Anonymous Rex (39 page)

“We didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Jaycee says eventually. “Especially Donovan.”

“But you needed those papers gone, didn’t you? And that frozen embryo—now that you had this baby, you had to get rid of the extra evidence. Why couldn’t you just ask Donovan for them back?”

“Yes, yes, well … He wouldn’t give them to me,” Vallardo says, stepping away from his computer and into the conversation. In the background, I can see the fragile eggshell continuing to disappear beneath the constant assault from the creature inside. It won’t be long now. “Simple as that, yes? He thought I was being controlled,” Vallardo continues, “and he wanted to protect me. Donovan was … very loyal.”

“Ha!” snorts Jaycee, and says nothing more on the matter.

I turn back to Vallardo and say, “Loyal, sure. Especially after you funded his club in Los Angeles. You needed a place to keep a separate copy of your work, a safe haven, and he needed a new job. Who would ever think to look in an LA nightclub for such controversial work? Worst thing that goes on there would be a little hanky-panky in the rest-room stalls.

“But the real question is why were you doing that work in the first place? And for this, we have to go back a little further.” Stretching my fingers as if to crack my knuckles—I can’t actually crack them, as my tight Raptor joints don’t leak enough air—I walk up to Judith, still on the ground, and easily hoist her to her feet. She sags in my arms, but I know she can hear me, and I think she can talk.

“How long ago did you and your husband start pretending you were dinos?” I ask Judith, and Glenda nearly passes out.

“Pretending?” Glenda says. “You lost me.”

“Like it sounds. We guise ourselves up as humans every day, she guised herself up as a dino when the need arose. Got away with it for
at least fifteen years now, everyone thinking she’s a Carnotaur costumed up as a matronly widow when she’s really a cold piece of dirt costumed up as a Carnotaur.” I grab a loose fold of flesh beneath Judith’s arm and tug; it doesn’t give, and the woman whimpers. Glenda, beginning to comprehend, takes a tug too, manhandling the flesh presented to her.

“So let me get this straight … this one here is a human pretending to be a dino pretending to be a human?”

“You got it,” I say, and Glenda drops any pretenses of civility and charges toward Judith’s throat, ripping off her guise mask with a practiced ease I have never witnessed before. This has got to be a Guinness record for disrobing. But I swing Judith around, away from the Hadrosaur’s suddenly exposed elongated duckbill, pulling the human to safety alongside the far wall.

“Outta the way, Vincent!” snarls Glenda. “We gotta kill her, those are the rules. She’s a human, she knows, she’s gotta go.”

“I know the rules, Glen, trust me. But this is a special situation. We’re going to bring her up in front of the Council,” I say. “They’ll decide what to do with her.” I catch Glenda’s eyes with mine, pleading for temporary clemency. There are still gaps in my information sheet I need to have filled in. Reluctantly, Glenda backs off, wiping her drooling beak with a short brown arm. I’ll have to watch her—she’s still anxious to taste Judith’s blood. “What I don’t know is how she found out about us in the first place. Who let it slip.” I spin Mrs. McBride around once again, stare into those vacant eyes. “You wanna enlighten me?”

“It was his Ba-Ba,” says Jaycee, taking over the storytelling for a moment. “Raymond’s Ba-Ba.”

“What the hell is a Ba-Ba?”

“It’s what he called his adopted mother. Kid talk for Barbara. Raymond’s parents died when he was just a toddler, and he was sent to live with his mom’s best friend, who happened to be a Carnotaur. He didn’t talk about her much, but I know that she raised him as a dino, taught him how to make the scent pouches, how to act, how to guise up, how to present himself in the dino world.

“He found Judith here working as a waitress in Kansas, introduced her to the only life he really knew—that of a dino—and allowed her
to make the choice as to how they would live their lives, as humans or as pseudohumans. They chose to act as dinos, and moved to New York City in order to find a greater population of their—of our—kind. The rest is pretty well documented if you look for it. Raymond’s rise up the business ladder, Judith’s rise up the social one, all because of their dino contacts. Jumping species can be very lucrative.”

Thanking Jaycee for her additions to the evening’s symposium, I take over once again, eager to display my crime-solving skills for all involved. “I knew there was something wrong from the moment I stepped into your office,” I tell Judith, “but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Your scent was odd, sure, but not odd enough to capture my immediate attention.

