Free Crime Zero by Michael Cordy

house.
    The night air was cool as she sat on the stoop by Rocky's pen in her backyard on Mendoza Drive. Mendoza Drive was a grand name for the rough track. Her house was at the end surrounded by woods and fields. Her nearest neighbor was hundreds of yards away, and that was just as well considering how noisy Rocky could get.
    At more than four feet tall Rocky was a massive chimpanzee. If he put his mind to it, he could easily tear a man apart. He had been one of the original primates on Project Conscience. In Kathy's laboratory at the Stanford Medical Research Center as many as eight apes used to be housed in the adjoining primate compound. But since the project had moved on to human volunteers three years ago, the apes had been found homes in local zoos and wildlife sanctuaries.
    However, Rocky was too old, and after his contribution to her work she felt obliged to care for him. So under the instructions of a keeper from the Charles Paddock Zoo down in Atascadero she had built this enclosed ape house in the garden of her stucco house on Mendoza Drive. Rocky had been instrumental in testing her discovery of the seventeen genes that coded for aggressive violent behavior.
    A normal chimp, he had been unusually violent when younger, almost killing one of the other apes. But ever since he had received one of the earliest somatic gene therapy serums taken from the genes of a smaller, gentler bonobo chimp, Rocky's behavior had changed markedly, prompting many of the developments on Project Conscience. The reformed bruiser was now violent only when he thought Kathy was in danger; otherwise he was as mild as the proverbial lamb.
    She put her half-empty mug of tea down on the ground next to her mobile phone and briefcase. After the Tice hearing this morning she had returned to her laboratory on Pasteur Drive at Stanford University. Any thoughts of Luke Decker were quickly pushed from her mind when she received the fax from the Food and Drug Administration giving her approval to test her viral vector on criminal volunteers. Grinning from ear to ear, she had broken the news to her two research assistants, Frank Whittaker and Karen Stein, and the lab technicians. An impromptu party in the labs had followed. So when she had rushed off to ViroVector to share the good news with Alice Prince, she'd felt deflated by her less than enthusiastic reaction. Still, tonight's farewell drinks for her assistants, Frank and Karen, had doubled up as a celebration as well. Kathy had taken them and the lab technicians out for a meal before dropping Frank and Karen off at the San Francisco airport.
    She didn't begrudge them their six-week field trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo; after all she had helped arrange the sponsorship from ViroVector. And even though the timing wasn't ideal, Alice Prince had arranged for two fully qualified scientists from ViroVector to stand in while they were away. It was just that Frank and Karen had been with her from the beginning and had become more than colleagues; they were her closest friends in California. Staring up at the clear night sky, Kathy saw an airplane pass overhead. In a few hours theirs would be doing the same.
    Reaching into her briefcase, she pulled out the folder she had prepared for tomorrow's meeting with Alice Prince and Director Naylor. Just reading the title, "Project Con-science--Next Steps," gave her a thrill.
    Would Project Conscience actually work? Alice Prince could be strange at times, but her work was brilliant, and Kathy had learned a huge amount from her in the last nine years at the cutting edge of gene therapy and viral vector technology. And although her other main sponsor, Madeline Naylor of the FBI, was paranoid about secrecy, at least she gave clear direction on the few occasions they met.
    Kathy stood up and patted Rocky's arm through the wire of the pen. She picked up her briefcase, unlocked the door, and walked to the back of the pen, where she bent down to an old school trunk