It was his expression, rather than the words on the page, that conveyed to her the significance of this discussion. Elizabeth Weir was a diplomat, and her strengths lay in reading people, not nucleotide sequences. She had an advantage in this case, because she knew her chief medical officer well. In nearly two years of working together in Atlantis, and the months before that in Antarctica during his attempts to operate the Ancient chair, she'd never seen Carson Beckett look so ill at ease.
Upon hearing his explanation, she understood the basis for his apprehension.
"You've just discovered this?" she asked, handing the printout back across her desk.
Carson hesitated in the middle of a nod. "Yes and no," he replied in his soft Scottish brogue. "I originally identified it during our initial efforts to isolate the ATA gene. We received a great deal of assistance from the Human Genome Project, as well as from Allan Wilson's Mitochondrial Eve research. Through their data we determined that the gene required to operate Ancient technology was first introduced into the human population approximately ten thousand years ago."
"Which fits with what we know of the Ancients' evacuation to Earth from the Pegasus Galaxy during that time period." Elizabeth folded her hands on the desk, a habit she'd cultivated to present an air of interest. In this instance it served to mask her anxiety. "I assume you believe that all of this is interrelated?"
"That I do. I didn't come across my earlier data again until just recently, while making some refinements to the retrovirus." Carson paused a moment, his eyes flicking out from Elizabeth's glass walled office to the city's control room, which was minimally manned for the evening shift. His reluctance came as no surprise to Elizabeth. No one was wholly comfortable with the next planned step of the retrovirus project, but life in the Pegasus Galaxy had forced a kind of moral shift on many aspects of the Atlantis expedition. She just hoped in the case of Michael it wouldn't come back to bite them.
The doctor exhaled a disappointed breath. "At the time of the original research, I'd been focused on isolating exactly what gave General O'Neill the ability to use the Ancient database-to the exclusion of all else. I should have recognized the importance of this other finding immediately."
Elizabeth shook her head. "Hindsight, Carson. No one, least of all you, could have been expected to anticipate what we'd find in this galaxy." With an air of reassurance that she hoped would disguise her own concern, she continued, "It's been ten thousand years, and nothing's shown up in Earth's population to suggest any problems. I'd venture to say that no news is good news."
His concerned expression remained fixed in place. "I probably ought to find that more comforting than I do."
Apparently they were of the same mind. Rising and walking over to the glass wall, Elizabeth crossed her arms and gazed out at the empty gate room. "I suppose this adds a new wrinkle to the retrovirus study. As if we weren't raising some complicated ethical questions with it already."
"In a strange way, I'm more resolved to go forward with the project now."
She turned back to see Carson's lips twisted with grim humor. "At the very least," he continued, "we can take solace in the fact that we won't be the first to tread such shaky ground."
If he could handle this new knowledge without undue alarm, then so could she. Giving a single, sharp nod, Elizabeth said, "All right. Send me your report the moment it's finished. I'll move up our regular check-in time with the SGC so we can get this information to them as soon as possible. What, if anything, they can do with it, I have no idea, but they need to know."
"I'll have the report ready by morning. I'd also like to request that anyone examining the Ancient database notify me immediately if any further references to this topic, or to the Ancient responsible for the research, are found." Collecting the file, Carson stood and, attempting to roll the tension out of his shoulders, started toward the door. "Can I assume you don't plan to participate in movie night? I think they're starting in a few minutes."
She couldn't suppress a wry smile. "I think I'll pass. I have it on good authority that Ronon got to choose tonight's feature, and he's been working his way through the Rambo series. I blame John."
"I'm not sorry to miss it myself, then. Say what you will about our lads, at least they're predictable."
"When they choose to be, anyway. Good night, Carson"
After he had left, Elizabeth stepped out of her office. Intending to go to her quarters, she changed her mind in transit and stopped for a moment at the top of the gate room steps. Although Atlantis operated around the clock to accommodate the vagaries of interplanetary time differences, the expedition's current duty schedule was designed to allow most personnel to stand down in the evenings. The spacious chamber that housed the Stargate seemed even larger at night, its lights dimmed to conserve energy, no technicians chatting or securing equipment.
