PRECINCT 20: DEAD STRANGE
(Web serial, 2002 - ) - stories by A.R.Yngve
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SNIPER, VIPER...
By A.R.Yngve
Five kids had defied their parents - or their parents had failed to look after them or care - and were playing in the street. The October morning was cold and clear. The children wore thick clothes in garish red, blue and yellow.
A couple of little girls skipped rope while they sang a rhyme: "Sniper, viper, wears a diaper! Sniper, viper..."
Homicide detective Innis Garris exited his apartment, went out through the front door of the apartment block, and walked up to the kids. On his way, he anxiously looked up at the rooftops and high windows, scanning for the gleam of a rifle barrel or a telescopic sight.
The sniper might be anywhere. Waiting... like he must have been waiting for that young boy who stopped on the street one morning to tie his shoelaces. Or the bus driver who stepped out of his bus during lunch hour to throw away a candy wrapper. Or any of the other victims who had done nothing but show up...
The children stopped playing and stared up at Garris: an overweight, stone-faced, potato-nosed figure with short-cropped dark hair, wearing a worn overcoat. Maybe they think I'm the mad sniper, he thought fleetingly.
"Kids, you'd better go indoors. It's not safe playing in the streets." His voice sounded deep with a touch of gravel.
"But you're here," said a little black girl with piercing eyes and pointed at him with a gloved hand. "You're the cop who lives here. We're safe when you're here."
"I'm off to work now," he said and frowned. "I'll have to go catch the sniper, but he's still out there. If I have to worry about you playing outside, I can't concentrate on catching the sniper, okay? So please play indoors, and you'll help me catch him."
The black girl regarded him suspiciously for a moment, and Garris thought: Please God, let them believe me.
She nodded. "Okay." Turning to her friends, she said: "Let's go to my house and play Nintendo."
"Good girl."
The five children retreated to the apartment block across the street; Garris waited until the last one had disappeared inside. Only then he dared step into his car and drive away. He switched on the police radio and called the front desk at his precinct station, Number 20. Sergeant Bolland answered.
"Tell the captain I'm a bit late. Had to make sure the neighborhood kids stayed indoors."
As he drove through the streets, he saw much fewer pedestrians on the sidewalks than usual. Automobile traffic was at normal levels or higher.
Garris mumbled the children's rhyme to himself: "Sniper, viper, wears a diaper..."
***
Down at the precinct station, the morning briefing had already started when Garris came into the room. Collins, the precinct captain, threw him a quick angry glance and continued his briefing.
Next to the chief stood a uniformed Army general who Garris had not seen before. Precinct 20 lay far from any military base.
"The military does not promise that their surveillance planes can find the sniper, but of course we appreciate all additions to our overstretched resources."
The general harrumphed and said: "The Army spy drones are remote-controlled from our mobile operating center on a twenty-four-hour basis."
He opened a large carton and picked up a drone which lay inside. It was just over two feet wide, unmarked, painted black and had two small propellers. Its two camera lenses were almost invisible against the black shell.
"This baby makes very little noise. The public won't even notice them. Two cameras, one standard, one infra-red."
He pointed to the city map on the wall, where Precinct 20 had been marked with a red border. Red dots marked out the locations of previous sniper shootings. Most of the dots were placed in other districts of the city.
But when seen as a whole, the dots vaguely formed a border around Precinct 20� as if the sniper, in some perverse way, was defending the perimeter of the precinct. This made no apparent sense: the victims had not been gang members or known criminals, just random citizens on the street.
"Three unarmed drones will patrol over Ratboro, Riverside and Bayliss Street. We've had success using drones against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. I'm not saying the sniper is one, but we can't rule out the poss..."
"Excuse me, General," Garris interrupted loudly interrupting, "why don't you perform house searches instead? Shouldn't we call in the National Guard?"
Garris's colleagues looked at him, then at the general and Collins - who was turning a shade red.
"We're not in a state of martial law yet," the general said. A wry smile escaped him. "Ask the Mayor if he wants to call in the National Guard."
Collins walked over to Garris's chair. "Garris, you behave now or I'll report you. General Westmoreham's promised to cooperate with the police, and we're going to cooperate with him. We do not dictate to the military and the military does not dictate to us, because this is America, not a police state! Is that understood?"
