Читать книгу Dean Koontz 3-Book Thriller Collection: Breathless, What the Night Knows, 77 Shadow Street - Dean Koontz, Dean Koontz - Страница 33

Cammy Rivers in her kitchen, in the ceaseless throbbing shadow of the light-drunk moth, eliminated protozoan diseases as possible causes of the behavior of the animals at High Meadows Farm.

She seemed to be left with only the possibility that a toxic substance or a drug had been administered to the Thoroughbreds and their pets. The method of delivery would most likely have been through accidentally or intentionally contaminated food.

The different species – horses, goats, dogs – would not have been fed the same things. Even some of the horses might have been on diets different from the others. Consequently, the contamination surely would have been intentional.

This explanation struck her as melodramatic and implausible. But she had no other avenue to explore.

Although she was old-fashioned in her approach to research, preferring books to Internet sources that more often contained misinformation, the time had come to go downstairs to the computer. The large number of drugs with their lengthy lists of side effects and the even larger number of natural and man-made toxins could be considered and eliminated only with the use of carefully composed search strings.

As she pushed her chair away from the table and got to her feet, the wall phone rang. She plucked the handset from the cradle: “Cammy Rivers.”

“Hey, Doc,” Grady Adams said, “hope I didn’t wake you.”

“It’s not even ten-thirty yet, Grady.”

“Well, I know you get up early. Listen, could you maybe come out here?”

“What – now?”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“Tell me nothing’s wrong with Merlin.”

She had given Grady the wolfhound as a puppy almost three years earlier.

“No, no, he’s fit enough, you could saddle him up and ride him. There’s this other thing.”

“What thing?”

“This thing – I want you to take a look at it. At them. Bring your bag, whatever you need, ’cause you might want to examine them.”

“They have a name?”

“That’s just it – I don’t think they do. I’ve never seen anything like them. Right now, they’re chasing Merlin around the room, and he loves it.”

“I have to ask you, furniture guy – you been breathing too many shellac fumes?”

“Maybe I have. Maybe I’ve been drinking the stuff.”