leather couch and taking a nap in that bright spill of light.
Instead I sat on it and took a small notebook from my pocket to rest on my knee. I’d bought it with the map at the gas station, having already formed a vague idea of the story I was going to feed the scientist.
“Dr. Bellucci, this is Daniel,” I said in introduction as Michael settled on the arm of a nearby chair. “He’s an intern. Actually, he’s my sister’s kid, but he is on his high school paper. I had my arm twisted to let him tag along.” I gave a sheepish shrug of my shoulders. “Family. What can you do?”
“Helping your nephew is admirable,” he said, but it was obvious neither his heart nor brain was behind the statement. The entirety of his attention was on Jericho. He was Bellucci’s bête noire, as a distant junior high school English teacher of mine would’ve pompously labeled him. Our good friend Fisher Thieving Lee would no doubt have called him the stick in his craw. Whatever you wanted to call him, from the moment I mentioned the name Jericho, he was all Bellucci could think about.
“What brought you to me?” He carded his fingers through wiry salt-and-pepper hair with an energy that seemed less nerves and more the fire of a man with a cause. “Outside certain academic circles you don’t hear Hooker’s name much anymore. He’s been a forgotten man since he dropped out of the public eye.” Setting his mouth grimly, he amended, “Forgotten except by me.”
I leaned back, sprawling with casual comfort in my best imitation of a seasoned journalist. “I read a whole stack of books. Well, skimmed them—most were thicker than the phone book. Some had articles that quoted your opinion on your former colleague. He was quite the bad boy of genetics, according to you. It seemed like a good look back, what with all the cloning brouhaha being pretty much over now and the stem-cell matter being the new target.” Michael had donned his glasses again, but I could see the humor in his eyes. I would bet he thought he would never see a pretentious word like brouhaha pass my lips—junior high detention had been proctored by our librarian. As for taking credit for his research, I was sure I’d pay for that later on.
“Colleague.” Bellucci tasted the word and found it bitter from the twist of his lips. “Try friend. The son of a bitch was my friend.”
“And what changed that?” I opened the notebook and fixed him with an expectant and sympathetic gaze. From the feel of the contortion that sent my face into, as with my smile, I should’ve practiced the expression in a mirror first.
“Two words. Human experimentation.” He enunciated the last so clearly, I could hear the pause between each syllable.
“He experimented on people?” I didn’t have to fake outrage. It wasn’t precisely news, but my fury hadn’t faded since day one of discovering what that maniac was up to at the Institute.
“It wasn’t quite as simple as that,” Bellucci denied, beating a tattoo with his fingers on the arm of the chair he’d chosen. “He started on himself. You’re familiar with his rare genetic makeup? That he’s a chimera?” At my nod, he continued. “He wanted to prove something that simply wasn’t true. And when he couldn’t, he decided to make it true.” Sighing, he got to his feet and paced across a rug brilliant with a jungle print. Candy-colored birds and cheetahs peeked from emerald green foliage. “But he couldn’t. Chimeras are nothing more than people with a little extra DNA. He wouldn’t accept that, though, and that’s when he started with the pregnant girls.”
Apparently Jericho had held back more than the true nature of the experiment to Bellucci. He also hadn’t revealed his healing abilities. “Pregnant?”
He nodded with a grimace. “He figured if he could accomplish the manipulation he had in mind in utero, it would be merely a series of extrapolations to achieving the same in those already fully formed.”
“And what exactly were the accomplishments he hoped to make?” I doodled something on the pad, nonsense basically, to give the impression I was actually taking notes.
“Faster, smarter, stronger.” There was a pained crease between his eyebrows. I wondered what would happen to that deepened line if he knew the “improvements” Jericho had actually ended up making instead. “Nonsense, all of it.” He sat back down and tapped a toe restlessly on the floor. “They were volunteers. He did pay them money. They knew more or less what he was doing to the fetuses, what little they could understand, but the women were poor . . . desperate. Many of them were drug users, which didn’t precisely lend any kind of credence to the experiment results, human trial violations aside.”
