Season of the Harvest Read online

  The dean was Rachel Kempf, Ph.D. The photo on her bio page showed a formidable-looking middle-aged woman with an expression that would have been at home on a drill sergeant’s ID card. Toward the bottom of her long list of impressive accomplishments was a mention that she was also on the board of directors at New Horizons.

  No big surprise there, Jack thought as he scribbled more notes on his first sheet of scratch paper. He paused a moment and looked over what he’d written, surprised at how much he’d come up with and how few doodles there were. Most of it was probably academic (Bad pun, Jack, he scolded himself), but it was generally better to have too much data than too little.

  But whatever had drawn Sheldon to LRU didn’t fit with the cyber attacks against other genetics research labs that Clement had told him about. Checking FIDS again, he couldn’t find any incident reports of malicious attacks against computers of LRU’s facilities or staff. So, Sheldon had probably gone there for some other reason.

  Jack’s chain of thought was interrupted by a plaintive mewling noise. Looking down, he saw a pair of brilliant green eyes staring up at him from a black, furry face. It was Alexander, his cat. Alexander’s long hair had a tuxedo pattern, glossy black except for his belly, chin and paws, which were pure white. His long whiskers were also white, and stood out nearly five inches on each side of his muzzle.

  “Don’t tell me you’re hungry,” Jack said, darting a glance at the stainless steel bowl on the floor near the refrigerator. He didn’t remember feeding Alexander, but there was still food in the bowl, so he must have. Jack leaned back and moved his arms aside, and twenty pounds of sinewy Siberian forest cat leaped nimbly into his lap. Sitting up so he could supervise Jack’s work, Alexander began to purr, the surprisingly loud and deep rumbling filling the kitchen over the sound of the rain.

  As he stroked the big cat’s soft coat, Jack began to relax. He thought about how uncanny Alexander was: he could be a royal pain in the ass when he felt like getting into trouble, which seemed to be most of the time. But when Jack felt down, Alexander always knew that his human needed some therapy.

  Damn cat, Jack thought, a small smile coming to his face despite his melancholy mood. Who needs Valium?

  Pushing his frustration aside, he focused more closely on the details of the crime scene. According to the field reports, Sheldon had been found in one of the service tunnels running under the lab complex. The on-site team had found a trail of blood, believed to be Sheldon’s, leading upstairs to one of the second floor labs.

  The entrance to the lab where the blood trail terminated was through a heavy steel fire door set into the concrete-core walls. The door was controlled by a lock that required both a coded access card and five-digit entry key to open. It would have taken a small explosive to blow the lock, but there was no sign of forced entry. So Sheldon, or his assailant, must have had at least one card, and had known the code. Unfortunately, the digital access logs for the door had conveniently been erased, as had the previous twenty-four hours of recordings from the building’s security cameras, four of which were in this particular lab.

  Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to conceal what had happened there, and it almost certainly had to be someone on the inside. Who else would have that sort of access to the university’s security systems?

  From the digital images that had been forwarded over FIDS from the investigating agents and forensics technicians in Lincoln, Jack could see that a life or death struggle had taken place in the lab. In fact, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle of the large room, with what was no doubt incredibly expensive scientific equipment knocked over or flung from the heavy metal benches lining the room. Several laptops and workstations had been smashed, as if someone had rolled right over the top of them. Along one wall, a bank of huge stainless steel freezers stood open, their contents – hundreds of small containers of corn kernels and other biological samples, the report said – strewn across the floor. On the floor near the door that led out to the main hallway were traces of blood.

  Most significant, Jack thought as he read through the attached document, glancing periodically back at the images, were the cartridge cases that had been found scattered over the floor by the door. Fifteen of them had been recovered, all from .40 caliber rounds that were probably fired from Sheldon’s Glock 22 pistol. The forensics team had found two slugs, probably .40 caliber, lodged in the walls and a third in the ceiling, but there was no trace of the other twelve. The immediate conclusion, pending confirmation from the forensics and ballistics experts, was that Sheldon had hit whatever he had been shooting at.

  But the only blood found at the scene seemed to be his, Jack thought. A DNA analysis would be run to make sure, but initial on-site testing matched Sheldon’s blood type.

  Jack sat back, a chill running down his spine, his hand momentarily frozen in mid-stroke on Alexander’s back. Sheldon had never been in the military or seen combat, but he’d been involved in two shootouts in his career, and had been as calm and cool as one could expect in such a situation. He wouldn’t have panicked, even if he’d been surprised by an assailant. He wasn’t nearly as good a shot as Jack, but he was no slouch, either. At the distances that must have been involved in the lab, a couple dozen feet at most, given the layout of the equipment and the various lab tables, Jack knew that Sheldon would have hit his target with most of his shots.

  But Jack couldn’t get around the one major gap in his theory: there didn’t appear to be any trace of blood from anyone but Sheldon. Jack was well aware that body armor could certainly stop .40 caliber rounds at close range, but it was a long stretch for him to believe that Sheldon’s opponent had absorbed twelve bullets without leaving a single drop of blood behind. How likely could it be that not a single bullet had hit a part of Sheldon’s opponent’s body that wasn’t protected by armor, which typically only covered the chest and back: an arm or a leg, or the head. Even if a bullet didn’t take down the target, it would have left traces of blood behind.

