The God Gene: A Novel Page 14

  “That’s right. And this is Doctor Laura Fanning.”

  She gave Laura’s hand a quick shake, saying, “DVM?”

  “No. MD. Call me Laura. You’re a vet?”

  She nodded. “Call me Mito.” She turned to Rick. “You don’t look at all like your brother.”

  “I take after my father,” he said, as if that should mean something.

  Mito led them to the elevator and pressed the down button.

  “As I said on the phone, I don’t know what I can tell you about Doctor Somers. I only met him maybe half a dozen times, and then only briefly. He was hard to get to know. Kind of shy, y’know?”

  “We know,” Rick said. “But we’re now more interested in his monkey.”

  “Well, you really can’t call it a mon—”

  “Sorry … primate.”

  “Did he ever classify it?” Mito said as the elevator stopped. “When he first arrived with Mozi he wasn’t sure if she was a simian or prosimian. I mean, she had features of both.”

  “We don’t know,” Laura told her. “His records … aren’t available to us.”

  Mito led them down a tiled, fluorescent-lit hallway. “I’d sure like to know. I combed through my entire NHP database while Mozi was here and—”

  “NHP?”

  “Non-human primates. We never see exotics in our primatarium.”

  “So Mozi was … refreshing?”

  Mito nodded. “We’ve got some squirrel monkeys and spider monkeys, but almost ninety percent of our primates are macaques. So yeah, Mozi was refreshing. And so cuuuute. Those big blue eye didn’t miss a trick. I was sure I could nail her species, but she didn’t fit anywhere. Something would always be off.”

  “You keep the animals in the basement?” Rick said as they walked along.

  “Uh-huh. Best place. No windows. If one gets loose, there’s no way to get out except the elevator and stairs, which are always closed off.”

  She pushed open an unmarked door and ushered them into a small spare room with an oblong table and a half dozen chairs. A sink, a microwave, a Keurig, and a small fridge completed the furnishings.

  “My office is too small to seat three, so we’ll use the break room.” She indicated the chairs. “Have a seat. I can offer water, coffee…”

  Laura and Rick both declined.

  “I’ve got to say I’m confused,” Mito said. “I mean, you said you’re more interested in Mozi than your brother.”

  Rick grimaced. “I guess I didn’t phrase that right. We’re looking for Keith but have almost nothing to go on. But we think the monk—Mozi might be somehow connected to his disappearance.”

  She looked surprised. “How can that be? I mean, you do know she’s dead, right?”

  “We do,” Laura said. “But we don’t know why or how. Are you aware that he had it cremated?”

  “Well, yeah, seeing as I did it for him.”

  Laura sensed Rick stiffen. “You cremated Mozi? You have a crematorium here?”

  “Of course. We go through a lot of animals in our research.”

  Laura felt a tingle of excitement. “So you saw her corpse. You wouldn’t happen to know how she died, would you?”

  “Doctor Somers wouldn’t give me any details, but I could tell from the way her head dangled that her neck was broken.”

  Now they were getting somewhere. Or were they?

  “Any idea how that happened?”

  “Doctor Somers was too upset to talk about it.”

  “You think he might have been responsible?”

  Mito shrugged. “I can’t possibly say, but I seriously doubt it. He loved that little thing. And if he somehow was responsible, he sure regretted it. He was on the verge of tears the whole time.”

  Rick was staring at her. “Keith … on the verge of tears…”

  “No question. I tried to talk him out of the cremation, you know. I mean, Mozi being a unique species and all that, but he wasn’t buying. He kept saying, ‘I must. I must.’” She shook her head. “Such a shame. I really would have liked a look at her brain.”

  Laura hadn’t expected that. “Her brain? Why?”

  “Smart as could be. In fact…” She popped from her chair and headed for the break room door. “Looks like we’re gonna wind up in my office anyway. It’s the only place I can show you.”

  “Show us what?” Rick said as he grabbed the door and held it for Laura.

