Before I could yell, “Freeze!” the guy turned around. And he had a gun, too. Before I could think about it, I kicked it out of his hand. My badge dropped to the floor as my hand clenched tight and rocketed toward his face. I didn’t put everything behind it, just enough to eliminate any disagreement about how things would be going from there.
He was quicker than I expected, bobbing his head out of the way. Rage flared deep down inside me and burned closer to the surface when the guy backhanded my gun out of the way. The Warrior inside me reveled in that rage, tried to elbow Joe the Cop out of the way. You don’t win a fight pulling punches, said the Warrior’s voice.
I ignored it, or tried to, slamming my elbow into the guy’s face. But he landed a solid left under my ribs that weakened my resolve not to go full Warrior. I landed a left of my own, and felt the exhilaration of the other man folding. The Warrior wanted off the leash, to press this momentary advantage into triumph, beat this guy down, and ask questions later.
As I paused, conflicted for a nanosecond, an uppercut clipped my chin, and in my head, I heard the Warrior in me telling the Cop, You might not want to watch this.
I could feel air on my teeth as I launched myself, grinning, at my enemy. The guy was bringing something up in his hand—a knife, a gun, I didn’t care. He wouldn’t have it for long. The right-left combination that was going to shatter his nose and close off his larynx became a right-left-right that would disarm him first. My right hand chopped the bundle of veins and nerves and tendons on the underside of the guy’s wrist, and whatever was in his hand went tumbling through the air. As my left fist tore through the air with everything behind it, from the corner of my eye I saw the object tumbling through the air: leather, gold, leather, gold, leather, gold.
A badge. Then the guy said, “Police!”
My shoulder locked, the muscles in my back and arm twisting and seizing as I applied the brakes to the ball of knuckles rocketing through the air. My fist stopped three inches from his face.
“Police?” I said, looking down at him.
“Police,” the guy said, looking down even farther.
I followed his gaze and saw he had a second gun, and it was pointed at my midsection.
That’s why you don’t pull your punches, the Warrior growled in my head as it returned to the depths where it spent most of its days.
That’s why I do, I thought to myself.
“Me too,” I said out loud, stepping back, giving the guy some space.
He kept the gun on me as he retrieved his badge from the corner of the room. “Really?”
“More or less.” I picked up my own badge.
The guy looked it over. “Joseph Ledger,” he said, then handed it back, “Homeland Security, huh? I know some people there.” He rattled off a few names.
I shook my head. “And who are you?”
He held up his badge. “Doyle Carrick. Philly PD.”
“And what are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same thing.”
“You might, after you answer me.”
Carrick’s mouth formed a tight smile. “A friend of mine has gone missing. Bruce Scott. Goes by Moose. The girl staying in this room, Melissa Brant, was the last person who saw him.”
“Missing?” I could feel the situation getting more serious around me. I thought back to Melissa’s call, saying she was on to something big.
“How’d you get into the room?”
“The lock was busted. Fried. Moose’s room, too.” He raised an eyebrow at me, reminding me it was my turn to explain.
“Brant’s gone missing, too.”
His eyes darkened. “Since when?”
“She was supposed to give a big presentation this morning. She didn’t show. No one can find her.” I looked around the room. “Did you find anything here?”
“Her computer’s gone, but the case is here. Handbag’s next to the bed. These were inside it.” He handed over a prescription bottle, Tapazole, and an iPhone.
The phone was locked, but the display showed two medication reminders: YOU HAVE MISSED ONE DOSE OF TAPAZOLE and YOU HAVE MISSED TWO DOSES OF TAPAZOLE.
There were also five missed calls.
“Two of those calls are from Oscar Tubbs, a mutual friend of theirs. The rest are from me,” Carrick said, holding up a different phone. “Calling from Moose’s phone. I could hear her phone buzzing from out in the hall.”
“Not quite probable cause, is it?”
