Becraft said, “Professor Sterling, is there anything in here that could be dangerous? Anything potentially explosive? Any chemicals we should be aware of?”
“No, nothing beyond the usual.”
“Usual?”
“Bottles of reagents, maybe some syringes, things like that.”
He nodded. “Okay, then go ahead. Open the door.”
Jake slid his ID through the reader, and the door clicked open. Becraft flipped the switch, illuminating the rectangular space, twenty feet wide and twice that deep. The room was orderly and deathly still. There was a laptop on the desk in the corner, the screen blank. The opposite wall was lined with three lab benches, the shelves packed with pipettes, flasks of reagents, and sample cuvettes. And in the center of it all, the three huge mandalas of the gardens of decay. Jake always thought they looked like a giant painting by Klee, a spellbinding tapestry of complex mixtures of greens and yellows tucked between the narrow passageways down which the Crawlers ran.
“That’s what you told me about?” Becraft asked. “The gardens of…”
“Decay. That’s them. Each square is a different kind of fungus. Genetically engineered to cause the decay of one kind of trash or another.”
“Incredible,” Becraft said. But then Jake saw his gaze change. “Professor Sterling, speed is important in a case like this. If there’s something to be found, we want it now instead of later. Understand?”
“Sure. Of course.”
“What I want you to do is this: Walk slowly through the lab and carefully examine every little thing. Is there anything out of the ordinary? Anything odd? I don’t care how small a detail it is. If it strikes you as wrong in any way, speak up.” He handed Jake a pair of powdered gloves. “But don’t touch anything without asking me first.”
Jake pulled the gloves on and circled the perimeter of the lab while Becraft went to work. Jake watched Becraft quizzically as he turned over the trash can and laid the contents out on a small white sheet he had brought with him in a translucent bag. “What are you looking for?”
“Draft of a suicide note. A paper cup with a good print. You never know. When I was with the Rochester PD, I once found the credit card receipt from the purchase of a murder weapon in a trash can not ten feet from the victim. The husband had dropped it there.”
Jake returned to his searching. The door to a metal cabinet was slightly ajar. He glanced inside: a half-empty bottle of whiskey sat on the shelf. Next to it were two tumblers, a trace of brown in the bottom of each. Liam marked every important event, good or bad, with a shot of whiskey.
A memory bubbled up from a few years back. Jake had returned from a morning run to find Liam sitting in the hallway of his apartment complex, cross-legged on the floor outside his door, a paper bag at his side. “Is that the human snail?” Liam had said.
“Snail?” Jake smiled. “You’re just jealous.”
Liam scanned Jake up and down, taking in his running shorts and sweatshirt, the sweat dripping. “Of you?”
“Of my knees.”
“That is, in fact, true,” Liam said. His knees had forced him to give up running almost two decades ago. “Which route this morning?”
“Cayuga trail. Up by the lake, then along Fall Creek to Route Thirteen.”
“Time?”
“Today? Hour forty-five.”
“When I was your age, I could have shaved thirty minutes off that.”
“When you were my age, the gorge was buried under an ice sheet.”
“You are funny. A human tortoise, but funny.”
Jake offered a hand. Liam took it, pulling himself up from the floor, a clinking sound coming from the paper bag in his other hand. He stood, all five and a half feet of him, head high. Jake was nearly a foot taller. It was an odd feeling, to be physically so much larger than this man Jake viewed as a giant.
Once inside, Liam pulled a bottle of Cooley whiskey and two tumblers out of the bag. He poured two fingers into each tumbler.
Jake said, “To what do I owe the visit?” Though he knew.
“Thought you might want a drink. Given all that’s happening today.”
“All” being Gulf War II.
Jake had tried to avoid the TV, the images of missile assaults on Baghdad, banners in blue and white along the bottom, but Liam flipped it on. “Shock and awe,” Liam said. “Wars have taglines now.” Jake barely heard him. The visuals were enough to set the triggers snapping inside him, the trip wires of an ex-soldier. The itchy feeling, dread and adrenaline. The sense that he should be there, a part of it, good or bad. The ground incursion had started up a few hours before, a massive wall of steel and ordnance grinding forward out of Kuwait. It was going even easier than the first round, thirteen years before. No columns of Iraqi soldiers to plow under. They had learned. They stayed out of the way of the grinding monstrous machine. The real fight would come later, though no one knew that then.
Liam took a drink. “May it be short, and then may it be over.”
JAKE CLOSED THE CABINET DOOR, LETTING THE MEMORY GO. He looked around the lab, trying to focus on his task. Anything out of the ordinary.
A lab notebook lay on the bench, facedown. He glanced at Becraft.
“Can I?” Jake asked. Becraft nodded.
Jake picked up the notebook by the edges, turned it over. He touched a finger to the mottled red cover. Liam had written his name on it, along with the start date, March 23. No ending date. Most everyone used computers for lab notebooks these days, but Liam stuck to paper and pen.
Jake opened it and scanned the entries. Most of it was standard stuff—descriptions of experiments, names of data files, and lists of protocols. But there were other items, too:
Mountain chickadees can lose 10% of their bodyweight overnight in winter and face certain death if they don’t get food every 24 hrs.
Liam’s notebooks were famous among his colleagues and students. Everyone liked to sneak a peek at them. He kept everything in them, seeing no clear separation between a genetic sequence and an aphorism.
Jake flipped through the pages, coming across a series of comical drawings. A bumblebee wearing glasses and smoking a cigar. A spider blowing bubbles. Liam had rendered them in exquisite detail and with considerable skill. Jake flipped forward, the dates in the notebook approaching the present. He stopped on October 25, yesterday. The last entry was a series of numbers, column after column, rendered in Liam’s careful handwriting.
“Anything?” Becraft asked.
“Not so far.”
“Can you take a look at this?”
The investigator had Liam’s Internet history up on his laptop.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/