  “Mozi in action.”

  They made a right turn into another hallway where she led them to a door labeled M. Toda, DVM.

  She wasn’t kidding about the size, Laura thought as they followed Mito into her cramped office: a littered desk against a wall, teetering bookshelves, and one extra chair, its seat piled with journals.

  “Excuse the mess,” Mito said. “You can see why I brought you to the break room.”

  She seated herself before the widescreen monitor that dominated her desktop, brought it to life, and began typing.

  “I call this Mozi’s Greatest Hits,” she said.

  As Laura squeezed behind Mito’s chair, the screen lit with a grainy black-and-white view of a small, spare, dimly lit room with barred cages arranged on a shelf that ran along the three visible walls—one cage per wall. She froze the frame and rotated her chair to face them.

  “Let me set it up for you. Down the hall we have a quarantine room where we separate sick animals from the general population. We test them and treat them if we can, and either return them to their fellows if they get better or sacrifice them if they don’t.”

  “Sacrifice…” Rick said, his expression grim.

  “A common euphemism. Sounds better than ‘kill.’”

  Rick nodded. “Akin to ‘terminate’ or ‘sanction.’”

  “I guess. You watch a lot of spy movies?”

  A wry smile. “Yeah, sorta.”

  Laura said, “Does it ever bother you? The animals, I mean?”

  Laura couldn’t help remembering the dog she’d operated on in med school and finally had to sacrifice. Even though it was unconscious under heavy anesthesia, it damn near ripped her heart out when she’d tied off its main coronary artery.

  Mito shrugged. “It did at first. But my job is to see that they stay healthy and are treated humanely. You can’t romanticize them, or anthropomorphize them.”

  “Hard not to when we share common ancestors.”

  “Look, they play an indispensable part in saving hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of human lives.”

  Laura raised a hand: peace. “Don’t misunderstand. I’m not challenging the value of your work. Just having an emotional reaction.”

  “No problem. I understand perfectly. But back to Mozi. Doctor Somers somehow got her out of Africa and dropped her here for quarantine.”

  “Is that standard procedure?” Rick said.

  “We have an arrangement with NYU. There are various ways to bring an animal in under the radar. I don’t know what route Doctor Somers took, but he did the responsible thing by quarantining her.”

  “How long?”

  “A week. We did blood tests, checked her stools for parasites, the usual. All negative. But on the second day of her stay, a tech came in and found that a granola bar she’d left on the counter had been opened. The wrapper had been chewed and torn, and the bar partially eaten. The door had been locked as always and Mozi was the only occupant. Her cage, however, was latched just as it should be.”

  “A locked-door mystery,” Rick said. “I can already see where this is going.”

  “You have no idea.” Mito turned and clicked on the screen. “Schelling keeps the whole building under surveillance, especially the vivarium areas. Animal rights activists are a constant threat. So I accessed the CCTV recording of the quarantine room. First check out this tech fixing Mozi a meal.”

  A young bearded man in a white coat slices fruit on a counter to the right. He scoops the slices into a tray and slips it through a slot into one of the cages on the left. Then he rinse
s the knife and puts it in the drawer below the counter.

  “That’s Mozi’s cage on the left. Now we cut to hours later.”

  The image shimmers and it’s the same scene, except a bar of some sort lies on the counter. A few seconds of no motion, then a tiny black hand snakes through the bars of the cage door and fiddles with the latch. Seconds later the door swings open and a tiny monkeylike figure with a long bushy tail hops to the floor.

  Laura said, “I assume that’s not so unusual for a primate like that. Their hands are very human.”

  “It’s rare. But we’re not through here. In fact we’ve only just begun. Watch.”

  Mozi scampers across the floor and lithely hops up on the opposite counter where she grabs what looks like a candy bar and begins biting the wrapper. She tears it open and takes a nibble off the bar, puts it down, then begins exploring the room. After returning to the bar for a few more bites, she scampers back to her cage.

