Kajika said. He led them out the back door from the kitchen and along a fitted-stone pathway toward the weather-beaten aluminum outbuilding. "Two doctorates in Molecular and Cellular Physiology and Human Genetics from Stanford. After that I spent a couple years working as a genetic counselor for the Center for Perinatal Studies at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle to save up some money. I lucked into a couple fat research grants, which I used to buy my equipment, then turned around and used the equipment as collateral against an even fatter business loan."
He paused at the locked door to fish out his keys.
Solid concrete walls showed through the rusted seams of the corrugated aluminum sheets.
Kajika opened the door and guided them into a small tiled room. Machinery whirred all around them and there was the hum of forced air.
"You're a man of many secrets," Wolfe said.
Kajika toggled a series of switches and the overhead lights snapped on, revealing that the entire back half of the building was shielded from them by a thick wall of Plexiglas. Beyond was a laboratory reminiscent of the one at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, though on a much more intimate scale. Everything shone of stainless steel from the workstations to the tables and storage racks to the hoods on the ceiling, which drew the air from the room.
"You made that snake here?" Carver asked.
"I call it a Quetzalcoatl, which means plumed serpent, after the Aztec snake-god of intelligence."
"Is that what your company did?"
"Kind of." Kajika shrugged. "Though nothing quite so exotic. This is just for fun now."
"Why did you go out of business?"
"We didn't fold. I sold the place. Made a killing. Besides, the time was right. Not only did I have personal issues that demanded my attention here, I think I reached the burnout point as well. Man, the money was great and everything, but I was spending all my time on the administrative and financial portions of the job and not enough time working under the hood. That's the whole reason I went into genetics in the first place. I wanted to stare God in the eye, open Pandora's box and share all her dirty little secrets. Now we have all these regulations and legislations. You can't engineer a train without protests from PETA and Greenpeace. I mean, we developed a variant of the Chinook salmon that matured faster and averaged nearly fifty pounds at two years, which effectively cut the impact of commercial fishing on the wild population by half. We even--"
"Salmon?" Carver blurted. His heart felt like it had stopped beating. "What was your company's name?"
"HydroGen. I thought it was pretty clever. Hydro... water. Gen...genetics. Hydrogen. Get it?"
Carver had to brace himself against the wall to slow the spinning of the room.
"Are you all right?" Kajika asked.
Carver looked at Wolfe, whose face registered the same expression of surprise.
"You knew Tobin Schwartz," he finally said.
"Knew?"
"What do you know about him?"
"Tobin and I go back to grad school. Did something happen to him?"
The link between the two cases had been intangible before, based on supposition and intuition, but now there was no denying it. Could Schwartz have killed the victims they were only now digging out of the sand so many years ago? It wasn't like a serial killer to change his modus operandi. The girls in Colorado and Wyoming had been butchered with complete lack of regard for their physical vessels, while the killer down here had gone to insane lengths to preserve them in precise, ritualistic fashion. His gut said the killers couldn't be the same person. Or could they? Schwartz had been schizophrenic. Was it so unreasonable to think that his damaged psyche could have split into two distinct personalities capable of mass murder? That theory just didn't ring true. One method was an expression of passion, rage, the other the almost clinical approach of an organized mind. Somehow Kajika tied what he believed to be
He paused at the locked door to fish out his keys.
Solid concrete walls showed through the rusted seams of the corrugated aluminum sheets.
Kajika opened the door and guided them into a small tiled room. Machinery whirred all around them and there was the hum of forced air.
"You're a man of many secrets," Wolfe said.
Kajika toggled a series of switches and the overhead lights snapped on, revealing that the entire back half of the building was shielded from them by a thick wall of Plexiglas. Beyond was a laboratory reminiscent of the one at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, though on a much more intimate scale. Everything shone of stainless steel from the workstations to the tables and storage racks to the hoods on the ceiling, which drew the air from the room.
"You made that snake here?" Carver asked.
"I call it a Quetzalcoatl, which means plumed serpent, after the Aztec snake-god of intelligence."
"Is that what your company did?"
"Kind of." Kajika shrugged. "Though nothing quite so exotic. This is just for fun now."
"Why did you go out of business?"
"We didn't fold. I sold the place. Made a killing. Besides, the time was right. Not only did I have personal issues that demanded my attention here, I think I reached the burnout point as well. Man, the money was great and everything, but I was spending all my time on the administrative and financial portions of the job and not enough time working under the hood. That's the whole reason I went into genetics in the first place. I wanted to stare God in the eye, open Pandora's box and share all her dirty little secrets. Now we have all these regulations and legislations. You can't engineer a train without protests from PETA and Greenpeace. I mean, we developed a variant of the Chinook salmon that matured faster and averaged nearly fifty pounds at two years, which effectively cut the impact of commercial fishing on the wild population by half. We even--"
"Salmon?" Carver blurted. His heart felt like it had stopped beating. "What was your company's name?"
"HydroGen. I thought it was pretty clever. Hydro... water. Gen...genetics. Hydrogen. Get it?"
Carver had to brace himself against the wall to slow the spinning of the room.
"Are you all right?" Kajika asked.
Carver looked at Wolfe, whose face registered the same expression of surprise.
"You knew Tobin Schwartz," he finally said.
"Knew?"
"What do you know about him?"
"Tobin and I go back to grad school. Did something happen to him?"
The link between the two cases had been intangible before, based on supposition and intuition, but now there was no denying it. Could Schwartz have killed the victims they were only now digging out of the sand so many years ago? It wasn't like a serial killer to change his modus operandi. The girls in Colorado and Wyoming had been butchered with complete lack of regard for their physical vessels, while the killer down here had gone to insane lengths to preserve them in precise, ritualistic fashion. His gut said the killers couldn't be the same person. Or could they? Schwartz had been schizophrenic. Was it so unreasonable to think that his damaged psyche could have split into two distinct personalities capable of mass murder? That theory just didn't ring true. One method was an expression of passion, rage, the other the almost clinical approach of an organized mind. Somehow Kajika tied what he believed to be
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