J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 (17 page)

“Yeah, it’s a lot better.” I poured myself a mug and raised it to him. “Thanks.”

“Look here.” He turned around, grabbed my chin, and squinted at me hard, then shifted his focus from one side of my face to the other. “Yeah, better. Your pupils weren’t dancing the same tune earlier. Treat that brain good, you only got one.”

“Bullshit. I keep a spare on safe deposit at Wells Fargo.”

“You keep playing hide-the-pickle with people like this and you might need it.”

“Oh? What’d you find?”

Earl grinned a bit like the fake-looking shark from Jaws. “I think you’re gonna want fresh diapers.” He swiveled the leftmost monitor on its Lazy Susan mount so it was facing me, and brought up a chart.

“So, we’ve got Nya and Stephanie and Gina and Bridget. Different ages, but all within a couple years of each other. Different families, but all from the same social class, all living in the same area. Three of them lived there all their lives. Care to guess which one didn’t?”

“Stephanie. You told me this on Saturday.”

“There’s a rhythm to these things, roll with it.” He stretched out roll like he was an R&B singer. “You’re gonna love it. These four have a few other things in common.”

“Thrill me.”

“They all had abortions before they were twelve.”

The Doc had been wrong about the infertility, then. “Disgusting, but okay. This ain’t exactly tickling my testicles.”

“Wait for it.”

“Oh?”

“You said Phil the pill needed some working over before he did the nasty bop with his snookums?”

“That’s what Rawles said.”

“So let’s assume that the other Pops in the group are stand-up guys, and they weren’t molesting their girls.”

“Okay.”

“So we got four women bloomed way before May, and they learned out how to use it early. Precocious as puppies with their choice of legs.”

“Okay.” I winced and tried to ignore the montage of deviant images now running through my badly-abused brain. “What else? Aside from that thing with their faces.”

“Ah, I was wondering if you were going to bring that up. We’ll get to that in a minute. More important:” He clicked on the next step in his chart reveal, “The three that were born here all had the same fertility specialist.”

“IVF?”

“Better than that. Second gen, super-duper extra special designer IVF for couples that want to control exactly what comes out the business end of the pregnancy.”

“That’s not possible, is it?”

“It might be. Say if you went to someone really clever who was doing a clinical trial of some new technique. Someone who…”

“…someone who was nominated for a Nobel. Sternwood?”

“Sternwood.”

“What about Stephanie?”

“In ‘96 Sternwood vamoosed on his family and went to England to do a second study with a new sample group.”

“His daughter died in ‘95.”

“Yeah—grieving wife and eight year old boy left behind. Can you think of a better time to reinvent your career?”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah, prick-o-la. So Steph’s mother was attending Cambridge at the time—the limey one—and she couldn’t have gotten pregnant if she pulled a train for the whole obstetrics ward.”

I whistled. “So all four of them?”

“Sternwood babies. Off the same study. And you ain’t even seen my pantyhose yet.”

“Oh?”

“Sternwood’s had the press crawling up his ass for years, right? They even put in a briefing room next to his prostate. So the shit finally starts raining from the stars when two hundred of his guinea pigs join a class-action suit against him for ‘wrongful birth.’ Didn’t get their money’s worth for the free medical care when their kids all came out looking like Cookie Monster.

“So he had this problem. Even his pet grad student had a kid with problems when the pee hits the parade…”

“Research assistants aren’t allowed to be subjects, are they?”

“Nope. One of a bunch of irregularities that kept Sternwood out of all the fancy journals for a while. But Mr. and Mrs. Teacher’s pet were the only ones who didn’t sue over…” Earl read from his screen, “‘Obvious physical birth defects, precocious sexual curiosity, delayed onset verbal abilities, low-level autism spectrum disorder, and below average IQ.’ Two of those four you’ve been nosing around have been in therapy for treatment of low-latent inhibition disorder…”

“So they sued.”

“Yeah. And Sternwood’s backers settled out of court.”

“So that’s how they all know each other…”

“No, this happened when they were three, four, and five years old.”

