Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

lock was holding. Then he pulled down the shade. “No,” the little boy said. I could hear him whining as he was being dragged to the safety of another room.
    I didn’t stay there on the fire escape to wait for the cops. I had other things to do. I stood carefully, did a quick check of body parts—my own—and when I found I was more or less intact, climbed up the ladder I’d missed on the way down. My cell phone was next to the parapet between this building and the next. I picked it up, shoved it back into my pocket, and tried the door to the stairs, finding it locked.
    Ignoring my scraped hands and bleeding knees, I went quickly over the low wall to the next building, the one abutting Sophie’s. The fire door was locked there, too, but this building also had a fire escape. I climbed down the ladder, trying to think about anything but how much it was shaking and pulling away from the brick wall of the building, bits of mortar falling to the garden below as I descended as quickly as I could, trying my best not to make noise, which was, of course, a hopeless endeavor.
    The second-floor fire escape was the last one. From that one you could lower a ladder to the garden next to Sophie’s, if you had the tools to get it free. Apparently there hadn’t been a fire in this building for fifty or a hundred years. No way was I going to get this ladder to slide down. So I climbed over the edge and hung by my tom hands, dropping gracelessly onto the brick patio outside the living room of the vacant apartment, spun around, pulled open the window, and, in no time, was out on Third Street and heading home.
    I called Chip when I got to Bleecker Street, told him I was alive, skipped a few of the details, like the stuff that had happened on the roof and my escape through the empty apartment next door to Sophie’s. But I did tell him I’d found the lab where the cloning had been done and that I had the name of the geneticist who’d done the astonishing work sub rosa. He asked if I wanted him to come over. I told him no, I had to do some research, find out all I could about Ruprecht Philips before morning.
    “What then?”
    “Depends on what I find.”
    No one said anything for a minute. I thought about changing my mind, asking him to come over, bring his laptop, help me with the research. Then I thought about him seeing my hands and knees all bloody and raw and decided it wasn’t a good idea to risk clicking on the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” thing, making him feel he’d failed to protect me from the charging rhino.
    “Not to worry,” I said, wincing as my jeans pulled against one knee where the fabric had stuck to the wound, thinking if I wasn’t in jail by morning, I might do something the good doctor and all his colleagues no longer did. I might make a house call.
    There were no cops waiting for me on Tenth Street, only dogs, three of them, all acting as if I were Santa Claus with a bag full of liver treats. Dashiell spent a lot of time sniffing at my bloody knees. The bullies licked my hands. I fed them, let them out, and got to work.
    At a quarter to four, the excitement of the hunt keeping me wide awake, I found what I was after, an article about Ruprecht Philips, whose name I’d gotten from the mailing label on the cover of Clone Magazine. He’d been doing research on cloning for a small lab that was hoping to corner the market on human body parts, hoping that instead of waiting for a new kidney, patients would be able to buy one. The lab had lost funding when Clinton called the ban on human cloning and my guess was that Charles Madison had seen that same article and had snagged him for Side by Side.
    I wondered if it was Philips who had taken the DNA samples from Blanche, though it could just as easily have been Loma, going into the back room and taking cheek swabs. Sophie said she never saw the vet. I’d read the instructions at VetGen’s web site and it didn’t seem to me you’d have to be a rocket scientist to follow them.
    Okay, I thought, making notes as I did, let’s say Madison set up a lab for Philips in the cottage, paid him a fat salary, had him there cloning dogs.
    But why? What the hell was he doing there that made it worth killing Sophie?
    And Mel?
    Then I thought about the loft on Gansevoort Street, about the name on the bell. Didn’t that mean that Mel was Madison’s son?
    Impossible. No one would . . .
    But he hadn’t sent Joe to kill Mel. He’d sent him to kill me. Twice. Maybe three