Season of the Harvest Read online

  She sat back on her stool, eyes wide in surprise. “No kidding? Any idea as to who’s doing it?”

  “Yes,” Jack grated, the image of Naomi Perrault flashing into his mind, unbidden. “It looks like a group that’s screening itself behind UFO garbage on the web, if you believe that. The Earth Defense Society, EDS. The team in Lincoln found one of their flyers crammed down Sheldon’s throat. We don’t know yet, but it looks like they’re engaged in some sort of industrial espionage, possibly stealing genetic technology from New Horizons. Apparently they decided to move up the criminal ladder by killing an FBI agent.”

  They both looked up as Kilburn reentered the lab. He threw Jack a smug smile before returning to his table and getting back to work, looking for anomalous fibers in Sheldon’s torn-apart clothing.

  “Asshole,” Jerri muttered as she nudged Jack. “Let’s get back to it.”

  Not trusting himself to say anything more about the good Dr. Kilburn, Jack reached into the cardboard evidence box and withdrew the bag containing Sheldon’s Glock 22. His backup weapon, the Glock 27, was also in the box, in a separate bag, but wasn’t a priority right now: the field team in Lincoln had determined that there wasn’t any blood or other suspicious residue on it, and it hadn’t been fired. After being inspected carefully in the field, it had been unloaded and packed into the evidence box.

  The Glock 22, however, had definitely been fired. Sheldon had emptied one magazine, the one Jack and Jerri had just finished sampling, of its fifteen rounds, and had fired at least three more just before he was killed, based on the number of brass casings that had been found by the body. The weapon had blood spattered all over it.

  And there was something else.

  “Unidentified residue on gun muzzle,” Jerri murmured as she read the note that had been stuck on the outside of the box containing the weapon.

  “I wonder why they didn’t have that in the report?” Jack said.

  Jerri glanced at him, a wry smile on her lips. “You read all the field reporting?”

  “Well...yeah,” Jack confessed. “It was all in FIDS.” He shrugged. “Listen, Clement sent me home because he thought I was an emotional basket case, which maybe was true. But what was I going to do? Just sit and watch the boob tube?”

  “Well,” she told him, “this was reported. It was in a follow-up they added just before they shipped it out. You were probably on the road by then. One of the more senior techs in Lincoln took a second look at the gun and found something odd around the muzzle that didn’t appear to be blood.”

  “Right,” Jack said. “Okay, let’s get this done.”

  He carefully removed the weapon from the stiff cardboard box and laid it on the table under the lights. Jerri focused a high definition video camera on the weapon, looking at the magnified image on a flat panel display. She tapped a few buttons on the touch-sensitive screen to enhance the resolution and add some color filters to help make the residue stand out more.

  “Yeah,” she murmured, pointing to a very faint speckling of an amber-colored liquid right around the gun’s muzzle. It was very faint, and she was surprised the Lincoln team had found it. “See, right here, there’s definitely something, and it’s not blood. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s back-spatter from a bullet impact at extremely close range.”

  “We’re talking inches, Jerri,” Jack said grimly, trying to imagine who, or what, would have gotten so close to a man who was still firing a gun.

  “At most,” she agreed, zooming in even further.

  “And why is it just around the muzzle?” he wondered. “Why wouldn’t there have been other traces left at the scene?”

  “I don’t know, Jack,” she said, shaking her head as she wondered the same thing. “I can’t imagine what it is.”

  “One way to find out,” Jack told her, handing her a set of swabs.

  She took several samples, then told Jack as he cataloged them, “Set those aside for me, please. I want to take a look at those as soon as I’ve finished sampling the outside of the weapon. I’m pretty sure the rest of this is going to turn out to be Sheldon’s blood, but whatever this is on the muzzle is definitely something else.” Then she began to methodically take swabs of blood from the weapon to finish up the job.

  “Okay,” she said, finally handing him the last of five bloody swabs, now stained a dark maroon. “I think we’re done with his weapon. Go ahead and unload it and get it boxed up.” She picked up the swabs of the unidentified substance they’d taken from the gun and told Jack, “I’m going to get these set up for analysis. I’ll be back.”

