But the tradition of valuing education continued. She had gone into medicine and science. Her brother, younger by a year, was an oil engineer working for the state. For the moment, brother and sister, both single, shared the family estate.
A grind of wet sand on rubber pulled her back to the present.
The small island, one of a series forming a chain back to the dense coastal marshes, was covered in cypress trees matted together by Spanish moss. It looked impenetrable beyond the edge of the beach.
But that"s not where she was going.
"This way," the Zodiac pilot said. He offered a hand to help her out of the boat, but she ignored him and climbed out herself. "The FOS is waiting to speak to you."
"FOS?"
"Field Operations Supervisor."
She didn"t understand the command structure of the Border Patrol, but it sounded like this was the guy in charge of the investigation. Maybe the one who had summoned her away from ACRES. Wanting answers, she followed the pilot toward the beached trawler. Having grown up along the river, she knew boats. The trawler was a small one, a forty-footer. Its starboard booms had been shattered by the collision, but on the port side, the long poles still pointed crookedly toward the sky. The shrimp nets were still tied down to the booms.
A handful of men, all in rough duty uniforms of the Border Patrol, gathered on the beach alongside the trawler. Some wore tan Stetsons, others green baseball caps. She also noted the holstered sidearms. One man had a Remington shotgun resting on a shoulder.
What was going on?
The men fell silent as she approached. A few pairs of eyes traveled up and down her form, looking little impressed. She kept her face fixed into something resembling a stern expression, but she felt her cheeks heat up in irritation. She resisted the urge to flip them all off.
Definitely a boy"s club here.
The agents parted to reveal a tall man similarly attired in dark green trousers and a matching long-sleeved work shirt, casually rolled to the elbows. He finger-combed his black hair, damp with sweat, and secured a black baseball cap in place. But not before his blue-gray eyes also examined her from head to foot. Unlike the others, she sensed nothing lascivious in his attention, only sizing her up.
Still, she was glad when the bill of his cap shadowed those eyes.
He crossed to close the distance between them. He stood well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular without looking bulky. His carriage was of someone who knew how to lead with no need to dominate. Confidence, along with a feral edge, flowed from him.
He held out a large hand as he reached her.
"Dr. Polk, thank you for coming."
She shook his hand and noted a long scar down his forearm, from elbow to wrist. Glancing up, she met his gaze. His complexion was a tanned olive, further darkened by black stubble over his chin and jaw. Her ear picked up his slight French Cajun accent.
So he was local to the area. In fact, there was something naggingly familiar about him-and then it struck her. She was about to demand an answer as to why she was brought here.
Instead, a different question stumbled out.
"Jack?"
His lips, full but definitely masculine, shifted to a harder line as he gave the barest nod. Her image of him similarly transformed in a sudden shift of perspective. The anger drained out of her, replaced with something colder and more uncomfortable. It had been over ten years since she"d last seen him. She had only been a soph.o.m.ore in high school; he had been a senior.
Though she hadn"t really known him well back then-in high school, two years was an insurmountable social gulf-they had darker ties that bound them together. A connection she had wanted forever left in her past.
From the expression pa.s.sing like a cloud over his face, he possibly wished the same. Either way, now was not the time to reopen those old wounds.
"Dr. Polk," he said stiffly. His accent grew thicker, more husky. "I called you here because...because I didn"t know who else had the expertise to offer guidance about what we found."
She straightened her back, going equally professional. Maybe that was best. She swallowed and stared toward the trawler, glad for an excuse to look away. "What did you find?"
"You"d best see for yourself."
He turned and led the way to the trawler. A rope ladder led up to the deck. He climbed first, clambering easily up. She was all too conscious of the hard strength in his legs and back. Once he vanished over the gunwale, one of his men secured the ladder"s lower end, making it easier for her to climb.
At the top, Jack helped pull her to the deck. Two other men stood guard by a door that led to the lower holds. One of them pa.s.sed Jack a flashlight.
