They all piled into the service truck and headed out. Jack placed a quick call to his own brother about the change in plans. Randy still had Burt and had been waiting at the station for them to head back home together.
“Then I’ll just meet you at that zoo place,” Randy said and hung up before Jack could argue.
Lowering the phone, Jack glanced sidelong at his passenger. Lorna shared the front seat with him. He could tell she was lost elsewhere. Her eyes had crinkled at the corners, her mind already working on the mysteries surrounding this case, the woman becoming the doctor again.
Kyle leaned forward, intruding between them. “So what’s up with these damned animals anyway? What’s so special about them?”
Lorna muttered, still lost to the moment, “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Chapter 25
An hour later, Lorna sat before a thirty-inch wide-screen LCD computer monitor in the genetics suite. Multiple windows were open on the screen, but she studied the one in the center. A three-dimensional image of an avian brain rotated on the screen, compiled from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan done on the African Grey parrot named Igor. A neighboring window showed a photo of the reptilian-looking featherless bird.
“What are we looking at?” Jack asked behind her.
Zoë Trent answered him, standing on her other side. “Something remarkable.”
The neurobiologist shared the small conference room with them off the main lab. Her husband, Paul, was still out there reviewing the DNA analysis on the aberrant chromosome.
“What’s wrong with this bird?” Kyle asked.
Her brother sat on a stool beside the small birdcage that held Igor. The parrot sat sullenly, hunched low to the perch. The bird was nothing like the bright and attentive fellow he had been earlier. Also watery droppings covered the bottom of his cage.
Diarrhea due to stress.
A knot of annoyance burned in Lorna’s gut. Her colleagues should have waited until she returned to perform those extra tests. The health and well-being of the facility’s animals were her responsibility. And that duty extended to the animals rescued from the trawler. The creatures had already been through enough. They didn’t deserve to be treated like guinea pigs here, too.
“How come this ugly guy doesn’t have any feathers?” her brother asked.
Lorna answered without taking her eyes off the screen. “First, he’s not ugly. Second, we think it’s a genetic throwback, a lost trait that’s surfaced again.”
“Weird.”
She didn’t argue with that. It was weird. Everything about this was strange. “Just keep him company. He’s spooked. Talk to him.”
Parrots were social creatures and found solace in companionship.
Kyle shrugged and leaned closer to the cage. Her brother lowered his voice to a gentle coo. “So who’s an ugly bird? Not you.”
Igor cocked an eye quizzically at Kyle and responded with a soft clucking, the avian equivalent of a chuckle.
Like Lorna, her brother always had a way with animals. And despite his quick temper, he had a big heart, which might explain his volatility. He felt things deeply, and she knew how much he loved her, sought to protect her. With their father passing away when they were children, he had always taken on the role of the man of the house-and even more so after their mother had died. She both loved him for this effort and bristled against it, but in the machismo world of the South, it was an all-too-common family dynamic.
Jack drew her attention back to the computer. He leaned a hip on the desk. “So what’s so remarkable about this MRI scan?” he asked Zoë. “Why insist Lorna see this first?”
The neurobiologist pointed to the monitor. “It’ll help explain why we didn’t wait before performing the electroencephalograms.” Her voice took on an apologetic tone, but it didn’t appease Lorna.
She studied the rotating image. The brain looked like most birds’, and in fact it was not that much different from a mammalian brain. On the screen, the spinal cord bloomed into a medulla, a cerebellum, and a cerebrum that was divided into two hemispheres. She noted something strange almost immediately: five distinct darker objects appeared to be embedded between the hyperpallium and mesopallium layers of forebrain, the avian equivalent to the human neocortex. They were crisp and hard-edged, appearing almost crystalline in structure.
She rotated to get a top view of these odd densities. The five formed a perfect pentagram within the neurological tissue.
“What are they?” she asked.
Instead of answering, Zoë reached and tapped a button on the keyboard. The parrot’s brain vanished and was replaced by another. “This is the brain from one of the capuchin monkeys.”
Lorna pictured the conjoined twins as she leaned closer to the screen. The same strange densities were lodged within the brain tissue of the monkey. She revolved the image. The same number and lodged in the equivalent morphological locations. Even the pattern was the same. A perfectly symmetrical pentagram.
Despite the warmth of the room, a chill edged through her.
Zoë shifted closer. “We found these same odd intrusions in all the animals recovered from the trawler. I can show you the other scans.”
Lorna shook her head, trusting her colleagues’ assessment. “Are they implants?”
“We don’t think so.” Excitement welled in the neurobiologist’s voice. “We think they might be natural features.”
“Natural?”
“That’s right.” Zoë shifted the computer mouse to zoom down on one of the densities. “Look closer. See how there’s no scarring around the intrusions like you’d expect from a surgical implant. Also there’s no granulation tissue walled around it like you’d see from an embedded foreign body.”
“Then what are they?”
Zoë shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Metoyer wants to know. Jon Greer over in pathology is attempting to dissect one from the dead cub’s carcass so we can study it. He’s also taking multiple brain biopsies around the intrusion.”
“Biopsies?” Jack asked. “Why?”
Zoë circled a finger around the abnormalities on the computer screen. “The neurological tissue appears to be denser within the zone of the intrusions. Dr. Metoyer wanted to confirm a supposition that this region is made up of more densely packed neurons.”
Lorna wanted to know, too. She remembered the glow from the jaguar’s eyes, its cunningness. Even the parrot’s ability to recite the mathematical equivalent of pi. More neurons translated to a richer synaptic environment, which meant more computing power to be tapped. This discovery could explain why the animals seemed especially hyper-intelligent.
Zoë straightened and ran a hand through her short black hair. “Now you know why we wanted to perform those EEGs. We were so excited. We couldn’t wait.”
Lorna slowly nodded. By studying the electrical patterns of the brain, they were looking for any change in functionality associated with these intrusions. “What did you find with the EEGs?”
“At first nothing. Each animal’s brain-wave patterns seemed normal enough, each as unique as a fingerprint. There seemed to be no common ground.”
Rather than disappointment, Zoë’s face shone with amazement. Lorna knew there was another shoe still to drop. Zoë glanced over to Igor’s cage.
Lorna followed her gaze, then back to the neurobiologist. “What?”
“I’ll show you.” Zoë sidled next to her and tapped rapidly at the keyboard. “I’m going to display the set of four EEGs we took from the parrot, the two monkeys, and Bagheera, the cub. For simplicity’s sake, I’m only going to show a single lead from each animal.”
The readings appeared on the screen.
Zoë glanced over to Lorna with one eyebrow cocked. She read her colleague’s question. Can you see anything weird here?