Species II (17 page)

Press spun the wheel, making her grab for a handhold. “Reality check, babe. Where else would he be after eleven months of forced abstinence? I just hope we’re in time.”

“How much far—”

“You already asked me that,” Press said grimly. “And we’re here.”

They threw open the car doors nearly simultaneously and were already headed up the walkway to Patrick Ross’s townhouse by the time the other vehicles screeched to a halt behind them. The tri-level townhouse towered above them, the windows dark, no sound filtering through the door.

Laura grimaced. “Oh, this doesn’t look good, Press.”

Press hammered on the door. “Open up!” he shouted. He tried the handle for good measure, but of course it was locked. “Federal agents—open the door
now!”

He waited a few seconds, then stepped to the side and motioned to one of the other agents with a jerk of his head. The townhouse door was made of steel and two men stepped forward and set themselves in position in front of it, one on either side of a handheld battering ram. They steadied themselves against the coming motion, then gave the ram the set-up swings—

One—

Two—

WHAM!

A single blow at the lock area was all it took to send the door slamming into the darkened interior of the foyer. Press stepped over it and inside, slapping at a light switch to the right of the doorjamb. “Patrick Ross?” he yelled. “Are you here?”

No answer. Laura followed as he sprinted up the stairs, intent on finding the master bedroom. God, Laura thought as she saw Press tug his Glock 9mm free of its holster, let us be in time. Please let’s not go through this twice in one night.

The townhouse had only two bedrooms, and one was a small room at the top of the stairs that they quickly realized Ross used as a home office. The master bedroom was at the end of the hallway, and the door there was closed.

This time Press didn’t bother to knock. He shattered it with one kick and dove inside. Without hesitating, Laura went in after him.

“Oh, my God,” she said in dismay. She threw a hand out to support herself against the side of a beautiful golden-pine armoire.

They both stared around the room, gazes probing the corners on the far side of the neatly made bed with its luxurious Southwestern coverlet, touching behind the matching chair, and finally tracking along the dresser and framed photographs arranged next to old college football trophies and sports memorabilia. Everything was neat and clean and in its place.

And utterly empty.

“Christ,” Press whispered. “Where the hell is he?”

12

E
ven in the summer, nights in the Blue Ridge Mountains could be chilly.

But the fire would take care of that.

Patrick fed another log to the fire, watching as the flames licked along its side. He didn’t need the heat, but his fiancée’s body temperature tended to be on the cool side. Most of his clothes were already off, so he certainly wasn’t in any danger of overheating.

At least not yet.

Patrick turned from the fire and reluctantly went back to the bed where Melissa waited, snuggled beneath a heavy flannel blanket. He climbed under the covers and wished he could find the words to tell her how beautiful she looked, so much so that it made his heart ache. Her eyes looked like transparent amber in the soft light, her hair shone with orange-gold highlights reflected from the blaze across the room, skin as smooth and pink as an unblemished peach, and those lips . . . dusted with the slightest hint of gloss, begging to be kissed. There was no doubt a part of him wanted her very badly.

And that was the part Patrick most feared.

“Melissa,” he began, but she reached up and pressed a finger over his mouth.

“Shhhh,” she said gently. “It feels like I’ve been waiting forever to get you alone. All the interviews and the autographs, the screaming girls. All that . . .
hoopla,
finally gone. And as for tonight . . .” Melissa smiled. “Tonight, Patrick Ross, you’re all mine.”

He tried to say something, but she leaned forward and kissed him warmly. His lips parted of their own will. He felt and tasted her tongue—sweet, like peppermint candy—brush the inside of his mouth. For a long moment, he lost himself in her flavor and the sensation of her kiss, then fear flared in his gut and made him pull away, rougher than he intended as his fingers dug into her upper arms.

Melissa sat up, bewildered. “Patrick, what’s the matter?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” He couldn’t,
wouldn’t,
look her in the eye. “I think we should, you know, hold off.”

“Tonight? For heaven’s sake, why?”

Fidgeting on the bed like a nervous schoolboy, Patrick said the only thing he could think of—the
truth.
Surely Melissa, of all the people in the world, would listen to him. “Because I just don’t feel that well.”

She ran a hand experimentally over his forehead, as though checking a child for a fever, then leaned forward and trailed her lips across the line of his jaw. “There, there.” Her voice turned low and silky. “Then let Missy make you all better.” Before he could stop her, she wriggled out of his grasp and ducked beneath the sheets.

“Melissa, don’t—”

His protest died in mid-syllable as her mouth closed around that most sensitive part of his body and desire blasted through him. He made one last attempt to push her away—

—then Patrick had no choice but to just surrender to everything he felt inside him.

It took only a quarter of an hour, and he never even heard Melissa’s screams.

“I
demand an explanation,” Dennis Gamble said furiously. “You don’t just break into a man’s house in the middle of the night, drag him off to Monroe Air Force Base without saying why, keep him there for
hours.
And why the hell are there five,
five
guards with loaded rifles aimed at
me?
I’m not armed and I haven’t done anything to anyone.” He sent a scathing glance toward a couple of the guards who’d been among the raiding party at his home. “Just ask these jamokes!”

“Please calm down, Mr. Gamble.” The words came from a white-coated female biologist and were spoken with the air of someone suffering through an unwanted ordeal. Shit, this woman had no idea what an ordeal
was.
He felt a sting as she withdrew what was hopefully the last of the syringes of blood they’d been taking from his arm. Fucking vampires, that’s what they were. “We’ll have the results in just a few minutes,” she continued as she passed a stinging pad of alcohol over the puncture in his arm. “You’ve waited this long, what’s a few more minutes? Hold your finger here.”

