The Devil on Chardonnay by Ed Baldwin Read Free Book Online

at the nails that had held the slanted roof beam in place.  They pointed skyward.
    Ten yards behind the building lay the scorched, twisted metal roof.  The wooden frame blown off with the metal roof was entirely burned away, even the ashes were scattered by the wind. 
    “Blew the roof off,” Boyd said to himself, looking back at the little house.  Boyd turned over the metal roof, hoping he wouldn't find another body.  Instead, duct taped to the roof, he found a melted plastic device with solid state electronics – a cell phone.  He cut the duct tape away and put the cell phone in a specimen bag and into a cargo pocket on his thigh.  Returning to the generator house, he reconstructed in his mind that the cell phone had been taped behind the main roof beam at the lower back of the house, out of sight.  It had triggered an explosive device, probably incendiary.  Instead of setting the building on fire, as had probably happened in the other two buildings, the explosion was confined to a smaller space and had blown the roof off, leaving it to burn furiously a few feet away. 
    “Primate cages,” Joe said solemnly as they stood looking at the remains of the third building. 
    Two dozen wire cages were scattered about under the metal roof.  Five of them contained cooked monkeys.  This building had been smaller and of lighter construction, so the fire hadn’t been as hot.  The monkeys presented a grotesque array of singed, charred and contorted creatures, confined to contemplate their fate as the building had burned. 
    Things must have heated up pretty quick, Boyd thought, as he easily found two of the cell phones concealed in the remnants of electrical junction boxes near the center of the building.  Someone got double-crossed here. 
     “Look here! Incredible!”  Joe said, beckoning toward a scorched bundle at the corner of the building.  “Two monkeys out of a cage and wrapped in paper, probably died before the fire.  I can’t believe these guys were so careless.  They violated every principle of maintaining laboratory animals.  To just leave dead primates wrapped for disposal not 6 feet from the rest of the population is cruel, criminal and highly dangerous.  Maybe they didn’t know what they were dealing with,” he added, shaking his head and stooping again to turn over one of the creatures and look into the bloated face of a dead monkey. 
    If there had been any doubt about why Joe was needed on this mission it was dispelled in the next half hour.  He laid all the monkeys out in a row in front of the building, opened his equipment container and arranged syringes and specimen containers by each body.  Then he went quickly down the line attaching a fresh 4-inch-long needle to each syringe and probing the chest of each monkey to draw blood directly from the heart.  Ignoring Boyd, Joe next produced some large wide-mouth jars and filled them from a gallon jug of formalin, placing one at the head of each monkey.  He plugged a small recorder into his biohazard suit and attached it to his chest, then approached the first monkey and opened his instruments.  Grabbing a scalpel he made a sweeping circumferential cut around the forehead of the monkey, peeling the scalp back from the front.  Next, he produced a battery-operated hand saw and sawed the top of the skull off in the same plane.  When he reached in and cut the spinal cord with a scalpel and removed the brain with one hand, Boyd vomited into his suit. 
    “Monkey Number One is a pigtailed Macaque that appears to have died of natural causes before the fire.  The brain shows numerous petechial hemorrhages over the cortex.  Upon slicing …”  Joe continued dictating as he worked. Using a cutting board and large knife, he sliced the brain like a loaf of bread.  Seeing something that interested him, he cut a small square out with the knife and dropped it into the formalin.  Still retching, Boyd retreated to the generator house to look for