Gene Pool by Regina Clarke

Author:Regina Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder, small town, detective, alien, winter, paleontology, extraterrestrial, strong female, genetics experiment

nineteen

I hadn’t seen Ethan since the dance. It had only been a few days but the change in him was striking. He was pale and drawn and greeted Wyatt and me in a distracted way.

“What’s going on?” I asked the sheriff.

“I’ll let Ethan tell you both. I’ve explained to him that you’ve been assisting me in my investigation, along with Emma who’s been working on several objects recovered at the murder sites,” Tyler said. “Go ahead,” he said to Ethan.

What could it be now? I wondered. The feeling of peace I’d felt in the diner vanished, replaced by trepidation.

Ethan walked over to the sheriff’s desk and picked up a metal box and opened it. He took something out and brought it over to us, thrusting it into Wyatt’s hand.

“You’re the detective. What would you call this?” he said.

Wyatt and I stared at the object. It was a small, polished sphere a half inch in diameter.

“I found that in the body.” He removed two more objects from the box, identical to the first. “I found those in the bodies of Jim Price and Jesse Walton.”

“Don’t drag it out. Tell them,” the sheriff said.

Ethan sighed, an exhausted, ragged sound.

“Each one was in the same location . . . the left side of the brain, near the temporal lobe.”

“What are they?” I asked. “How did they get there?” Yet I knew the questions were absurd even as I asked them.

“What you see is all I know.” He was having difficulty saying the words. I knew there had to be more going on. I looked at the sheriff.

“What Ethan hasn’t mentioned yet is that he saw these things moving around in a circle,” Tyler added, his expression neutral.

“I know you think I’m crazy,” Ethan said to him, “but it only happened this last time, with the Mason body, not before. That’s what’s crazy! It was rotating like an oscillator might—the same way—and giving off a repeat pattern, like a frequency transmitter.”

Wyatt understood the implications before I did.

“You mean, like a signal?”

“That’s what he’s been suggesting,” Sheriff Tyler said, in a dry tone. It was obvious he didn’t believe the story.

“I can’t explain what these things were doing there in the first place.” Ethan’s nervousness was extreme and though his face was still pale he was sweating.

“Sit down,” I told him, leading him to a chair. “Take a deep breath. Tell us what happened from the beginning, just as you told the sheriff.”

Ethan grabbed my hand and then let go. “I thought the first sphere was a fluke. A surgical implant I didn’t recognize. That’s the best I can say. But when it showed up a second and third time, I had to face the fact that something wasn’t right.”

“Yet you didn’t want to report it?” Wyatt asked, curious.

“I didn’t think about it much until now. I wanted to analyze the way the bodies had been dissected, see what I could find out about the person who’d done the work.” Ethan kneaded his hands together in a compulsive motion.

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