the Third Twin (1996)

by Ken Follett

  At last she spoke: “Bail is granted in the sum of two hundred thousand dollars.”

  Relief washed over Steve like a tidal wave, and his whole body relaxed. “Thank God for that,” he murmured.

  “You will not approach Lisa Hoxton nor go to 1321 Vine Avenue.”

  Steve felt Dad grasp his shoulder again. He reached up with his manacled hands and touched his father’s bony fingers.

  It would be another hour or two before he was free, he knew; but he did not mind too much, now that he was sure of freedom. He would eat six Big Macs and sleep around the clock. He wanted a hot bath and clean clothes and his wrist-watch back. He wanted to bask in the company of people who did not say “motherfucker” in every sentence.

  And he realized, somewhat to his surprise, that what he wanted most of all was to call Jeannie Ferrami.

  23

  JEANNIE WAS IN A BILIOUS MOOD AS SHE RETURNED TO HER office. Maurice Obeli was a coward. An aggressive newspaper reporter had made some inaccurate insinuations, that was all, yet the man had crumpled. And Berrington was too weak to defend her effectively.

  Her computer search engine was her greatest achievement. She had started to develop it when she had realized that her research into criminality would never get far without a new means of finding subjects for study. She had taken three years over it. It was her one truly outstanding achievement, not counting tennis championships. If she had a particular intellectual talent, it was for that kind of logical puzzle. Although she studied the psychology of unpredictable, irrational human beings, she did it by manipulating masses of data on hundreds and thousands of individuals: the work was statistical and mathematical. If her search engine was no good, she felt, she herself would be worthless. She might as well give up and become a stewardess, like Penny Watermeadow.

  She was surprised to see Annette Bigelow waiting outside her door. Annette was a graduate student whose work Jeannie supervised as part of her teaching duties. Now she recalled that last week Annette had submitted her proposal for the year’s work, and they had an appointment this morning to discuss it. Jeannie decided to cancel the meeting; she had more important things to do. Then she saw the eager expression on the young woman’s face and recalled how crucial these meetings were when you were a student; and she forced herself to smile and say: “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Let’s get started right away.”

  Fortunately she had read the proposal carefully and made notes. Annette was planning to trawl through existing data on twins to see if she could find correlations in the areas of political opinions and moral attitudes. It was an interesting notion and her plan was scientifically sound. Jeannie suggested some minor improvements and gave her the go-ahead.

  As Annette was leaving, Ted Ransome put his head around the door. “You look as if you’re about to cut someone’s balls off,” he said.

  “Not yours, though.” Jeannie smiled. “Come in and have a cup of coffee.”

  “Handsome” Ransome was her favorite man in the department. An associate professor who studied the psychology of perception, he was happily married with two small children. Jeannie knew he found her attractive, but he did not do anything about it. There was a pleasant frisson of sexual tension between them that never threatened to become a problem.

  She switched on the coffee maker beside her desk and told him about the New York Times and Maurice Obeli. “But here’s the big question,” she finished. “Who tipped off the Times?”

  “It has to be Sophie,” he said.

  Sophie Chapple was the only other woman on the faculty of the psychology department. Although she was close to fifty and a full professor, she saw Jeannie as some kind of rival and had behaved jealously from the beginning of the semester, complaining about everything from Jeannie’s miniskirts to the way she parked her car.

  “Would she do a thing like that?” Jeannie said.

  “Like a shot.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Jeannie never ceased to marvel at the pettiness of top scientists. She had once seen a revered mathematician punch the most brilliant physicist in America for cutting in line in the cafeteria. “Maybe I’ll ask her.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “She’ll lie.”

  “But she’ll look guilty.”

  “There’ll be a fight.”

  “There’s already a fight.”

  The phone rang. Jeannie picked it up and gestured to Ted to pour the coffee. “Hello.”

  “Naomi Freelander here.”

  Jeannie hesitated. “I’m not sure I should talk to you.”

  “I believe you’ve stopped using medical databases for your research.”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘No’?”

  “I mean I haven’t stopped. Your phone calls have started some discussions, but no decisions have been made.”

  “I have a fax here from the university president’s office. In it, the university apologizes to people whose privacy has been invaded, and assures them that the program has been discontinued.”

  Jeannie was aghast. “They sent out that release?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “I saw a draft and I didn’t agree to it.”

  “It seems like they’ve canceled your program without telling you.”

  ‘They can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have a contract with this university. They can’t just do whatever the hell they like.”

  “Are you telling me you’re going to continue in defiance of the university authorities?”

  “Defiance doesn’t come into it. They don’t have the power to command me.” Jeannie caught Ted’s eye. He lifted a hand and moved it from side to side in a negative gesture. He was right, Jeannie realized; this was not the way to talk to the press. She changed her tack. “Look,” she said in a reasonable voice, “you yourself said that the invasion of privacy is potential, in this case.”

  “Yes.…”

  “And you have completely failed to find anyone who is willing to complain about my program. Yet you have no qualms about getting this research project canceled.”

  “I don’t judge, I report.”

  “Do you know what my research is about? I’m trying to find out what makes people criminals. I’m the first person to think of a really promising way to study this problem. If things work out right, what I discover could make America a better place for your grandchildren to grow up in.”

  “I don’t have any grandchildren.”

  “Is that your excuse?”