“Did they find out what went wrong?”

“Gag order. Nothing leaked out of court. But nothing went wrong, either.”

“The kids were all deformed…”

“No. The parents
thought
the kids were deformed. ‘Antony’s Syndrome.’ That one grad student co-authored the definitive paper on it with the Doc. Still works for Sternwood’s company, too. Business manager. Guy by the name of Phil Thales.”

“Holy shit.”

“Strap on your SCUBA gear. This shit gets deep.”

I leaned forward and studied the next bit of the chart he uncovered. “‘Species revivification.’ I’ve heard Sternwood talking about that at Stanford.”

“His big hobby horse. Brought his career back zombie style. Really big in the bioethics community. He figures if humanity drives a species to extinction…”

“Yeah, I heard the pitch…most of the pitch,” I’d slept through part of it—wanted to get tapes for next time I had insomnia, “Bringing back the dodo and stuff.”

“To start with. He’s been fooling around with some real Jurassic Park shit.”

“Like what?”

“Like this.”

A Guardian article from a few years back popped up on the screen. The headline read “We can save the Neanderthal and the Mammoth, says world’s most respected embryologist.” The article outlined his argument for bringing back species that had been gone for tens of thousands of years.

“Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the earth.” I meant it to be a joke, but it didn’t really sound funny when it came out. Earl was right—real Jurassic Park shit.

“You got it, Clarkie.”

“This guy’s a nut.”

“He is, huh? Take a look at this picture on the second page.” He enlarged the inset.

Staring back at me was a young boy—or maybe a masculine girl—with a sloping forehead, pinched nose, sharply downturned mouth that cut just a touch farther to his jawline than normal.

He could have been Nya’s kid brother.

Or Stephanie’s.

Or Gina’s or Bridget’s.

The caption read “Sculptor’s reconstruction of Gibraltar Boy, a juvenile skeleton of
Homo
Neanderthalensis
found in 1928. More recent finds contain intact genetic material, allowing scientists to sequence the Neanderthal genome for the first time.”

Earl flashed the headshots of Nya and her friends down the side of the screen, just to make the point.

“You’ve got to be shitting me. Neanderthals?”

“Neanderthals. One step away from human—highly aggressive, highly social, canny apex predators,” it sounded like he was reading from his screen again, “Known to have lived alongside and traded with humans. Larger brains. Postulated greater spacial and visual acuity, lesser language abilities.”

It fit. Crazy as French militiaman, and it fit every step of the way. “What else have you got?”

“That’s most of it. Just to be thorough I did deep background on everyone else in your notes. Sternwood, the other parents. Your client did the clinical psych internship for her masters running support groups for incest survivors. I think she suspects her husband is screwing her daughter.”

I hadn’t put it together myself, but it tracked. Like Rawles said, shrinks develop a nose for that kind of stuff, see it everywhere even when it’s not there. The kid wasn’t all boners and bongs. “She was probably hoping I’d prove her wrong.”

“Good bet. Other than that…”

“What about Gravity?”

“The man who wasn’t there. Doesn’t exist. I’d need a name, or a family connection, or something. He could be anybody.”

“What about face matching?”

“Statistical dead-average white guy like that’ll get you a date with two hundred of the most boring twinks you ever laid eyes on—and that’s just from the FBI. If you want ‘em, though, I can do it for you in probably two days.”

“How much?”

“Just cause you’re so cute with your hair mussed like that…let’s say another five K. Six K if I can narrow the search to under fifty names.”

Mrs. Thales was gonna hate me for the expenses bill, but that’s what it takes. This fucker was the linchpin, I was sure of it, and I wanted him like a fly wants warm cow shit.

“Done. Back-date your report to yesterday night?” Just to keep my alibi consistent.

“Sure.” His keyboard chattered for a moment. “Just dropped you the reports, plus deep background on Sternwood.”

He pushed my laptop at me and I verified they were there, then put it to sleep. He was looking at me with one eye on the door.

“Well, I guess I better get moving.”

