Read Online Mutant by Peter Clement - Free Book Online

or his needing a kick in the ass. Nor had the fact that he didn’t have the sense or courage to listen lately deter her any. In an odd way he took her harassing him as a comforting vote of confidence—her way of saying that she still believed he could stop being such a jerk and get on with his life.
    A widow, Martha had no children, and when Luana had become ill she offered to expand her housekeeping by moving in to help care for her. Just weeks before her death six months later, Luana, her bright eyes glittering from the depths of hollow sockets, informed Steele that Martha would be staying on permanently. Steele, barely able to care for himself at that point, gratefully surrendered to the arrangement.
    Cringing at the memory of his wife’s features on that dreadful morning, he forcefully sustained a happy face. “Gee, Martha. Don’t start going easy on me now,” he replied with a weak chuckle.
    “Now that’s something I haven’t seen in a while,” she told him, pointing to his smile as her own flint-gray eyes softened. “It’s a pathetic little bitty thing, but better than nothing. Make sure you don’t forget to bring it home with you.”
    The sound of the phone brought him out of a deep sleep.
    “I told you she’d be trouble!” he heard Morgan declare excitedly at the other end of the line.
    “Who?”
    “Sullivan! I think she’s been poking around the place.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “A couple of kids parked in the lot the night of the press conference, apparently to smooch. One of the guards took down the plate number when he shooed them off. He passed it on a few days later to a friend who’s a cop and asked him to trace it when he could, just to be on the safe side. It turned out to be Sullivan’s car. The head of security called me just now after he got the match. I figure those kids were waiting for her, maybe creating a diversion with the guards to let her get away. Why else would they be in our neck of the woods?”
    “Are you sure she left the building that afternoon?”
    “Absolutely. I called the day shift, and the guards at the door told me that they signed her out. But no one at the gate remembers a solitary woman leaving early. She may have hid out on the grounds in the dark.”
    “Is there any way she could have sneaked back into the building?”
    “No. Of that we’re sure. The electronics in there make it safer than a bank vault. But she could have been outside on her own for hours.”
    The second man gave no reply, thinking over this last piece of information for nearly a minute.
    Morgan broke the silence. “She’s on to us after all, isn’t she!” he declared, his voice cracking with anxiety.
    “No, not necessarily.”
    “Then what the fuck was she doing here?”
    “Probably collecting twigs and leaves.”
    “What!”
    “It’s how she would check out a lab in your business, hoping to find what vectors you’re using and if they’re infecting the DNA of every living thing in the vicinity.”
    “Then we’re okay,” he said, his voice immediately dropping an octave. “With our new filters, she’ll find no traces of what we’re making, right?”
    “Right,” he answered, getting out of bed and growing uneasy over how readily Morgan grew rattled whenever they encountered a problem. The man would need a lot steadier nerve for what lay ahead. “And more than that, she could be doing us a big favor,” he reassured, figuring the more secure he made Morgan feel, the better.
    “How do you mean?”
    “Think about it. You could confront her with the fact that you know she snooped around the place illegally, then challenge the great Dr. Kathleen Sullivan to release the results she obtained from the samples she took. She’d have to pronounce us clean as a whistle. A seal of approval like that from someone with her credibility would guarantee we won’t be under any additional scrutiny for the time being. What better conditions could we have for preparing the