  Mozi hops back into her cage and closes the door after her. Then a little hand appears through the bars and resets the latch.

  “See that?” Mito said, her voice rising with enthusiasm as she froze the recording. “A certain percentage of primates who manage to get loose will return to their cages, others won’t. No big deal. But I’ve never seen or heard of one spontaneously closing and relatching the door from inside.”

  “Almost as if she was hiding her trail,” Laura said.

  “Exactly, although I find it hard to credit her with that level of cognition. My best guess is that she was simply returning her environment to its previous state. But she seemed so at ease with working the latch that I decided to try an experiment. Before we locked up the room for the night, I wired the latch shut and left another granola bar on the opposite counter. This is what happened…”

  The same room with no sense that time has passed. Again, a little black hand slips through the bars; it fiddles much longer with the latch this time but eventually the door swings open and Mozi emerges. Jump cut to Mozi returning to the cage, relatching the door and fiddling with the wire.

  “I cut out the middle with her eating and wandering around,” Mito said, freezing the screen and rotating again. “But did you see what she did?”

  Rick said, “It looked like she was trying to rewrap the wire around the latch?”

  “Exactly. She did a poor job, but the point is she tried. I was stoked now. So I added a combination lock to the cage—nothing fancy, just a simple three-number model like you’d use on a school locker. I made sure we opened it and relocked it half a dozen times each day so she could see how it worked.

  “Was she watching?” Laura said.

  “Ohhh, yeah. She’d press her little face against the bars and watch with those big blue eyes, studying every move.”

  “I’m guessing she learned to open it.”

  “Not right away. That night the video showed two little hands poking through the bars working furiously at the dial but to no avail. But the second night…” She hit a few keys and the video began to race. “I’m fast forwarding through the first night and taking you to the second.”

  Two little black hands grip the combo lock and twist the dial this way and that until the latch pops open. The lock is pulled loose and drops to the floor.

  “Incredible,” Rick said softly. “She memorized the numbers.”

  “I don’t think she has any concept of numbers. Probably more like pattern recognition. But she remembered the patterns in the proper sequence, and that’s saying plenty about her intelligence. But wait, as the commercials say, there’s more.”

  Mozi tears open the granola bar, takes a nibble, then leans over and pulls out the drawer beneath the counter.

  “Now watch this,” Mito said. “Here’s where it becomes even more interesting.”

  Mozi extracts the same knife the tech used and, after a little trial and error, slices a couple of pieces off the granola bar. She returns the knife to the drawer, eats the pieces, then hops back to her cage.

  “She learned how to use a knife?” Laura said.

  Mito nodded. “Just by watching the tech every day.”

  “That’s a little scary.”

  “Depends on how you look at it. I told Doctor Somers about it when he came to visit her and he was fascinated. He said he’d kept a padlock on her cage from the start so her getting out had never been an issue.”

  “So a padlock is the answer?” Laura said.

  Mito nodded. “But that didn’t stop her from trying to stick a piece of straw in the keyhole. Show me a chimp or gorilla doing what she did and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. But this is a tiny prosimian. She weighed in at less than two pounds. Relatively speaking, she had such a tiny brain. That’s why I wish I could have had a look at it.”

  “What do you think you’d find?”

  Mito shrugged. “Who knows? At the very least I could have compared it to other simians or prosimians of equal size. You know, encephalization quotient and such, see if certain areas of Mozi’s brain were more developed than in comparable primates.”

  “Well, maybe another Mozi will pop up.”

  “I hope so. And I hope it’s Doctor Somers who brings her in.”

  “Amen to that,” Laura said. She was finding herself less interested in Mozi’s brain and more interested in the effort Dr. Toda had put into her video. “Did he see Mozi’s Greatest Hits?”

  “Well, no. Not in this form. I showed him some raw footage on his visits.”

  “It must have taken you a while to assemble everything.”