Garris sat immobile and sipped a mug of coffee. A colleague leaned over and whispered in his ear: "Shoulda had your coffee before you opened your mouth, eh?"
Garris grunted.
***
II
After the briefing, Garris sat down by his desk and went over the sniper case on his computer.
He had other ongoing cases to think of, as did the other few detectives on Homicide, Precinct 20. But apparently everyone in his department focused on finding the unknown sniper who had shot and killed fifteen people in the city area over the past three weeks. The most recent shooting had occurred in Precinct 20, only last week.
That the military had just entered the investigation did nothing to help the detectives. The general's theory about an Islamic terrorist struck Garris as wholly unrealistic. Previous serial killers and mass murderers in the city had worked without any religious or political affiliations whatsoever.
Would the police find the sniper? Garris had no idea, but he wanted to get his hand around that creep's neck before any criminal psychologist or slimy lawyer managed to declare the guilty unfit for trial.
Serial killers almost always turned out to be male. Were guys more inclined to do evil? Garris had brooded over that question too many times. The jails certainly contained many more male killers than female. His mother used to say: Boys will be boys.
Maybe, he thought as he flipped through page after page of grim crime scene photos, files and reports on the PC screen, maybe Mom was right. We never grow up. We keep playing childish games, and the games just get more violent and nihilistic as we grow older...
"Sir?"
He looked up and saw the lean, poker-faced Sergeant Bolland, thirty-seven and prematurely balding, standing in front of Garris's desk. Bolland was holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and a handcuffed, scruffy-looking young man in the other.
"Who's the punk, Sergeant?"
"Just a pusher I ran into on my way here. I missed the briefing. Did the chief have anything interesting to say, sir? I saw someone in uniform leave the place..."
Garris saw the ink blots on the arrested punk's fingers - Bolland worked his routines swiftly. The detective picked up a file printout and urged Bolland to come along.
"Put him in the tank and I'll tell you. I've got a lead I want to check over at Riverside Park. If you have no other pressing business today..."
Bolland made a light shrug, pushed the handcuffed man before him, and plopped him down on a chair by Lieutenant Melvin's desk.
"Found him in Ratboro," said Bolland and dropped the evidence bag on Melvin's desk with the fingerprint sheet. "Fill in the report for me, will you?"
Melvin sighed and nodded. Bolland followed Garris and picked up his jacket on the way out.
***
Bolland drove the squad car out onto the street, keeping cruising speed; Garris rode shotgun. They had not come far, when a man in a black coat and glasses stopped on the edge of the road and waved excitedly at them. Bolland stopped alongside the man and Garris rolled down the side window, with one hand on the shoulder holster. He did not quite recognize the person, but he had seen him before�
"Officer Garris!" gasped the man.
"What's the matter?"
"Rob Ferment, National Surveillor." Garris suppressed a groan. "What's your comment to the rumors that the Invisible Sniper is a rogue FBI agent -"
"No comment." He turned to Bolland. "Drive."
"'Rogue FBI agent?'" Bolland chuckled as they left the reporter behind. "When I was young, it would've been something more creative, like 'Aliens Brainwash Elvis into Mad Sniper.'"
Garris shook his head. "'The Invisible Sniper'... I hate it when the media give the killers a nickname. The crazies get off on that."
"But it fits, doesn't it, sir? Seems the sniper really can make himself invisible. The bullet trajectories, the way the bullets impacted on the victims� he always shoots from a high point, like rooftops and water towers. But what with all the surveillance cameras in this city, we should've gotten at least one picture of the guy entering and leaving a building. So how did he get up there?"
"If the sniper uses a helicopter to get up on the rooftops... or he parachuted in, I don't know... then the military are bound to find him. If he doesn't, the general isn't going to find him. I was thinking, maybe he climbs walls."
Bolland's stomach burbled and groaned. "I'll stop for donuts. Want some, sir?"
"Sure."
