Free Altar of Eden by James Rollins Page A

family mansion.
    Paint bubbled and peeled across the porch. Its Italianate columns were chipped. Even the carved mahogany front door took an extra hard tug to pull it open, its frame warped from a century of passing seasons.
    She struggled with the door now and fought it open. The house was dark. Her brother was troubleshooting a problem at an offshore oil platform in the Gulf. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.
    Just as well.
    She flipped on the entryway light. A wooden staircase rose on the right side and climbed to a second-story landing and from there up to the third-story level. Overhead, a massive chandelier imported from an eighteenth-century French chateau hung down through the stairwell. Half the bulbs were dark. It took a feat of engineering to change the bulbs and polish the crystals.
    She dropped the heavy case she was carrying by the door, wondering if she had time to draw a hot bath. Back at ACRES, she had changed out of her scrubs and back into her worn jeans and shirt. She longed to shed the soiled clothes and run the hottest bath the old water heater could manage. Maybe with bubbles and a single glass of Chardonnay. A girl could dream.
    It would be a long night, and tomorrow would be a busy day at ACRES. She had done all she could there for now. Critical tests were still processing and wouldn’t be finished until the morning. She was especially interested in the DNA analysis of the extra pair of chromosomes shared by all the recovered animals. Who had been performing these experiments and why? Answers could lie in the genetic codes of those strange chromosomes.
    Before she could reach the stairs a phone jangled from deeper in the house. She hurried across the entryway to a hall table. It must be Jack, though she was surprised he wasn’t calling her cell phone. Her heart beat faster, anxious to hear about the plans for tonight’s hunt. But as she lifted the phone her heart sank—more than it should have—when she heard her younger brother’s voice. It was Kyle, calling from the oil platform.
    “Lorna, just checkin’ in. Making sure the house is still standing.”
    “At the moment it is. Can’t promise anything beyond that.”
    Her brother chuckled. He must be bored. As usual, they spoke more on the phone than at the house. When together, they tried to maintain a measure of privacy for each other, which wasn’t hard in a home with seven bedrooms and five baths.
    “I left a message earlier,” Kyle said. “Figured you must’ve been called into work. Didn’t want to bother you there.”
    “You could’ve called. Though it’s been a crazy day.” She gave him a thumbnail version of what had happened.
    “Christ, that’s really odd.”
    “I know. We’re still doing some lab tests—”
    “No, I meant that Jack Menard called you into the investigation. That must have been uncomfortable.”
    She took a moment to respond. Uncomfortable was a pale description of the storm of emotions that had run through her: guilt, sorrow, shame, anger, and something deeper, something hidden but shared between them. She pictured Jack’s storm-gray eyes, the way his stare seemed to strip her to the bone. Not even her little brother knew the truth about that bloody night.
    “At least you’re done with him now,” Kyle said.
    She found her voice again, but only a shadow of it. “That’s not exactly true. I’m going to help him search for the escaped jaguar.”
    “What do you mean by help? To offer professional advice?”
    “That, and I’m going with him on the hunt tonight.”
    Stunned silence followed, then a hard outburst. “Are you plumb nuts? Why?”
    She glanced back at the black case by the door. It held a disassembled tranquilizer rifle. “I want to make sure we capture the cat alive.”
    “Screw the cat. You’re going into the swamp with a member of a family that would just as soon feed you to a gator.”
    She couldn’t explain why she had nothing to fear from Jack. “I’ll be fine. It