Page 50 of Catnapped

“You should run a scan on yourself, too,” he repeated.

I chuckled. Shrugging hurt, and I muttered a few curses for having forgotten. “Sure. I’ll run my scan. So, while this handles the heavy work, is there anything I should know? Any infections, diseases, or whatever, so I won’t panic when I spot them on the diagnostic? If you have cancer with a tumor size of larger than a centimeter, the scanner might even pick it up.”

“Through a blood sample?”

“It’s not just reading your blood. The instant that needle enters your flesh, it pulsed with magic, which ‘echoes’ through your entire body. The scanner then reads the echoes and translates the echoes into data using even more magic. Honestly, what amazes me is how accurate these things can be. The DNA tests can be really wonky, though. It turns out there are very minor differences between what makes someone a human versus elf or pixie, satyr, or centaur. Once you get into the lycanthropy virus, things get exceptionally strange.”

“This was a far geekier conversation than I was expecting to have. Are you going to start talking to me in genome next?”

“I could,” I confessed. “We sometimes need to break into the relationship between cellular interactions during an emergency, and it makes a great deal of sense for me to have some idea what the scientists are talking about when there is a genome architectural disorder, their class, and if the disorder could result in something like heightened infection risk of a generalized plague. For example, take the rabies outbreak recently. Somebody hacked the virus to give it heightened infectivity through aerial transmission. The CDC discovered that people with certain common numerical chromosomal faults were more likely to contract the disease. Interestingly, that fault made those people more likely to be asymptomatic carriers. We think the initial modification of the rabies virus was to take advantage of the fault to help spread rabies through humanoid populations. Until recently, it was believed mice share eighty-five percent of their DNA with humans, which is what the culprits initially used to create and spread the modified virus. In reality, the differential between mouse and human DNA is less than three percent, which made this even more effective. The culprits then worked with gorgons, isolating the numerical chromosomal fault found in roughly forty percent of gorgons that is shared with humans. The fault is present in roughly twenty percent of people.”

“Is it a fault if it’s that prevalent? I’m not sure I understand. What is this fault?”

“The CDC classifies it as a fault because it results in an immune system a little less inclined to respond to certain types of illnesses, including rabies. This allows the virus to replicate without the immune system reacting. In this specific case, the uninterrupted replication of the virus results in the victims being asymptomatic for longer.” I wrinkled my nose at the clever exploitation of a human oddity. “It’s a fault because the lack of immune system response is a result of this specific element of the human genome; it’s considered harmful.”

“I think I’m having an unreasonable and unfair reaction to you talking science to me.”

I laughed. “Fortunately for you, the scanner does not typically register sexual interest as a condition unless you’re under the influence of a demon or devil. If you want to learn more than the basics of that, go ask a scientist. The last time I tried to wrap my head around numeric chromosomal faults, I gave myself a migraine and cried for several hours.”

“That you’re specifying numeric means there are other kinds of chromosomal faults.”

“Don’t ask questions you will regret hearing the answers to, Darian.”

“Okay. Can you explain a numeric chromosomal fault in a way that won’t make me feel utterly inferior, thus making me even more attracted to you and your discussion of science than I already am?”

Men. As far as human males suffering from lust went, Darian did a good job of controlling his urges and impulses, although I wondered how the hell I was supposed to explain such a thing without adding to his attraction problems. “Down syndrome is a numeric chromosomal fault, where a person has forty-seven chromosomes instead of the standard forty-six. That’s one of the more obvious numeric faults. Any time cells have an abnormal number of chromosomes, whether they have more or less than what is anticipated, it’s an abnormality or aberration or anomaly. I haven’t quite figured out what the nuanced differences between those terms are, honestly. I had a hard enough time figuring out how cell division or multiplication failures during stages of conception and fetal development create numeric chromosomal faults. Basically, these problems typically happen sometime after or during fertilization of the egg. When, how, or why remains a mystery I might understand better if my mother cared more about science than trying to convince me I had to be properly subservient or go to hell. I can’t say she’s wrong, since I am going to hell, but I’m not going for the reasons she believes. Anyway, the CDC uses the term fault because calling someone’s chromosomal situation an aberration didn’t sit well with anybody, so we changed the language. People understand there’s something wrong with the patient with that word, and the last thing we need is telling someone suffering from a genetic disorder they’re an aberration! Most of us can stomach abnormality, but even that one is sketchy.”

“Nobody warned me to be aware of the education levels of secretaries. You say your education is lacking, but then you start talking about cellular structure, and I’m thinking I need to go dig out some science books to keep up, and I wasn’t home schooled.”

