In the Blood (33 page)

“My name is Dr Kurt Matthias. I’ve been doing research for Reverend Scaler.”

I saw a name scrawled on a property transfer.
Kurt…Not Matthews, Masters, Mathers…
Matthias. Was this also the man who’d swabbed the Q-tip through Shanelle’s mouth?

My heart started beating hard against my ribs. I gestured for him to step over the threshold, enter.

I said, “What’s your connection to a house below Coden, Doctor? A place near the Gulf in an abandoned shrimping village. There is a connection, right?”

A sharp frown. “Excuse me, but how do you know about –”

“Please answer my question, sir.”

“I used the Reverend’s money to purchase the property. I needed an isolated place to house a young couple and their child until finding better accommodations in the city.”

Dr Matthias’s eyes strayed to the threshold of the study, saw the dark swashes of red.

“Something terrible has happened, hasn’t it?” he said.

Harry and I took Matthias to a sunroom at the back of the house, far from the din of the investigation. It was bright and cheerful and at odds with everything the house had come to represent. We told Matthias we suspected his young couple – Anak and Rebecca – were dead, but were clinging to hope that the child had survived.

The news hit him like a falling wall. Matthias needed several moments to gather himself, seeming to drag his emotions into a box, storing them for later. He switched into a scientific mode, calm and clinical. He sat in a chair beside a potted fern, tented his fingers beneath his lips, and frowned.

I said, “The residents of that house, Doctor…what was so special about them?”

“Anak and Rebecca? They were simply two young people who, by nothing more than chance, carried a wide variety of genetic material from around the world.”

“What were you using them for?” Harry said.

“Study. Trying to advance a theory.”

“Some people think you were playing God,” I said. “Breeding people. Creating Frankensteins. What’s your answer to that?”

Matthias looked at me like I had started clucking like a chicken.

“Breeding? Playing God? Making Frankensteins? My God, man, what are you talking about?”

“Cloning a new race,” I said, stealing from Spider’s addled jargon. “Creating super-humans.”

Matthias closed his eyes and his face fell into his hands. He muttered about ignorance. He stood wearily, his shoulders slumped, and turned to Harry.

“You know people with sickle-cell anemia, Detective. Is that not so?”

“I do.”

“All are of African-American descent, right?”

Harry nodded.

“People of Jewish descent are prone to Tay-Sachs disease. Many Asians have difficulty digesting milk. Some populations have long life spans. Others are prone to schizophrenia. Some resist cardiomyopathy better than others. Every disparate population has a multiplicity of positive and negative genetic dispositions. I’m talking statistics, here. The actual differences are miniscule.”

Harry said, “What’s this have to do with…”

“Hear me out. What would happen if you ate little more than fatty meat, with vegetables almost unheard-of in your diet?”

“My arteries would clog and I’d tip over dead.”

“The Inuit and Laplanders eat vast amounts of meat and blubber and suffer no deleterious effects. Why?”

Harry said, “It’s not something I think about.”

“It’s what I’ve been thinking about all my life,” Matthias said. “I developed a theory, and I’m doing research. That’s all.”

“Further research into what?”

“Into where the finger of God is pushing us.”

“Pardon?” Harry said. “The finger of God?”

“Reverend Scaler preferred that phrase, which was fine. I lean toward a more historical perspective.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

Matthias walked across the room to a spreading areca palm. He touched the fronds, as if inspecting them.

“Near its beginning, the human race split into various tribes and went separate ways, geographically speaking. Over time, genetic positives and negatives arose in these separate populations. When disparate populations combine, it appears that the remediating, or, if you wish, the good genes, eventually triumph over the misfires.” He paused, showed a sad smile. “We are, in many ways, the cure for what ails us.”

“You’re saying that intermingling of these genetic pools results in…”

“Superior resistance to disease, which translates to better health and longer lives. Higher overall intelligence might result, and perhaps even more
benefits. With the world shrinking, these tribes are coming together. Take a genetic union – marriage – between European and African genes; rare in this country until recently. But now?”

I shrugged. “No big deal, especially to younger folks.”