"How does a sniper, carrying a high-powered rifle, scale the highest house on Bayliss Street after sunset, on a Saturday night, shoot a man on the street, and then disappear without a trace?" Bolland sounded unusually excited; even he had been infected by the mood at the station, the feeling that everyone must hunt for the sniper. "That's twenty stories of almost perfectly smooth glass and concrete. Not even a monkey could do it."
Garris felt a thought stir in his mind, a vague conceit that could grow into a hypothesis. Bolland had ignited it. A monkey... a trained monkey carried the rifle for the killer, climbed the building, then delivered the rifle to the man at the top floor...
Farfetched, but if no better theory appeared Garris was prepared to try it.
They made a stop at Dunkin' Donuts and then drove on south down Chippewa Alley until they came to Riverside Park.
***
III
Riverside Park had been in a state of decay for some time. The boom of the Nineties eventually caught up and turned it - briefly - into an upscale housing block with high-rise apartments. Now that a serious recession was going on, several of the apartments stood empty.
Bolland parked the squad car behind a signpost and helped himself to a jelly donut. He gazed out at the gleaming glass-and-steel apartments as he spilled crumbs on his uniform.
"What's the lead, sir?" he asked Garris, who finished his second donut.
"You know those 'I did it' morons who always call and confess whenever they hear about a murder in the news? One of them lives here, and she called me yesterday... I couldn't sleep, because I lay awake thinking about it. Listen."
He picked up his phone and punched the buttons that played a recording of the conversation.
"Homicide, Detective Garris speaking."
"Mr. Garris? This is Hilda Rufus, Riverside Park West fourty-one, I have to confess a crime..."
"Calm down, Mrs. Rufus, I remember you. So who did you kill this time?"
"Mr. Garris, I saw the sniper today. I looked out my apartment window, and saw him poke his head out the window across the street. It was around seven o'clock in the morning, I think. He was holding a rifle with a long sight, and he... "
"Take your time, Mrs. Rufus. Just tell me exactly what you think you saw."
"He didn't stay there long, just a few seconds, I'm afraid he saw me and got scared."
Bolland quipped: "She that ugly?"
"So he went back inside. His curtains are always down, so I couldn't look in."
"Could you please tell me what he looked like?"
"He... was wearing a Halloween mask, like a gorilla or a... one of them long-armed, shaggy ones."
"Orangutan mask?"
"Yes. With dark fur -"
The recording time ran out there. Bolland shook his head. "Media's going to have a field day with that nutty old woman."
"I know. She's a crank, but she may have seen the sniper with a mask on. Don't upset her. No 'good cop, bad cop' routine. Okay?"
"Yes, sir."
***
The old woman pointed between the thin flower curtains to the identical high-rise on the opposite side of the parking lot. Garris counted and determined that the apartment she indicated lay on the fourteenth floor, almost at level with Mrs. Rufus.
"Look down," said Bolland in a low voice. Garris did, and noticed Rob Ferment standing on the pavement below, pointing a zoom-lens camera up at their window. But Garris felt a small amount of respect for the guy - at least he tried hard to do his job, instead of just quoting other reporters.
"Ignore him. If he comes up to question Mrs. Rufus, she can serve him her old 'I did it' stories."
"I can call for a search warrant for that other apartment right now," Bolland said; his hand was on the cell phone.
"Wait. Call and ask the captain to arrange for a stakeout, Riverside Park East, fourteenth floor. He can call in that general if he wants to. Make sure the captain gets all the credit. Tell him... that I'm not sure about this lead and need his decision."
"Why, sir?"
"Because I want that sniper caught before he kills another kid. Give the captain a shot at the glory, and at least we're sure he'll throw all available resources at this lead."
"And what if he comes up empty, sir? We don't even know the sniper lives there."
"Then I guess the captain takes the blame," Garris said and shrugged. "Ain't that bad?"
"Right," Bolland said with a flat expression.
***
IV
Captain Collins sounded very hesitant, at first; Bolland told Garris this much later. Bolland conveniently forgot to tell the captain that Mrs. Rufus had a record of crank-call confessions.
When Bolland sent over an exterior photo of the suspect apartment Collins made up his mind and ordered a full stakeout operation. But he did not alert the Army general.
