“About what?”
“About pulling this out of our hands. The names of the
victims-Ernestina Hernandez and Rebecca Klienstadare still in the files,
but only the names. Plus a memorandum indicating that federal
authorities requested the case be remanded to their jurisdiction for
reasons of national security.” This morning, when I pushed Folbeck
about letting you and me assist the feds, he came down hard.
Said, Holy fuckin’ Christ, Julio, stay out of it. That’s an order.”
His very words.”
Folbeck was chief of detectives, a devout Mormon who could hold his own
with the most foulmouthed men in the department but who never took the
Lord’s name in vain.
That was where he drew the line. In spite of his vivid and frequent use
of four-letter words, Nicholas Folbeck was capable of angrily lecturing
any detective heard to mutter a blasphemy. In fact, he’d once told
Reese, “Hagerstrom, please don’t say goddamn’ or holy Christ’ or
anything like that in my presence ever again. I purely hate that shit,
and I won’t fuckin’ tolerate it.” If Nick Folbeck’s warning to Julio
had included blasphemy as well as mere trash talk, the pressure on the
department to stay out of this case had come from higher authorities
than Anson Sharp.
Reese said, “What about the file on the body-snatching case, Eric
Leben’s corpse?”
“Same thing,” Julio said. “Removed from our jurisdiction.”
Business talk had taken Reese’s mind off last night’s bloody dreams of
Janet, and his appetite had returned a little. He got another doughnut
from the breadbox. He offered one to Julio, but Julio declined. Reese
said, “What else have you been up to?”
“For one thing… I went to the library when it opened and read
everything I could find on Dr. Eric Leben.”
“Rich, a scientific genius, a business genius, ruthless, cold, too
stupid to know he had a great wife-we already know about him.”
“He was also obsessed,” Julio said.
“I guess geniuses usually are, with one thing or another.”
“What obsessed him was immortality.”
Reese frowned. “Say what?”
“As a graduate student, and in the years immediately following his
acquisition of a doctorate, when he was one of the brightest young
geneticists doing recombinant bNA research anywhere in the world, he
wrote articles for a lot ofjournals and published research papers
dealing with various aspects of the extension of the human life span.
A flood of articles, the man is driven.”
“Was driven. Remember that garbage truck,” Reese said.
“Even the driest, most technical of those pieces have a. . . well, afire
in them, a passion that grips you,” Julio said. He pulled a sheet of
paper from one of his inside jacket pockets, unfolded it.
“This is a line from an article that appeared in a popular science
magazine, more colorful than the technical journal stuff, It may be
possible, ultimately, for man to reshape himself genetically and thereby
deny the claim of the grave, to live longer than Methuselah-and even to
be both Jesus and Lazarus in one, raising himself up from the mortuary
slab even as death lays him down upon it.”
Reese blinked. “Funny, huh? His body’s stolen from the morgue, which
is sort of being raised up,’ though not the way he meant it.”
Julio’s eyes were strange. “Maybe not funny. Maybe not stolen.”
Reese felt a strangeness coming into his own eyes. He said, “You don’t
mean… no, of course not.”
“He was a genius with unlimited resources, perhaps the brightest man
ever to work in recombinant DNA research, and he was obsessed with
staying young and avoiding death. So when he just seems to get up and
walk away from a mortuary… is it so impossible to imagine that he did,
in fact, get up and walk away?”
Reese felt his chest tightening, and he was surprised to feel a thrill
of fear pass through him. “But is such a thing possible, after the
injuries he suffered?”
“A few years ago, definitely impossible. But we’re living in an age of
miracles, or at least in an age of infinite possibilities.”
“But how?”
“That’s part of what we’ll have to find out. I called UCI and got in
touch with Dr. Easton Solberg, whose work on aging is mentioned in