McKean S01 A Dangerous Breed (2 page)

“Guess not,” the man replied.

“What’s your name?” Tanner asked.

“Charlie Moses.”

“Moses,” I observed. “An interesting name for a Native American.”

“Moses is the white man’s name they gave my family at the boarding school a hundred years ago.”

“What tribe?” I asked.

“Colville Tribe, some say. Others say Columbia Tribe. Long time ago we just called ourselves ‘The People’.”

The sheriff continued eying Moses dubiously. “So tell me, Chief, were you around here about a week ago?”

“I’ve been camped over by Tule Lake for a couple weeks, fishin’.”

“Got a license?” Tanner asked.

“Don’t need a license,” Moses smirked. “Native, remember?”

“You hear or see anything suspicious last Tuesday?”

“About noon, I heard some shotguns down this way.”

“Didn’t come to investigate?”

“Duck hunters all over the place. Didn’t pay it much mind.”

McKean took a small plastic kit bag from a pocket of his cargo pants and withdrew a sterile pair of forceps, which he used to pluck up several chunks of blood-caked soil and drop them into a plastic screw-cap test tube.

Moses watched with amusement. “You a DNA man?”

“Mm-hm,” McKean confirmed. “Working on a little mystery of mixed coyote and human DNA.”

“Mixed blood, huh?” Moses said. “I know whose blood that would be.”

McKean stood and screwed the purple plastic cap on the test tube. “Whose?” he asked without much interest.

“Woyotl’s.”

“Whose?” I asked, taking more interest.

“Woyotl,” Moses repeated. “One of my family’s legends. He’s a coyote man from the time before the transformations.”

“Transformations?” I puzzled. “The change from native culture to white culture?”

“Uh-uh,” Moses replied. “Time when animals transformed into people. Woyotl was an ancestor of my family, son of the Coyote Chief, sometimes he was a man, sometimes he was a coyote. Everybody changed like that before the transformations. After the transformations, everybody was either animal or human.”

Tanner looked impatient. “So you’re saying this blood’s from a coyote man? I say you been camped out here too long.”

Moses went on. “Woyotl lived down in the canyons here with his family along Crab Creek. I’ve heard a lot of howling lately when I’m sitting by my campfire.”

“No fires allowed - ” Tanner began, but Moses cut him off with a laugh and a wide, white-toothed grin. “Try and find a trace of my fire,” he challenged. “You won’t. I live light on the land.”

The sheriff eyed him sternly. “You’re not the only one with ties to this country. My great-grandparents were missionaries. Tried to civilize you people. My grandparents were ranchers. My father shot and trapped and poisoned every damn coyote he could. And I, for one, don’t believe in any Woyotl. Whoever killed these guys was a man. What’s your alibi for last Tuesday about noon, Chief?”

“Don’t have one,” Moses grinned. “And I’m not a chief. I’m just a common, everyday Injun.”

“You better come up with a story, Chief, or you’re my prime suspect. F’rinstance, what are you doing here right now?”

“I came to see where the coyote man was shot.”

“How’d you know about that? We never told anyone.”

“Smoke signals,” Moses replied with a raspy laugh.

“I’m serious,” the sheriff warned. “You’d better tell me how you knew about a detail like the coyote blood.”

“Let’s just say news travels fast in Indian Country. We got our ears to the ground, ya know?”

The sheriff looked at him like he didn’t know, and then turned to McKean. “Okay, Doc, before we get outta here, you need anything else?”

“No, Sheriff. This sample will do nicely.” McKean put the capped tube and kit bag back in his cargo pocket.

“Let’s get going, then,” Tanner said. “I’ll be taking our Indian friend along for ques - ” He turned to where Charlie Moses had stood a moment before but the man had disappeared as silently as he’d come.

Going back to where we’d parked, I followed McKean and Tanner through the dusty landscape along the bank of a small stream that meandered along the canyon bottom, threading between small alkali ponds with cattail-choked edges where mosquitoes rose off the waters in clouds. While passing one pond with a green and scummy shore, a movement drew my gaze to the top of a low cliff where something was stirring. It was hard to make out, hidden in the shade beneath a sagebrush bush, but I put a hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and was able to spot a canine face staring back at me from the shadows. It had a peculiar white mark, a blaze running up its nose, around its eyes and over its forehead. It dawned on me that the white marking bore an eerie resemblance to a “Death’s Head” human skull design, out of which the animal’s dark eyes bored into mine with an intense, predatory look.

