Chapter 33

Gerald sat in his darkened dormitory room at the Primate Research Facility. The phone call from Millie both thrilled and worried him. He was delighted to hear from her but worried about her safety. She was on the run from the police and FBI, and that made her unpredictable. He opened a bottle of water, took several long gulps, then returned to the veterinary journal he was reading before her call. Absentmindedly thumbing through the pages of the journal, he couldn’t process what was written on the pages. After a few minutes of struggling with his concentration, he tossed the journal aside and slouched farther into his chair. His heart ached to see Millie.

If he could just talk to her, he was sure he could convince her to give herself up and join the hunt for Roku. He didn’t believe she had broken any laws. Maybe she was guilty of stealing university property, Roku, but that was about all. And he knew he could convince Radner to talk to Pauling and not have the school press charges. It was all an unfortunate state of affairs brought on by distressed egos, managerial hubris, and a gullible desire for fame and notoriety.

Everyone involved in the fiasco shared in the blame for the current situation from the university officials down to Millie herself.

Should he notify the FBI that she had contacted him? Harry? If Millie agreed to see him would he dare bring Harry and Dixie along? Even though they were no longer with the university, they would certainly be concerned and interested in Millie’s welfare. They would help her. But she might view their presence as a betrayal of her trust in him.

He agonized as to what was the best thing to do.

***

The FBI fliers did their job. The day after they were distributed in Chinatown an elderly woman by the name of Maureen Shen called Jacoby’s office and reported that she had seen a strange shadow lurking near her apartment. She wasn’t sure what it was, for it was dark when she took her garbage out, just that it wasn’t anything she had ever encountered. Five feet tall, long arms, very large head, stooped stature, it scurried down the dark street like a monkey. She thought something had escaped from the zoo, but when she saw the flier, she decided to call and report what she saw. “Creepy,” she said. “Very creepy.”

Jacoby jotted the woman’s address on a notepad, found Lenny Baudelaire, and the two men drove out to interview Mrs. Shen. She lived near the Baptist Chinese Church close to the Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground.

Mrs. Shen greeted them with a firm handshake and a toothless smile. After ushering them into the small apartment, they sat on vintage worn chairs as the woman talked.

“When I saw this paper,” she said, retrieving the flier describing Roku, “I knew I must call. It was after dark when I took my garbage to the curb that I noticed it lurking across the street in the shadows.”

“What was it doing?” Baudelaire said.

“Just prowling around. Like it was searching for something,” the woman said.

“Probably food,” Baudelaire said. “Can you describe it any better, ma’am?”

“Not really. Like I said, it was dark. Whatever it was looked like a large monkey but not really. It had long arms, an extremely large head, and prowled around in sort of a shuffling gait. Oh yes, and it had red eyes.”

Jacoby placed a quick cell phone call and then turned back to the woman. “Red eyes?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “It looked at me once from across the street, and I noticed its eyes. Glowing red.”

“Interesting,” Baudelaire said.

“It wasn’t an animal from the zoo then?”

Jacoby cleared his throat and shifted in his chair.

“No, not from the zoo. It escaped from a research project, and it’s important that we recover it as soon as possible.”

He noticed out Mrs. Shen’s front window that a number of patrol cars had arrived on the scene and uniformed officers were searching the area. Quick response from my phone call.

His cell phone rang. He answered it, listened for a while, then hung up.

“Come on,” he said to Baudelaire. “They found another body across the street.”

As the headed for the door, Mrs. Shen sat in her chair, a concerned look on her face.

“Oh, dear,” Jacoby heard her say as he closed the door behind them.

***

The corpse lay amongst trash barrels, and a dumpster in a cramped alleyway on the west side of the playground and by the looks of the wounds was at least eight to twelve hours old. The wounds had the same appearance of the other recent Chinatown homicides with a large amount of blood on the ground and the victim’s skull crushed. Flies circled the body. The medical examiner had yet to arrive on the scene.

“Same MO has all the others,” Baudelaire said, rising from his stooped position over the body. Has to be that monster.”

“The scientists would take offense at your use of that term, Lenny,” Jacoby said.

“Well, whatever the hell it is,” Baudelaire said, “it’s a monster to me. When those educated folks from the university can’t explain in plain English what we’re dealing with, I call it a monster. Some sort of half man, half animal. To me, that’s a monster. And it’s starting to get on my nerves.”

“You want Prescott to spell you?”

“Naw. I can take it. It’s just creepy, that’s all. I’ve never chased a monster before.”

After the medical examiner finished looking over the body, it was loaded into an ambulance and ferried to the downtown for the required autopsy. Jacoby chose to skip this one. Instead, the two men grabbed a quick lunch at a Hunan diner before returning to their office.

Jacoby sat alone, his stomach belching fire from the spicy lunch. He chewed a handful of antacid tablets and lit the stub of a day old cigar. It tasted foul, so he snubbed it out and gulped down some bureau coffee.