He shrugged. “I’m out of my jurisdiction anyway. We’re twenty hours away from the local police starting a search. I’ll worry about probable cause later. Right now, I’m worried about my friend.”
Fair enough. “How’d you get into his phone?”
“It wasn’t locked.”
I nodded. “So, they’re friends, Melissa and Moose?”
He shook his head. “They met last night, through Tubbs. How do you know Brant?”
“She’s friends with my girlfriend. They’re here at the conference together.”
“The foraging conference?”
“No, the UFO conference.”
Carrick snorted and looked away.
My face darkened as I fondly thought back to three minutes earlier when I’d been kicking his ass. Junie had long since stopped being bothered by people’s reactions to her field of expertise. I wasn’t quite there yet.
Carrick straightened out his face. “Okay, then.”
“You said Melissa was the last person to talk to Moose but they weren’t friends,” I said as I started looking through Melissa’s things. Carrick had searched the place, but I hadn’t. “What’s the deal with that?”
Carrick sat on the bed and watched me. “Moose is here for the foraging conference. I drove up yesterday from Philly to see him. I figured we’d have a few beers at the hotel bar, maybe grab breakfast the next day, but instead he wanted to take me foraging.”
“What do you mean by foraging?”
“Apparently, he hunts for wild delicacies out in the woods, mushrooms and stuff, and sells them to restaurants.”
“Really?” I said, moving from the desk to the bathroom.
Carrick shrugged. “Says he makes decent money at it. Anyway, so he wants to show me this secret, hidden spot he found a couple summers ago, where there’s something called tiger cress growing. A half-hour drive and a twenty-minute hike later, we climb up this steep little hill and down into this tiny valley, and it’s carpeted with these plants. I was actually a tiny bit impressed, but then Moose says, ‘It’s not right.’ I ask him what he means, and he says, ‘It’s the wrong color and it shouldn’t be growing so thick.’ Then he steps on it and it stinks like hell, like sulfur mixed with menthol.”
I was done searching, but I would have stopped at that point anyway. Carrick smiled. “I know, right? I’m thinking maybe it’s like cheese, like the stinkiness is why it’s so expensive. But he says it shouldn’t smell like that at all.”
“So what was it?”
Carrick shook his head. “He said it was the tiger cress, all right, but different. He bagged some up and took it to Tubbs, who’s a botanist at Gareth University, not far from here. Tubbs checked it out and contacted Brant. He thought she might be interested, for some reason.”
“Tubbs thought Melissa would be interested?”
“Yeah. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just weird. Melissa’s an astrobiologist.”
“Meaning…”
“Her specialty is extraterrestrial life.”
Carrick smiled but then saw how much I wasn’t and straightened out his face.
He clearly didn’t believe, but I’d seen stuff that I was pretty sure he hadn’t. I didn’t need him to believe, but I wanted him to take it seriously.
“Do you think you could find your way back to this place where you found the plants?” I asked.
“No. But I’d recognize it if I saw it.”
“Where was Tubbs when you called him this morning?”
??
?His lab at the university.”
“I’d like to talk to him in person.”
Carrick nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”
* * *
We dropped in unannounced. Carrick didn’t suspect Tubbs of anything nefarious, but he was the only connection between Moose and Melissa and we couldn’t rule anything out. If he had something to hide, a surprise could make him slip up.
During the twenty-minute drive, Carrick and I talked a little about our backgrounds. We both had our secrets. We both told some lies. We both seemed comfortable with that.
Mostly, we talked about Melissa and Moose, found photos of them online, and compared notes on what we knew about them. We needed more information to begin forming legitimate theories. The illegitimate theories—the connections between Moose’s bizarro weed patch and Melissa’s bizarro specialty of extraterrestrial life—we kept to ourselves.
We found Tubbs in his third-floor biophysics lab surrounded by clicking and whirring machines and the vague smell that could have been the sulfur and menthol Carrick had described. Tubbs’s head, shaved clean where it wasn’t already bald, was bent over a microscope.
