as it brightens I want you to draw energy down from your own Manipura, your city of jewels that also nourishes and loves, and would you look at that little ball—it’s so bright and happy to be here it can give you a suntan!”

The breathing increased in volume and tempo before cresting and falling into an infantesque burble.

“Yay!” said Destiny, clapping her hands.

Soon after, both emerged. The man had tears streaming down his cheeks. He did not acknowledge Peter and Roman, or did not even see them.