“I gave Donovan’s name to your secretary, solely as a method to gain access to your inner sanctum, and I didn’t expect it to last any longer than your first sniff of me. But we spent a good minute together—we even embraced!—and you
still
thought I was Donovan, guised up in a different human costume. And right there was the problem, my first inkling of suspicion, even though I didn’t realize it until later—you couldn’t smell me! Later in that same conversation, I asked you for Jaycee’s scent, a clue to help me track her down, and once again you hemmed and hawed. You couldn’t tell me what she smelled like because you didn’t know. Human noses, simply put, stink.

“I got another clue when I found a scent pouch at Dan Patterson’s house. You remember Dan Patterson, right? The LAPD sergeant you had killed? Nice try, telling your hit men to use a knife to try and simulate dino marks, but even a rank forensics amateur like myself can tell a knife wound from a claw slash from ten feet away.”

“She wasn’t supposed to hurt him,” Jaycee interjects. “She was just supposed to get the papers.”

“And Nadel?”

“He was going to give you the photos. The real photos.”

“And Ernie?” I ask. “Was she supposed to hurt Ernie?”

Jaycee’s head turns away. “I didn’t know about that ’til after.”

“After she’d killed him?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you do it?” I ask, and now I’m getting ready to take a bite out of Judith McBride. My grip on her neck grows stronger, and if I
just press a little to the left, I could snap it in one easy blow. “How’d—you—do—it?”

Jaycee pipes up again. “She told me—”

“I’ll deal with you in a second,” I say plainly, keeping my growing anger below the high-water mark. “I’m dealing with the human now.” Back to Judith—“Tell me, or you die right here, Council be damned.”

“It was easy,” Judith sighs. “A few hits on the head, a false witness report.”

“Because?”

“Because he was getting too close. You got lucky with those two morons in the car, or you’d be in the same place.”

I throw Judith to the ground, pacing back and forth around her supine body. I need to return to the matter at hand. “So I found the pouch in Dan’s den, the traces of chlorine, and matched it up with the pool supplies you received today at your apartment.” I saunter over to my pants, lying in a crushed pile on the floor, and search through the pockets, emerging with a yellow note. I hand it to Judith, who mindlessly grips it, staring past the words on the page. “Two packages, down at Receiving,” I tell her. “Open till nine.”

“So what does all this mean?” I say rhetorically, addressing my rapt audience. “It means that Judith is a human, that Raymond was a human, and that the both of you were indeed fooling around with the other species, but that the other species were us dinos.” Then, whipping around—“Judith here had her fling with Donovan, and she’s really the one who funded your experiments, right, Doc? It was Judith, not her husband, who’d come down with Dressler’s Syndrome. She was the one who wanted the dino/human mixed child.”

Vallardo, defeated for once, nods. He says, “She’s been looking for a way to have a child with the Raptor, yes? But it was not working.”

“Why not?”

“Dinosaur seed, human egg. The fetal process was incorrect, it … The mixes are in need of the opposite situation if they are to grow properly during the dino ten-month gestation period, yes? Human sperm and dino egg, a hard exterior shell. Otherwise …”

“Otherwise they come out deformed. Like those things you keep in the cages. And the thing that attacked me outside the clinic.”

A nod from Vallardo. “My earlier experiments. I did not have the heart to eliminate them.”

“Oh yeah,” says Glenda, “you’re all heart, Doc.”

“So when Judith realized she couldn’t have a dino/human child of her own, she decided to have the good doctor here use Jaycee’s eggs—which he’d already harvested and frozen from their earlier experiments with her and Donovan—and her husband’s fertile sperm. It wouldn’t be her genetic child, but it would be damned close enough. Vallardo would have made the kid, Judith would have raised it as her own, and no one would have been the wiser. And then—well, I can surmise and surmise all day, won’t get us any closer to the truth. Why don’t you tell it, Jaycee?”

“If you know it so well …” she says bitterly.

“I’d rather you fill us in. Firsthand accounts are always more enjoyable.”

We all fix our gazes upon Jaycee, and I suppose that the pressure of silence overwhelms her desire to remain quiet. She begins. “I went to see Raymond to wish him happy holidays, that’s all. The office was deserted—the whole building—because it was Christmas Eve, but Raymond was working as usual, finishing up some last-minute jobs here and there. I’d been bugging Raymond for a while, trying to get him to commit to some New Year’s plans I had set up. He’d been having some troubles getting out of his party with the missus”—Judith and Jaycee’s intense stares of hatred clash in the middle of the room and explode harmlessly—“and I was helping him come up with … excuses.