A chill ran through me despite the heat and, for a moment, I stood speechless with my skin crawling, mesmerized by the animal’s intense stare. Then I called to my companions, “Hey, look over there!”

Before McKean and Tanner could turn and look, the animal bolted away among the boulders on the cliff top.

“What’d you see?” Tanner asked, following my gaze to the now-deserted cliff.

“It was a coyote. A big one, and a weird-looking one. White faced. There was something really creepy about the way it stared at me.”

“Easy, buddy,” Tanner said. “Maybe the heat’s getting to ya.”

I described its markings.

“Odd lookin’ coyote,” Tanner remarked without much concern. “Coydog, maybe. Ain’t unheard of. Sometimes dogs and coyotes get together and the result is coydog pups. Could explain some of those DNA results.”

“Not the human component,” McKean replied.

We turned and finished our hot trudge back to the game reserve’s graveled parking lot and within minutes McKean and I were heading for Seattle in my Mustang with the air conditioner and the XM radio blasting.

Cog27

In his lab at Immune Corporation the next day, McKean ran a dozen DNA tests on his sample, working from morning until late into the night. He confirmed the presence of dog and coyote DNA, but the human component remained problematic. Just past midnight I was about to go home when McKean held up a sheet of computer printout and exclaimed, “It’s Cog27!”

“What’s Cog27?”

“The human DNA, Fin! There is just one piece of human DNA present, and within it I’ve identified a specific chromosome segment named Cognition Element Number 27, a key determinant of human intelligence.”

A tingle crept up the back of my neck. “You’re saying a piece of human intelligence DNA somehow got mixed in with coydog blood and turned up in that bloodstain? How?”

“How indeed,” McKean murmured thoughtfully. “I just might know the answer, and it’s a disturbing one. You see, Fin, I sometimes participate in grant application review committees for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I recall that we received a grant application a few years ago, in which a researcher proposed to splice exactly that portion of human DNA into dogs and carry out intelligence tests on them.”

“God!” I cried. “What an awful experiment!”

“We thought so too, Fin, and the committee unanimously declined to fund the project.”

“Who would propose such a thing?”

“I know who, and where, the author of that proposal is.”

By prearrangement I came to McKean’s office early the next morning. He put his desk phone on speaker and called the Braintree Institute, near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington. He asked for and got Richard Selkirk, President of the Institute. Briefly explaining the murder and his DNA results, McKean requested that Selkirk receive us in his office later that day. “Under the circumstances, how can I refuse?” Selkirk replied.

We left immediately and once more I drove Highway 90 across the Cascade Mountains, emerging from the cloud cover at Snoqualmie Pass and heading down into the sun-baked desert landscape of Eastern Washington. Within two hours we arrived at the Braintree Institute, a modern laboratory building just outside the main entrance gates of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of Selkirk’s spacious office, the windows of which faced out on a nuclear cooling tower not too far off across the arid landscape, McKean confronted him, face to face, with his findings regarding Cog27.

Selkirk, a slight, short, stubby man dressed in a gray suit and white shirt, sat for a long moment before speaking. “Cog27,” he began slowly and apprehensive, his eyes distant as if recalling events of some time ago. “We were looking for ways to study how radiation exposure affects an individual’s ability to perform complex tasks. We wanted an animal test as a model for situations that might occur in a nuclear waste repository spill here at Hanford. We’d already found that if we ran Border collies through mazes before and after exposing them to large radiation doses, we could measure a dose-dependent decline in their performance.”

“A cruel thing to do to dogs,” I murmured.

Selkirk looked at me unapologetically. “Would you like it better if we tested humans? Perhaps you’d like to volunteer?”

“No thanks.”

“You see,” he went on, “Border collies are awfully good at mazes and we could precisely measure decreases in their performance. When you, Peyton, and your NIH colleagues rejected our grant application, we didn’t give up on the idea. We took our proposal to the Department of Energy where such research was of great interest. DOE bought it, literally, and gave us a grant to set up mazes with different levels of complexity, all the way up to ones that baffled people sometimes, which we ran dogs through to see how their performance declined with increased radiation exposure.”