Carrick knocked gently on the door frame, trying not to startle him. It didn’t work.
Tubbs jumped as if the microscope had bitten him. “Who are you?” he demanded.
Carrick put up his hands reassuringly. “I’m Moose’s friend Doyle. The one who called earlier.”
Tubbs’s eyes shifted to me. “Who’s he?”
I held up my badge. “Joe Ledger. Homeland Security,” I said. “I’m a friend of Melissa Brant. She’s gone missing, too.”
Tubbs’s eyes filled with dread and he looked down at the floor. “I’ve been trying to call her.”
“We’re trying to find them both,” Carrick said. “So you need to tell us what’s going on.”
He gestured at his microscope. “That stuff Moose found is very, very strange.”
“Strange how?” I asked.
“All these weird compounds, some highly toxic. The arsenic content is off the charts. That’s why I called Melissa. That’s her thing, you know? Searching for life forms that use arsenic instead of phosphorus. But she’s been focusing on microbes so she didn’t believe it at first. But the more we looked at it, the more convinced she was that there was something important here.”
Carrick held up his hand. “Wait, why is she looking for life forms based on arsenic instead of phosphorus?”
Tubbs shrugged. “There’s a theory that some of the life on this planet might not have originated here, a ‘shadow biosphere.’ And if it originated somewhere else, one theory is that its metabolism might use arsenic instead of phosphorus, which this stuff seems to do.”
“So what are you saying?”
Tubbs put up his hands. “Well, she was saying it might be of extraterrestrial origin. I’m not saying that. In fact, now I’m pretty sure she’s wrong.”
Carrick snorted. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure, too.”
I ignored him. “Why’s that?”
“After they left, I compared the DNA to regular tiger cress DNA. It’s identical except for three chunks that are totally different.”
“You mean like, mutations?” I asked.
“Or do you mean like splices?” Carrick said.
Tubbs pointed at Carrick and said, “Bingo. There’s a company called Xenexgen, maybe ten minutes from here, that specializes in bioremediation using engineered microbes to pull contaminants out of polluted soil. One of the biggest sequences spliced into the tiger cress genome is almost identical to one they use for their arsenic remediation products. The weird thing is, most bioremediation products sequester the arsenic so it is less bioavailable. Melissa specifically said this arsenic is highly bioavailable.”
I shook my head. “It’s genetically engineered? Who would engineer a toxic version of a wild plant?”
Tubbs bit his lip. “Melissa’s theory is that it might not be toxic to everyone, or everything.”
Carrick snorted. “So, what, you think it’s genetically modified Purina Alien Chow?”
Tubbs didn’t smile. “Sounds crazy when you say it out loud, but I’d love to take another look at it.”
“What happened to your samples?” I asked.
“Moose and Melissa only left me a little bit. It turned into green goo overnight.”
* * *
As soon as we got outside, Carrick said, “You don’t believe that stuff, do you? The extraterrestrial stuff?”
I shrugged. “I’m just trying to find Moose and Melissa.”
“Right.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “So, next stop Xenexgen?”
I nodded and called Junie to see if she’d heard from Melissa.
“No.” Her voice sounded tight. “No one has seen her since last night. That presentation was a big deal for her. She wouldn’t have blown it off. Have you found out anything?”
“The last person she talked to was a guy named Moose Scott, a friend of a friend who found some weird plants out in the forest. He gave samples to Melissa to look at. Does that mean anything to you?”
“She’s an astrobiologist. Weird plants are kind of her thing.”
I told her what Tubbs had said.
“Arsenic? Hmm. Maybe that was her big thing she was on to. Did you talk to this Moose person?”
I paused. I didn’t want her to freak out, but I didn’t like keeping things from her—especially not things I knew she’d find out later. “Moose is missing, too.”
She gasped. “Joe, are you serious?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. They could have hit it off and gone somewhere together.” Although they wouldn’t have left their phones behind. “But I’m comparing notes with a friend of Scott’s, a Philly cop named Carrick. We’ll find them.”