Garris had other cases to work on, so he stayed away from the Riverside Park stakeout and waited for it to bear fruit - or not. One thing the job had taught him was that if you hit a dead end, you shrugged it off and pursued another unsolved case.
During its first few days, the Riverside stakeout team spotted nothing peculiar. The targeted apartment was quiet: laser microphones picked up no sounds except the rustle of an old air-conditioning unit. The lights were left on day and night, and the drapes stayed in place. Not even a toilet flush registered on the surveillance.
On the third day of the stakeout, around one AM., a short male silhouette appeared on the balcony. It climbed onto the rail, hobbled over to the door, slid it open and then closed it. The figure vanished behind the curtains.
"What was that on his back?" asked one of the stakeout officers, watching through the camera mounted in Mrs. Rufus's apartment.
"Looked like a rifle," said the other cop and radioed the precinct station.
***
The SWAT team stormed the suspect apartment on Riverside East ten minutes later. The heavily armed and armored officers screamed and aimed their rifles as they burst through the front door.
There was a flutter of curtains from the balcony, and the only living occupant vanished into the night.
The figure did not show up on the ground below the balcony. The police searched the entire block but found no sign of the escaped suspect. However, they found other things in the apartment itself. Among those, they also found a corpse.
***
Collins held a press conference in the afternoon the next day, in the station's small press briefing room. It was overcrowded with reporters from all over town and a few from other cities. Garris listened in from the doorway of an adjacent room.
"When the armed character was seen entering the balcony, I ordered my men to storm the apartment to try and take him. Unfortunately, the suspect escaped the way he came, and managed to elude the officers who guarded the park. Said apartment belonged to a Doctor Victoria Stone, who had no rap sheet.
"This is a photo of Victoria Stone, a biology teacher at Antonioni University in this precinct. She was on an extended leave from its medical faculty when we found her."
The picture of the woman alive showed a rather bland face: she had a thick build, in fact similar to Garris, with an expressionless face and head, and large eyes that just screamed: I don't like to have my picture taken.
"And this is what she looked like when we found her in the apartment."
The reporters gasped and murmured uneasily. The corpse of Dr. Stone on the next photo showed early signs of mummification.
"The autopsy report isn't complete yet," the precinct captain explained, "but apparently the apartment's climate control was set to keep it hot and dry.
This helped preserve Stone's head and limbs, but not the abdomen, for an estimated two or three weeks."
Rob Ferment could not keep quiet; he raised an arm and shouted. "Do you think the Invisible Sniper killed Dr. Stone and then took up living in her apartment?"
Collins shrugged. "It's too early to say - the coroners haven't established her cause of death yet. But we have found bullets and shell casings in the apartment, that match those used in all previous sniper shootings."
Several reporters started shouting.
"Is Dr. Stone the sniper? Did she kill herself?"
"Is the danger over?"
"Does this prove that the escaped suspect is the Invisible Sniper?"
Garris stood in a corner of the room behind Sergeant Bolland, and waited for the captain to take the cue and attempt to deduct on his own. Come on, Captain - say something stupid. We know you can do it.
"Uh," Collins said, "the manner in which the suspect escaped does not prove he is our man. It could have been a burglar, who found Dr. Stone's corpse and then fled the place."
But you forget the apartment's front door was locked from inside, thought Garris. How did a "burglar" get inside from the fourteenth floor?
The captain went on: "Night-camera images were taken of him entering the apartment. We're looking for a pale, strong man, about five feet tall, in dark clothes and a baseball cap, with long dark sideburns on his face. On his back he carries a rifle by a shoulder strap. He's agile, and considered very dangerous. The public should not apprehend him, but try to alert the police."
After the reporters had been shuffled away, the captain called in Garris and Bolland to his office.
***
V
"Sir, why didn't you tell them about the other stuff we found in Stone's apartment?" Garris asked the captain. He sat on a worn wooden chair and held a plastic bag in his lap. Bolland served coffee.
Collins gave the detective a peculiar, predatory smile from behind his desk, leaning his arms forward as if he were about to leap at Garris's throat.
"For the sake of credibility. And I ain't telling the vultures more until the lab guys have figured out just what we found." He thumbed the printed photos on his desk and handed one to Garris. "What's this gizmo? Looks like those boxes with gloves they use in nuclear power plants."
