Redheads (14 page)

The isotope hydrologist I contacted at Harvard got some results from a saliva sample I gave him. His report is attached, and it’s as specific as he could get.

If you were sitting here, you’d probably ask me what I thought this thing is. Or you’d want to know where it came from. I don’t have the answers you want. But I can give you a few guesses. I think I can safely say it’s not from outer space. Its DNA is similar enough to other organisms that it probably evolved naturally. The only other possibility is that it was engineered, but I wouldn’t put much money on that: genetics has gone pretty far in the last ten years, but not that far. So if you asked for my gut feeling, I’d say this: it’s a natural product of evolution, something that branched off from everything else long ago.

It’s an old planet. We don’t really know everything that’s out there.

Why would a predator so finely tuned for killing not be more successful as a species? Why aren’t there more of them? Who knows—there are a lot of reasons for a species to die out besides not being adapted to hunt and kill prey. Maybe this species is so violent that whenever two of them are in the same room, instead of mating, they kill each other. Maybe there are a couple hundred of them and they’re just hard to spot. Maybe they look just like us. If I’m right that its lack of telomeres means it doesn’t age, that would explain why this one is still around, even though its species as a whole has declined.

I believe nothing good could come from this knowledge, besides what you four propose to do. If this creature has done what you say, it needs to be tracked down and wiped out. It doesn’t need to be researched, or understood, or, God forbid, bred. If it has cells and DNA, if it eats to stay alive, then it can be killed.

Regards,

Dr. Gerard Chevalier, M.D., Ph.D.

Chevalier didn’t believe he was doing the right thing, but he knew he was doing the smart thing. The smart thing was to close the lid on this box as fast as he could, give it back to Chris Wilcox, and forget it as quickly as possible. Within two years, with enough work on other projects, he was sure he could forget this. He would come to doubt all of his conclusions and would believe that this had been some kind of strange hoax.

He hit the
Send
button and in a moment, the email was gone.

The sun was coming up as he walked across the lobby and used his access card to sign out and open the front door. A green light was blinking on the console of lights behind the security station. He assumed this meant the system was properly functioning.

Chapter Sixteen

Chris woke at dawn and went in his bare feet across the back lawn to the dock. He stepped into the dinghy, used a hand pump to bail the rain water from the night before, and then rowed to his boat.
Sailfish
was a sixty-two-foot Hallberg-Rassy, three years old when he and Cheryl bought her at Nawiliwili Harbor on Kauai and sailed her to Oahu. Now she was nine years old but in better-than-new condition. He rarely sailed her, but he kept her maintained. She was too beautiful to rot on her mooring, and Cheryl had loved her. Not a single bad thing had ever happened to either of them aboard the
Sailfish
. They had sailed each weekend, had crossed the Kaiwi channel to Molokai in every kind of weather, had made love in
Sailfish’s
spacious center cockpit while sailing on autopilot under a full moon with the cloud-shadowed volcanoes of the Big Island ten miles ahead of their bow. Every time they stepped aboard, they had the same conversation and went through the same calculations: how much longer do we have to work before we can sell everything but the boat and follow the wind for the rest of our lives? They had a map of the world on the bedroom wall and they penciled in routes and highlighted places they wanted to see in the first five years. When Cheryl was killed they had six years of work left on their plan. They might have been packing to leave this week. Instead, Cheryl was dead, Chris had more money than he could ever use, and
Sailfish
lay idle on her mooring in Kaneohe Bay, collecting barnacles that he scrubbed off every two weeks with a stiff brush.

He climbed aboard, tied off the dinghy, and opened the bronze combination lock on the companionway hatch. Once inside, he checked the volt meter to be sure the solar panels were still charging the battery bank; he checked the bilge for water; and he powered up the laptop computer at the navigation station. Then he went into the galley to make a cup of coffee. With that brewed, he climbed the companionway ladder and went back into the cockpit where he sat under the bimini cover. It was only 6:01 a.m. but Julissa would be up—she’d only been in Honolulu for one night and couldn’t have adjusted to the time yet. He took a sip of his coffee and dialed her number on his cell. She picked up on the second ring.

“Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Not at all. I’m walking on the beach.”

“Any news?”

“She took the bait and clicked the link.”

“The program installed?”

“Yeah, but that’s enough about that for now,” she said. And then, more gently, “I’ll give you the details when we meet up. Not over the phone.”

“Okay.”

“You checked your email this morning?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s an email from the scientist you hired. Chevalier. Either he’s completely insane and just stole half your deposit, or…”

Chris waited for her to finish, but she didn’t.

“Or what?” he finally said.

“Maybe you ought to read the email. Read it and come see me—room 1708 You checked this guy out before you hired him, right?”

“And Mike did a full background. He’s completely legit and so’s his company.”

“Jesus,” Julissa said. “I was afraid of that.”

Thirty minutes later Chris had printed the two hundred pages of attachments to Chevalier’s email, locked the boat, rowed ashore and fetched a pair of flip-flops from his back porch. He took the Pali Highway over the mountains, got stuck in traffic near the tunnel and remembered that for everyone else this was just a normal workday. He risked getting a ticket by picking up his phone and calling Chevalier’s cell number. No answer. Chevalier said he wanted no more involvement, but Chris didn’t think very much of that. The man had shaken his hand and agreed to do a job; he’d already been paid fifty thousand dollars and apparently planned to keep half.

He was going to make himself available for questions.

