The God Gene Read online

  “This is a low price for traveling much distance. The only way I can make that work is if you pay for the food and fuel.”

  Diesel was on the rise again. The Sorcière had a thousand-gallon tank, but the area of search with the best chance of success was six hundred nautical miles away. The Sorcière burned half a gallon per mile at her top speed of nine to ten knots. The fuel bill would run no small sum.

  Sensing his hesitation, Amaury gave him a gentle slap on the shoulder. “It is only money.”

  “And you think I am rich?”

  “Richer than I, I am sure, monsieur.”

  Jeukens shrugged. “‘Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.’”

  “Wise words, monsieur.”

  “They belong to an American named Ben Franklin.”

  He certainly liked his quotes. How many had he memorized?

  “Food and fuel…” Jeukens chewed his upper lip. “I can see you’ve inherited some of your namesake’s piratical genes.”

  If only that were true, Amaury thought.

  Jeukens added: “You need to find a higher purpose.”

  “A higher purpose? What does that mean? Working for God?”

  “God?” The Afrikaner’s eyes almost glowed in the night. “Hardly! I serve mankind. And I am simply saying one needs to live for more than profit and pleasure.”

  Amaury shrugged. “I am a simple man and, if truth be told, rather fond of profit and pleasure.”

  But he understood. Like his namesake, he felt he was destined for greater things. Maybe not a place in the history books, but greater than an animal merchant. But he’d done nothing about it, and time was passing him by—already half a century gone. He’d better get to seeking that higher purpose soon. He doubted it would come looking for him.

  “Perhaps I can guide you to that next level.” Abruptly Jeukens stuck out his hand. “Two thousand a week plus food and fuel.”

  Amaury grasped it and gave a firm shake. “We have a deal then?”

  “We do.” The Afrikaner’s eyes narrowed as he released Amaury’s hand and grabbed the front of his shirt. He jerked him close until they were nose to nose. “But if you try to cheat me, I will gut you like a fish and watch you flop around until you’re dead. Clear?”

  Amaury’s gut knotted. Where had that come from? And he’d said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly.

  “Amaury Laffite cheats no one! I am a man of my word!”

  Jeukens released his shirt and smiled as if he’d simply mentioned a possible change in the weather. “Then we shall get along splendidly. When do we leave?”

  Amaury wondered if he was making a mistake, allying himself with this man. He shook it off.

  “I-I will need tomorrow and Thursday to fuel up and have her seaworthy. We can leave at dawn on Friday.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I will need an advance for the fuel.”

  “I’ll drop it off at your shop tomorrow.”

  Amaury forced a smile. “Excellent, mon ami! We shall hunt down this island and make it our own!”

  He watched Jeukens stroll away. A strange, strange man. A little voice from the back of his brain cried out to stay away from this man. He shut it down.

  Those monkeys … a fortune beckoned from their blue eyes.

  But first … the woman in the red dress was waiting for him …

  NOW

  Wednesday, May 18

  1

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

  “I’m surprised he didn’t choose a place with a doorman,” Laura said as they waited outside Keith’s Upper West Side apartment building.

  She’d spent much of her morning on paperwork in Hauppauge at the coroner’s office while one of her fellow assistant MEs did the post-mortem exams. As she’d trained into Manhattan to meet Rick, the small container of ikhar nestling in her shoulder bag seemed almost alive, awaiting its moment. Today was Emilie’s day …

  She banished the poor woman to the back of her mind as she waited with Rick. Keith lived in an ornate corner building with a Beaux Arts feel—not as cake-decorated as the Ansonia, but in the running. She counted eight stories. Street level was all retail, and the rest apartments. The rounded corner edge with the bay windows on the upper units added to the vintage look.

  “Doorman?” Rick shook his head. “Keith wouldn’t want to deal with a doorman every day. Or tip him at Christmas. Too much hassle. He’s the type who likes to come and go without having to talk to anyone. Not into human interaction.”

