“Let’s hope so. And let’s also hope he’s easy to find.”
She watched pensively as Caesare dropped his gaze briefly back down to Dulce and gave her a quick peck on the top of her head.
“Well, even if he is hard to find, he won’t be hard to spot when we do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you hear how Alves and his men came across Dexter?”
“I thought it was your researcher friend that found him.”
“It was. But it was how they spotted him that made them realize there was something unique about Dexter. It was at a poacher’s camp. They’d caught dozens of capuchins and were packing them in cages, getting ready to ship them to the coast. Capuchins fetch a high premium on the black market.”
Caesare continued listening.
“You see, Dexter wasn’t caught with the others. He was caught after the fact when they spotted him in the darkness trying to get the ropes securing the cages undone. And apparently he’d almost succeeded.”
“What?”
DeeAnn caught herself smiling. “That’s when they knew.”
“He was trying to spring the others?”
“Evidently. Don’t get me wrong, primates are smart, but not like that. This monkey is damn smart, which is what I meant when I said you’d notice him when you saw him. There’s something different in his eyes. Something almost eerie.”
“How is it eerie?”
“More like he’s watching you. Even more than you feel it with Dulce.”
“That should help. And hopefully we’ll have a little luck on our side.”
DeeAnn grinned and reached out for Dulce. “Let’s hope. Alves was lucky to find Dexter, twice. I helped him the second time, but I’m sure this time is going to be much harder. It isn’t just his smarts that make him special. It’s his age. He’s older than he’s supposed to be, a lot older, which has only added to his intelligence.”
Caesare watched DeeAnn, noting a momentary change in her eyes. “What is it?”
She blinked and looked back at him. “I’ve been thinking. It’s the DNA we’re after here…but we also need to find Dexter for a very different reason too.”
“And what is that?”
After a quiet moment, she continued with a question. “Do you know who Lucy is?”
Caesare thought about it and grinned. “Like from Peanuts?”
“I mean Lucy as in the nickname for Australopithecus. The skeleton found in Ethiopia in the 70's.”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Lucy is the skeleton of the first bipedal, small-brained hominin that lived about three million years ago. The first one found with a small brain like primates but one that walks like us. It’s pretty well accepted now, at least genetically speaking, but the fact is that it’s still technically a hypothesis. Of course, a lot of scientific hypotheses were like that; theories that weren’t proven correct until years later. Sometimes decades.” She took a deep breath. “But here’s the thing. To many, Lucy is the missing link. The link in our own evolutionary path where things…changed. She represents an important threshold, a time and place where the most significant leap in human history took place. The catalyst.”
DeeAnn paused momentarily, a thoughtful look on her face. “What I’m saying is that Lucy is arguably the most important thing to have happened to us. All of us. Imagine how profound it would have been to have witnessed that incredible evolutionary moment. The single lifespan of a primate that changed everything.”
Caesare’s face was serious as he listened intently.
“Steven,” she said. “Dexter is that moment! Or at least a re-creation of it. Dexter is the modern Lucy. A primate who’s made the same leap across an evolutionary gap. We’ll never know exactly how it happened with Lucy, but we can watch it unfold with him.” She watched the expression change on Caesare’s face. “Do you see what I’m getting at? We have a chance to witness the equivalent of our evolutionary birth firsthand! It’s a scientific opportunity of almost unimaginable significance.”
Caesare was staring at her. This went way beyond anything he’d even considered. “Wow.”
DeeAnn grinned. “Wow is right. But that’s not all. It’s not just that we have the opportunity to observe this…but now we also have the technology to actually communicate with him as it’s happening!”
Caesare’s jaw suddenly dropped. If he had been surprised by her last point, he was now completely stunned. It was a moment Clay and Borger would have given anything to witness. Steve Caesare was…speechless.