Michael R. Hicks

Here’s a snippet from draft chapter two of Season Of The Harvest. The usual caveats apply for draft tidbits: this is only the first draft, so there are likely some typos and other odds and ends here…

Jack Dawson didn’t even remember the drive home to his two bedroom home in Alexandria. With the life insurance settlement from Emily’s death he could have afforded something larger, but hadn’t seen the point: he didn’t have anyone to share it with, nor did he ever entertain, except occasionally for Sheldon and a couple of his “geek friends” that he usually brought along. He sat at the kitchen table, much like he had after Emily’s funeral, and thought how empty the house was. One of Sheldon’s many girlfriends had insisted on helping him decorate it, and she had actually come up with ideas that appealed to Jack. The furniture was masculine, mainly dark leather and sturdy dark wood, with some of Jack’s own paintings, that he had reluctantly handed over to her so they could be properly framed, hanging in strategic locations throughout the house.

Painting was his main passion outside of work. He didn’t consider himself any good at it, but everyone who ever visited the house had embarrassed him by gushing over the work. He outwardly dismissed the compliments as people just being polite, but a part of him, deep down, enjoyed the praise. The paintings were mostly still life portraits, ranging from an apple that had been sitting on the table, lit by the glow of a setting sun through the window, to his memory’s view of some of the rugged hills of Afghanistan. They couldn’t be called cheery or dark, nor did they follow a particular theme. But each one seemed to evoke an emotional response in those who saw them. Jack painted because he found it inwardly satisfying, and it had been good therapy after Emily’s death. That others might enjoy looking at his work had never really occurred to him.

Tonight, his easel sat in the corner of the living room with a bare canvas. That was how he felt inside as he listened to the rain drum against the roof in the darkness of the evening. Bare. Empty.

With a sigh, he took another swig of beer and set down the bottle, his second so far this evening, on the table before flipping open the folder containing the initial field report on Sheldon’s murder.

Next to the folder was the digital photo frame that Sheldon had bought for him a month ago, and Jack sadly watched the images fade in and out as they had day and night since Sheldon had given it to him. It was an outrageous gadget that Jack never would have bought for himself, but that was the perfect gift from a gadget nut like Sheldon: it not only had a tiny storage card that could hold thousands of photos that the frame would display, but even had Wi-Fi wireless networking, and Sheldon had insisted on hooking it up to Jack’s home network so he could remotely upload his latest ridiculous photos. He was a true character, the perfect complement to Jack’s role of straight man, and Jack desperately missed him.

Unable to look at the photos anymore, he turned off the frame and carefully set it down where he kept it, on a shelf next to the table. There would be a time for grieving and remembrance, but not now. Not yet.

With a heavy sigh, he opened up his laptop and logged into the FBI Intelligence Information Reports Dissemination System (FIDS) to check on any updates on the case. It didn’t take him long to determine that the special agents in Lincoln hadn’t found anything new that leaped out at him as being terribly significant. The forensics team was still hard at work gathering physical evidence, and the small army of special agents was interviewing anyone and everyone who could have had access to the Lincoln Research University building, a special genetics research facility, where Sheldon had been found, and would quickly widen their search from there. So far, no leads had turned up: no one who’d been interviewed remembered ever having seen him.

Fine, he thought, frustrated, let’s see what we can figure out on our own. Jack didn’t consider himself brilliant, but he had a knack for looking at a pile of seemingly unrelated or contradictory information about a case and coming up with a story of what happened. It was all about making associations between the different elements and seeing the underlying patterns. In a way, it was akin to painting, and the “pictures” that he came up with were usually spot on.

Unfortunately, he had very little to work with so far, but that was real life: you never had all the answers you wanted, especially right off the bat. So he started with what he had. He normally used paper of his initial brainstorming, idly doodling on the page as his mind processed information, then he typed things up on the computer later. Pulling a sheet of paper from a small stack, he took a pencil and began to write.

Murder scene: Lincoln Research University genetic research labs; maintenance tunnel. Lincoln Research University. He’d never heard of it. A quick search on the web told him that “LRU” had only opened its doors only a year before. He had assumed that it was an extension of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but it wasn’t. Digging deeper, he found that LRU was a graduate institution that had been largely funded by a grant from New Horizons, a huge agribusiness whose main focus was on producing insect-resistant commercial crops like corn. Technically, some might argue that it was a graduate college focusing on a single discipline and not a university, but for Jack’s purposes the difference was meaningless.