Chris dialed the number again and left a message when the voicemail finally picked up. On the other side of the tunnel the traffic cleared and moved quickly all the way out of the mountains. When he got off of the highway, he followed Kalakaua Avenue into Waikiki.

He left his car with the Hyatt’s valet and rode the elevator to Julissa’s floor, carrying the printout of Chevalier’s report. Julissa opened the door as soon as he knocked. She was wearing a tank top and denim shorts, and her hair was still wet from the shower.

“Come in. I just finished making coffee.”

He stepped into her room and followed her to the counter next to the TV. He’d forgotten what it was like to be in a room with a beautiful woman who’d just stepped from the shower. It came at him from every angle: the smell of her hair, the steam in the air, the sheen of moisture on her throat. And he knew with a certainty what it would feel like to hold her close, with nothing between them, his hands plunged deep into her red hair. He studied the bedspread, embarrassed, his left thumb touching the base of his third finger, seeking the reassurance of a ring he hadn’t worn in years. Her laptop was open on the bed and he could see she’d been surfing the Internet, reading about genetics.

She poured two cups of coffee from the little pot and handed him one. If she’d sensed anything that had just gone through his mind, she didn’t show it. The door to the lanai was open and the curtains were blowing inward on the light morning wind. Without speaking they moved outside. Chris put the printed report on the glass patio table.

“You get through the attachments?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Make any sense to you?”

“Some. But keep in mind I’ve got no background in biology. Anything more confusing than high school is over my head. And just because the attachments make sense doesn’t mean Chevalier didn’t make it all up. Lots of bullshit makes sense.”

“Good point.”

“For all we know, you come to him with this fork and this story, and he thinks you’re playing a sick hoax on him. So he throws it back at you, tells you an insane story of his own.”

She bit her lower lip and shrugged.

“Okay,” Chris said. “That’s a theory. Here’s another: what if it’s true?”

She looked at him, considering it, but he started to answer his own question.

“For one thing, it answers a couple questions. Namely, why he can swim so fast and why he’s still so strong after all these years.”

“
If
he can really swim like that,” Julissa said. “That story might not even be true. And there’re easier explanations for the age. Like, he was seventeen or eighteen when he killed Tara Westfield.”

“Let’s go through the report and see if we can find any holes,” Chris said. He picked up the first printed attachment.

“You tell him about the connection to redheads?”

Chris thought about it, replaying his few phone conversations and his face-to-face meeting with Chevalier.

“No,” he finally said.

“Interesting he says the man or thing we’re looking for is a redhead.”

“You think that means anything?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

For a while they sat in silence and read the attachments. Julissa went back into the room and returned with her laptop. She balanced it on one leg and held the printout on the other and looked something up. Chris’s phone rang and they both jumped.

“Maybe it’s Chevalier,” Chris said. “I left him a message on the way over.”

“I’ve already left him two,” Julissa said.

Chris picked up his phone and saw a familiar number. He answered and put it to his ear.

“Hey, Mike,” he said. He met Julissa’s eyes and shrugged. “I’m with Julissa…yeah, she’s in Honolulu. I’m going to put you on speaker.”

He set the phone on the coffee table and hit the speaker button.

“You guys read it?” Mike said.

“We’re going through the attachments now, but yeah, we read it.”

“You been able to get in touch with him yet?”

“No, but we both tried.”

“So did I. Office and cell. There’s a receptionist picking up in the office but they’re saying he didn’t come in for the day,” Mike said.

“Where are you?” Julissa asked.

“I left Westfield to finish up in Galveston and caught a flight back to Honolulu. I’m driving home.”

“Let’s meet at my house for lunch,” Chris said. “See if we can sort this out.”

“Fine with me,” Mike said. “I think I got my wife’s college biology textbook somewhere. I’ll bring it.”

He hung up.

“Sounds like Chevalier’s keeping his head down,” Julissa said.

“We’ll reach him,” Chris said. “Even if it means flying back there and knocking on his door at three a.m.”

An hour later they had finished going through the attachments to Chevalier’s email. Westfield called Chris while they were midway through, and they spoke to him on speaker phone. They agreed there was no point in drawing conclusions until they talked to Chevalier.

Julissa took their coffee cups back to the counter in her room and then they sat on the balcony together and looked out at the ocean.

“Now what?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Does it change anything?”

“If the report’s bullshit, we might’ve just lost our best lead. Even if he actually returns the evidence, we can’t be sure he hasn’t ruined it.”

“You think it’s true?” Julissa asked.

Chris shrugged. “It’d explain some things. But it sounds crazy.”

“There’s still the FBI angle,” she said. “We might get something good out of that.”

“Where are you on that?”

“It’s almost all on autopilot now. Assuming she clicks the link in the cloned email I’ll be sending her, I’ll be able to start monitoring her computer use. From there, I’ll pick up her passwords whenever she logs into the FBI intranet. Once I have those, I can start working my way into headquarters.”

“And then?”

“I’ll start checking for deleted files in VICAP. I should be able to figure out when the data was removed and track where and how the commands to remove it were made.”

“Basically the same investigation the FBI would be doing if they tried to track you down.”

“Yeah.”

Chris stood, resting his forearms on the rail of the lanai. Three surfers were kneeling in the sand next to their long boards, rubbing them down with disks of wax. He watched them for a while, then watched the way the wind was moving the fronds of the coconut trees that lined Kalakaua. He guessed it would be getting windier by the evening.