“Then what the hell was he thinking?” I asked for appearance’s sake. I knew precisely what he’d been thinking, and science had been only half of it. “No one would touch him or his work after he was found out. He had to know that.”
“You would think.” Shaking his head, he repeated with a soft incredulity unfaded by time. “You would think.” He stood and walked to the expanse of windows to stare blindly at the rain. “John was the most determined person I’d ever met . . . will ever meet. He truly didn’t believe there was anything in the world he couldn’t do if only he wanted it badly enough. Maybe he thought he was too smart to be found out. Maybe he thought the ends justified the means. Maybe he was completely out of his mind.” His shoulders hitched in a dismissive motion. “Could be all three. We’ll never know.”
“But he did get caught, right? If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it. How did that come about? Who was the first to discover he’d strayed from the path of the scientific straight and narrow, so to speak?” I had a suspicion on that score that was easily confirmed by the iron-rigid set of his spine.
“Why, his closest colleague of course.” His voice was deceptively calm. “His friend. The one he nearly turned into an unwitting collaborator. We helped each other out, you realize, on various projects. One would lead and the other would come in later to help with the paperwork and publishing end of it. We’d done that for years. By the time I waltzed obliviously into that last experimental trial, John was too far gone to save. So far . . .” Sighing heavily, he turned away from the outside world. “He wasn’t even ashamed. There wasn’t the slightest iota of guilt in him over what he’d done. I tried to reason with him, but it was futile. He simply couldn’t see where the line was anymore. Couldn’t even understand
“And then?” I prompted quietly.
“And then nothing.” He took his seat again, loosely clasping his hands in his lap. “By the time administration managed to get off their collective wrinkled asses to confront him, it was too late. He had disappeared and all evidence of the project had disappeared along with him.”
“The women?”
“The same. They were invisible people to begin with, living on the outskirts of society. Many of them lived in missions or with other lost souls. Not one of them ever showed up at the lab again. I’d copied a few names before I blew the whistle. I used that to try to find some of the women, but I never did. They had vanished just as thoroughly as John.” The nervous energy was draining away now, leaving a bitter emptiness in its place.
“Did any of them have their babies before the project was blown open?” I shifted and leaned forward. This would’ve been nearly fifteen years ago. Had the first genetically altered chimeras been produced then?
He shook his head. “No. The farthest along was a woman at eight months. I never saw the results of John’s work.”
Until now, I thought, as Michael continued to follow our conversation with a blank face. What Jericho had learned to do to children before they took their first breath, he’d adapted to those already born natural chimeras . . . not yet genetically manipulated by a monster.
“What do you think happened to those children?”
“After they were born?” The intertwined fingers tightened on one another. “At best, nothing. At worst, congenital defects that would make thalidomide seem like party punch. Genetics, as a science, wasn’t yet advanced enough then that we could do even half of what John was attempting. It still isn’t. He thought he was a god. I’d never noticed that before. He was my friend and arrogant as hell, yes, yet I never noticed that he thought himself a god.” He paused and cleared a suddenly tight throat. “But I imagine those poor damn children proved him less a god and more a fiend. If they grew up capable of coherent thought or purposeful movement, I’d be surprised.”
I didn’t argue the label of monster; after all, I’d thought it many times myself. But Bellucci was less accurate with the rest of his assessment. Jericho hadn’t crippled his subjects, not physically or intellectually. There were other damages, to be sure, but for all that he was a monster, he was a monster who knew his business.
I closed my notebook. “No one has seen him since, have they?”
“No. He disappeared so very well that I have to wonder if he didn’t have some sort of help. That and the fact the majority of what happened was kept out of the papers.” The wide mouth thinned to a knife-edged gash. “And I was bound by a nondisclosure agreement. The university would’ve ruined me if I’d spoken up.” There was a broken-glass glitter behind his eyes. “Odd. I’ve kept quiet all these years; yet I still feel ruined. It hardly seems fair,
