Read Online Reckless Creed by Alex Kava - Free Book Online

bound to happen. Migratory waterfowl were the original culprits, bringing it with them into the Pacific Flyway. By the time the virus made its way to the Midwest it had already changed and mutated in order to survive. H5N1 is genetically different than the Asian or Eurasian strain.”
    â€œI never thought about it before,” Hannah said. “How easy it would be for migratory birds to bring diseases from clear across the world.”
    â€œMost of the time it doesn’t kill the waterfowl. They’re convenient carriers. But once it infects the domestic bird population like it did with commercial turkeys and chickens in the Midwest, it’s devastating. They’re literally sitting ducks. There’s no way to cure it. No vaccines. Slaughtering the flocks has been the only way to destroy the virus.”
    â€œAnd that’s what Tabor wanted to do with our kennel,” Creed said. “I have to think he was out of line. Maybe just misinformed? He said he was following someone else’s orders.”
    He had been clenching his jaw so tight that it now ached. The coffee had set off an acid storm churning in his gut.
    â€œPlease tell me,” he said, searching the veterinarian’s eyes, “that euthanasia’s not the solution if we find out Grace has contracted this virus.”
    â€œLet’s wait for the results,” she said.
    It was not the answer Creed was hoping for.
    â€œIn the meantime,” she continued, “we need to take precautions for ourselves, too. We’ll need to follow our standard decontamination procedures—coveralls, masks, shoe covers, gloves, and goggles anytime we go into the kennel. And one last thing—none of us should leave the grounds.”

15
    CHICAGO
    N ow in her own hotel room several floors above the victim’s room, Agent Maggie O’Dell finished jotting down all her notes. She had already made several phone calls and guzzled down a Diet Pepsi. The television was turned to a news channel, but only for background noise. She hadn’t unpacked yet except for her notebooks, copies of documents, and her personal laptop, all of which were strewn across the desk and the foot of the bed.
    There was something that troubled her about Tony Briggs’s suicide. Never mind that he had left behind no signs of a ritual or a single good-bye note. His room had been too tidy. Other than the spray on the TV screen and the wall behind—what Platt suspected might be bloody sputum—there were no bloody tissues anywhere. She hadn’t found a single bloody washcloth or towel. In fact, the bathroom actually looked as though someone had cleaned it, and yet the hotel remained adamant that housecleaning had not entered Briggs’s room. And if they had, the wastebasket would have been emptied.
    So did Briggs clean his bathroom? Did he make his bed? Could that have been his ritual? To clean and tidy up his room before he stepped out onto the patio and jumped to his death?
    Anything was possible. She’d seen stranger things in her career as an FBI agent and criminal profiler.
Much stranger things.
    And yet she couldn’t help but wonder if someone else might have come into the room. If not housekeeping, then someone who knew exactly what Tony Briggs was doing.
    O’Dell picked up a sheet from one of the piles. Attached to the corner was one of the few recent photographs they had of Dr. Clare Shaw. The scientist looked younger than her forty-two years. For this photo—one that had been taken and used for her ID badge at the research facility—Shaw had chosen to pull back her dark hair, leaving only bangs that dangled over her eyeglasses. She was attractive, with only subtle wrinkles at the corners of her mouth to hint at her real age.
    She had earned several degrees from Johns Hopkins University in molecular biology, concentrating on genetics and biomedical engineering. Her advanced studies focused on neuroscience and