LRU’s web site touted its genetics research labs as the most advanced in the world, and a key asset in developing the next generation of genetically modified, or GM, products in the New Horizons line. If nothing else, the school had certainly attracted a breathtaking array of talent, based on the lofty-sounding bios for the faculty and the incredibly steep entry requirements for student applicants. While it was billed as a learning institution, it was clear that anyone short of a genius would have a tough time getting their foot in the door, which seemed to have driven potential applicants into a frenzy of competition. If the web site could be believed, LRU accepted only one percent of the applicants who met the admission requirements. Having earned a suma cum lauda in your bachelor’s program meant nothing at LRU.

The dean was Rachel Kempf, Ph.D. The photo on her bio page showed a formidable-looking middle-aged woman with an expression that would have been more at home on a drill sergeant’s ID card. Toward the bottom of her long list of impressive accomplishments was a mention that she was also on the board of directors at New Horizons.

No big surprise there, Jack thought as he scribbled more notes on his first sheet of scratch paper. He paused a moment and looked over what he’d written, surprised at how much he’d written down and how few doodles there were. Most of it was probably academic (Bad pun, Jack, he scolded himself), but it was generally better to have too much data than too little.

If nothing else, whatever had drawn Sheldon to LRU fit with the cyber attacks against other genetics research labs. But was LRU the victim of a cyber attack, or had Sheldon gone there for something else?

Checking the FIDS again, he couldn’t find any incident reports of any malicious attacks on LRU’s facilities or staff. So, Sheldon had probably gone there for some other reason. But what?

Jack also needed to learn what other labs were involved to see if he could find a connection. So far, all he had to go on was what Clement had told him, but he couldn’t find any other associations in FIDS.

He was interrupted by a plaintive mewling noise. Looking down, he saw a pair of brilliant green eyes staring up at him from a black, furry face. It was Alexander, his cat. His long hair had a tuxedo pattern, glossy black except for his belly, chin and paws, which were pure white. His long whiskers were also white, and stood out nearly five inches on each side of his muzzle.

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry,” Jack said, darting a glance at the stainless steel bowl on the floor near the refrigerator. He didn’t remember feeding Alexander, but there was still food in the bowl, so he must have. Sighing, Jack leaned back and moved his arms aside, and twenty pounds of sinewy Siberian forest cat leaped nimbly into his lap. Sitting up so he could supervise Jack’s work, Alexander began to purr, the surprisingly loud and deep rumbling filling the kitchen over the sound of the rain.

As he stroked the big cat’s soft coat, Jack began to relax. He thought about how uncanny Alexander was: he could be a royal pain in the ass when he felt like getting into trouble, which seemed to be all the time. But when Jack felt down, Alexander always knew that his human servant needed some therapy.

Damn cat, Jack thought, a small smile coming to his face despite his melancholy mood. Who needs Valium?

Pushing his frustration aside, he focused more closely on the details of the crime scene. According to the field reports, Sheldon had been found in one of the underground service tunnels running under the lab complex. The on-site team had found a trail of blood, believed to be Sheldon’s, leading upstairs to one of the second floor labs.

The entrance to the lab where the blood trail terminated was through a heavy steel fire door set into the concrete-core walls. The door was controlled by a lock that required both a coded access card and five-digit entry key to open. It would have taken a small explosive to blow the lock, but there was no sign of forced entry. So Sheldon, or his assailant, must somehow have had at least one card between them, and one of them had known the code. Unfortunately, the digital access logs for the door had conveniently been erased, as had the previous twenty-four hours of recordings from the building’s security cameras, four of which were in this particular lab.

Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to conceal what had happened there, and it almost certainly had to be someone on the inside. Who else would have that sort of access to the university’s security systems?

From the digital images that had been forwarded over FIDS from the investigating agents and forensics technicians in Lincoln, Jack didn’t have to read the attached report to know that a life or death struggle had taken place in the lab. In fact, it looked like a bomb had gone off in the middle of the large room, with what was no doubt incredibly expensive scientific equipment knocked over or flung from the heavy metal benches lining the room. Several laptops and workstations had been smashed, as if someone had rolled right over the top of them. Along one wall, a bank of huge stainless steel freezers stood open, their contents – hundreds of small containers of corn kernels and other biological samples, the report said – strewn across the floor. Near the main door that led out to the main hallway were the first traces of blood…

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