It was Dr. Flannery Gilman and she had a sheaf of papers in her hands.

“I’ve been calling you and calling you,” she said to Fareed, without greeting anyone, or even so much as a nod to Lestat.

Of all the doctors Fareed had brought into the Blood, this one he loved the most. And it was she who had helped him in the making of Viktor, the nearest thing that Fareed would ever have to a son. It was she who had enticed Lestat into the few brief moments of erotic passion that an infusion of hormones had allowed him and she who had carried Viktor, given birth to Viktor, nursed and cared for Viktor until finally the time had come when Viktor would be all right on his own.

Now both were blood drinkers, Flannery and Viktor, and the only pair of blood drinkers in the whole world who were mother and son, other than Gabrielle and Lestat.

“You have to look at this, all of it, now,” said Flannery. “You can bring it up on the screen if you want, but I’ve gone over this here and circled everything that’s relevant. She lied to you. She deceived you.”

“What do you mean? Who?” Lestat turned as if somebody had pulled him out of a dream.

“Fareed said go over every single requisition, order, list of purchases, everything for as far back as the records went. And I did it. I pulled everything she’s ever ordered for any experiment, any project, any trial!”

Fareed went through the papers, eyes moving with preternatural speed over the printout, over Flannery’s many felt-tip-pen circles, over her underlining, turning the pages rapidly, and then he carried the whole stack around the side of the table so that he could spread the pages out.

“What is it?” asked Seth.

“I see exactly what you’re saying!” Fareed said. He looked up to his beloved mentor and then to Lestat. “All the way back to her first weeks at Collingsworth. But how did she get away with it? Oh, I’m beginning to see. Under the names of the assistants.”

“And look at the notations for duplicate amounts,” said Flannery. “Reorders, claims of stolen packages, or packages damaged or never received. I wager every single order was always received. Look at this, these orders for human growth hormone. What could she conceivably have been working on to use that amount of human growth hormone? Or this one, look at this one. This was all for the synthetic skin project. Why, that’s enough to make skin for half of Europe.”

“She was building a Replimoid body!” said Lestat. “And she lied about it.”