AUGURING
Julie was quick. Herron opened the attachment. He scanned down the list quickly, his eye immediately drawn to his own number at 3:19 a.m. At 3:17 there was a text to another number and then a call to the same number at 3:22. There was an incoming call from the same number at 5:21 a.m. He quickly scanned up the page. All the calls but two that day were to the same number and none was longer than a minute. Herron picked up his desk phone and dialed. After four rings a voice answered. “Hey, this is Alex. Leave me a message. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.” He remembered the voice, the dead guy’s partner, Penn, no, Prenn. Slick, used to bossing people around. Didn’t like him much, either.
He emailed Julie back. Hey, Julie, you’re the best. Now I’m going to have to owe you one. I need to go further back, say, eight months, and can you pull this one for me, too? and he carefully typed in Alex’s number.
* * *
They were going through dense clouds. You couldn’t tell which way was up but occasionally the wing would cleave a discrete wisp and you could see suddenly how fast they were going. It should have been bumpy but it wasn’t. Horizontal streaks of rain striped the window. Someone had scratched the initials TS into the Plexiglas. The seats were old, unchanged since the ’70s, and stank of decades-old cigarette smoke. He still remembered when you could smoke on planes.
Suddenly the plane broke through the clouds but something was wrong. They were too low. The jungle canopy was right there. They were at the treetops. He knew they were going in. The image out the window, the section of wing, the dense green canopy laced with vines, froze in his eye, like when the old 16 mm films would jam in the projector at school, the image slightly skewed and undersaturated, fading from focus. He felt no fear, just a curious sense of regret. He felt himself pulling back; sounds became muffled and subdued. He was aware of a violent shaking and, even as the snapshot of the window persisted in his mind, he saw the foliage hurtle by as the plane tore through the canopy. So, this would be dying, he thought impassively as his vision tunneled in, vaguely aware that the plane was cartwheeling now. He was glad there would be no pain.
It was quiet. Then there was a harsh Klaxon from the street and Jordan opened his eyes. It was dark. He pressed the stem of his watch—2:45 in the morning. He was wide-awake, eyes fully dilated; the bottom sheet was soaked in sweat but he felt cold. He pulled up the duvet that had slipped to the floor. The skin on his hand felt tight where the sutures had been. It hurt. Tomorrow would be a busy day; he needed to sleep. He’d never believed that stuff about dying in dreams.
He closed his eyes and tried to recapture the thread. The snapshot of the canopy through the window hung there like a dark pool in the forest. He slipped in.
* * *
The snow was melting on the yews hanging over the walk. The sun couldn’t reach through the overhanging branches, though, so the pattering drops refroze in the shade. As a result the path was lethally slick. Alex was trying to piece together what he was going to say when he lost his footing. He tried to catch himself and hit the ground hard with his elbow, sending shooting pain up and down his arm just before the back of his head struck the icy brick with a solid thud. He lay still, watching the sun glitter off the ice that sheathed the tiny needles like myelin. A drop of water splashed his forehead and he groaned and tried to sit up. The front door opened and Stephanie looked out. Haden was wrapped around her leg and peering out from behind her.
“Jesus, Alex, are you okay?” she said, picking her way carefully down the walk and helping him up. “I meant to salt it but I got distracted.”
He gingerly rubbed the back of his head. “I’ll live, probably get a good bump, though.”
“Come on,” she said, taking his arm, “we’ll ice it.”
He winced and pulled his arm away. “I slammed my funny bone, too.”
“Why’s it called a funny bone?” Haden said. “’Cause it feels funny when you hit it?”
“That’s one reason,” his mother said. “See if you can think of another.”
“I don’t know.”
They made it up the stairs and Alex draped his wet coat over the radiator.
“What is the real name for that bone?” Stephanie said.
Haden thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said, losing interest in the subject.
Sophie was sitting at the piano in the front room listening and chimed in smugly, “It’s called the humerus. Get it?”
Haden rolled his eyes. “Ha, ha.”
* * *
Dennis drove quickly through the cold early-morning streets. They crossed the river and headed east into the tenth arrondissement. He swung the little Citroën into a lone parking spot across the street from a bus stop: Grange aux Belles–Juliette Dodu. A pair of older women with empty mesh bags sat in the shelter, conversing rapidly. Right behind them was a modern brown building that appeared to be wrapped in netting. The face of the building was striped with alternating bands of wide and narrow reflecting windows. On the sides they were flush but in the middle they were set back as if a giant hand had peeled off the ugly shell to reveal the glittering jewel beneath. A small unobtrusive sign by the door identified the building as the Institut de Génétique Moléculaire.
They entered through plain glass doors and Dennis walked purposefully to the security desk. The guard looked up, and before he could speak Dennis handed him a folded piece of paper. The guard opened it and read, glancing once or twice at Jordan as he worked down the page.
Apparently satisfied, he took a white plastic card from a drawer and inserted it into a small machine on the desk. He typed a sequence of numbers into his computer and the card was smoothly ejected. He handed it to Dennis and said, “Deux cent quinze, monsieur,” and went back to his paper.
In the elevator Jordan saw that most of the floors were devoted to the CEPH. He smiled to himself; the Centre d’étude du Polymorphisme Humain had been one of the biggest private labs involved in sequencing of the human genome. They would be well equipped.
Dennis unlocked the door with the card key. The lab was small but more than adequate. “How long you going to need?” Dennis asked, slouching in the doorway.
Jordan took a deep breath. “A while. I’ll probably use deoxyribonuclease I in a solution with manganese ions to cut the strands. That should give a pretty random length assortment. Then I’ll have to treat the fragments with mung bean nuclease to clean up the ends. Otherwise, they could theoretically be able to tell they were restriction cuts, not natural necrosis—”
Dennis interrupted, “How long?”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe?” Jordan said. “I’m not sure because I’ll have to do a gel electrophoresis pass and make sure the strand length distribution corresponds to the hypothetical necrosis. I’ll probably do a couple of shorter incubations with the DNase to make sure I don’t oversegment... I guess I could PCR up some of the longer strands—”
“Okay,” Dennis cut in. “I’ll be back with lunch. Get busy because we only have the lab for today.” The door smoothly clicked shut behind him.