"An incubator. For raising delicate or prematurely born infants. It contained animal hairs, same color as in the used animal cage we found in her bedroom. But it's the stuff in Dr. Stone's freezer that really worries me. I think the brains there come from human beings. And pieces of dried brains were found in the good doctor's kitchen mixer. Seems she used it to mash up brains."
"So where'd she pick up all that gray matter, sir?" asked Bolland, tasting the coffee.
"She could get fresh stiffs from the city morgue through the university research. Transporting brains from the morgue, packed in ice, that's much easier than putting whole corpses in her trunk."
"Maybe..." Collins began, but stopped. When Garris and Bolland looked at him, he smiled. "I just thought, maybe the sniper was working in cahoots with Dr. Stone. The sniper shot people in the street, and supplied the doctor with fresh brains for her... experiments."
Garris pretended not to have heard the captain's hypothesis.
"If you ask me, she was a sicko," said Bolland. "I bet she caught mad-cow disease from eating some victim's infected brain."
Garris wagged his index-finger at the sergeant. "Not so. I just checked the coroner's report on stomach content - the good doctor had not eaten any brains whatsoever."
"So what was she doing with a freezer full of brains?" asked the captain.
"I called up the university early this morning and asked if any live animals had been reported stolen from the lab where Stone worked. And the janitor said one male chimpanzee named Errol had been missing for three months. Errol was young then, but he should grow fast at his age."
"What's this got to do with anything?" the captain said as he picked up some anti-ulcer tablets from his desk and chewed them down.
Detective Garris took a deep breath, looked into the captain's eyes and said with a straight face: "My theory is that the doctor kept the stolen chimp in her apartment, and that monkey is the Invisible Sniper."
***
The precinct captain's eyes went wide.
"Are you on something, Garris? A trained monkey with a rifle?"
He put out the palms of his hands in a gesture of despair. "Look. Before the sniper started shooting people in the streets, I used to take my grandkids to the zoo every month. Once, one of the kids tossed a small firecracker at the monkey cage. The poor beasts screamed loud enough to make us all deaf, ran for cover and wouldn't stop screaming for half an hour. You can't train monkeys to use guns. It's physiologically and psychologically impossible."
Sergeant Bolland asked: "You mean, because they don't have opposable thumbs?"
"That, too."
Garris offered them a box of fresh chocolate-glazed and pink-frosted donuts from his plastic bag.
"Now bear with me a minute," he explained. "Suppose Dr. Stone had found a means of making a chimp smarter. I've been reading several scientific magazines recently. Geneticists have discovered a very simple method of reprogramming the genes of individual cells."
He held up his coffee mug and a chocolate-glazed donut.
"Picture this donut as a nerve cell. The nerve cell behaves in a very specific way - it receives and transmits impulses to other nerves, and reacts to stimuli. Now let's mash this cell up into its smallest proteins and active chemicals..."
He crumbled the donut into the coffee and stirred the contents, until he had produced a soggy, dark-brown mush. The captain sneered. Garris picked up a pink-frosted donut.
"Picture this one as a skin cell. It can only do certain things... like grow, divide and make goosebumps. When it dies, it dries up and turns into dandruff - there's no way a nerve cell could do that. Now you soak the skin cell in the mashed nerve-cell soup for an hour..."
He lifted up the dripping donut from the cup after just two seconds. Its pink color had changed to a soggy brown.
"Okay, so you turned it into a chocolate donut," said Collins. "Where's your Nobel Prize?"
"What happens in the real test is, the soaked skin cell changes. It appears to soak up the properties of the mashed nerve cell, and after a while it starts to behave like a nerve cell too. The cell's been chemically reprogrammed. Because every cell type contains the latent DNA for any other cell type... the soaking acts as a kind of chemical trigger. And I figure, if you expose a monkey brain... you following me?"
Collins pointed at his own wrinkled forehead.
"This thing works, you know. So the scientist has soaked a chimp's brain in a soup of mashed human brain cells, and turned it into... what?"