“Good. They’ve got your office on the news.”

“Oh, joy.”

6:00 PM, Monday

Neanderthals?

Up until twenty minutes ago, I knew as much about them as I do about quantum physics.

Cavemen. Lumbering hairy hulks with skin that looked like they’d borrowed it from a rhinoceros in all those PBS documentaries from the nineteen eighties.

Throwbacks. Apes.

Monkeys.

They’re monkeys. We can fuck ‘em like monkeys.

That was what Gravity had said to Phil in the shed.

Monkeys? Nya was more human than most regular people. A wild human, maybe, who couldn’t tame easily to suit her home culture, but very human.

Far too human.

So why was she screwing her own father—or the man she thought was her father?

Nya was all into it, man.

What if Rawles was telling the truth? Was incest just a cultural taboo? If it wasn’t, would a Neanderthal have the same taboo? She liked her conquests…but something about that didn’t feel right.

They all just fell over for Phil…Like he was some kind of god…Same way they played up to G.

So maybe it wasn’t about sex for her—or, at least, not recreation. What if it was about power? On that snow video, Nya had acted like the other girls were her responsibility. She was the alpha female—was Gravity the alpha male? And Phil too?

But why would Phil and Gravity qualify for that kind of position if Rawles didn’t? And why were the men running the show? Wasn’t caveman society supposed to be matriarchal?

You’re swatting at shadows in a dark room, Lantham. Go back to what you know
.

Sternwood was involved with a group of men who were molesting and drugging up what were essentially his own children—particularly when they were his daughters, created around the time he lost his own.

Molesting?
Your thinking on this case is fucked up man…these aren’t girls, they’re women.

It
was
fucking me up. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Stephanie lashed to the bed in my office like a shipwreck. She
did
look like the fifteen year old street whores who started showing up dead twelve years ago, except Stephanie wasn’t knifed. First murder I ever saw. Doesn’t take much to bring it back.

But if I changed the assumption of responsibility, maybe for a minute, what did that do to the puzzle?

Rawles said they bloomed early. Nya’s video journal confirmed it. Smart, self-possessed, not approval seeking, not looking for Daddy—hell, Daddy didn’t even show up in her innermost thoughts. Interested in having fun—what college student wasn’t?—but more than that. She got meaning out of it. Archery, skiing, sex, hiking, like they were all the same thing. They totally absorbed her in a way the drugs didn’t. It wasn’t that she had something to live for, it was that she had
life
to live for.

From what little I understood about such things, it wasn’t the profile of someone who suddenly started having sex with a parent. Most people in the world look outside the family for lovers…

…when you’re watching people out the window, you’re not focused on what’s going on in the restaurant
.

Doctor Tam had
told
me, dammit. She’d told me that I was looking in the wrong place. She’d tried to tell me I needed to watch what was going on in Nya’s family, as close as she could, and I thought she was giving vague advice about my perspective being screwy, and commenting on the food.

Well, my perspective
had
been screwy. But she’d known about Phil—and she couldn’t tell me, because there was no coercion, no abuse, no “danger to self or others,” and everyone was over eighteen. Didn’t fall under required reporting standards.

So she was drawn to Phil and Gravity…why? Maybe an Oedipal thing—or whatever the female version was? It didn’t start until a few months ago, though. What changed?

But I already knew what changed. It had been sitting in front of me all along.

Permission.

From the black hole that still sat in the middle of my puzzle, and every time someone talked about him the shape got weirder.

Gravity. It all kept coming back to Gravity.

He spoke their language.

He did speak their language. I’d seen it. On that snow video.

Nya really settled down when he came around
.

Gravity had met the gir…women and Rawles in
France
. Why was he there? How was it he lived in the same area, so that he could continue the relationship when he came back? Sure, it was a big world full of unlikely things, but that was an awfully convenient coincidence.

The man had no history I knew about. I hadn’t gotten his license plate when I was chasing him—I’d been too worried about keeping up.

Which brought me back around to another question—why had he been at Stanford?