  Rick seemed different out here in the world. At her place last night he’d been relaxed and warm, bantering with Marissa. Today his gray eyes had regained that hard, flat look, like smooth, dark stones—the look they’d had when she first met him. Back then she’d thought he looked like a man prepared for the worst and expecting it. Now she knew that he’d already seen the worst.

  He’d told her about what he’d witnessed and what he’d done in Düsseldorf. He’d come back scarred and damaged. But had he told her all of it?

  So she stood with him here in the middle of a Columbus Avenue sidewalk. Tourists would do that: block the pedestrian flow to gape at a sign or an iconic building. Annoyed Manhattanites on their way to work would often purposely bump obstructing gapers. No one bumped Rick. They flowed around him. He had that look.

  She liked the other Rick better.

  “By the way,” he said. “How does it feel?”

  “How does what feel?”

  He smiled and it changed his whole face. “You and me, back on the road together.”

  “Well, it’s not quite the globe-trotting we did last month, but it feels … good.”

  And it did. In fact it felt great being out here with Rick.

  “Yeah. It does.”

  A voice behind them said, “Are you Mister Somers?”

  Laura turned to see a slim young woman with platinum hair in bangs who couldn’t be more than twenty-five. She wore a blue skirt and jacket. Next to her stood a young man, equally blond, equally banged, dressed in a blue pinstriped suit.

  Somers? she thought. Oh, right. Only natural to assume Keith’s brother would use the same surname.

  Rick nodded. “That’s me. And you must be Hari’s assistant.”

  “Casey,” she said, extending her hand. “And this is my brother, Peter.”

  Laura had to ask. “You wouldn’t happen to be twins, would you?”

  Peter smiled. “How’d you guess?”

  “Identical?” Rick said.

  Laura nudged him. Seriously?

  The twins glanced at each other, looking a little uncomfortable.

  Casey said, “Well, no. You see, to be identical we’d have to—”

  “—be the same sex,” Rick said, waving off the explanation. “Just kidding. You both work with Hari?”

  Casey’s blond bangs fluttered as she nodded. “I’m the firm’s IT nerd; Peter’s—”

  “I specialize in corporate tax,” Peter said. “We share an apartment and we were both heading out at the same time, so…”

  “I see,” Rick said. “By the way, how are things in Midwich?”

  They looked confused. Laura felt the same. Midwich?

  “Is that in Connecticut?” Peter said.

  “Not quite. Got something for me?”

  Casey handed him a manila envelope with 7D scrawled on the front in Magic Marker. “The keys are in there. Please drop them back at the office when you’re through. Hari’s card is inside with the address on it. Oh, and I need to warn you about the computers.”

  “What about them?” Rick said.

  “Well, I borrowed the laptop and removed the desktop’s hard drive.”

  How strange.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Hari needed them for her investigation, and I’m sort of the in-house hacker. She wanted me to check the drives for any bank records or financial transactions, and a hard drive is much more portable than lugging a whole desktop downtown.”

&nb
sp; “Find anything?” Rick said.

  The young woman shook her head. “Someone used a shredder on the drives. I’m pretty good at data recovery but couldn’t pull out anything.”

  Rick frowned. “Hillary-ed it?”

  “Yeah. But more thorough. Whoever did this knew what he was doing. Way too overwritten to dig up anything.”

  Laura was confused. “The drives were shredded?”

  “I’ll explain,” Rick said. He nodded to Casey and Peter. “Thanks, guys.”

  “What’s a shredder?” Laura said as he unlocked the building’s front door.

  “Software. When you delete something on your computer, it’s not really gone.”

  “Well, right. It’s in the trash bin. It’s not gone until you empty the trash.”

  “Well, even then it’s not really gone. All you’ve done is remove the codes that allow your computer to find that data. The data remains on the drive until it’s overwritten. And even after it’s overwritten it’s often still recoverable. A shredder program overwrites multiple times with random data. DoD recommends seven overwrites.”

