Altar Of Eden

From the expression passing like a cloud over his face, he possibly wished the same. Either way, now was not the time to reopen those old wounds.

“Dr. Polk,” he said stiffly. His accent grew thicker, more husky. “I called you here because… because I didn’t know who else had the expertise to offer guidance about what we found.”

She straightened her back, going equally professional. Maybe that was best. She swallowed and stared toward the trawler, glad for an excuse to look away. “What did you find?”

“You’d best see for yourself.”

He turned and led the way to the trawler. A rope ladder led up to the deck. He climbed first, clambering easily up. She was all too conscious of the hard strength in his legs and back. Once he vanished over the gunwale, one of his men secured the ladder’s lower end, making it easier for her to climb.

At the top, Jack helped pull her to the deck. Two other men stood guard by a door that led to the lower holds. One of them passed Jack a flashlight.

“Sir, we’ve run a portable lamp down into the hold, but it’s still damn dark down there.”

Jack thumbed on his flashlight and waved for her to follow. “Careful of the blood on the stairs.”

His light revealed a dark stain along one side of the steps. Like something had been dragged down into the hold.

She suddenly did not want to go down there.

“We found no bodies,” Jack said, as if sensing her discomfort. Or maybe he was merely filling her in on the details of the case.

She followed him down the steps and along a narrow passageway.

“They kept them caged in the main hold.”

She didn’t bother to ask what was caged. She already smelled the familiar musk of a rank kennel. She heard the shuffle of bodies, a rustling, a mewling cry, a sharp screech of a bird.

She began to understand why she had been summoned. Exotic animal smuggling was a billion-dollar-a-year industry, ranking just behind drug and gun trafficking. And unfortunately the United States was one of the leading consumers of such smuggled cargo, accounting for 30 percent of such sales.

She had read just last week about the bust of a major trafficking ring dealing in rare tigers. In that case, the Missouri couple wasn’t bringing in the big cats for pets, but for parts. They were smuggling in tigers, then butchering them. Hides of leopards, tigers, and lions could fetch upward of twenty thousand dollars. But that wasn’t all. Like some bloody chop shop, they were selling off all parts: tiger penises to be ground into aphrodisiacs, bones for arthritis cures. No part went to waste. Gallbladder, liver, kidneys, even teeth. In the end, such large cats were worth far more dead than alive.

She felt anger building as she followed Jack into the main hold.

A tall pole lamp lit the low-roofed space. Stainless-steel cages lined both sides of the long hold; larger pens in the back were still in shadows. She gaped at the size of the smuggling operation, certain now why she was needed here, a veterinarian specializing in exotic animals.

Jack turned and shone his flashlight into the nearest cage.

She stared inside-and knew she was wrong about everything.

Chapter 3

Jack Menard studied the woman’s reaction.

Shock and horror widened Lorna’s eyes. She covered her mouth with a hand. But only for a moment. After the initial surprise, he also recognized a glint of concern. Her eyes narrowed again, her lips drawn tight in thought. She moved closer to the cage.

He joined her and cleared his throat. “What type of monkeys are they?”

“Cebus apella,” she answered. “Brown capuchin monkeys, native to South America.”

Jack stared at the two who shared the small cage, squatting in their own filth, huddled and scared at the back of the cage. Their limbs and backsides were a deep chocolate brown, their faces and chests a softer tan, their heads capped in black. They were so small he could have cupped one in the palm of his hand.

“Are they babies?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. The fur coloring suggests they’re adults. But you’re right. They’re way too small. Pygmy versions of the breed.”

But Jack knew that wasn’t the most shocking aberration. With a quiet cooing noise, Lorna coaxed the pair to move toward the bars. Her coldly professional manner seemed to melt away, her face softening, relaxing. The pair of monkeys responded to her. Still hugging each other, they crept forward, clinging tightly. Not that they could ever truly be apart.

“Siamese twins,” Lorna said.

The two were joined at the hip-literally-fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.

“Poor things,” she whispered. “They look half starved.”

They came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.

She gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers-then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.

She glanced to Jack. For a moment he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother, Tom, during their sophomore year-and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.

Lorna must have sensed this well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. “Show me.”

He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizardlike evolutionary origin.

“It looks like a severe form of atavism,” Lorna said.

“And that would be what in English?”

She offered him a small apologetic smile. “Atavism is where a genetic trait, lost for generations, reappears in an individual.”

“A genetic throwback?”

“Exactly. In this case, a throwback to a time before snakes lost their limbs.”

“That’s a mighty long throw, isn’t it?”

She shrugged and moved on. “Most atavism is caused by the accidental recombination of genes. But I don’t think it was accidental here, not with these many cases.”