“I don’t know what made me do it, but as we sat at his desk, me perched on his lap, laughing about the holidays and our baby and what a wonderful life we were going to have, I felt such … I don’t want to say love, but closeness … Whatever it was, I had to tell him. The truth.

“ ‘I have to show you something,’ I said to him, and he laughed and asked me if I was going to undress. ‘In a way,’ I said. So I stepped out into the middle of the room, took off all my clothes, and removed my guise. I stood there, a naked Coleo, and waited for his reaction.

“Raymond was quiet. Very quiet. I assumed he was furious with me for deceiving him, and was ready to throw me out, call Security … But I know now he was weighing his own options. Then he had me come back to the desk, he sat me down, and he told me his
story. How he was raised. Where he came from. What he came from. And who he really was.

“He wanted to effect a settlement between the humans and the dinos, to introduce his kind to our kind in as peaceful a way as possible. He was so excited, he told me, that he could be the one to bring the dinosaur community out into the open. To bring us ‘out of the closet,’ as he put it, was his fondest dream, and he wanted me to be the figure under whom it could all take place.

“I don’t know if he expected me to be happy, shocked, dismayed, and to be honest, I didn’t know how I felt at the time. There was no time for me to think; you know how it is. I know you know how it is. All of us have been prey to instinct before, it’s our species’ cross to bear—Vincent, you tried to kill me when you thought I was a human and I had seen you in guise; we saw your partner’s reaction to Judith just now. It’s inbred, and what’s more, it’s what we’re taught from day one: If a human knows, a human must die.

“I don’t remember much about the attack. Honestly, I don’t. I do remember coming to in a pool of blood that was not my own and seeing Raymond, who I had grown to care for, dead in the middle of it all. But that drive was still humming in me, and I cleaned myself up, sat down in Raymond’s desk chair, and waited for Judith, who I knew would be arriving shortly.

“My plan was to kill her, leave the office, and disappear to another country: Jamaica, Barbados, the Philippines. I hear Costa Rica is fairly dino-intensive. The plan was to live anywhere that I didn’t have to be around humans; they’d caused quite enough distress in my life.”

Judith stirs to life then, dragging herself up from the floor, keeping a wary gaze on Glenda and me. “She attacked me when I came in. Threw herself at my throat.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you then and there,” Jaycee says, then turns back to me. “But she got me to hold off for just a second, and she told me about the baby.” Turning back to Judith now—“
My
baby. She said that she would continue to fund the experiment, that after we gave birth, I could raise him on my own.

“If I killed her, the experiment would die out. If I told the Council, they would surely destroy the egg and any of Dr. Vallardo’s papers. So we had a deal.”

Jaycee pauses, takes a long breath, glances around the room at the audience she has so competently held in the palm of her tanned fleshy hand. “And that’s all there is to it. That first night, when you came to the nightclub and I got the letter from Dr. Vallardo—that was a false alarm.”

“The egg was showing stresses on its lateral equator,” says the doctor defensively. “I thought it best I should summon you.”

“Whatever the case,” Jaycee says, “it was a false alarm. But I kept in contact with Dr. Vallardo, and last night … well, last night was wonderful, Vincent. I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. But when I called the doctor and he told me to come back to New York, that it was beginning … Can you blame me for not wanting to miss it?”

“Of course not,” I say honestly. “But you didn’t have to drug me.”

“Necessary precautions,” she explains.

I begin to pace the floor again. “Doctor, Jaycee, expect to be called up in front of the National Council within the next few weeks. I think they’re gonna want to hear this one. And don’t either of you make any sudden vacation plans.

“Mrs. McBride, I’m going to take you back to LA with me, and we’ll see what the department wants to do with a cop killer. Glenda, a little help?” Glenda and I flank Judith McBride, each taking a firm grasp on her limp arms. She does not resist.

“It’s happening!” Vallardo cries suddenly, his call echoing across the lab, accompanied by a gurgling squeal blasting out from the nearby speakers. The crackling has amplified as well, filling the air with hot white noise, drowning out Jaycee’s subsequent shriek. Motherly delight? Phantom birthing pains?