  “DoD?”

  “Department of Defense. Most people say four overwrites are enough.”

  Laura was going to ask him how he knew what the DoD recommended, then realized she’d be surprised if he didn’t.

  Rick led her through the foyer to where the elevator stood open. They entered and he jabbed the 7 button.

  “Why would your brother do that?”

  “Normal reasons are because you’re either selling the computer or giving it away. If you’ve been doing, say, your banking online, you don’t want someone else seeing all your transactions.”

  “Likewise,” she said, “if you were planning on disappearing, you’d want to shred all evidence of where you might be headed.”

  Rick looked at her as the doors opened on the seventh floor. “Thinking he ran off?”

  “Shredding his drives seems like premeditation, don’t you think?”

  “Not necessarily. If he was being pressured about something he knew, makes sense to want to erase all trace of it.”

  Laura hadn’t looked at it that way.

  “Or,” he added, “maybe whoever grabbed him snuck in and shredded the drives.”

  “Maybe that’s the way we should approach this,” she said. “I’ll spin everything we see toward running away and you spin it toward abduction, and we’ll see who makes the best case.”

  “Deal.” He unlocked the door to 7D.

  Early afternoon sunlight glaring through the southern windows brightened the room. She’d anticipated the musty-dusty odor—inevitable after six weeks with no open windows or air-conditioning—but she was taken aback by the blaze of colors on the walls.

  “Wow,” Rick said, closing the door behind them. “Didn’t know he was so into photography.”

  “In his book he’s credited on a good number of the photos.”

  The photos were all colors and varying sizes. He’d used glossy, heavy-duty photo paper but hadn’t bothered with frames. It looked like he’d simply printed them out and either tacked or stapled them to the walls. And not haphazardly. Despite the different sizes, he’d fitted each snugly against its neighbors. Some appeared to have been trimmed to fit, but the effect was a huge, room-size mosaic that spread from wall to wall to wall. Virtually nothing of the original surface remained visible.

  “Oh, man,” Rick said, turning in a slow circle. “Must have taken a lot of work—a huge amount of work.”

  They did a quick tour and found every room, even the small but functional kitchen, bedizened with photos of every imaginable variety of plant and creature—mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects. She recognized some from The Ties That Bind. Only the bathroom had bare walls.

  “A photo-free zone,” Rick said.

  “Probably because the moisture from showering would ruin them.”

  “All these photos,” Rick said, shaking his head as they returned to the front room, “and not a single human being in any of them.”

  Laura realized with a start that he was right.

  “But … but there’s got to be one picture of his family here—his parents at least. Doesn’t there?”

  “You find one, give a holler,” he said. “Meantime, keep an eye peeled for any photo of a blue-eyed monkey.”

  “You think that’s key?”

  “Don’t know. Paulette thinks so. We might as well know what it looks like.”

  They divided up the rooms: Rick took on the major task of combing the large front room while Laura started on the bedroom. She figured her best chance of finding a photo of something supposedly as near and dear to Keith’s heart as that monkey would be where he slept.

  The bed was made, the closets and bureau drawers full of clothes. He didn’t appear to have taken anything with him. She gave each photo a brief glance and then moved to the next. Many were labeled with “MZ” or “TZ” or “EAR.”

  Nothing. Maybe the office …

  As she was leaving the bedroom she glanced up at the high ceiling and froze. Keith had arranged dozens, maybe a hundred or more, photos up there in a giant pinwheel mosaic. Or maybe whirlpool was more like it. Did he lie in bed and stare up at it?

  She spent a while checking out each photo, but no blue-eyed monkey.