"Sir, we"ve run a portable lamp down into the hold, but it"s still d.a.m.n dark down there."
Jack thumbed on his flashlight and waved for her to follow. "Careful of the blood on the stairs."
His light revealed a dark stain along one side of the steps. Like something had been dragged down into the hold.
She suddenly did not want to go down there.
"We found no bodies," Jack said, as if sensing her discomfort. Or maybe he was merely filling her in on the details of the case.
She followed him down the steps and along a narrow pa.s.sageway.
"They kept them caged in the main hold."
She didn"t bother to ask what was caged. She already smelled the familiar musk of a rank kennel. She heard the shuffle of bodies, a rustling, a mewling cry, a sharp screech of a bird.
She began to understand why she had been summoned. Exotic animal smuggling was a billion-dollar-a-year industry, ranking just behind drug and gun trafficking. And unfortunately the United States was one of the leading consumers of such smuggled cargo, accounting for 30 percent of such sales.
She had read just last week about the bust of a major trafficking ring dealing in rare tigers. In that case, the Missouri couple wasn"t bringing in the big cats for pets, but for parts parts. They were smuggling in tigers, then butchering them. Hides of leopards, tigers, and lions could fetch upwards of twenty thousand dollars. But that wasn"t all. Like some b.l.o.o.d.y chop shop, they were selling off all parts: tiger p.e.n.i.ses to be ground into aphrodisiacs, bones for arthritis cures. No part went to waste. Gallbladder, liver, kidneys, even teeth. In the end, such large cats were worth far more dead than alive.
She felt anger building as she followed Jack into the main hold.
A tall pole lamp lit the low-roofed s.p.a.ce. Stainless steel cages lined both sides of the long hold; larger pens in the back were still in shadows. She gaped at the size of the smuggling operation, certain now why she was needed here, a veterinarian specializing in exotic animals.
Jack turned and shone his flashlight into the nearest cage.
She stared inside-and knew she was wrong about everything.
Chapter 3.
Jack Menard studied the woman"s reaction.
Shock and horror widened Lorna"s eyes. She covered her mouth with a hand. But only for a moment. After the initial surprise, he also recognized a glint of concern. Her eyes narrowed again, her lips drawn tight in thought. She moved closer to the cage.
He joined her and cleared his throat. "What type of monkeys are they?"
"Cebus apella," she answered. "Brown capuchin monkeys, native to South America."
Jack stared at the two who shared the small cage, squatting in their own filth, huddled and scared at the back of the cage. Their limbs and backsides were a deep chocolate brown, their faces and chests a softer tan, their heads capped in black. They were so small he could have cupped one in the palm of his hand.
"Are they babies?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I don"t think so. The fur coloring suggests they"re adults. But you"re right. They"re way too small. Pygmy versions of the breed."
But Jack knew that wasn"t the most shocking aberration. With a quiet cooing noise, Lorna coaxed the pair to move toward the bars. Her coldly professional manner seemed to melt away, her face softening, relaxing. The pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.
"Siamese twins," Lorna said.
The two were joined at the hip-literally-fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.
"Poor things," she whispered. "They look half starved."
They came to the bars, plainly needing rea.s.surance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.
She gently pa.s.sed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers-then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.
She glanced to Jack. For a moment, he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother Tom during their soph.o.m.ore year-and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.
Lorna must have sensed that well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. "Show me."
He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large gla.s.s-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizard-like evolutionary origin.
"It looks like a severe form of atavism," Lorna said.
"And that would be what in English?"
She offered him a small apologetic smile. "Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual."
"A genetic throwback?"
"Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs."
"That"s a mighty long throw throw, isn"t it?"
She shrugged and moved on. "Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don"t think it was accidental accidental here, not with these many cases." here, not with these many cases."
"So you"re saying someone bred them this way on purpose. Is that even possible?"
