They crossed the drawing room, but before Swithen could open the door, Liddon said, “Wait. I have a what-if of my own.”
“I’m getting good at this.”
Liddon said, “What if you experienced something so astounding that it could turn your concept of life upside down, blow apart your idea of how the world works.”
“Astounding – how, what?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just say there was something that happened, something so difficult to get your head around, you needed to think hard about it.”
“You have a close encounter of the third kind or something?”
“No. Something more astounding. Just say it’s something, once you experience it, you need to think hard about it. But suppose you saw that chances were, if you thought about it enough, you would have to change almost everything about yourself.”
“What’s everything?”
With a sweep of his hand, Liddon indicated the elegant room with its priceless antiques and by extension the house and the inheritance.
With a wry contempt for the very concept of being astounded by anything, Swithen said, “And if I don’t think hard about this experience? If I just say ‘Screw it, I don’t care what it means,’ and instead I just keep on keepin’ on?”
“Then nothing changes for you. You lead the life you always wanted to live.”
“Then why is this even a what-if? I’m not that big a fool, and for sure, you’re not.”
Liddon didn’t reply.
Frowning as though having doubts about his defense counsel, Swithen said, “What does this have to do with me, you, and staying out of jail?”
“Nothing,” Liddon said. “If I hadn’t already decided to say ‘Screw it,’ I wouldn’t have come here. We both know what we want, and there’s no reason we can’t have it.”
Clearly puzzled by this entire exchange, Swithen said, “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m more than all right,” Liddon assured him. “I’m the best there is in a courtroom. If I put my mind to it, damn if I might not convince a jury that Branden Jones is the one who ought to be on trial for assault with intent to kill himself.”
After recovering from the jalapeño, Riddle apparently decided that the pantry might contain additional dangerous items that made another snack too risky. He turned out the light, closed the door, and sat with his back to it.
On the floor with her veterinarian, Puzzle seemed to think that she was the recipient of a most relaxing massage, for she purred and sighed as Cammy pressed firmly on all the joints of her hind legs in search of some indication of how Riddle could have performed as he did.
The previous evening, when she’d first seen the creatures, they impressed her as sophisticated mammals with some of the qualities of primates. By the time she had gone home, she regarded them more as primates. The complex and sustained curiosity they displayed by so methodically examining the contents of the living-room desk, the reasoning they revealed in their raid on the pantry, and the upright running posture that Riddle exhibited in his reaction to the hot pepper argued that they were hominids. But the only hominids on Earth were human beings and the extinct races of ape-men from which it was thought they had evolved.
Except for their well-articulated hands, Puzzle and Riddle did not look much like hominids. In truth she didn’t know enough about evolutionary biology and anthropology to adequately classify any unfamiliar species or to properly compare this one to human beings.
While Cammy was still on the kitchen floor with Puzzle, Merlin padded in from the hallway.
Grady followed him, having quickly showered and dressed in expectation of the authorities. “While I was out of the room, did they suddenly reveal they can fly?”
“No wings yet. And I can’t find anything odd about their joints by palpating them. I’d love to get X-rays. But what would they show, anyway? It’s just not possible what happened – pretty much a dog-form leg straightening into a leg with an entirely vertical humanlike line of extension – and then back again. It’s not simply a matter of two different structures for each ankle, knee, and hip joint. Muscles and tendons serving one kind of joint wouldn’t likely stretch or torque perfectly to serve another kind.”
“You ever see one of those crazy movies about cars and trucks that turn into robots?”
“Transformers. The science, technology, and mechanics of those things are ridiculous, just fantasy, they’d never work in the real world. What Riddle did shouldn’t work in the real world, either, but we saw it happen.”
“Maybe we’re not in the real world.”
“It seems more unreal by the hour,” she agreed.
Pointing to the memory stick from his camera, which Cammy had put on the table, Grady said, “I’ve thought about it, and I’m with you on the photos.”
Before leaving the clinic, she had loaded the photographs from the memory stick into her office computer and then had copied them onto three diskettes. Two of the diskettes were well-hidden at the clinic, and the third was tucked under the cargo-hold mat in her Explorer.
If Homeland Security claimed permanent possession of Puzzle and Riddle and eventually took them away, the photos were going to be blown all over the Internet with Grady’s and Cammy’s testimony. They would mount as strong a campaign as they could to free the creatures, risking prosecution under the National Security Secrets Act.
Puzzle and Riddle were not engineered animals. No scientist on the planet possessed the knowledge or the technology to create them. They were mysterious, and if their origin was ever known, it would not be a cliché like recombinant DNA or extraterrestrial visitation, but something unexpected. No reasonable person could arrive at any sane scenario in which they were a threat to a single human being, let alone to the entire nation.
If Eleanor Fortney and Sidney Shinseki hadn’t reported Cammy to the feds, and if Homeland Security hadn’t moved so quickly, she might have tried to run Puzzle and Riddle out of the immediate area and find a place to keep them for a while, crazy as it might be to go on the lam with two creatures that seemed to be a cross between furry cherubim and Looney Tunes characters. But the authorities were already inbound, they knew her vehicle, and they had the forces to seal off the entire state. To go on the run successfully, she would have needed to leave the previous evening.
As if reading her mind, Grady said, “Maybe there’s still time to turn them loose in the woods.”
Stroking Puzzle, Cammy said, “They’d come right back. I know they would. They’re socialized. They relate to people. Essentially, we’re now a pack. And if they didn’t come back … I’m not so sure how they’d fare in the wild.”
“That’s where I found them.”
“But they hadn’t been there long. Remember – no ticks, no fleas, their fur so clean.”
Merlin issued a low, protracted growl as Cammy had never heard from him before.
Getting to her feet, she said, “Why does this have to happen?”
Body tensed, ears pricked, Merlin growled again and looked at the ceiling.
Puzzle and Riddle were on all fours, poised to sprint, heads cocked, listening.
After a moment, Cammy heard a familiar but not yet identifiable sound in the distance. Then she knew it: the hard, low clatter of helicopters.
“From the