The Mad and the Macabre

November 4th, 2010

Thursday

“Office hours don’t start for another twenty minutes,” Gabriel Hartnell said without looking up from the following day’s lesson plan. He was going to have to insert an image of staphylococcus aureus into the Power Point presentation as an introduction to those depicting MRSA if he expected his students to follow the lecture.

He heard the door close and again focused on the task at hand. There was only so much depth he could provide in a two hundred-level Intro to Pathology class, but he couldn’t glaze over the actual pathology portion. Maybe he simply wasn’t cut out for this teaching thing after—

An impatient sigh.

“I said come back in—,” Gabriel started, but his words died at the sight of the man, who waited just across the chipped oak desk from him. Rather than a timid undergrad with the fear of potential failure etched upon his face, he stared into the eyes of a man in his early thirties with thinning black hair and several days’ worth of stubble. He appeared so sleep-deprived he could have passed for a grad student. Gabriel hadn’t seen the man in more than a year, and honestly hadn’t expected to ever again. The man’s mere presence elicited a fresh wave of the pain Gabriel still struggled to hide, even from himself.

“Been a while, professor,” the man said. He wore a charcoal polyester suit, the creases betraying how long it had been since he had last changed it. His pale blue tie hung loosely around his neck. A tuft of curly hair peeked out over the unbuttoned collar of his shirt.

Gabriel rose so quickly he knocked his notes to the floor and banged his hip in his hurry to get out from behind the desk. He proffered his hand and the two men shook abruptly. There were so many thoughts racing through Gabriel’s mind that he couldn’t formulate any of them into words. He could only think of one reason why Brent Cavenaugh would have driven all the way out to Boulder to see him face-to-face. His stomach clenched and he felt the room start to spin. He steadied himself against the edge of the desk and ran his fingers through his shaggy, sandy-blonde hair, slicking it back with the cool sweat beading his forehead.

“Can we sit down?” Cavenaugh asked. He gestured to the twin chairs in front of the desk.

Gabriel nodded and they sat side by side. He felt the heat of Cavenaugh’s hazel eyes upon him, but couldn’t force himself to raise his eyes to match the stockier man’s stare. Cavenaugh was with the Denver Police Department, a detective with the Pattern Crimes Bureau of the Criminal Investigations Division, and had a way of looking through a man rather than at him. While Gabriel had an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Denver and a master’s in Cell and Molecular Biology from Colorado State, Cavenaugh had joined the force after earning an associate’s degree in Criminal Justice from Front Range Community College, and what he hadn’t learned in the police academy, he had picked up in a hurry on the streets. The only thing they had in common was the overwhelming sense of loss, the hole in their lives that the past two years hadn’t begun to fill.

Gabriel tried to ask the question out loud, but couldn’t find the strength to voice it.

Did they find the bodies?

“I want to show you something,” Cavenaugh said. He reached under his jacket and produced a manila folder, which he passed to Gabriel. After a moment of expectant silence, Gabriel opened the folder. “Tell me what you see in that first picture.”

It looked like the crater-pocked surface of the moon with a long, segmented mealworm crawling across it.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Gabriel said. “There’s always at least one student every semester who thinks he can stump me with this. It’s an unclassified extremophile found on a meteorite speculated to have originated on Mars. The closest living microorganism we can find on Earth is a halophile, a species of haloarchaea. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Look at the next picture.”

Gabriel flipped the page and studied the image, which showed five of the microbes on a lattice-like substrate. Some were curled into crescents while others were elongated.

“And the next,” Cavenaugh said.

The following picture had the exact same background, however the microorganisms had assumed different shapes and positions. He noticed a time stamp on the bottom of the image and turned back to the previous page. It had been stamped only one minute prior.

“They’re alive,” Gabriel whispered. “That’s impossible.”

“You aren’t the first to say that.”

Gabriel finally met Cavenaugh’s eyes. The expression on the man’s face was unreadable.

“What aren’t you telling me?” Gabriel asked.

“Those images were taken through an electron microscope on samples of bone prepared from a human femur that was found just outside of Pine Springs.”

Gabriel drew a sharp breath.

“DNA testing confirmed it was Nathan Dillinger’s.”

“Did they find anything else?”

“You mean anything belonging to one of our sisters? No. Just the one bone. No other parts of Nathan Dillinger or the other six.”

“Are they investigating the site where they found it? I mean, if they discovered one bone, then surely—”

“Calm down, Gabriel,” Cavenaugh said. His eyes softened and he placed a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “They scoured the National Forest for two straight days and came up with nothing. I would have told you at the time, but I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”

“I don’t understand any of this. How did this microorganism that by all rights shouldn’t even be alive get onto the disembodied femur of one of the people who disappeared with our sisters? Where’s the rest of Nathan, and where is Stephanie?”

Saying her name was a self-inflicted wound.

“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on that.”

“What do you mean? How the hell would I—?”

“An anonymous tip led us to the mountain lion den where we found the bone. Of course, it didn’t take long to track the call to the man who poached the animal. It was tagged and being tracked after all. It took all of about an hour to place it on his property prior to its death and perform a ballistics match on the bullet, but here’s the interesting part. Mountain lions are nomadic. They tend to move around when food becomes scarce. The Division of Wildlife had been monitoring its movements for more than a year, and twice in that time it passed within five miles of the cabins. The most recent of which was only two weeks ago.”

“You think it came across Nathan’s remains during that time.”

“Stands to reason,” Cavenaugh said. “But here’s the kicker: they performed an autopsy on the mountain lion and found it riddled with those microorganisms. I figure that’s our most substantial link. We’ve had cops scouring the mountain lion’s trail, but haven’t had any luck. I was thinking you might have some stroke of genius that could help us find where these microorganisms can live.”

“I’m sure you already have experts far more qualified than I am.”

“I have a group of scientists poring over microscopes and slides, giddy with the prospect of publishing and naming these little bugs after themselves, and a cold case for which the department can’t spare any more manpower.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to help me find my sister,” Cavenaugh said. Fire burned behind in eyes. “And yours.”