  Jack watched her head off toward the lab next door where the DNA analysis equipment was, her feet beating a rapid tattoo across the hard floor. He caught Kilburn looking at him again. The man smiled slyly before turning back to his work.

  “Pissant,” Jack muttered as he turned back to his own task. He released the magazine from the Glock, then pulled the slide back to eject the round in the chamber before putting the weapon in a fresh evidence box that he’d already labeled.

  Then he changed his gloves, not wanting to accidentally contaminate the magazine that had been in the weapon before he examined it. Aside from a trace of blood on the bottom, which Jerri had already sampled, the magazine’s exterior appeared to be clean. The rear of the magazine had holes that showed how many rounds remained. Counting the glint of the bullet primers showing in the holes, Jack saw that the magazine, which had a capacity of fifteen rounds, held only twelve now. While ballistics would need to confirm it, Jack felt certain that the three .40 caliber brass cartridges the Lincoln team had found around Sheldon’s body were from this magazine.

  Looking more closely, Jack saw something odd. In the hole for round thirteen, which should have simply been dark and empty, he saw...something. He couldn’t tell what it was, even through the zoomed-in view on the video display.

  “What the hell,” he muttered. He began to thumb the rounds out of the magazine, since he had to unload it anyway, carefully putting each bullet into a bag that he’d already marked for the purpose.

  He was just about to take out the last round when his cell phone rang. He felt his stomach suddenly curl into a tight, acidic ball, because the ringtone was that of a dog barking, and the only numbers he’d assigned that particular ringtone were the ones that Clement used.

  “Shit,” he cursed, quickly setting down the magazine. Forgetting to remove the latex gloves, he grabbed the phone from his pocket and hit the answer button. “Special Agent Dawson,” he answered, trying to muster as much dignity as he could. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kilburn set down his samples before strutting in Jack’s direction.

  “I’m going to call your house phone in exactly sixty minutes,” Clement said quietly. “If you don’t pick up the phone and give me your word of honor that you won’t stick your nose any further into Sheldon’s case, I’ll expect to see you at eight a.m. sharp to turn in your gun and your badge. Do you understand what I just said, Special Agent Dawson?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack said, feeling like a turd for disappointing Clement. He wanted to try and explain himself, but now definitely wasn’t the time. He stared daggers at Kilburn, who stood right next to him now with a gloating expression on his face. “I understand. I’ll talk to you in an–”

  Clement hung up before Jack could finish.

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” Jack growled as he turned to confront Kilburn.

  The DNA specialist suddenly seemed to realize that being so close to an enraged man who outweighed him by a good twenty pounds, had experience in close combat, and was also armed probably wasn’t a good thing. Shuffling backward a few steps, he pointed at Jack. “You’re not properly trained in this line of work!” he said in righteous indignation. “You–”

  “What the hell is going on?” Jerri said from behind him, a fierce glare in her eyes.

  “Your buddy here ratted me out to Clement,” Jack said, clenching his gloved hands. He knew he would be canned if he did it, but
the urge to throttle Kilburn was nearly overpowering. “I’ve got to go.”

  “We’ll see about that!” Jerri nearly shouted, drawing sudden looks from the other technicians working in the lab. Then she started in on Kilburn, using a vocabulary that Jack never would have guessed at.

  “Jerri,” he tried to interject, “forget it...”

  She didn’t hear him, or pretended not to as she continued to ream Kilburn. The man, gesticulating wildly, sputtered in protest, and the two of them made an incredible scene that brought the work in the lab to a complete halt as everyone watched in silent amazement.

  Jack turned back to the magazine lying on the table, deciding that he had enough time to finish unloading it before getting back on the road toward home. He carefully thumbed out the last bullet and watched, dumbstruck, as four golden kernels of corn popped out into his gloved hand.