“A few minutes?” Dennis choked out. His finger dug savagely into the pad on the crook of his elbow. “I have been here for nearly
four fucking hours.
No one will tell me anything, my night is ruined, and my girlfriend is probably going to break up with me because of this. Damn it, I want to know
why
I’m being tested. The NSEG doctor said I was fine!”

From across the room, the stiff military man whom the others had referred to as Colonel Burgess gazed at him placidly. “Just sit tight, son. We’ll explain everything later.”

“Don’t call me
son,”
Dennis blared. “And
you
sit tight, you damned jarhead. I haven’t been laid in eleven months and you meatheads have probably ensured it’ll take another month to get my girl to talk to me again!”

Leaning against the wall was a dark-haired, suave-looking guy who’d introduced himself as Special Agent Preston Lennox—
“Just call me Press”
—when they’d first brought Dennis down to the blood-testing lab. Now he unfolded his arms. “Come on, Burgess. The man’s entitled to a reasonable explanation.”

“You’re damned right I am,” Dennis said hotly. “And you can start by telling me what’s with these guards. What the hell is going on?”

When Burgess stayed stubbornly silent, Press tilted his head. “It’s a . . . precautionary measure, that’s all. I realize it’s a pain in the ass and we screwed up your evening, but if you’ll relax and hold on just a little while longer, the computer will analyze your blood and we’ll know everything we need to.”

“About
what?”

Press made a game attempt to hide how troubled he was. “I can’t really say, not just yet. But in a few minutes . . .”

“Fine,” Dennis said sullenly. He made himself lean back on his chair, but couldn’t stop his hands from worrying at each other. “But my patience is getting really, really thin.”

“Then why don’t we pass the time with a few questions,” Colonel Burgess suggested. “You can start by telling us what happened during that seven minutes when the
Excursion
lost contact with Mission Control.”

Dennis scowled at him. “Is that what this is about? We’ve been over this a hundred times with the NSEG, and I don’t have anything to tell you that I didn’t already tell my superiors.”

“Which is?”

“That I don’t remember. I must’ve blacked out. Patrick said the life-support systems failed—maybe we were shorted on oxygen or something. If I knew what happened, I’d tell you. In fact, I’d tell the NSEG and the
world,
but I don’t
remember.”

Dennis couldn’t decide whether Burgess believed him or not. Instead the colonel asked another question. “When did you last speak to Dr. Anne Sampas?”

“Annie?” They’d spent so much time together he had to stop and think for a second to recall that she was no longer in his life twenty-four hours a day. “That would have been at the NSEG fund-raiser a couple of nights ago. She was there with her husband; we all sat together at Senator Ross’s table with him and Patrick and Melissa.”

Burgess looked at him oddly and it took Dennis a moment to realize that it was because the man had one glass eye. No wonder this bastard was so creepy. “Did she act peculiar that night?”

Dennis drew himself up, not at all happy about where this conversation was headed. “She seemed fine to me,” he said slowly. “What’s this about? Did something happen to Annie?”

“You tell me.”

Dennis was off his chair and standing before he even realized it. “Enough of this shit!” he yelled. “What happened to Anne Sampas? You tell me right now of I’m walking out that door and you fuckers can just shoot me if you want to stop me.
What the fuck happened to Annie?”

“Anne Sampas is dead, Dennis.” Press crossed his arms. “I’m sorry.”

Dead?

“But . . . she was just there,” Dennis said in bewilderment. He sagged back onto the chair.
“Damn.”

Before anyone could say anything more, the telephone mounted on the wall next to the door began to ring, the sound more like a rude buzz than a ringing bell. Burgess’s expression had turned murderous at Press’s admission, but the young agent ignored him and turned instead to answer it.

Dennis didn’t know who Press Lennox was talking to, but there was something about the way the guy was looking at him, a set to his expression of thinly disguised suspicion . . .

Seven minutes in space, still unexplained.

And now Annie was dead, and he clearly remembered Melissa saying Patrick hadn’t been feeling well.

Oh, this was getting worse all the time.

“P
ress, is that you?” Laura Baker tucked the telephone receiver between her ear and shoulder, fighting to keep it from sliding off as she flipped through the computer printouts in her hands. Spread on the stainless-steel autopsy table in the center of the medical examiner’s laboratory was what remained of Dr. Anne Sampas. Despite the streaks of blood across her skin, the woman’s green eyes were clear and staring at the ceiling—for God’s sake, why hadn’t the Medical Examiner closed them? Instead the moron was blithely poking away at the chasm in the dead woman’s belly, not a thought in the world to Anne Sampas’s now sightless eyes.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

Irritated, Laura turned away from the corpse, focusing instead on the printed information in her hands. “You know, of course, that Anne Sampas’s blood work indicates the presence of recombinant alien/human DNA. But it doesn’t match with the substance we found in Dr. Orinsky’s wounds. Anne Sampas did
not
kill Ralph Orinsky—it was either Ross or Gamble.” Press didn’t say anything and Laura could picture him, standing in the lab at Monroe and staring at the healthy young black man perhaps only a few feet away. Was he wondering if Gamble was going to undergo some unspeakable transformation? She certainly was. “Press,” she said urgently. “Please—be careful.”

“Yeah,” he said at last. He hung up, leaving her listening to a dial tone and shaking her head.

Laura put the receiver back on its hook and turned to the medical examiner, Mark Lundquist, a youngish guy with premature lines across his forehead and a perpetual squint. He was still energetically moving flaps of skin and dead tentacle tissue around the cadaver’s abdomen. The scene reminded Laura of something she’d seen in a science-fiction movie once, where an android had been busily examining the dead shell of an alien parasite. This time, it was the host that had ended up as the dead shell.

“Close her eyes, would you?” Laura snapped. Lundquist looked appropriately ashamed as he cupped one hand and drew the dead woman’s eyelids down. “How’s it going?” she asked, a little more gently.