The number of victims was beginning to pile up, and all he knew was the perpetrator was some sort of animal-human mixture that scientists had created, like in science fiction movies. And they were no closer to nabbing the thing than weeks ago when he first visited Dr. Olson at Cal Pacific. Since that time, he’d learned the professor had been fired, and his wife had quit. Jacoby remembered reading in a magazine how the genes for human insulin had been sliced into a bacteria’s DNA and now that bacteria was a little human insulin factory, pumping out human insulin, so patients no longer needed to use animal insulin. Science was doing weird things these days.

Two years earlier, his wife died of cancer. When the doctors first discovered it in her breast, they were confident a lumpectomy followed by chemotherapy would do the trick, but within six months the cancer had spread to her bones, then to her brain. She’d had radiation therapy to her head and more chemo. She put up a valiant fight, always smiling to the end, but it was not enough. She slowly succumbed to the disease and died in her sleep one night in the middle of winter.

Jacoby was lost without her, and that first year he almost quit the Bureau. But he was assigned a complex white-color-crime case, where he spent six months investigating and living in Philadelphia, so gradually the pain of her death lessened. He still missed her, but he tried to stay busy with his career and a few hobbies.

This current case, with what Dr. Olson termed a chimera, puzzled him. He couldn’t get his mind around the idea of a creature--and that was what this thing was, a creature whose genetic makeup was part animal and part human. And the animal part was something Olson called a Yeti, some sort of prehistoric animal. Jacoby knew a little about genetic engineering, and what he knew frightened him. Since he began the case, he had done some reading. The chimaera was a hybrid monster in Greek mythology, child of Typhoeus and Echidna and sibling of Cerberus and the Lernaean hydra. It had the head and body of a lion, as well as the head of a goat that was attached to its back, and a tail that ended on a head of a snake.

It had resided in Lycia, a place in Asia Minor, where it ravaged the lands with its fire breath. Assisted by Pegasus, it was killed by Bellerophon when King Iobates of Lycia asked him for help. Bellerophon rode on Pegasus’s back flew overhead and shot arrows at the chimera from above. Modern day genetic chimeras were created artificially by combining genetic material from different species into a single embryo. The adult animals that developed had different populations of cells that reflected the different contributions of the species from which they were produced. Scientists had created the geep, for example, by combining genetic material from both a goat and a sheep. If this creature was man-made, what could science do next? What bizarre monster could be unleashed upon an unsuspecting public? And most of all, who was overseeing all of these experiments? Congress? The FDA?

***

Dixie waited for Miles Radner to come to the phone. Harry had driven downtown to see Special Agent Jacoby, so she sat in San Mateo until she summoned the courage to call the research facility. Radner sounded cheerful when he answered.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Dixie. I was down in the Animal Care Unit, doing a little inspection. What’s up?”

“Miles,” she began, a slight quiver in her voice. “I don’t know where to begin. There have been a number of murders in Chinatown that seem to point to a large animal-like creature. It sounds like it could be Roku--”

“In San Francisco?” Radner butted in.

“Yes, in Chinatown. The FBI and Frisco police are investigating, but it is beginning to look like it is Roku. Where Millie is we don’t know.”

“Gosh, Dixie, that’s not good.”

“It isn’t. But mostly, Miles, I am worried about Harry. He hasn’t found a job as yet, and he’s depressed. I don’t know what you can do but...”

Dixie did her best to keep from breaking down and sobbing. But she was at her wit’s end. Radner cleared his throat.

“Dixie, look, Harry means a lot to me. When Jimmy Winkleman was killed, and the Yeti escaped, I offered Harry my resignation. You know what? He just smiled and refused to accept it. I can’t begin to tell you how much that meant to me. So, if there is anything I can do to help, you know I’ll do it gladly. How can I help?”

“I don’t know, Miles. I think he’s taken it on the chin about Millie’s experiments and her disappearance. On top of feeling responsible and guilty, he was terminated. He felt bad enough and then to--”

“Yes, yes,” Radner interrupted. “Harry would have been well within his rights to fire me, but he didn’t. To this day, it’s hard for me to believe just how far out on a limb he went for me. Dixie, I always felt the trustees and Pauling acted too hastily in firing Harry. In fact, I have learned that other faculty members feel as I do.”

“That’s wonderful to hear,” Dixie said. “It might make Harry feel somewhat better, but it won’t put bread on the table as he likes to point out.”

“Well, maybe there’s something I can do. Along with a few others. I owe Harry that much.”

“Like what, Miles?”

“You know, Dixie, all my life I’ve been a gamer. Always figuring the odds on any endeavor, weighing people and how they could further my career. When the Yeti escaped, your husband wasn’t thinking of himself. He was thinking of his staff and protecting the public along with saving a rare scientific specimen. And everyone admired him for that. We were proud to be called his colleagues. His actions made my life up to that point seem foolish. Maybe it’s time for me to do the same. Maybe it’s time for me to act honorably. Maybe I can return the huge favor Harry did me.”

“How, Miles?”

“I’ll think of something, Dixie,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”