together. The twins are six years old. Around nine o’clock last night, Judy is tucking the weeds in for the night, she hears a noise, and when she turns around, there’s a stranger right behind her.”
“Stocky, close-cropped black hair, yellow eyes, thick lips, seed-corn teeth,” I said, describing the kidnapper I’d encountered under the warehouse.
“Tall, athletic, blond, green eyes, puckered scar on his left cheek.”
“New guy,” Sasha said.
“Totally new guy. He’s got a chloroform-soaked rag in one hand, and before Judy realizes what’s happening, the dude is all over her like fat on cheese.”
“Fat on cheese?” I asked.
“That was Charlie’s expression.”
Charlie Dai, God love him, writes excellent newspaper copy, but though English has been his first language for twenty-five years, he has not fully gotten a grip on conversational usage to the degree that he has mastered formal prose. Idiom and metaphor often defeat him. He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.
Bobby peered through the stained-glass window once more, gave the day world a longer look than he had before, then returned his attention to us: “When Judy recovers from the chloroform, Aaron and Anson — the twins — are gone.”
“Two abbs suddenly start snatching kids on the same night?” I said skeptically.
“There’s no coincidence in Moonlight Bay,” Sasha said.
“Bad for us, worse for Jimmy,” I said. “If we’re not dealing with typical pervs, then these geeks are acting out twisted needs that might have nothing to do with any abnormal psychology on the books, because they’re way beyond abnormal. They’re becoming, and whatever it is they’re becoming is driving them to commit the same atrocities.”
“Or,” Bobby said, “it’s even stranger than two dudes regressing to swamp monsters. The abb left a drawing on the twins’ bed.”
“A crow?” Sasha guessed.
“Charlie called it a raven. Same difference. A raven sitting on a stone, spreading its wings as if to take flight. Not the same pose as in the first drawing. But the message was pretty much the same. ‘Del Stuart will be my servant in Hell.’”
“Does Del have any idea what it means?” I asked.
“Charlie Dai says no. But he thinks that Del recognized Judy’s description of the kidnapper. Maybe that’s why the guy let her get a look at him. He wanted Del to know.”
“But if Del knows,” I said, “he’ll tell the cops, and the abb is finished.”
“Charlie says he didn’t tell them.”
Sasha’s voice was laden with equal measures of disbelief and disgust. “His kids are abducted, and he hides information from the cops?”
“Del’s deep in the Wyvern mess,” I said. “Maybe he has to keep his mouth shut about the abb’s identity until he gets permission from his boss to tell the cops.”
“If they were my kids, I’d kick over the rules,” she said.
I asked Bobby if Jenna Wing had been able to make anything of the crow and the message left under Jimmy’s pillow, but she had been clueless.
“I’ve heard something else, though,” Bobby said, “and it makes this whole thing even more of a mind- bender.”
“Like?”
“Charlie says, about two weeks ago, school nurses and county health officials conducted an annual checkup on every kid in every school and preschool in town. The usual eye exams, hearing tests, chest X-rays for tuberculosis. But this time they took blood samples, too.”
Sasha frowned. “Drew blood from all those kids?”
“A couple school nurses felt parents ought to give permission before blood samples were taken, but the county official overseeing the program flushed them away with a load of woofy about there’s been a low-level hepatitis outbreak in the area that could become epidemic, so they need to do preventive screening.”
As I did, Sasha knew what inference Bobby had drawn from this news, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if chilled. “They weren’t screening those kids for hepatitis. They were screening them for the retrovirus.”
“To see how widely distributed the problem is in the community,” I added.
Bobby had arrived at a further and more disturbing inference: “We know the big brains are burning up gray cells around the clock, searching for a cure, right?”
“Ears smoking,” I agreed.
“What if they’ve discovered that a tiny percentage of infected people have a natural defense against the retrovirus?”
“Maybe in some people the bug isn’t able to unload the genetic material it’s carrying,” Sasha said.
Bobby shrugged. “Or whatever. Wouldn’t they want to study those who’re immune?”
I was sickened by where this was leading. “Jimmy Wing, the Stuart twins…maybe their blood samples revealed they have this antibody, enzyme, mechanism, whatever it is.”
Sasha didn’t want to go where we were going. “For research, they wouldn’t need the kids. Just tissue samples, blood samples, every few weeks.”
Reluctantly, remembering these were people who had once worked with Mom, I said, “But if you have no moral compunctions, if you used human subjects before, like they used condemned prisoners, then it’s a lot easier just to snatch the kids.”
“Less to explain,” Bobby agreed. “No chance the parents won’t cooperate.”
Sasha spat out a word I’d never heard her use before.
“Bro,” Bobby said, “you know, in car-engine design, in airplane-engine design, there’s this engineering term, something called
“I know where you’re going with this. Yeah, I’m pretty sure in some biological research there’s something similar. Testing the organism to see how much it can take of one thing or another, before it self-destructs.”
Sasha spat out the same word, which I had now heard her use before, and she turned her back to us, as if to hear
Bobby said, “Maybe a quick way to understand why a particular subject — why one of these little kids — has immunity from the virus is to keep infecting him with it, megadoses of infection, and study his immune response.”
“Until finally they kill him? Just kill him?” Sasha asked angrily, turning to us again, her lovely face so drained of blood that she appeared to be halfway through applying the makeup for a mime performance.
“Until finally they kill him,” I confirmed.
“We don’t know this is what they’re doing,” Bobby said in an attempt to console her. “We don’t know jack. It’s just a half-assed theory.”
“Half-assed, half-smart,” I said with dismay. “But what does the damn crow have to do with all this?”
We stared at one another.
None of us had an answer.
Bobby peered suspiciously through the stained-glass window again.
I said, “Bro, what is it? Did you order a pizza?”
“No, but the town’s crawling with anchovies.”
“Anchovies?”
“Fishy types. Like the zombie club we saw last night, coming back from Wyvern to Lilly’s house. The dead- eyed dudes in the sedan. I’ve seen more of them. I get the feeling something’s coming down, something super- humongous.”
“Bigger than the end of the world?” I asked.
He gave me an odd look, then grinned. “You’re right. Can’t go down from here. Where do we have to go but up?”
“Sideways,” Sasha said somberly. “From one kind of hell into another.”