"That's what I'm not sure about. Let's say Dr. Stone injected mashed human brains into the chimp's head. Would the chimp's brain start to mutate into a more intelligent brain right away? I read that the change shows after just an hour of soaking. Maybe the chimp developed an improved skill for imitating human behavior, so that it could learn to use a rifle? Or it got less scared of the bang. Or its brain absorbed some human property we can't properly describe, like..."
"A soul?" suggested the captain, tongue-in-cheek.
"Let's not get all metaphysical here. I'll just hazard a guess that human brains are inherently better at learning than monkey brains. The monkey might get a little brighter and bolder from the process I described, but it'll still be a monkey."
"Okay," said Bolland. "Let's leave a trail of bananas leading to the police station."
"Even a smart monkey is going to return to its caretaker sooner or later. Not just for the bananas. My gut feeling is we have to keep watching the apartment until it returns."
"I don't get it, sir," Sergeant Bolland complained. He had dissolved a pink-frosted donut in his coffee, and regarded the sorry mess with a disappointed face. "Any monkey that's smart enough to climb a tall building, aim a sniper rifle and shoot people ought to figure out that that apartment isn't safe for him anymore. How desperate would it have to be?"
"Desperate enough. Whaddya say, captain?"
Collins shook his head. "I say you're crazy, but the whole case is. Okay. We'll keep the stakeout going for a week."
***
Garris visited Antonioni University next day - alone - and searched Dr. Stone's workspace. The university morgue, where she had performed autopsies with students, contained several corpses with missing brains. All the corpses were male.
The personnel let him read the files on Stone's workstation.
Dr. Stone's remaining computer files contained only a few cryptic notes - apparently, she had preferred to keep notes in her head - but two stored pieces of text stuck in Garris's mind:
A follow-up experiment with a female animal must use female tissue injections. Do not use female brain tissue on the current male test subject, for risk of hormone disturbances.
And:
Does the test subject follow human orders if it wears a uniform?
He spent a few hours asking Stone's colleagues about her. They had little to say, but agreed that she was a very reserved, private character who lived for her work. The university dean assured Garris that no complaints had been raised over Dr. Stone's behavior. Her extended leave was due to health reasons: she had a heart problem and needed to relax.
During lunch in the university restaurant, Garris called the coroners and got the final word on Dr. Stone's remains. It was established that she had died two to three weeks ago. The cause of death was a heart attack, caused by high blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
***
The same evening, the fugitive chimp returned to Riverside Park.
The police was ready and waiting for the monkey - or whatever it had become - when it climbed back into Victoria Stone's apartment.
It was evident from the way the creature moved, that it was suffering extreme discomfort in its hind regions. It wore clothes, which gave it a comical appearance. But a rifle was slung from its back and infrared camera images showed the rifle-barrel was hot and freshly used.
Captain Collins, watching the apartment through a TV set on the precinct station, gave the order over the radio.
"Okay, kill it."
The police snipers shot the simian sniper as it climbed the balcony rail. It fell fourteen stories and landed on the pavement below.
***
The dead chimpanzee proved a pitiful sight. It was unusually tall - for a monkey - and wore jacket, pants and a cap. The pants were extremely dirty and stank. When Sergeant Bolland came up to the corpse, he had to pinch his nose.
Garris bent down over the lifeless chimp and examined its head with a flashlight and magnifying glass.
"I see several surgical scars and needle marks. Let the lab guys examine the head, and I'm sure they'll find its brain cells resemble human cells."
Garris felt a shiver down his back when he checked the pockets of the chimp's clothing: they were stuffed with rifle bullets. The shootings might have continued for days.
Detective Franklin from Narcotics came over, wearing surgical gloves. He had collected the rifle. "Check this out, the monkey's owner had attached a pouch to collect the spent casings. That's why we never found them."
The pouch, screwed tightly to the side of the rifle, was bulging with empty bullet casings. Franklin packed the rifle in a large plastic bag and carried it to the police van.
"But how could a monkey acquire such a taste for murder?" the captain asked, clasping a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. "A four-week rampage... sixteen people shot... why? Did Dr. Stone deliberately teach it to kill? For God's sake, why?"
Bolland spoke in a nasal tone, due to his pinched nose: "When Rob Ferment sees this, he's got to think we're kidding."