“The same applies on the West Coast, but, from a statistical point of view, more Asian genes are entering the gene-pool stew. A person from Japan or China might marry a person with a black father and a white mother. Or someone from Mexico or Central America. The offspring move to Minneapolis, marry Swedish-Germans. In human genetics, this is climbing toward betterment.”

I thought of a line from the poet Theodore Roethke about a lowly worm making its way up a winding staircase. Had Roethke been analogizing Humankind crawling up the spiraling staircase of DNA?

I said, “But there’s still much more to combine, right?”

“Polynesian genes, genotypes from the Indian subcontinent, Siberia, tribes along the Amazon, genes from peoples in Andean countries…the list goes on and on.”

“Tell me more about the couple and their child,” Harry said.

“I discovered them in Vancouver, a wide-stanced pair, genetically speaking. She’s Jewish and Oriental with significant ties to South American genetics. His lineage is Inuit and Scandinavian, Eastern
Europe and sub-Saharan African just at the parent level. The child is a rainbow of genetic input.”

“You discovered this by cruising for hookers?” Harry asked.

Matthias sighed. “I seek out all manner of people for genetic samples. I swab mouths for DNA. It’s one metric to determine rapidity of genetic mingling. Port-city prostitutes mingle more widely than most.”

“Sailors from everywhere.”

“I saw Anak and Rebecca at a park, with the child. They looked interesting so I swabbed. When testing revealed the breadth of their genetic experience, I paid them to come here. I plan to put them to work in my new genetics lab. It was Reverend Scaler’s suggestion to keep the couple isolated for a few weeks.”

Just in case someone pried into the story before he told it his way,
I figured.

“New lab in Mobile?”

“Part of a huge grant from Reverend Scaler – his generosity has been boundless. He called his sponsorship of my work part of his penance. I’d do the research and he’d explain it to people.”

“That project’s dead now, I take it?”

“Goodness, no. The money is in place. We met quite privately at an attorney’s office for the arrangements some weeks back. Not the usual attorney, I gathered, from all the secrecy.”

Carleton was cut out. Scaler was stepping fully
away from his past. Carleton had felt Scaler slipping away, had high anxiety at losing a major client.

“How did you hook up with Richard Scaler?” I asked.

Matthias looked uncomfortable, cleared his throat. “Eight years back I did prototype research. I suggested if pure African genetics were bred out of existence, it would be a good thing. I was leading to the positives of broader genetic stances and could have said the same about Caucasians, Asians, Australian Aborigines…” Matthias looked disgusted and threw his hands in the air.

“You stirred up a hornet’s nest,” Harry said.

“People concentrated on the math, ignored the bottom line: When races disappear into one all-consuming genetic pool, we’re an improved evolutionary product. Instead, I got an immediate reputation as a racist, sentences from my paper used out of context. Drooling white-supremacist morons began quoting me.”

“Scaler called you to confirm his views on racial superiority?”

“Obviously his intent, to affirm life-long tenets. I said my research was in a final phase, that I’d send synopses in layman’s language. He asked for the scientific research as well.”

“What was his initial response to your research, given that it was the opposite of what he’d expected?”

“His first instinct was falling into rhetorical evasions, rationalizations, denials.”

“Just what I’d expect,” I said.

“But in the end, Detective, Richard was smart enough to realize he was wrong. I think he found great strength in order to face the mirror and declare himself incorrect. Mr Scaler was far smarter than people gave him credit for, by the way. A more enlightened upbringing might have given us a scientist.”

I looked at Harry. He’d suspected Scaler had more depth than the man presented. I’d viewed the Reverend almost as simplistically as Scaler had viewed the world for most of his life.

Matthias said, “My travels and sampling show a world moving rather well toward assimilation, my terms. Richard spoke of the finger of God. Of lost tribes gathering. To each his own.”

“How long will this assimilation take, Doctor?” Harry said.

“At current rates of genetic transfer? Thirty or forty generations. A thousand years or so.”

“Answer me this, Doc,” Harry said. “The child. Is she different than the rest of us?”