  Shit, he thought as his eyes went wide with realization, and his mind suddenly spun back to his mental image of Sheldon’s last moments. This is what he’d been after in the lab, what he’d taken. Even the last shots he fired at whoever killed him had probably been another distraction: who would think of looking for something hidden in a weapon that had just been fired? Instead, his killer figured that Sheldon had swallowed the corn, and had carved him up to find it.

  Jack then had a sudden flash of insight, one that was based not on rational, considered thought, but on instinct alone. Kilburn, he thought. Jack was somehow sure that Kilburn’s presence here in the lab wasn’t an accident. Kilburn coming from New Horizons to work for CODIS, then just happening to be tapped to help with the evidence from Sheldon’s murder, seemed like too much of a coincidence.

  Despite the promise Jack was going to make to Clement to butt out of the case to save his job, he had to at least call Richards in Lincoln and give him a heads-up that Kilburn might be in league with the EDS. There was no way that Jack was going to let Kilburn see what had been hidden in the magazine of Sheldon’s weapon, because he felt sure in his gut that was why Kilburn was here: to find anything that Sheldon’s killer – or killers – had missed.

  That clinched it. Jack knew that he would be fired, and could possibly face a prison sentence, for what he was about to do, but he saw no alternative. Concealing his hand from Kilburn behind his body, he dropped the bullet he had been holding into the evidence bag while still holding onto the kernels. Then he peeled off the glove, trapping the kernels as the glove snapped inside-out. He took off the glove from his left hand and threw it away, while surreptitiously sliding the glove containing the corn into one of the outside pockets of his jacket.

  “Listen, Jerri,” he said, gently taking her by the shoulder and turning her away from her confrontation with the still-blustering Kilburn, “I’ve got to go.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jack,” she said hoarsely, blinking back tears of anger, her entire body shaking with rage. “Promise me you’ll call me?”

  “I will,” he told her, meaning it. He had to talk to her about the corn, although he wasn’t sure how he was going to do it without making an even bigger mess of his own situation. “I promise.”

  “Good.” Then, turning to Kilburn, she said in an ice-cold voice, “And please escort Dr. Kilburn out of my lab, if you’d be so kind. His services are no longer needed here.”

  “With pleasure,” Jack said with a feral smile, gesturing toward the door. “Doctor, shall we?”

  There was a moment, a brief flash in time, when Jack saw a look of deep suspicion pass across Kilburn’s face like a fleeting shadow.

  Then it was gone. With a final sneer, Kilburn turned on his heel and stalked out, slamming open the heavy door to the lab.

  After giving Jerri’s hand a gentle squeeze, Jack followed him out. By the time he got to the door, Kilburn was already out of sight, having turned down one of the other corridors.

  Jack made his way back out of the building, running through the continuing downpour to the parking garage. Wrenching the door shut on the Defender after he got in, he slammed his hands on the steering wheel.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, venting an emotional brew of anger, frustration, and fear. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he had to get going if he was to meet Clement’s deadline. He started up the car and backed out of the space, then roared out into the rain.

  ***

  After Jack left, Jerri went around the lab, seeing how the others were coming with their own evidence samples, and explaining the cause of the scene she had made earlier with Kilburn.

  Once that was done, she went back over to the DNA analysis lab to look more closely at the anomalous residue from the muzzle of Sheldon’s weapon. When she had brought the swabs over earlier, she had asked one of the lab techs to take a swab and prepare a wet mount slide for Jerri to check before she went ahead with any further testing.

  Now, after the emotional confrontation with Kilburn, it was a relief to sit quietly behind a microscope and let her body and mind cool off. At least a little.

  Cheryl, the lab’s senior tech, had prepared the slide as Jerri had requested, and had mounted it on one of the microscopes arrayed along the wall of the lab.

  “Beats the heck out of me what that is,” Cheryl said, shaking her head.

  Jerri glanced at her, frowning. Cheryl was a competent biologist who had worked in the lab for a dozen years and had seen just about anything that one could look at through a microscope. That she had no clue what was on the slide came as a surprise.

