"She heard him talking over and over about 'the Lamb.' And we thought he was talking about Christ — we had heard the expression 'the Lamb of God.' We thought he must have gone crazy with religion. Now I know he was talking about Dolly. They must have been afraid that the news about cloning was going to affect them."
The rain lessened and then stopped altogether as suddenly as it had started. Jude turned off the wipers. The black tarmac ahead was streaked with puddles and sent up puffs of steam.
Skyler told about their growing doubts and suspicions, the trip to the Records Room and the discovery of Patrick's body and how Julia had learned the computers and become convinced she had discovered the passwords to unlock the files.
And then at long last, he came to the part he had dreaded, the final chapter. Speaking haltingly, he told about Julia's death — how she'd disappeared and he had run in desperation from Kuta's shack to the girls' barracks and then to the Big House, how he'd found her body in the basement morgue, lying on the slab, serenely white and beautiful but grotesquely maimed, cut open, her insides missing.
And when he finished with that description, he finished with his tale and could not bring himself to talk about his escape or anything else.
The car was silent. Jude lighted a cigarette, and Tizzie sat with her knees raised, hugging them, her head to one side, staring through the raindrop-streaked window.
"Jesus, Skyler. I'm so sorry," Jude said finally, reaching over and patting his knee.
He was moved by Skyler's story and by the openness and vulnerability he'd displayed in telling it, and again he felt that sensation of brotherly protectiveness. The world was a large and dangerous place, never more so than now, and Skyler was ill-equipped to deal with it. Jude would have to make sure that no harm came to him.
But at the same time, Jude's gesture had a slight absentmindedness to it, because his mind was elsewhere. For he had heard something in Skyler's long account that set off a giant alarm bell — it appeared to confirm a suspicion that had taken hold in his mind like a tiny dark cloud on the horizon. It had been growing for some time now, and it seemed ready to burst, like the thunderhead that had clapped open upon their heads.
A smaller, minor suspicion had taken hold, too, and this one he decided to test as soon as they stopped for the night.
They drove into Albuquerque and found a small hotel on Central Avenue and took three rooms on the ground floor.
Jude took a hot bath, filling the tub almost to the rim, and soaked in it for a long time, thinking things through. Then he got out, dried himself, changed into a fresh pair of blue jeans and a clean shirt and walked down the hall to Skyler's room. He paused before knocking on the door, thought he heard voices inside, and gave two quick raps with his knuckles. Skyler opened it and Tizzie was there, sitting on the foot of the bed. She seemed embarrassed, and Jude felt suddenly awkward — though he quickly put that to one side and got down to the business at hand.
"Skyler," he said, looking into that face that so resembled his own, "I've got something to show you. I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not, I don't want you to get too upset."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper, carefully opening it and smoothing it out upon the top of a table. It was the photograph of the judge that he had taken from the newspaper files.
Skyler stared down at it fixedly, his mouth dropping open slightly, and Jude could tell from reading his face and seeing the dawning realization begin to contort his features, that his suspicion had been correct.
The face in the photo was known to Skyler.
"Where did you get this?" he asked urgently, confused.
"It's a picture of the judge I was telling you about, the one up in New Paltz. I'm beginning to think the person who was killed up there, whoever it was, looked exactly like him."
"What's going on?" demanded Tizzie. "What's this all about?"
"He's older," said Skyler. "The eyes look a little different and the hair's not the same, but otherwise it looks like him…"
"I was afraid of that," said Jude, speaking softly.
Skyler sat on the bed, slumped.
"Come on," insisted Tizzie. "Jude, tell me, for God's sake. What's going on? Who are you talking about?"
"Raisin," said Jude. "He didn't die in a boat leaving the island. That was a lie. He made it to the mainland. In fact, he made it all the way up to New Paltz, and he was probably there trying to track down his double, the judge. Maybe he even learned the name of his double before he left the island — maybe that's why he left. He might have cracked the code just the way Julia did."
"And what happened to him?" she asked.
"He probably made contact with the judge and they killed him."
Now it was Tizzie's turn to be dumbfounded.
"And who are they?"
"That's what we have to find out. But I'll give you odds it's those thick-necked thugs with the streak in their hair — the Orderlies."
"So they'll do anything," she said. "They'll even use the Orderlies as assassins. "
Jude turned to her. "Who do you mean when you say they?" he asked.
But now Tizzie was worried. "What if these Orderlies are after us? What if they're on our trail right now?"
But Jude was still thinking about his own question to her and did not feel like calming her fears right now. He knew he would be thinking about it later, back in his room, when he replayed the exchange in his mind.
Skyler looked dreadful; the color had drained from his face, and his forehead had broken out in beads of perspiration that settled in the rivulets of the worry lines. He lay down on the bed and turned his face to the wall. Jude worried that he had broken the news about Raisin too coldly. Tizzie asked Skyler if he were getting sick, felt his forehead with her palm and said she thought he was running a fever.
But most of all, Skyler just wanted to be alone. He told them so, and they left the room, closing the door quietly behind them.
Out in the corridor, Tizzie walked, holding Jude gently by the elbow.
"How did you know the body was Raisin's?" she asked.
"I didn't know for sure. I guessed. But it was an educated guess. McNichol — he's the Ulster County coroner — initially identified the body as the judge's. The DNA was the same. So it was a clone. Not that many people have left the island. And I remembered that the judge was taking medication called Depakote. It's for the treatment of petit mal epilepsy. One of the organizations he joined as a board member raised money to study neurological disorders. But not until I heard Jude's story did I know that Raisin also suffered from it."
Tizzie looked at him, impressed.
"Don't you see?" he continued. "Everyone on that island is a clone of someone over here — that's what they're raised for. A whole legion of doubles. That's what this whole thing is all about — some kind of horrible experiment."
He could tell that what he was saying upset her, but he needed to air the questions that had been eating away at him.
"There's one thing I don't get at all. When the judge saw me, he freaked out. He practically fell off his chair. I can't figure that out — I never saw him before in my life. What do I have to do with him or he with me?