  She moved on to the spacious office in the bay-windowed corner. Lots of natural light here, with a great view of Columbus Avenue. Neat and tidy, the office boasted a large oak desk against the wall, a Dell computer on the floor next to it with its housing removed, exposing its guts. An oversize Canon printer sat on its own table on the other side of the desk. As for the photos, same story here, although she did find a cluster of blank spaces on the wall above the desk. She could tell from the tack holes in the wallpaper that something—a number of somethings, from the look of it—had been pinned there. With all the walls obsessively covered, the effect of empty space was jarring. Why had he chosen to remove these particular photos?

  She opened the wide center drawer over the kneehole and spied a U.S. passport. She flipped through it. The country stamps inside—Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Madagascar—confirmed what all the photos suggested: Keith had spent an awful lot of time in East Africa.

  She looked at his ID picture: brown eyes, full lips, a bored expression, thick, bushy brown hair.

  Rick stepped into the room, saying, “I get ‘MZ’ and ‘TZ,’ but what’s this ‘EAR’ he keeps writing on photos?”

  “He discussed it in his book: the East African Rift. It’s a huge valley that runs from Kenya down to Mozambique. Scads of early hominid bones have been found there. Some people call it the cradle of humanity.”

  “Guess I need to read his book.”

  Laura pointed to the empty spot on the wall. “Something’s missing.”

  Rick leaned closer. “Yeah. First blank spot I’ve seen. No sign of anything behind the desk?”

  “Already checked. Not on the desk either, although I did find this.”

  She showed him Keith’s passport.

  “That’s pretty much the way I remember him,” Rick said, glancing at the photo. He returned his attention to the big blank spot. “What do you think he posted there?”

  “I’m going to bet on the monkey. Because I’m going to bet you didn’t find a single photo of it.”

  “You’d win.”

  “And so now I’m becoming convinced your mother is right.”

  “That the monkey’s involved?”

  Laura nodded. “From what she told you, it was his constant companion—even brought it to her house. He had it cremated and discarded the ashes off the shore of his family home. That screams attachment. Add that to his taxonomy work—”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “She told you he was trying to find its place in evolution and maybe get it named after him, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s called taxonomy. He was looking to classify it. That involves compa
ring characteristics with others of its type. So if he was doing that, wouldn’t he have photos of it all over the place?”

  Rick looked around. “Sure as hell would. Or at least on his computer.”

  “Which he shredded.” This wasn’t piecing together right. “It’s almost as if he was trying to wipe out any trace of the monkey’s existence.”

  “Makes no sense. Paulette said he mentioned getting the species named after him. Why erase your chance for academic immortality?”

  “I can’t see it either.” An idea was taking shape. “Unless…”

  Rick beat her to it. “Unless he was being coerced. Paulette quoted him as saying, ‘I’m being backed into something I would have considered inconceivable just weeks ago.’”

  “Could that ‘something’ be liquidating his assets and depositing them around the globe?”

  Rick smiled. “Aren’t you supposed to be countering that theory?”

  “Oops.”

  She stared at the open case of Keith’s desktop computer. If only his hard drive were readable. She shifted her attention to the big Canon printer. She checked the output tray but, as expected, found it empty.

  “Heavy-duty photo printer,” Rick said. “Looks like a professional model.”

  Right. That would account for the high quality of the prints. And then Laura remembered something …

  “We had this coroner’s case where a murder victim’s computer was stolen, but the forensics folks were able to get evidence off the printer in his office.”

  Rick snapped his fingers. “Right. High-end printers have their own hard drive. And I saw a toolbox of sorts in the front closet.”

  Handing her the passport, he took off, leaving Laura alone in the office. She seated herself in the desk’s swivel chair and started going through the drawers. Rick returned holding a couple of screwdrivers.

  “Find anything?” he said.

  “Lots of pens and paper clips. Flashlight … scissors … calculator.”

  “In other words, no help.”

  “Right.”

  She continued pawing through the drawers while he unplugged the Canon and tackled the access panel with a Phillips-head. She finished her fruitless search and moved to the bookcase. There she found half a dozen copies of his own book and a slew of textbooks, mostly old and worn.