Normally she enjoyed the stillness at the end of the day, taking it as a sign that all was well-or at least as well as was possible. Tonight she found herself feeling unusually exposed to all the threats, both known and unknown, that lurked beyond the silent gate.
She wasn't a scientist, and so she couldn't see Carson's discovery in purely analytical terms. Science could explain-to a certain extent-why and how a Wraith fed on human life; it couldn't explain the sensation of frozen dread generated by the mere presence of one of the ghastly creatures.
What Carson had found should have been exciting, a leap forward in their understanding of two galaxies and a potential hope for resolving the Wraith issue at last. Instead, she felt unsettled, as if everything they still didn't know was poised to come crashing down on them.
Stepping out of her rental car, Rebecca Larance squinted through the glare of flashing red and blue lights and breathed deeply, preparing herself for what she knew she would see inside. Despite the early hour and freezing temperatures, the suburban street was alive with the curious and the morbid. Death had visited here, and it was the nature of humans to scrutinize it, as if they could gain some understanding, perhaps a talisman against their own inevitable passing.
Based on the number of vehicles parked haphazardly on the manicured lawn, most of the Colorado Springs Police Department had arrived soon after the fire truck and ambulance. Vehicles from the ME's office were also here. Just one thing was absent.
Rebecca turned her attention to the house-small, neat, middleclass modern. Inside, it would not be so neat, and the ME would probably be cursing. Determining the cause of any death was rarely straightforward, but, like all puzzles, the evidence could be pieced together, most often by reverse engineering a sequence of definable events.
This death, however, would defy that methodical, scientific approach, leaving the ME with no option but to use phrases such as heart attack due to an abrupt onset of extreme senescence. The etiology of the death would elude him, just as it had eluded others, because they lacked the tools or understanding to chart the complete desiccation of the victim's body. The heart ceased to beat only because of advanced decrepitude. There was no scientific explanation as to why.
Two uniformed cops were belatedly securing the yard with canary yellow crime scene tape. Several more were directing the inquisitive onlookers-most of whom were dressed in sleepwear and bundled up in overcoats against the cold-to stand back. Firemen were rolling hoses, packing away equipment they'd never used, and climbing back into their trucks. In the near distance a car siren bellowed. Rebecca absorbed the background noise of radios and conversations, a Lilliputian dog yapping from a house across the street, and someone throwing up. She glanced around and noticed a cop bent low between the house and a tree strung with Christmas lights that had yet to be packed away. The forensics team was going to love that: a rookie's regurgitated takeout meal messing up their crime scene.
Through the glare and confusion, Rebecca saw more uniformed cops easing a visibly distraught man toward a car, no doubt to be delivered to neighbors, friends, family-anything to get him away from a site of inexplicable horror.
"Hey, you! Get that car the hell out of here. This is a crime scene."
And a fresh one at that. Rebecca could almost smell the lingering trace of the perpetrator. She resisted the temptation to study the crowd. It would be pointless; he wasn't the type to take nourishment from the fear he engendered in the living. Instead, she pulled her ID from the pocket of her blue leather jacket and angled it so that the cop approaching her could see it in the light from the lamppost. "Who's in charge?"
The cop looked her over once and turned a pointed gaze to her empty car.
"Contrary to popular myth," Rebecca added, "we don't all wear black overcoats and travel in a posse."
"No! I can't leave! She… she…!"
The cop's attention was drawn to the distraught guy-victim's husband, most likely-being helped into the other vehicle. An agonized sob was cut short when the car door was closed behind him. It was more than grief, Rebecca knew, but an emotion that spoke of horror and something more… an edge of desperation and… urgency? A childhood memory briefly mounted an assault, but her well-honed defenses soon shut it down. Still, she watched the car drive away, vaguely uneasy that she'd missed something.
"This way." With another look, this time frankly appraising, the cop led Rebecca up to the front porch and announced her arrival to his clipboard-wielding partner. "FBI."
"Feds, huh?" The second cop, rumpled, weary-looking, and considerably older but clearly just as disturbed by the situation, regarded Rebecca with a mix of suspicion and relief.
Local law enforcement didn't much like it when the feds stepped on their turf, despite-or perhaps because of-the numerous Denver police officers now assigned full time to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This crime, though, had nothing to do with terrorism. Fundamentalism and terror, yes, but not terrorism as the world currently defined it.