I could hear her voice getting thick and wet. “Okay. Keep me posted.”
As I put down the phone, Carrick looked at me. “She’s worried?”
I nodded.
“You too?”
I shrugged. If I wasn’t worried, I wouldn’t be looking for her. “I don’t know Melissa well, but she didn’t seem the type to flake off.”
We drove in silence for a minute or two, then Carrick asked, “So what do we know about Xenexgen?”
It was a good question. I picked up my phone and called my pal Bug.
“Hey, Joe. How’s it going?” he said. “You and Junie having fun with all the saucer heads?”
I smiled. “Having fun being away from you guys, that’s for sure.”
Bug laughed. “I’d be deeply hurt if I didn’t know that was a lie. I know you miss me—why else would you be calling me?”
The conversation chilled the tiniest bit. I wouldn’t be calling him without a good reason, and good reasons were never good news. I was calling him because he ran MindReader, the DMS’s supersecret, superpowerful computer system.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m here with a new friend,” I said, letting Bug know I was not speaking freely. “Philadelphia detective Doyle Carrick and I are looking into a couple of missing friends.”
Bug typed for a second. “Carrick looks legit … a bit of a loose cannon, makes some enemies, but he’s a righteous dude who makes a lot of busts and has been on the right side of some nasty fights.”
“Great. We’re looking for a Bruce ‘Moose’ Scott and a Melissa Brant, both went missing sometime last night.”
“Want me to track ’em? Credit cards, cell phones, the usual?”
“They left their phones and wallets behind, but see if anything pops up. Also, Brand left behind a prescription drug called Tapazole. She’s missed a couple doses, so anything you can find on that would be great. First, though, I need you to look into a company called Xenexgen.” I spelled it.
Bug typed some more, then said, “Headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and Monroe County, Pennsylvania.”
“What the hell are they doing out here?”
“Looks lik
e the company was originally involved in coal. Acquired three years ago by current CEO Cecil Bortman. Very closely held, very quiet.… There’s some very heavy-duty encryption protecting their systems.”
“Apparently they have a line of bioengineered products used for hazardous waste remediation?”
“Let’s see … yes, Clean Sweep, a line of microbial products that sequesters heavy metals and other pollutants in soil. It seems to be one of their main product lines. I don’t see much in the way of sales, but they seem sound financially.”
“What’s their communications like?”
“Not as secure as their servers, but they’re pretty quiet.”
“Okay. Keep an eye on that. We’re about to visit their Monroe County location.”
“You thinking they might get chatty after you leave?”
“Exactly.”
“You got it.”
* * *
We drove through fields and farms and wooded hills, rounded a bend, and there was Xenexgen. The front was all high-tech global HQ office chic with the chrome double-helix X logo. As we pulled into the vast and almost empty parking lot, we could see production facilities in the back. Along one side, there was a long row of shipping containers with the blue Xenexgen logo being loaded with pallets of blue-and-white sacks.
Carrick parked in front of the main entrance, a curved overhang of mirrored glass sheltering a row of green glass doors. Inside, the lobby was more mirrored glass and chrome, a very modern impression that was seriously undermined by the cardboard boxes stacked two deep, at least three or four high, against the marble walls. The old guy at the desk eyed us for employee badges, then sat up straighter, surprised that we didn’t have any.
“Can I help you?”
I held up my badge. “We’re looking into a possible link between a couple of missing persons and one of your products.”
He stared at us for a second, then picked up a phone, spoke quietly into it, and told us, “Someone will be with you shortly.”
Half a minute later, a short, odd-looking man in an expensive suit appeared behind us. His face was pale and disconcertingly placid, his eyes drooped, and his skin was smooth but saggy, like bad cosmetic work.
“How may I help you gentlemen?” he said. He had an odd hitch in his voice, like a faint but unfamiliar accent. He extended his hand. Shaking it felt like grasping a wisp of smoke.