In a Family Way by James Calder

Author:James Calder [Author]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2512-1
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

15

“Tell me I'm not crazy,” I said to Clem.

“You're not crazy, Mr. Damen. Whatever was in those reeds was way bigger than a duck.”

“Thank you.” We were speeding across the Peninsula to Montoya County Park, where Margaret had been abducted. My cell phone had buzzed as we'd started to walk back to the Oyster Point parking lot. It was Wayne, with the unexpected news that Ulla was ready to show us where the incident had occurred. Clem and I dashed back to the Scout, sparing ourselves further homilies from Tim and Cynthia. They were all right, actually, though I wished they'd been more reticent about thrusting their belief systems at us.

“You think Sabell really used nuclear transfer technology on Margaret?” Clem asked.

“I've got to research this stuff. Nuclear transfer is when you suck the nucleus with its chromosomes out of one organism's cell and insert it into another's egg, which you stimulate to start dividing as if fertilized, right? The egg's reprogrammed with the donor organism's DNA. No one's done it before in humans.”

“Oh yes they have. A Korean lab transferred a cumulus cell into an enucleated egg and got a ball of cells growing. Like most of the legit research in the field, it's all about stem cells, not reproduction. They're looking for the pluripotent cells in early embryos, cells that can differentiate into any kind of tissue.”

“How come you know so damned much about this field, anyway?”

“I told you,” she said, “I've had many incarnations. I was a blastocyst once myself.”

“The entire universe was an infinitely hot and dense dot. Once.”

“A blastocyst is probably the stage Helen's frozen embryo sisters would have been. Did a little bell go off in your head when Cynthia asked where Sabell would get cells from Helen?”

“A big bell. He got tissue from Margaret at her autopsy. I'm wondering if Helen had an autopsy, and where Sabell was when it happened.”

Clem nodded, and my phone rang again. It was Wayne. “I'm taking the exit onto 280 right now,” I told him. “We'll be in the convenience store parking lot where you said to wait in about ten minutes. Orange Scout, you can't miss it.”

As before, meeting Ulla was fraught with cloak-and-dagger protocol that involved us waiting around to receive further instructions. I supposed Wayne had people watching the store to make sure no one else was with us. Clem and I sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes before Wayne called and permitted us to proceed along the frontage road to a cross street near the park. We waited there again until we were instructed to get out of the car, walk down one block, and duck through a hole in a wire fence. I kept him on the phone as we went down the street. Clem found the small gap in the fence and stretched it open. I went through, then held it open for her.

We were in the park now, at the edge of a steep, redwood-forested slope. Wayne told me to head due south, downhill.

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