"I have no idea who taught Errol to shoot the first time." Garris replied, "Chimps in the wild are naturally aggressive. They guard their turf with their own death squads." He seemed indifferent to the stench from the dead animal at their feet. "All they're missing is the intelligence and insight to use tools. Wild chimps kill rivals and intruders by bludgeoning them to death with their arms. They're pretty strong, but it takes a while. With a rifle and the skill to use it, this chimp could kill much faster and more often."
Collins nodded; he had gotten an explanation he could understand. "Just a dumb animal protecting its turf." He paused. "What's wrong with the chimp's mouth?"
Garris pried the jaw open and made a barely audible gasp. "The tongue. It's been cut out. Dr. Stone made sure no one would ever hear it shriek."
"Can you imagine, sir?" Bolland said. "Poor thing must have gone for days without having its diapers changed, and it couldn't even scream for help. A rash like that would turn anyone into a killer."
The irony was not lost on Garris. Thanks to the "brain soup," this chimp had learned to shoot a rifle and open doors, and probably gained a great deal of confidence in the process. But eventually, the monkey had returned to its master - if only because it remembered where it used to get its diapers changed.
The captain had asked whether the scientist's treatment had given the chimp a soul. Garris very much doubted that was the case. But now he wondered if evil in humans could be scientifically transferred to monkeys. Or perhaps monkeys already possessed some evil quality in common with humans. It had only been concentrated further in Dr. Stone's test subject.
He picked up the chimp's grimy baseball cap from the ground and pointed the flashlight at the printed text on its front.
It read: ELEPHANT MAN - COMIN' 4 U!
Garris considered the worst possibility of all: no one had actively taught that animal to become the Invisible Sniper. It had simply soaked up an invisible sniper from the mashed-up thoughts of randomly selected dead men in a city full of guns...
He put the cap down over the dead chimp's hairy, wrinkled face.
"Boys will be boys."
Then suddenly, three black vans drove into the parking lot between the apartment blocks. Their doors opened and out rushed a dozen men in uniforms.
Among them was General Westmoreham.
He walked up to Collins, shook his hand briskly and said: "I saw everything on the drone camera. Congratulations, Captain. A job well done."
Half his men hurried into Dr. Stone's apartment block. The other half lifted the dead monkey, put it in a body bag, zipped it up and carried it off to a van in great haste.
"We're securing the research equipment," said the general. "Dr. Stone may have kept classified files in her home, and for the sake of national security we'll make sure they do not get into the wrong hands."
Garris froze up and his mouth fell open. It couldn't be that simple�
"Why are you even here?" he asked. No answer came from the general - not so much as a glance in his direction. "Was Stone working for you. Or did you just want to get her test subject for future use?"
The general looked irritated. He excused himself and went into the building to join the other half of his crew. Garris made to run after, but Collins and Bolland grabbed his arms and held him back.
"Don't," said Collins. "I know. It stinks. But this is the lousy hand we've been dealt, and we've got to play it. Let's get out of here and bury this case."
Garris let out a laugh like a sob. "Bury it? A chimp... that shoots people?"
Collins rubbed the skin between his eyebrows and looked at the ground.
He did not sound proud: "I'll tell the media exactly what we found here: the rifle, a dead animal that had no connection to it, and the body of the animal's owner, who probably was the sniper. No more sniper shootings happen from now on... our conclusion confirmed. Case closed."
"The reporters won't believe you."
"They'll print the official statement. That's what they do."
Garris gave his superior a short stare of impotent rage, then pulled himself free and walked away to the waterfront overlooking Sanford Bay. He stood and watched the dark swirling waters, as his hands trembled with anger.
Above his head grew a slight buzzing noise, like an angry insect. He looked up... and saw, against the illuminated wall of the apartment block, the rounded shape of one of the general's spy drones.
The small drone slowed down and hovered, wobbling slowly, some five or seven feet from where Garris stood.
He was not a trigger-happy cop; he almost never used his gun. He quickly pulled his pistol from the shoulder holster, took aim and put a bullet in the drone's hull.
The machine spouted smoke, sputtered and crashed down on the asphalt. The propellers clattered against the ground for a moment and stopped.
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