Kate extended a hand toward the door tentatively, worried that it might be hot. She touched her fingers to the metal. It was cold. Kate pushed and the door swung inward. She looked for a light switch and found one, but it didn't work.
'Do you have a flashlight?' Kate asked. Daniel got one from the car and Kate started inside. He tried to follow, but she stopped him.
'This is a crime scene. Just stay here and keep the door open so I can have a little more light.'
Daniel propped open the door but did not go any farther. He was secretly grateful not to have to view the body.
Kate walked slowly toward the room she had seen through the window and stood in the doorway. Part of the roof had collapsed and a ray of fading sunlight illuminated a section of the room. Charred wooden beams had crushed a table and what had once been a video monitor. Near the monitor was a rack of plastic test tubes that had been melted by intense heat.
Kate edged around a burn-scarred desk that was tipped on its side. She noticed another roof beam resting on the top of two filing cabinets whose drawers had all been pulled out. The paint on the cabinets had blistered off. The metal was charred and scarred but intact. A breeze gusted through the broken window and drifted down through the gaps in the roof. It blew blackened scraps of paper around the room. The source of the paper was a pile of ashes in the center of the floor that Kate guessed had once been the contents of the filing cabinets.
Kate's eyes stayed on the pile for a moment more before being drawn, almost against her will, to the two bodies sprawled in the center of the room. One was human, its skull charred and its clothes seared to ash. Kate's stomach heaved, but she closed her eyes for a second and kept it together. When she opened her eyes they shifted to the second corpse. For a moment Kate was confused. The body was too small even for a child, unless it was an extremely young one. She braced herself and stepped closer. That's when she saw the tail. Kate backed out of the room.
'What's in there?' Daniel asked when she stepped outside.
'A human corpse and a dead monkey. I'm going to look down the hall.'
'We should get out of here,' Daniel said nervously.
'In a minute.'
'No one's alive. We would have heard them.'
'Just give me a second.'
The light from the doorway barely reached the end of the hall, so Kate had to use the flashlight. She spotted two open doors but had no idea what was inside. The smell of burned flesh grew more intense as she neared the rooms. Kate held her breath and cast the beam inside. The first room was filled with cages, each containing a monkey, and every monkey was pressing against the wire mesh as if it had been trying to claw through the wire when it died.
Chapter Eleven.
A uniformed officer was taking Kate and Daniel's statements when an unmarked car parked behind the van from the medical examiner's office. Homicide detective Billie Brewster, a slender black woman in a navy-blue windbreaker and jeans, got out of the car. Her partner, Zeke Forbus, a heavyset white man with thinning brown hair, spotted Kate at the same time she spotted him.
'What's Annie Oakley doing here?' Forbus asked Brewster.
'Shut the fuck up,' the black woman snapped angrily at her partner. Then she walked up to Kate and gave her a hug.
'How you doing, Kate?' Brewster asked with genuine concern.
'I'm doing fine, Billie,' Kate answered without conviction. 'How about you?'
The black woman shot her thumb over her shoulder toward her partner.
'I was doing great until they partnered me up with this redneck.'
'Zeke,' Kate said with a nod.
'Long time, Kate,' Zeke Forbus answered without warmth. Then he turned his back to her and addressed the uniformed officer.
'What have we got here, Ron?'
'Crispy critters,' the officer answered with a sly smile. 'If you ain't had dinner, I'll get you a bucket of KFM.'
'KFM?'
'Kentucky Fried Monkey,' the cop answered, cackling at his joke. 'We've got a passel of 'em inside.'
'Why am I investigating monkey murders?' Forbus asked. 'Don't we have animal control for that?'
'One of the crispy critters ain't a monkey, that's why,' the uniform answered.
'I understand you called this in,' Billie said to Kate. 'Why were you out here at night in the middle of nowhere?'
'This is Daniel Ames, an associate at Reed, Briggs, the firm I work for. One of our clients, Geller Pharmaceuticals, is in the middle of a lawsuit over one of its products. Up until last week all of the tests of the product came out favorable to Geller, but a scientist named Sergey Kaidanov reported negative results in a study of rhesus monkeys.'
'The same type of monkeys we've got in there?' Billie asked with a nod toward the lab.
'Exactly. Everyone wants to talk to Kaidanov because the study could have a huge impact on the lawsuit, but he disappeared about a week ago.'
'Anyone fixed the time of this fire?' Billie asked the uniform.
'Not yet, but it's not recent.'
'Go on,' Billie told Kate.
'Dan and I went to Kaidanov's house to interview him. He wasn't there, but someone had taken the house apart.'
'What's that mean?' Forbus asked.
'Someone searched it and left a mess. We did a little investigating and found an address for the lab. We came out here hoping that we'd find Kaidanov and it looks like we have.'
'You think the dead guy is your scientist?'
'I think there's a good chance he is.'
'Let's take a look,' Billie said to Forbus as she started inside. Kate took a step toward the door, but Forbus held out an arm and barred her way.
'No civilians allowed in the crime scene.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake,' Billie responded, glaring at her partner.
'Forget it. He's right. I'm not a cop anymore,' Kate said, trying to sound unconcerned, but Daniel saw her shoulders slump.
'What was all that about?' Daniel asked as soon as the detectives were out of earshot.
'Old business.'
'Thanks for covering for me.'
Kate looked puzzled.
'You know, about my breaking into Kaidanov's house.'
Kate shrugged. 'You didn't think I'd burn you, did you?'
A deputy medical examiner was videotaping the office while a tech from the crime lab snapped 35mm photographs, then digital shots that could be fed into a computer and E-mailed if necessary. Billie took in the scene from the doorway. A corpse lay on its stomach near the center of the room. The flesh on its side and back had been burned off and the heat from the fire had turned the bones grayish blue in color.
'Any ID?' Billie asked the medical examiner.
'Can't even tell the sex,' he answered.
'Is it a murder?'
'Best guess, yes. Deutsch says it's definitely arson,' he replied, referring to the arson investigator. 'And look at the skull.'
The detective took a few steps into the room so she could get a better look at the corpse. The back of the