"I can"t rule it out. Genetic science has come a long way and continues to push boundaries. At ACRES, we"ve successfully cloned wild cats. We"ve even merged a fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to produce a cat that glows in the dark."
"Mr. Green Genes. I read about that," he said. "In fact, it"s one of the reasons why I called for you. I needed an expert on genetics and breeding. Someone to tell me who could have produced this bizarre cargo."
He led her through the hold. A wire cage held a ma.s.s of winged bats the size of footb.a.l.l.s.
"Vampire bats," Lorna said. "But they"re ten times the size they should be. May be a form of primordial gigantism."
Similarly a caged fox down the row was the size of a bear cub. It hissed and growled and threw itself against the bars. They quickly moved past, stopping briefly at a tall cage that held an ordinary-sized parrot, but it had no feathers.
It cawed loudly, leaped to the front bars, and studied them while c.o.c.king its head back and forth. Jack had a hard time hiding his disgust. There was something so alien and wrong wrong about its appearance. about its appearance.
Lorna just moved closer. "When baby parrots first hatch, they"re featherless or covered only with a light down. I don"t know if this one"s stunted into an infantile state, or if it"s a throwback, too. In fact, it"s theorized that birds are the closet living relatives of dinosaurs."
Jack didn"t argue. The creature-leather-skinned and beaked- definitely had a prehistoric look to it. But what really got him unnerved was the sharpness of its attention.
The bird leaped back to its perch, spouting a garble of Spanish. That aspect of the parrot-the ability to mimic-remained intact. It began to screech a string of numbers in English, its p.r.o.nunciation and diction sounding perfectly human, if pitched slightly sharper.
"...three one four one five nine two six five..."
They continued onward, then Lorna stopped in mid-step. She stared back at the cage as the bird continued to screech out numbers. It went on and on without stopping.
"What is it?" he asked.
"That parrot...those first numbers...I can"t be sure..."
"What?"
"Three one four one five. Those are the first five digits of the mathematical constant pi pi."
Jack remembered enough from high school geometry to know about pi pi, represented by the Greek letter ?. He pictured the number in his head.
3.1415...
Awe filled Lorna"s voice as the parrot continued its numerological tirade. "Pi has been calculated to trillions of digits. I"d love to find out if the numbers the bird is mimicking are sequentially correct. And if so, how long of a sequence the parrot has memorized."
As the bird continued without pause, Jack noted a hush fall over the hold. The mewling, growling, even shuffling of the other animals grew quiet, as if they too were listening. Eyes, reflecting the light, seemed to stare toward them from the dark cages.
With a shake of his head, he moved on. He had a crime to investigate.
"What I really wanted to show you is back here."
He led her to the larger pens at the stern end of the hold. One pen held a nursing lamb and its mother. But rather than curly wool, the animals" coats hung straight to the ground, more like a yak"s pelt than a sheep"s. But that"s not what Jack wanted to show Lorna.
He tried to urge her on, but she paused at the next cage. The occupant of that pen lay stiffly on its side atop the hay floor, legs straight out, eyes wide and fixed, dead. It looked like a miniature pony, but the creature was no larger than a c.o.c.ker spaniel.
"Look at its hooves," Lorna said. "They"re cloven. Four toes in front, three in back. The earliest ancestor of the modern horse-Hyracotherium-was only the size of a fox and had the same digital division."
She crouched to examine the dead body. The hoof of one toe had been torn away. Its head bore signs of fresh concussions, as if it had panicked and thrashed against the bars before it died.
"Looks like something scared it to death," she a.s.sessed.
"I can guess what that might have been." Jack headed toward the very back of the hold. "This way."
She followed. Irritation entered her voice, along with a thread of deeper anger. "What were these people doing? For that matter, how how did they do it?" did they do it?"
"That"s what I hoped you could answer. But we have a bigger and more immediate problem." They reached the last pen. It was large and heavily barred. Hay covered the floor, but no animal was in sight. "We found the door dented and broken open when we came down here."