"Not exactly," she replied, trying to suppress a yawn with a rapidly expelled breath that sounded like a sigh. "I'm a forensic psychiatrist. Your boss called my boss after the second victim, so do me a favor, would you, Officer-" she glanced at the nametag- "Wilson, and save any indignation for him."
"Okay, Dr. Larance, but… look, this is a bad one. Really." Even under the frosted yellow porch light, Wilson's features were gray, and his freckled fingers shook as he filled in her information on his crime scene log.
What was the standard for bad? When could someone say with any certainty that one scene was worse than any other? It was all a matter of perspective. For her, for an investigator, it depended on how much could be read from it. Bad was when the body lay intact and clean, a dozen or more people having come stumbling through. Worse was a DOA, the forensic evidence contaminated by discarded items from EMTs and anyone else involved in the failed attempt at first aid. Best was when the patterns of the killer's mind were still intact. Like now.
"I appreciate the heads-up, Officer Wilson. Mutilated and set on fire in what looks like a satanic ritual. Got it." She lifted her cell phone. "Welcome to the wonderful world of text messaging. Detective Ramirez and the ME inside?"
Wilson nodded and kept writing, taking his time to note her ID number. His partner wandered off to man the plastic tape barricade.
"Tell them I'm here. I'd like to get a look in before the crime scene guys arrive and start stomping all over the place." With their sterile equipment and methodical indifference, they would rapidly dissolve the subtle, persistent scent of fear, and the equally subtle sense of satiation.
Pen frozen mid-stroke, Wilson shot her a peculiar look. The crime lab had bitten heads off over the mess the Sheriff's Department had made of the first cases.
"Kind of ruins the atmosphere for me. You know what they say about profilers," she added with a conspiratorial grin.
A familiar expression settled over his face; contempt born of ignorance, with a hefty dose of good old-fashioned chauvinism thrown in. Rebecca didn't come across it too often, but there were still some old timers who lumped profiling into the same category as Tarot card reading and crystal ball gazing, plus maybe a touch of voodoo-the latter no doubt inspired by the occasional need to interpret artfully macabre displays of human entrails.
Giving no indication that he'd even considered her request, Wilson went back to writing.
Rebecca's patience was pretty much at an end. Enduring a transatlantic flight in a coach class seat beside some guy whose philosophy of personal hygiene didn't include deodorant had been bad enough, but, to add to her misery, he'd had the most vocal case of sleep apnea Rebecca had ever encountered. By the time she'd cleared customs, collected her luggage, and gotten a taxi to her apartment in D.C., she'd seriously entertained the idea of ignoring the order to get her ass out to Colorado Springs. A hot shower and comfortable bed beckoned.
It had been a nice fantasy, but the situation was escalating and the FBI only had so many resources to go around. She'd had just enough time to swap the dirty clothes in her suitcase for clean ones, calla cab-same taxi, same driver-and head back to the airport.
She was about to pull rank when a touslehaired detective with a caffeine-deprived expression emerged from the front door. Ramirez, presumably, had been dragged out of bed for this one. "You the profiler'?" he asked, shooting her a hopeful look.
Wilson, who looked more like he'd been dragged out of a marriage, stopped writing and looked up. "By the way," Rebecca told him, "she's not going to take you back, so deal with it."
"I'll take that as a yes," Ramirez said, smirking.
Ignoring Wilson's dropped jaw, Rebecca introduced herself, and said, "Tell me about the vic."
"Jamie Cabal, thirty eight, engineer; three months pregnant. Her husband, Logan, got here about two minutes ahead of the fire trucks. Somehow he managed to keep it together long enough to put out the fire with an extinguisher." Ramirez's dark-eyed gaze slid from Rebecca's and moved across the faces in the nearby crowd.
"Don't bother," Rebecca told him. "Not his style to hang around." A couple of television trucks had arrived and were setting up rooftop cameras, completing the scene.
Ramirez's gaze returned to hers. "His'? Witnesses in the D.C. cases all saw a woman."
"That was D.C. This is Colorado. How 'bout we go inside and you can walk me through it?"