“But what of the experiments in question?” McKean insisted. “What about Cog 27?”

“Yes,” Selkirk said with the light of enthusiasm that had grown in his eyes suddenly dimming. “As good as our results were, they still gave no measure of how well an individual could perform tasks more complex than maze-running. We believed Border collies with human Cog27 in them could be subjected to tests of a more sophisticated nature, like recognizing symbols, moving and rearranging objects within a room, or carrying out multi-stepped tasks that required planning. These tests would be more like the sorts of things employees at Hanford might need to do under emergency circumstances. Cog 27 has been associated by scientists with such functions in humans, as you probably know.”

“Answer: yes,” McKean said. “Although I also know the wisdom of placing a crucial human intelligence gene in animals might be seriously questioned.”

“More than that!” I exclaimed. “It’s downright horrifying!”

“You’re entitled to your opinion,” Selkirk replied. “Would you rather we waited until a nuclear accident happened and then monitor people?”

McKean asked, “How did you get the Cog27 DNA into the animals?”

“Standard transgenics procedures,” Selkirk replied. “Microinject human DNA into the nuclei of fertilized dog eggs, then implant them back in the bitches. We had an excellent postdoctoral fellow here, Derek Curman, a genius at manipulating DNA and embryos.”

McKean was quiet for a moment, thinking deeply. Then he asked, “Did Curman inject simply the Cog27 gene, or was it part of a larger DNA construct?”

“Astute, as always, Dr. McKean,” Selkirk replied. Then his expression clouded further. “It was a much larger piece of human DNA. We were on an extremely limited budget without NIH funding, and DOE had us on a tight timeline, so Curman did things fast and cheap. We couldn’t afford the time and effort to isolate the Cog27 gene so we put a whole section of a human chromosome into the animals. Are you familiar with Yac 222?”

McKean’s own expression turned darker. “The acronym Y-A-C of course refers to yeast-artificial-chromosomes, which may carry sizeable fragments of human DNA and can be grown in yeast cells and kept in culture dishes indefinitely. Yacs were developed as standard way-stations for large chunks of human DNA during the human-genome-project years.”

“Large chunks?” I asked. “How large?”

“As I recall,” McKean murmured, staring momentarily at the ceiling as he scoured the tremendous databanks of his memory, “Yac 222 contains nearly a quarter of chromosome two. Quite a big segment of human DNA, with quite a few genes in it.”

“How many?”

“Several hundred, I’d guess. Some of unknown function.”

“Unknown!” I gasped.

We both turned to Selkirk, waiting for more explanations. He shrugged. “Maybe we didn’t think that one through as thoroughly as we should have. But none of our transgenic pups showed any signs of increased cognition, anyway. There was no improvement in maze solving, not even a measurable improvement in learning simple commands like ‘sit’ and ‘stay.’ The whole project never really worked.”

McKean folded his hands, steepled his long index fingers, touched them to his thin lips thoughtfully and then asked, “Where are these animals now?”

“They were useless to us, so we destroyed them all.”

McKean shook his head. “Given my findings regarding the Swanson case, that statement must not be fully true despite the sincerity with which you speak it.”

Selkirk shrugged. “I get what you’re saying, but I can assure you the animals were all euthanized.”

“May I talk to the people in charge of that task?” McKean asked.

“Of course.”

Selkirk led us into the laboratories, past rows of lab benches cluttered with vials, reagent bottles, centrifuges, and other scientific apparatus. In one of the bays between benches, he introduced us to a woman and man whom he indicated had destroyed the animals. He then abruptly left us, apologizing that he had other pressing business to attend.

The woman, Zoe Peterson, was a pleasant, middle-aged redhead in a white lab coat, who’d been busy with a benchtop experiment involving several racks of test tubes when we came in. Resuming her seat after having risen to greet us, she explained in melancholy tones, “It’s a sad business, euthanasia. You get to know the animals a little, almost like they’re pets. But orders are orders and I filled out the euthanasia forms and gave them to Jaime, here.” She indicated by gesture a dark Hispanic man in blue jeans and chambray shirt who’d stood by, looking uncomfortable and out of place, and who now nodded an acknowledgement of what she’d said.