  Yet, there was nothing.

  The shootout appeared to have happened amidst a physical struggle across the lab that had also left traces of Sheldon’s blood and various fibers on the sharp edges of several pieces of equipment. There was remarkably little in the way of other evidence aside from fabric fibers that the forensics team had tentatively identified as being from the standard lab clothing worn by the people who worked there. It was a controlled environment where anyone entering was required to wear sterilized scrubs, caps, masks and gloves, just as if they were in an operating room. The only fingerprints or other questionable physical evidence found so far had been from Sheldon.

  The same was true of the small electrical equipment alcove where the body had been discovered early that morning by a maintenance worker. Three more bullet casings, believed to be from Sheldon’s gun, had been found, but there were no bullets lodged in the walls, no traces of ricochets. And the range this time, even if his target had been across from the alcove along the tunnel wall, would have been point blank: he could hardly have missed.

  What the hell happened, Sheldon? Jack asked himself. It’s like you were shooting at a goddamn phantom that could absorb bullets.

  Alexander, annoyed that Jack had stopped petting him, began licking Jack’s hand, trying to get his attention focused on more important matters like feline ego maintenance. Jack absently began petting him again, but his mind was twelve hundred miles away, trying to visualize Sheldon’s encounter at the LRU lab.

  Staring at a blank spot on the wall and clearing his thoughts, he tried to visualize the lab in his mind. It was a technique for associative analysis that he had developed while he was in Afghanistan. Sometimes you could go analytically from A to B in an orderly, logical way, given the data you had on hand. Other times you couldn’t, and Jack had found that his subconscious could often help him “see” things that his conscious mind missed. It didn’t always work, and then he had to resort to more traditional analysis. But when it did work,
it worked damn well. His commander in Afghanistan had thought Jack was full of shit the first time he had done it while planning for an operation to take down some suspected Taliban targets. That attitude changed after Jack’s analysis and “staring at the wall bullshit” led him to believe that his unit was being baited into an ambush. The commander was unconvinced, but he was a prudent man: he prepared for both contingencies. It was indeed a trap, but when the jaws sprung, the American troops were ready, and wound up taking down nearly twice as many Taliban fighters as they had expected to find, at a cost of only two of their own soldiers lightly wounded. After that, Jack’s commander gave him all the time he wanted to sit and stare at the wall.

  Now, sitting in his kitchen, the LRU lab as he’d seen in the photos slowly came into focus and the movie in his mind began to play.

  Using a badge and key access code that he’d gotten from someone who works at LRU, Sheldon enters the lab. His LRU contact has access to the security systems and has shut them off to cover Sheldon’s illegal entry. Sheldon’s a cyber expert, investigating network attacks against facilities like this. He looks around and sees what he’s come for: the computers. They have data that he wants, but he can’t access or hack these systems remotely, or he would not have taken the risk coming here: they’re isolated from the rest of the university’s intranet. Physically secured in this lab.

  He takes out the USB flash drive containing hacking programs that he lovingly refers to as his “toolbox” and gets to work, breaking into the computers. He has to do this because his inside contact at LRU who gave him physical access to the lab does not have access to the computers, or doesn’t have the knowledge to get at the data.

  Time passes, and Sheldon finds something. The data he came here for now points him in a new direction. He looks up at the big stainless steel freezers along the wall. There. Quickly covering his tracks in the computers, erasing all signs that he had accessed them, he gets up and goes to a particular freezer. The data on the computers is maintained by some of the most gifted scientists in the world, working for one of the world’s most powerful corporations. Everything maintained here is orderly and precise. The data has told him exactly where to look for the prize, the true reason he has come here.

  Taking a set of mitts to protect his skin from the extreme cold, he opens the freezer and slides out one of the many shelves, each of which holds dozens of tiny sample containers. He sets the tray on a nearby lab table and carefully picks up a particular container. It looks exactly the same as the others, and the writing on the label indicates it is in sequence with the others on the tray. But something about this one is different. The computer data told him so.

  He could simply take the sample container, but that would be too suspicious. Instead, he takes another container, perhaps a small bag that he has brought with him, and extracts some of the contents from the sample container he has taken from the freezer. Corn kernels. He carefully puts the corn into a pocket.

  The meticulous scientists who work here would know exactly what was in each sample container; this would be logged in the computer. They would know quickly that something was missing from this container, for this item was the main focus for the research here. Sheldon considers substituting samples from another container, but abandons the idea: the scientists will know soon enough. Too soon. He needs to conceal his theft for as long as possible.

  He looks at the sample tray and the dozens of containers it holds, all of which look exactly alike except for the small labels. Coming to a decision, he upends the tray, dumping the containers onto the floor.

  Moving quickly, he does the same to the remaining trays in this freezer, then moves on to the others. Soon the white linoleum tile is covered with plastic containers, and Sheldon kicks and scatters them across the lab as he moves from freezer to freezer. It will take the scientists who work here weeks to undo this simple act of vandalism and discover what was taken. Or so he hopes.

