I listen intently for sirens all the way home, but there are none. When we get there, Laurie is waiting anxiously for us. We update her on how flawlessly her plan went, and then Marcus and Waggy head down to their hiding place in the basement, while Laurie, Tara, and I go upstairs to bed.
I lie in bed for an hour, unable to sleep. What we did tonight almost seems surreal. But it wasn’t. In fact, the justice system has some very real terms for it, like “breaking and entering,” and “grand larceny.”
Laurie wakes up and sees me with my eyes open. “Can’t sleep?”
“No,” I say. “Not so far.”
“Does the fact that you’re now a felon have anything to do with it?”
“No. I’m just planning my next job. I’m thinking maybe a bank.”
“Good night, Andy.” “Good night, Bonnie.”
THEY’RE GROWING A STRANGE CROP of college professors these days, and Dr. Stanley McCarty is as strange as they come. First of all, he looks like he’s about seventeen years old, with hair halfway down to his shoulders. He is wearing jeans and sneakers, with a white buttondown shirt that is buttoned all the way to the neck.
When Sam introduces him to me, he doesn’t make any gesture to shake hands, but instead says “hey” and walks past me into the house. He goes to the large-screen TV on the wall in the den and spends about three minutes examining it, even seeming to caress it. Then he says, “Very cool,” and comes back to Sam and me.
I’ve got a feeling that if I bring him in as an expert witness, Hatchet will hold him in contempt before he even opens his mouth.
“So my man here says you need to talk to me,” McCarty says, and I have to assume that Sam has earned the designation “my man” in record time.
“I do,” I say. “Thanks for coming over.”
“No prob.”
“You work with DNA?” I ask.
He smiles. “The whole world works with DNA.”
“But it’s your specialty?”
“Hey, I never thought of myself as having a specialty, but let’s go with genetics.”
“Did you know Walter Timmerman?” I ask.
“Met him once. Didn’t really know him, which is okay, because he didn’t know me, either.”
By this point in the conversation, Sam and I have made eye contact at least a dozen times. If malicious eye contact could kill, Sam’s song-talking days would be over for good.
“I need to find out what Timmerman was working on when he died,” I say.
“You got his notes?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“What do you have?”
“Pretty much nothing.”
“Nothing?” he asks.
“Basically. At least no real facts.”
McCarty looks at Sam, as if I’m the lunatic in the room. He may be right. Then he turns back to me. “You see the problem here, right?”
I nod as I hand him a copy of the e-mail that Robert Jacoby sent to Timmerman, expressing surprise that he had sent him his own DNA to test. “Take a look at this.”
McCarty takes the e-mail and reads it. He’s either the slowest reader in America, or he’s reading it a number of times. Finally, he nods. “Okay. What else?”
“The FBI had an entire task force assigned to Timmerman, all because of what he was working on. They said it was important to national security.”
McCarty just nods, silently, so I go on. “And I believe that Timmerman was murdered because of that same work.”
“Keep talking,” he says.
“The same people that killed Timmerman are trying to kill his dog; somehow the dog represents a danger to them.”
“What kind of dog?”
“Bernese mountain dog.”
He nods. “I love those dogs; the markings are amazing. Can I see him?”
“He’s not here,” I lie. “At this point he’s missing.”
“That’s the dog I saw on television this morning? The one who was kidnapped?”
“Yes. Is any of this making any sense? Maybe ringing a bell?”
He’s still quiet for a few moments, hopefully thinking. “You know anything about DNA?”
“No.”
“You got a pen and a piece of paper?”
“In my desk.”
“I’ll get it,” says Sam, and he goes off to do that. He’s back quickly and hands the pen and paper to McCarty, who sits down and starts writing on it. When he’s finished, he shows me a drawing of what I take to be a strand of DNA.
“This is nature,” he says. “Everything comes from this. You control this, you control the world.”
“How can you control DNA?” I ask, not understanding this at all.
“By creating it. Timmerman was creating synthetic DNA. There were rumors that he was, and now I’d bet anything on it.”
“Is that known to be possible?”