I laughed. “I have a high school diploma, Darian. I never went to college. I started in the CDC as entry level because that is what I could do, there was an opening, and I was honest on my resume about my situation. My education was too haphazard to qualify for the kind of colleges I wanted to attend, and I couldn’t afford the colleges I could attend without scholarships, so I decided to educate myself. Just because my GPA was good my senior year didn’t mean the rest of my education didn’t count as a black mark against me. I sucked at the tests for college entry, too. And don’t get me wrong. Not all home schooled kids have my problems. It was the excessive influence of religion at the cost of science and history that screwed me over. A lot of parents do a great job home schooling; the CDC often checks for that because the home schoolers are often more self-driven than the publicly educated. Having a mix results in a more robust employee base.”

“Is your problem due to the fact you missed foundational education?”

“Yep. It’s fine. It worked out. I mean, it worked out until I educated myself into accidentally being able to see through divine shrouds. That’s a problem. I like living. But first, I have to find my cat. To find my cat, I have to make sure the scanner is working properly. That means waiting for your test to come through and evaluating if it’s taking readings accurately. Humans make the best fodder for that. After it looks like the scanner is working, then I can evaluate the samples. Unfortunately, this model can’t do dual readings. It’s good at what it does, but it’s inflexible in that regard.”

“Relax, Diana. We should get a lot of good information out of the paperwork, and waiting for a few hours to start working on the samples shouldn’t be an issue. Considering how my family operates, your cat is probably as safe as a bunch of nosy archangels on a mission can make him, the Devil probably has the culprits pissing their pants—or he has sent a minion or ten to steal your cat from the lab operators. Now, that said, it’s entirely possible Lucifer’s keeping an eye on the situation explicitly to get you to go in and raise hell. Some things he really can’t meddle with or he could break everything. But he really wants you on his team, and that means making sure your cat emerges from this unscathed.” Darian snapped on a pair of gloves and grabbed the first stack of papers we’d located in the trailers. “We’ll start with the exterior paperwork, as I expect that will be the quickest to sort through. Mostly, you need to write down anything I tell you to while I shuffle through these. We’ll bag them after we’ve looked through and photographed copies for ourselves. We rinse and repeat until we’ve handled every sheet of paper we grabbed. By the time we’re done, your scanner should have my results finished. At that point, it’ll be late, we’ll need some sleep, and we’ll start again tomorrow with the vials. Ready to show me just how good of a secretary you are?”

I got up and put the scanner on the bed so it could do its work without us banging into it and potentially scrambling the results. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Good. Hold onto your britches, because this is going to be a rough ride.”

Darian underestimated my tolerance for mundane paperwork along with my base ability to transform chaos into order. After five minutes of twitching through his haphazard attempts to organize the mess of documentation, I slapped his hands and took over, shuffling through the sheets to figure out what they were, who they were intended for, what purpose they served in the general scheme of lab operations, and otherwise determining a coherent method for filing and registering every paper.

Within an hour, I had everything separated into piles by type and age, and a sea of note stickers flagged the important sheets.

Darian stared at me the entire time I worked, his mouth hanging open.

“I’m a secretary,” I reminded him. “You should see what my one boss gives me. His office is the equivalent of a disaster zone. He walks in, and paperwork disasters happen. It’s my job to organize his disasters. This is barely a blip compared to him. He’s a brilliant man, but he views tossing the used sheets across his desk to deal with later as a viable way of storing important papers. We’re not here to glean every single sentence from every single sheet. We need the important information, such as addresses, names, phone numbers, and subjects.” I pointed at the largest pile. “Those are the invoices for various animal care products. No services. The veterinarian supply store they were using might be a place to check into, as they’re probably involved. Some of the drugs are restricted, and this lab likely doesn’t have the right licenses to order the classes of drugs they were receiving. So, the supply center is a good place to investigate.”

“Drug licensing is something I can access with my various permits.” Darian grabbed the stack and shuffled through until he found the sheets dedicated to the supplier. He went to his laptop, typed in the names provided on the receipts as the recipient, and shook his head. “There’s no valid drug licenses under these names in the state of California or in the state of Utah, where the supplier is located. The invoices imply the orders were picked up in person. No shipping addresses listed on the forms, no shipping fees.”

I nodded, and I gestured to the next stack in line. “Those are their tax documentation; it looks like the company was about to file various documentation with the government to cover up their activities, but the bust happened before the filings could happen. At first glance, I suspect a lot of it is generally falsified. There’s no evidence of any actual incoming monies from the other documents I looked over, so someone was funding it out of pocket and pretending to have expenses and earnings.” I pointed at the next stack. “That’s definitely falsified payment information on them receiving money. The CDC doesn’t issue payments out of the office they picked for their cover up. It would have triggered a flag, leading to their downfall if they had submitted it. It’s a trap the CDC likes to use; they have an office that looks like it should be responsible for issuing payments, but that building never issues payments, so it’s used as a trap.”

“That is disgustingly clever of the CDC.”

“Fraud is common, and it’s an easy way to catch people in the act. The CDC issues a lot of payments, so making claims of receiving a payout is often done. But the CDC is meticulous about tracking payouts, so it rarely works out for the crook.”

“Yet you’re telling me about this.”