  This is when things go wrong. Whether drawn by the noise, the security monitoring system being shut off, or perhaps just by chance, someone enters the lab. Sheldon goes through the motions of informing the newcomer – or newcomers – that he is an FBI special agent, showing his badge and trying to bluff his way out. But the newcomer knows that Sheldon is on his own: he has no warrant, no authorization. No backup. He is alone.

  They struggle. Sheldon opens fire, and keeps shooting as they careen across the lab, further spreading the mess on the floor, knocking equipment from the benches, smashing things to pieces. He empties his weapon’s magazine, firing at his assailant.

  Then...something happens. Something that allows Sheldon to break away. But he does not escape cleanly: at the last moment, just as Sheldon can reach the door and freedom, his assailant somehow injures him, the wound serious enough to leave a clear trail of blood as Sheldon escapes the lab.

  He heads downstairs to the maintenance tunnel; perhaps this is how he entered the otherwise secure building, or perhaps he knows he is cut off from the other exits. His injury is more severe than he thought, and he is bleeding badly. He would have called someone, would have called Jack, for help, but could not. Perhaps there was no signal, or he had lost his cell phone during the struggle. He is all alone now.

  Exhausted, scared, and slowly bleeding out, Sheldon holes up in the dark alcove. He reloads his empty weapon, knowing that his pursuer or pursuers will find him; the trail of blood will see to that. He knows they will find what he has taken, the precious, mysterious sample from the lab. Having come this far, he would not simply give it up, allow them to find it easily. Sheldon is smart: swallowing the stolen material would be the logical thing to do, the obvious thing. He must find another way.

  He takes some precious time to hide some of the kernels...somewhere, in a place that his pursuers will not think to look. The rest, he swallows: he will let his enemy find what they expect to find, drawing attention away from the other hidden cache.

  Having done what he can, he waits, waits for his assailant to come as more blood drains from his body.

  When his enemy arrives, Sheldon fights to the last, firing three more rounds before he is overcome. After that, there is only agony as his enemy cuts into his flesh and cracks his bones apart, a sea of pain until darkness finally falls...

  Jack blinked his eyes, clearing the last horrible image from his mind just before the tears came. Tears of loss, tears of rage for his murdered friend.

  Alexander, still purring, rubbed his big head against Jack. Jack gathered the big cat up in his arms and held him close, burying his face in Alexander’s soft fur as he wept.

  After the tears stopped, he looked down again at the photographs and spread them out so he could see the one that clearly showed Sheldon’s butchered body. Beside that he put the photo showing the meticulously torn clothing.

  It makes sense now, he thought grimly. He hadn’t been far from the mark when he had thought Sheldon’s wounds looked like someone had performed an autopsy on him. But autopsy wasn’t quite the right word: his friend had been vivisected, cut to pieces while still alive, and not simply as an act of cruelty. His murderer had been looking for something.

  “Jesus, Sheldon,” Jack rasped as warm tears continued to trickle down his cheeks. “What could have been so important that they’d rip you apart to get it back?”

  But the real question now was where had Sheldon hidden the rest of the sample he had stolen, if Jack’s analytic insights were right?

  Sensing that Jack no longer needed his feline therapy services, Alexander uncoiled and hopped down to the floor to investigate his food bowl as Jack pulled out his smart phone. The step he was about to take would likely land him in extremely hot water with Clement, but Jack couldn’t stay away, couldn’t sit on the sidelines. Not on this one.

  He was going to call the SAC in Lincoln, but wasn’t sure of his prospects for getting additional information. Jack had worked with Special Agent Carl Richards on a case two years ago, and knew him as an incredibly compet
ent agent who was an equally monumental asshole. He punched in the number for Richards that he’d pulled up from the FBI contact database.

  The phone rang twice before a clipped nasal voice answered, “Special Agent Richards.” In the background, Jack could hear a dull roar of people talking.

  “This is Special Agent Jack Dawson,” Jack said.

  “What the hell do you want, Dawson?” Richards snapped. “You’re not on this case and I don’t have any time to waste on idle conversation.”

  Jack bit back a sharp reply. Stay cool, he told himself. “Listen, Richards, I think I know why Crane was there and what he was looking for.”

  “That’s classified, Dawson,” Richards growled. “I wasn’t given access to that information, and I know you weren’t, either.

  “I don’t know the details of what he was investigating,” Jack said, “but I don’t think he was there as part of his assigned investigation. He didn’t have a warrant to conduct a search, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Richards grudgingly admitted. Then, after a pause, he said, “Dawson, when was the last time you saw or spoke to Crane?”

  Jack hadn’t really thought about that. He and Sheldon were close, but it wasn’t like they were in contact every day. Their schedules were hectic and work took them off to different places around the country, sometimes for weeks at a time. It wasn’t unusual for them to go a week or more without even exchanging emails. Now that he thought about it, it had been a fairly long time since he’d heard from his friend. Not so long that it was terribly unusual, but longer than normal. “Three weeks ago,” Jack said. He remembered that Sheldon had held a party before leaving town and, as always, insisted that Jack come.