“Siamese twins,” Lorna said.

The two were joined at the hip-literally-fused together, sharing three legs but bearing four arms.

“Poor things,” she whispered. “They look half starved.”

They came to the bars, plainly needing reassurance as much as sustenance. Their eyes were huge, especially in such small faces. Jack sensed their hunger and fear and also a trace of hope. He reached into a pocket and removed a granola bar. He ripped it open with his teeth, broke off a piece, and handed it to Lorna.

She gently passed it through the bars. One of them took it with its tiny fingers-then the pair retreated to share the prize, huddled around it, nibbling from both sides. But their eyes never left Lorna.

She glanced to Jack. For a moment he saw the girl he remembered from his school days, before he left for the Marines. She had dated his younger brother, Tom, during their sophomore year-and the summer thereafter. He shied away from that memory.

Lorna must have sensed this well of pain. Her face hardened, going professional again. She nodded to the other cages. “Show me.”

He led her along the rows of cages, shining his flashlight into the shadowy recesses. Each enclosure held a different animal, some familiar, some exotic. But like the monkeys, they all bore some twisted abnormality. They stopped next at a large glass-walled terrarium that held a fifteen-foot Burmese python curled around a clutch of eggs. The snake looked ordinary enough until its coils slid more tightly around the eggs and revealed two pairs of folded vestigial legs, scaled and clawed, remnants of its lizardlike evolutionary origin.