  “Yeah, kind of.” Was that a blush creeping into Mito’s cheeks? “After editing it down I copied it to a disk for him and was going to send it to him, but then he showed up with her dead. He seemed so upset. I was heartbroken too. I mean, I’d only spent a week with her but I got to know her and we kind of bonded. Anyway, I … I didn’t think it was the right time to give him the disk, and then he disappeared.”

  “Wait,” Rick said. “You’ve mentioned how he’d visit Mozi?”

  “Yes. She was really attached to him, and vice versa. He doted on her, bringing her treats and playing with her. Whenever he’d leave she’d sulk in the corner of her cage for hours.” She looked from Rick, to Laura, and back. “Nobody has any idea where he is?”

  “We have people following some leads,” he said, “but nothing yet.”

  She bit her upper lip. “You think there might have been, you know, foul play?”

  “We hope not.” Rick pulled Hari’s yellow pad from his pocket. “Say, do you remember the day you cremated Mozi?”

  “Not off the top of my head, but I keep a log.” She banged at her keyboard and a grid appeared. After a few seconds of studying it she said, “March thirtieth. Why?”

  He made a note. “Making a timeline.”

  “Look, if there’s any way I can help,” Mito said, “any way at all, just let me know.”

  Sensing her sincere concern, Laura gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder. “We will. And thank you for your time. Mozi’s Greatest Hits was fascinating.”

  Mito guided them back to the elevator. As soon as the doors pincered closed, Laura said, “I think your brother has a secret admirer.”

  Rick’s eyebrows lifted as he flipped through the sticky pad. “Mito? Yeah, maybe,” he said with a distracted tone.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Well, today’s takeaway is that at least now we know Mozi’s really dead.”

  That surprised Laura. “You had your doubts?”

  He shrugged. “Never take anything at face value. I confess it crossed my mind that Keith may have wanted everyone—including whoever might have been coercing him—to believe she was dead. His making such a public show of disposing of her ashes had me a little suspicious.”

  “But now…?”

  The doors opened and they stepped into the ground-floor lobby.

  “Now we have an eyewitness account—the word of someone who knew Mozi from before, and who did the
actual cremation. So she’s truly gone, probably from a broken neck.”

  The broken neck had been bothering Laura since Mito had mentioned it. It didn’t sit right, but she couldn’t say why.

  “Okay. We learned that Mozi was a very clever little primate and that she’s dead.”

  “‘Not only merely dead, she’s really most sincerely dead.’”

  Was the Munchkin coroner reference for her benefit? She let it pass. “What’s our next move?”

  Rick shook his head, his expression baffled. “I’m tapped out of ideas. Guess we’ll have to wait until Hari finds the end of the money trail.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I go find the money. If Keith’s got it and wants to stay off the grid, fine. That’s the way it’ll be.”

  “And if he’s…?”

  “Dead? I’m counting on him being alive.”

  “But if he’s not?”

  “I’ll bring back what’s left of him, then go after whoever killed him.”

  “And then?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On a lot of things. I’m playing this by ear, one step at a time. Don’t want to get too far ahead of myself or get locked into anything. Let’s just say all options are open.” He looked at his watch. “Gotta run.”

  “Stahlman?”

  “Yeah. Wants to hire some new security guys. Needs me to background them.”

  Laura had been hoping to grab some lunch with him again.

  “Something wrong with his old security guys?”

  “Nah. Since his cure he’s putting new irons in the fire one after another. He—”

  His phone rang. As he listened, his usually controlled expression ran through a variety of emotions. The only real words he uttered were, “South Africa? No kidding.” Then, “Okay. We’ll be there. You call Paulette.”

  He hung up and turned to Laura.

  “Hari’s gal Casey has tracked down the transfer from the Cayman account. It went to a bank in Johannesburg.”

  “South Africa?” Laura said, realizing Rick had just said the exact same thing.

  He nodded. “She wants us all to meet in her office tomorrow. Casey should have lots more info by then.”