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moment seizing this
opportunity to gain his freedom.
    He leaps up quietly, but quickly, and runs after her as she
heads to fill the food dish and water bottle. As he gets very near her back he
extends his needle. Sahar turns around partway to the left as she hears
something behind her. She sees the needle extended from the moving creature and
stumbles in surprise at seeing the animal up and out of his cage. The stumble
is away from the creature and she falls backward. As she falls, she drops the
dish and plastic bottle and the dish lands with a metallic clatter. Sahar hits
her head on a lab bench on the way to the ground, losing consciousness.
    The creature moves in on her as she lays there. He reaches
down and feels for a heartbeat with his right hand on her neck. He finds a
pulse and quickly injects his drawn needle into her lung. He then draws the
needle out and cleans the blood from it with a ritual lick.
    Satisfied that she is dead, he moves to the door, opens it
slowly and peeks outside to the hallway. It’s clear. He sees a dark window at
one end of the hallway and moves toward that. The creature moves unsteadily
through the hallway, weaving a little from the effects of the drugs. When he
gets to the window, he sees that he is one story up from the ground. To his
left are a door and a staircase. He pushes open the door, goes down the stairs
and ends up near a door at the bottom of the stairs. He pushes that door open,
peeks out, and runs away from the lab, disappearing into the New Jersey night.
    ›
    Mike Huggins and June Dituro are returning to the lab from
dinner. An ambulance and four police cars are in the parking lot outside the
Princeton Primate Research Lab as they drive up. They look at each other with
concern.
    “Was there anybody else in the lab when we left?” asks June.
    Huggins wants to be positive. “There were people in other
labs in the building.” But he speeds his car toward the front door, parking as
near to it as he can. The two of them jump out and run through the building
door, sprinting up the stairs toward their lab. As they round the top of the
stairs they see medical technicians and police officers.
    June lets out a horrified squeak. “Oh my God, Mike.”
    They arrive at the door and are intercepted by a detective. “ Hooolllld it there. What’s the
rush?”
    Detective Randy Maas is in his fifties, balding and carries
some weight around his midsection. The bifocals he wears sit on the end of his
nose, and he often takes them off completely, unless he is inspecting something
closely. Now he peers at them through the glasses.
    “This is our lab,” says Huggins. “What’s happened, Officer?”
    “I am Detective Maas. May I have your names please?” He
pulls a small notebook out of his jacket’s breast pocket.
    “Yes. This is June Dituro, the chief scientist here, and I’m
Mike Huggins, also a scientist here.”
    Detective Maas takes off his glasses when he finishes
writing down their names and positions. “I’m sorry to say this, but according
to Security this young woman worked here. He’s ID’d her as Sahar Franklin.”
    June’s knees buckle and she nearly faints, but Huggins is
quick to catch and support her. When she gets some of her steadiness back she
speaks weakly. “Sahar…ah, God. Where’s the animal?”
    “No animal,” says Detective Maas. “Your security guy told us
you had some kind of ape in there. It’s gone.”
    June and Huggins respond as one. “Gone?!”
    June’s knees start to give way again. Detective Maas nods.
    “How?” asks Huggins.
    Maas shrugs. “His cage was open.”
    He goes into the lab to show them. They follow, and though
June is devastated, she waves off Mike’s help and tries to regain some control.
    “It should have been locked,” she said. “Mike locked it when
we left.”
    “What it looks like is, Miss Franklin was feeding the animal
and it got out. She appears to have hit her head pretty hard, though at this
point we