Matthias smiled. “The child is a single instance, and statistically insignificant, but I hope to find her discrete genetic strains have canceled certain harmful genes in favor of positive ones. She should be a rather healthy child. That’s about all.”

I thought of all the doctors and nurses amazed by Noelle’s resistance to infection. Then I thought of Mr Mix-up, Ms Best’s poor doomed pooch.

I said, “Noelle’s as healthy as a mongrel dog.”

“Odd analogy,” Matthias said. “But it has merit.”

We arranged to meet with Matthias in the morning when things were less chaotic. Harry and I returned to the car. He put the car in gear and pulled away, shaking his head in disbelief.

“It appears that instead of fighting, your average warring tribes should be…”

I held up my hands, making an O with my left thumb and forefinger, poking through with my right forefinger.

“Make Love, Not War,” I said. “The hippies were right.”

“Imagine what Meltzer thought when he heard of Matthias’s research via the ever-vigilant Patricia Scaler.”

“Race mixing is good? In an eye-blink, everything the white supremacists ever stood for is wrong. It would cost him adoration. He didn’t give a damn about anything but the symbolic kid. So he went after her. Twice.”

Harry thought about my words for a couple of miles.

“It doesn’t fit, Carson. Why not use Douthitt again? He hadn’t been compromised by Bailes. Why didn’t Meltzer keep using Douthitt as his eyes in the hospital?”

I shook my head, perplexed. Harry drove a mile. I saw his hand tighten on the wheel. “Jesus, Carson, what if two camps were trying to grab Noelle?”

My turn to think away a couple of miles. Two
separate entities trying to grab Noelle explained a lot.

“I like it,” I said. “It works.”

“What we do know is that white-power bikers are in the mix, and that leads to Meltzer and Baker. Let’s aim a hard eye that direction.”

Thirty minutes later we were a half-block away from Baker’s house in a 1991 Dodge Caravan with rust holes in the paint, giving it a speckled look. The left front tire was flat. The seats had springs poking through.

The van was courtesy of the metal-recycling firm next door. When we showed ID and told them we needed something looking like an abandoned vehicle for surveillance they were happy to oblige, dragging the Caravan to the watch point with a tow truck. It looked at home on the grubby, barren street.

Harry had offered money for the rental.

“You after that guy in that house next door?” Tony, the manager of the scrap yard, nodded toward Baker’s property. “The muscle-bound asshole?”

Harry nodded, pulling a couple twenties from his wallet. “Yep.”

“We keep security dogs here at night. Or did
until someone shot ’em dead. Started just after that guy moved in a few months back.” Tony pushed Harry’s money away. “Shit, man, you get rid of that bastard I’ll give you cars all day long.”

We hunched down in the seats and waited. Night started to fall, a few stars pressing against the blue, the moon at the far corner of the sky. The air was still and hot and smelled of the slack-tide on the Intercoastal Waterway four hundred feet distant. A barge tow pushed up the broad canal, the throb of its diesels rattling the loose metal on the Caravan. Two windows were out on the van and we swatted mosquitoes from our faces.

After a few minutes Harry nudged me with his elbow, pointed down the street. I peeped above the dash and saw a blue truck roll by, a loaf of bread painted on the side.

“So?”

“It’s the third time that bread truck’s gone by. Think there’s much need for bread this time of night?”

We watched the truck continue down the street, turn into a stand of trees beside a condemned house half enveloped in kudzu.

“Whoops, lights behind,” Harry said, ducking.

I followed suit, dropping toward the floor. A vehicle rumbled beside us and a flashlight lit the interior of the van.

“Anything?” a voice said.

“Hunh-uh. Dead metal.” A low laugh. “Prob’ly
ought to be hauled to the yard over there and ground up.”

“How much longer?” the first voice said.

“Ten minutes, give or take.”

“Let’s book.”

The vehicle rolled away. Harry and I simultaneously let out our breath.

“You recognize the second voice?” I asked Harry.

“Sure enough,” he said. “It’s my old buddy, Sheriff Briscoe.”

We sat up enough to see the taillights of a dark, nondescript sedan of American vintage glide past the house where the bread truck was parked. The brake lights brightened on the car for a few seconds, then it moved on.