A Dangerous Breed

By Thomas P Hopp

DNA-test researcher Peyton McKean and his sidekick Fin Morton are called in to help unravel some inexplicable DNA results in a grisly murder case in a desert canyon in eastern Washington State. Blood traces suggest the perpetrator was wounded but the sample contains DNA from both canine and human sources. While McKean gathers more samples, Charlie Moses, a Native American traditionalist whose campsite is nearby, joins them. Sheriff Joe Tanner quickly establishes that Moses has no alibi and moves him to the top of his list of suspects. Moses, on the other hand, proposes that the killer might be Woyotl, a half-man, half-coyote creature of his family legends.

McKean confirms that the blood indeed contains both human and canine DNA, and this leads him to play a hunch. He visits the nearby Hanford Nuclear Power facility where a former colleague, Derek Curman, was carrying out experiments aimed at creating dogs capable of entering radiation spill sites. It doesn't take long to establish that Curman had genetically altered his dogs, and also to learn he has mysteriously disappeared, taking one of them with him.

These are just the first clues in a long and convoluted trail that leads back to the canyon, to Moses, and to an entity too awful to contemplate, created by Curman. McKean's horror grows as he realizes the solution to this murder mystery is more astonishing—and terrifying—than anyone could have suspected.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas P Hopp
• Release date: Oct 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465944450

Thomas P Hopp

Thomas Patrick Hopp routinely imagines the unimaginable. He writes science fiction and mystery thriller novels that draw on his background as a scientist and scholar of the natural world in all its glory and terror. His stories have won multiple literary awards and garnered him a worldwide following. He is a member of both the Mystery Writers of America and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and served for several years as President of the Northwest Chapter of MWA. Tom is also an internationally recognized molecular biologist. He discovered powerful immune-system hormones and helped found the multi-billion-dollar Seattle biotechnology company Immunex Corporation. He advised the team that created Immunex’s blockbuster arthritis drug Enbrel. He developed the first commercially successful nanotechnology device, a molecular handle for manipulating proteins at the atomic level, which is used by medical researchers around the world to study human cells and every major microbe known to science.Tom’s NORTHWEST TALES are thrillers set against backdrops of disaster, whether natural or man-made. Earthquakes, eruptions, and epidemics are grist for these gripping adventures. Tom’s mystery stories follow Dr. Peyton McKean, a super-intelligent sleuth known as “The Greatest Mind Since Sherlock Holmes.” Viruses, microbes, and evil geniuses form the core of his opposition. Tom’s DINOSAUR WARS science fiction stories read like “Star Wars meets Jurassic Park.” Featuring laser-blasting space invaders and huge beasts from the past, they follow Yellowstone Park naturalist Chase Armstrong and Montana rancher’s daughter Kit Daniels, who struggle to survive in a world where dinosaurs live again. Most of Tom’s tumultuous adventures are suitable for readers young and old.

Book preview

A DANGEROUS BREED

Thomas P. Hopp

A Peyton McKean Mystery Short Story

Genetically modified tomatoes are the least of our worries.

Copyright 2011 Thomas P. Hopp

Smashwords Editions copyright 2011 and 2016 Thomas P. Hopp

CONTENTS

Blood Evidence

Cog 27

Multiplying Threats

Derek Curman

Dog 106

About The Author

Books by Thomas P. Hopp

Blood Evidence

That’s where the bodies were found. Sheriff Joe Tanner nodded the brim of his gray Smokey Bear hat toward a wide patch of barren ground.

We had followed Tanner along a game trail through the frying-pan heat of the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge to where the sagebrush thickets opened onto a rocky flat surrounded by low black basalt cliffs. The vertical walls, splotched with orange and chartreuse lichen, were baking hot under the fierce sun of an Eastern Washington Indian summer day. Tanner was a big man and sweat had soaked a streak down the back of his gray shirt in the short time since we had left the air conditioned comfort of our cars and hiked to this spot. The sun scorched the top of my forehead where the hair has begun to recede just a little, and I was nearly as uncomfortable as on any day I had spent in Iraq.

In contrast, Peyton McKean seemed almost cool. It was as if his lanky body could somehow radiate heat back the way it had come. Energetic despite the swelter, he moved around the open space quickly with his hands folded behind his back in a schoolteacherly way, his powerhouse cranium shaded beneath a Stetson safari hat of olive-green canvas. He moved to and fro over the gravelly, dusty ground, intensely observing every detail of the crime scene.

They died here? He paused where a wide bed of angular brown pebbles was blackened by two large, oily bloodstains, each four or five feet across.

That’s right, Doc, Tanner replied.

Were the bodies badly decomposed?

Just scattered bones.

Scattered by whom or what?

Tanner shrugged his meaty shoulders. Coyotes?

McKean bent far over to examine the ground closely. I smiled at how his short-sleeved cotton shirt, cargo shorts, and hiking boots emphasized the thinness of his exposed limbs, from the angularity of his boney elbows and knees to the white pallor of his bare arms and calves. Heedless of appearances, he hummed softly to himself while scouring every inch of the bloodstains with his dark eyes. I sensed prodigious mental wheels turning inside a skull that housed what was perhaps the greatest mind since Sherlock Holmes.

It had been a cool and foggy morning in Seattle when I fetched McKean at his waterfront labs for the ride to the east. I had thought him underdressed for the weather on the west side of the mountains. But now I looked vainly for the hint of a cloud in the sky, overdressed as I was in a plaid flannel shirt and slacks. I silently cursed McKean’s habitual lack of warning as to exactly where we would be going or what conditions we would encounter on our trip. But I had accepted his offer to accompany him as his driver and companion, knowing as I did that to deliver Dr. Peyton McKean to the scene of a mysterious death or happenstance was to greatly increase my chances of getting a good story. The opportunity to write up and sell such stories was worth almost any price in personal discomfort, although I sometimes felt my blue Ford Mustang and I were nothing more than a convenient car and driver to him. He was so thin, nervous, and hyper-energetic as to be constitutionally unfit to drive an automobile any great distance. Thanks to frequent reveries, mental diversions, and inattention to his velocity—often too fast or slow for traffic—he could at times be a public nuisance on the road, if not an outright menace.

So I had acted as a glorified chauffeur and driven him 200 miles east from Seattle, crossing the Cascade Mountains and the flat lava lands of the eastern desert to reach this wildlife refuge that seemed no refuge at all. It was a harsh place for any living thing, a land of dry washes and baked, dusty soil, a place of sagebrush in profusion, cut through by ridges and low cliffs of broken black basalt as far as the eye could see. It was a hard landscape, its arid wastes contrasting dramatically with the lush green forests we left behind on the west side of the Cascades.

Tanner spit some tobacco juice into a sagebrush bush. You fellows came a long way to have a look without much to see.

Sorry to drag you out here in this heat, Sheriff, McKean mumbled as he crouched down almost double, a frown knitting his dark brows as he quested after minute details in the dirt. But I don’t expect to be disappointed by what I find here. He stood to