  As Jerri bent down to look through the stereo eyepiece, she caught a glimpse of what was on the slide and involuntarily recoiled. “Jesus,” she whispered, looking with wide eyes at Cheryl.

  “That was my first reaction, too,” she said quietly.

  Jerri checked the magnification, which was set at 20X. Had this been a blood sample, the field of view would have been filled with hundreds of roundish red blood cells, some completely opaque, some largely transparent except for the outline of the cell membrane, along with the other cells that called the bloodstream home.

  But this was...different. The cells in the sample varied wildly in size and shape. The only common traits appeared to be a spherical cellular nucleus that was barely discernible at a magnification of 40X, and a uniform, sickly amber coloration.

  “What the hell,” she breathed. Flipping on the video output from the microscope, she sat back and looked at the image on the seventeen inch high definition display. “Do you see that?” she asked Cheryl, pointing to what appeared to be a fuzzy cast, almost a blur, over the strange cells. “What’s causing that?”

  “I don’t know,” Cheryl said slowly. “The slide’s clean. Whatever that is, it’s in the sample.”

  Frowning, Jerri bumped up the magnification to 100X, then 400X. The blurriness seemed to be resolving into a pattern of lines that didn’t become completely clear until she pushed it up to the maximum magnification of 1000X.

  “My God,” Cheryl breathed. “Look at that!”

  The amorphous cells were joined together by a complicated web of tiny strands, like the haphazard web of a Black Widow spider, without the sense of order and pattern found in the webs of most other spiders. Even more shocking was that some cells had partially-extended stubs, as if the cells had been in the act of extending or retracting the strands when the sample had been taken.

  They didn’t notice Dr. Kilburn, staring through the door he had cracked open. His eyes were fixed on the strange cells on the display. After a moment, he silently closed the door.

  ***

  Kilburn walked down the hall to his cubicle in the CODIS unit, ignoring the other lab workers he passed along the way. Next to his desk, there was a file cabinet in which he kept notes and other information that he used as part of his daily work. Glancing around to make sure there was no one who could see what he was doing, Kilburn unlocked the cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. Pulling it all the way out, he reached behind the last set of folders and withdrew a bulky manila envelope. On the outside was written in sloppy
script, “A.P. Hawking – Dissertation Draft.” Kilburn had brought the envelope in with him one day, right through security, and even left it on his desk in plain view for a while. It wasn’t a secret that he periodically mentored graduate students in their DNA studies, although no one could believe a student would willingly pick Kilburn as a mentor. To everyone who happened to see it, it was just another dissertation someone had sent him to review.

  He closed and locked the file cabinet. Tucking the package under his arm, he made his way back down the hall to the DNA analysis unit’s lab.

  But instead of going through the door that would have taken him back into the lab where he and Tanaka had had their confrontation over Dawson, he stopped in front of an electrical closet that was between that lab and the adjoining one where Tanaka had seen...it, where she had gotten a glimpse of The Secret.

  Glancing up and down the corridor to make sure he was alone, Kilburn slipped on a set of latex gloves, then took a large ring of keys from his pocket. Choosing the key he wanted, he opened the door to the electrical closet. Stepping inside, he quietly closed the door behind him.

  The term “closet” was a misnomer, as it was actually a small room, festooned with electrical cables and junction boxes, which jutted into both of the adjoining labs.

  Kilburn tore open the envelope and extracted the contents: four M112 demolition charges, bound together, with four embedded primers linked to a detonator with a countdown timer, and an unregistered cell phone. The package held five pounds of C-4 explosive, enough to kill everyone in the adjoining labs and gut most of this floor of the building. He set the timer for ten minutes before stuffing the bomb behind one of the electrical junction boxes.

  The door suddenly flew open behind him, and he turned to find Jerri Tanaka standing there.

  “What the hell are you doing in here? And how did you get a key?” she demanded, stepping just inside the doorway. “I was just leaving the lab down the hall when I saw you close the door. Don’t tell me you’re an electrician, too,” she added sarcastically.