“No.”
“Well, there’s more good news. We’re not going to have to chopper you out of here.”
“I’m okay. Give me second.”
The back of my head stings. But that should go away. There’s no funny smell, and I don’t feel dizzy, which means I probably don’t have a concussion. Probably.
“You hit the rock over there perfectly. Right on the sweet spot.”
“I was . . . startled.”
“No kidding.” Glenn checks for a dry spot, then sits down. “What the hell are you doing up here?”
“I thought it would be a great place to fall on my ass.” I glance over at the pool of Juniper’s blood, then shake my head. “Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah. Not a graceful moment. You still haven’t answered my question. Why are you up here?”
“Mrs. Parsons, Juniper’s mom, she asked me to take care of her car.”
Glenn cocks his head. “Up here? I don’t think there’s much parking. You sure you’re okay?”
“Back at the garage. What’s his name? Bryson. He’s changing my tires. I thought I’d go for a walk.”
“And ended up here?” Glenn asks skeptically.
“I saw the ribbons. I was curious. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t have to have a reason. But if you have to know, tying up loose ends.”
I think back to the sense I had of not being alone. “You were watching me.”
“Yep. Ever since you got here.”
“And you didn’t say anything?”
Glenn looks to the side as he tries to remember something. “What do they call it? The observer paradox?” He shrugs. “I figured it would be more interesting if I saw what you did if you thought you were alone.”
“But I knew I wasn’t alone.”
“Maybe. But I bet you thought it was a bear or cougar stalking you.”
He’s right. “It might as well have been. You were quiet. Military, right? What did you do in the service?”
“Spotter.”
A spotter is a soldier who accompanies a sniper and helps them identify targets. “Of course. I guess if you’d been a sniper, I’d be dead already.”
“I think you did a pretty good job of taking yourself off the battlefield.”
I reach back and feel the tree trunk. Slowly, I stand up, using it to brace me.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I think so.” I wipe away the leaves stuck to my clothes. “How did Juniper end up all the way down the hill after losing so much blood up here?”
Glenn stands up and raises an eyebrow. “What makes you think we found her down there?”
“It’s closer to the road. I’d assume she met the bear deep in the woods and tried running toward the road.”
He shakes his head. “No. She died right here. Exactly where you fell.”
“She ran up here?”
“Ever been attacked by a bear?”
“Five minutes ago I thought the answer was yes.”
“Well, I haven’t. But I would imagine my only instinct would be to run any way I could.”
“Yeah. You’re right. I guess it’s easy to overanalyze things when you’re not about to die. Still. It seems counterintuitive.”
Glenn folds his arms and looks around. “All right. As a scientist, can you tell me what she may have been looking for up here?”
“Not a clue. Her mother mentioned something about fish. Obviously there aren’t any around here.”
“Nearest lake is through Brookman’s Pass. That got filled in with a mudslide a month back. The only way there from here is a two-day hike. Half of that through pasture.” He points toward the road. “On the other side of there are a few ponds. But you can’t get there from here, as they say.”
“Interesting. I’ll do a little more digging to find out about her research.”
“Let me know. It’s also possible she was looking for a shortcut.”
“I think she was brighter than that.”
Glenn acts as if he’s trying to hold something in. He shakes his head. “If her teacher is any example . . .”
“Don’t judge her,” I reply coldly. “I may be a klutz, but from the looks of things, she went down with a hell of a braver fight than I did.”
“No. You’re right. That was out of line.” He replies with a grave tone. “Tough girl.”
“I wish I’d known her better.”
Glenn lowers his voice. “Come on, now that you’re out of the hot seat, you can level with me. You knew her pretty well, didn’t you? Maybe had a little rendezvous in town?”
I’d punch him if he didn’t have a gun and I wasn’t a coward.
All I can fight back with is a hurt look. Hurt that he’d think that of me. Hurt that he’d think that of Juniper.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. It’s the detective side of me. I’m always poking. I wanted to see how you’d react.”
“What difference does it make now? She’s dead and you got the bear.”
“True. I guess it’s like research. If I ever meet someone else like you, I want to know what’s going on inside his head.”
I’m not sure I like the idea of him still probing my motives. “Have you ever met anyone like me before?”
“Actually, when I first met you, I thought I had.”
“Was he a bumbling goof like me?”
Glenn studies me for a moment. “No. He was a killer. As cold a man as you could imagine.”
“A killer?” My stomach churns.
“Fourteen confirmed kills, to be accurate.”
My skin goes cold at the comparison. “A serial killer?”
“I wouldn’t call him that.”
Glenn’s observation isn’t amusing. “Then what? A mass murderer?”
“No. A sniper. I was his spotter.”
I don’t know what to make of that comparison and just manage to mutter, “I’m only dangerous to myself.”
“Maybe. But I still get the feeling I wouldn’t want to see you angry.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GENBANK
When I get back to my motel room, I notice a voice mail from Julian. “Call me . . .”
“What’s up?” I ask a minute later.
“I’m about to send you a fat file. We got DNA back.”
“That quickly?” I check my watch. His courier picked it up less than twelve hours ago.
“I have a rapid DNA testing start-up, Xellular—with an X.”
“Of course. You named it, I bet. I don’t think I’ve heard of them.” This was the lab he was alluding to. Of course it’s his own.
“Yep. And you probably wouldn’t have heard of them. They’re not in academia. Our main client is the CIA. They use us to identify terrorists and figure out after the fact who they hit with a drone strike. Money is no object, so they were willing to foot the bill on rapid testing. The upside is that we’ll be able to make it commercially available soon.”
“Sounds good. Although I don’t know what to expect out of Juniper’s DNA. If there was some kind of hormonal or pheromonal thing, it would have been in the blood plasma.”
“No,” he corrects me. “Theo, this is the bear’s DNA.”
“The bear’s? I didn’t realize there was a follicle in the sample. It just looked like a short hair shaft.”
“There wasn’t. We got it from the shaft.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.” Accepted wisdom is that hair only contains mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, passed from mothers to their children with little change. Men don’t pass it on. Changes in mtDNA are so slow, mainly due to random mutations, that you can use hair as a kind of genetic clock to see when populations split. As far as identifying individuals, it’s pretty useless. The mtDNA of you and all of your maternal cousins is effectively the same.
Nuclear DNA, or nuDNA, is the DNA that contains the combination of your mother’s and your father’s DNA that describes you. This is how you tell one individual from another. This is how you’d try to clone someone or identify their involvement in a crime.