  “I don’t need excuses—”

  “Perhaps not, but wouldn’t you do better to find a case of invasion of privacy that someone really cares about? Wouldn’t that make an even better story for the newspaper?”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Jeannie sighed. She had done her best. Gritting her teeth, she tried to end the conversation on a friendly note. “Well, good luck with it.”

  “I appreciate your cooperation, Dr. Ferrami.”

  “Good-bye.” Jeannie hung up and said: “You bitch.”

  Ted handed her a mug of coffee. “I gather they’ve announced that your program is canceled.”

  “I can’t understand it. Berrington said we’d talk about what to do.”

  Ted lowered his voice. “You don’t know Berry as well as I do. Take it from me, he’s a snake. I wouldn’t trust him out of my sight.”

  “Perhaps it was a mistake,” Jeannie said, clutching at straws. “Maybe Dr. Obell’s secretary sent the release out in error.”

  “Possibly,” Ted said. “But my money’s on the snake theory.”

  “Do you think I should call the Times and say my phone was answered by an impostor?”

  He laughed. “I think you should go along to Berry’s office and ask him if he meant for the release to go out before he talked to you.”

  “Good idea.” She swallowed her coffee and stood up.

  He went to the door. “Good luck. I’m rooting for you.�
��

  “Thanks.” She thought of kissing his cheek and decided not to.

  She walked along the corridor and up a flight of stairs to Berrington’s office. His door was locked. She went to the office of the secretary who worked for all the professors. “Hi, Julie, where’s Berry?”

  “He left for the day, but he asked me to fix an appointment for you tomorrow.”

  Damn. The bastard was avoiding her. Ted’s theory was right. “What time tomorrow?”

  “Nine-thirty?”

  “I’ll be here.”

  She went down to her floor and stepped into the lab. Lisa was at the bench, checking the concentration of Steven’s and Dennis’s DNA that she had in the test tubes. She had mixed two microliters of each sample with two milliliters of fluorescent dye. The dye glowed in contact with DNA, and the quantity of DNA was shown by how much it glowed, measured by a DNA fluorometer, with a dial giving the result in nanograms of DNA per microliter of sample.

  “How are you?” Jeannie asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  Jeannie looked hard at Lisa’s face. She was still in denial, that was obvious. Her expression was impassive as she concentrated on her work, but the strain showed underneath. “Did you talk to your mother yet?” Lisa’s parents lived in Pittsburgh.

  “I don’t want to worry her.”

  “It’s what she’s there for. Call her.”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  Jeannie told the story of the New York Times reporter while Lisa worked. She mixed the DNA samples with an enzyme called a restriction endonuclease. These enzymes destroyed foreign DNA that might get into the body. They did so by cutting the long molecule of DNA into thousands of shorter fragments. What made them so useful to genetic engineers was that an endonuclease always cut the DNA at the same specific point. So the fragments from two blood samples could be compared. If they matched, the blood came from the same individual or from identical twins. If the fragments were different, they must come from different individuals.

  It was like cutting an inch of tape from a cassette of an opera. Take a fragment cut five minutes from the start of two different tapes: if the music on both pieces of tape is a duet that goes “Se a caso madama,” they both come from The Marriage of Figaro. To guard against the possibility that two completely different operas might have the same sequence of notes at just that point, it was necessary to compare several fragments, not just one.

  The process of fragmentation took several hours and could not be hurried: if the DNA was not completely fragmented, the test would not work.

  Lisa was shocked by the story Jeannie told, but she was not quite as sympathetic as Jeannie expected. Perhaps that was because she had suffered a devastating trauma just three days earlier, and Jeannie’s crisis seemed minor by comparison. “If you have to drop your project,” Lisa said, “what would you study instead?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Jeannie replied. “I can’t imagine dropping this.” Lisa simply did not empathize with the yearning to understand that drove a scientist, Jeannie realized. To Lisa, a technician, one research project was much the same as another.

  Jeannie returned to her office and called the Bella Vista Sunset Home. With all that was going on in her own life she had been lax about talking to her mother. “May I speak to Mrs. Ferrami, please,” she said.

  The reply was abrupt. “They’re having lunch.”

  Jeannie hesitated. “Okay. Would you please tell her that her daughter Jeannie called, and I’ll try again later.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jeannie had the feeling that the woman was not writing this down. “That’s J-e-a-n-n-i-e,” she said. “Her daughter.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Thank you, I appreciate it.”

  “Sure.”

  Jeannie hung up. She had to get her mother out of there. She still had not done anything about getting weekend teaching work.

  She checked her watch: it was just after noon. She picked up her mouse and looked at her screen, but it seemed pointless to work when her project might be canceled. Feeling angry and helpless, she decided to quit for the day.

  She turned off her computer, locked her office, and left the building. She still had her red Mercedes. She got in and stroked the steering wheel with a pleasant sense of familiarity.

  She tried to cheer herself up. She had a father; that was a rare privilege. Maybe she should spend time with him, enjoy the novelty. They could drive down to the harbor front and walk around together. She could buy him a new sport coat in Brooks Brothers. She did not have the money, but she would charge it. What the hell, life was short.

  Feeling better, she drove home and parked outside her house. “Daddy, I’m home,” she called as she went up the stairs. When she entered the living room she sensed something wrong. After a moment she noticed the TV had been moved. Maybe he had taken it into the bedroom to watch. She looked in the next room; he was not there. She returned to the living room. “Oh, no,” she said. Her VCR was gone, too. “Daddy, you didn’t!” Her stereo had disappeared and the computer was gone from her desk. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t believe it!” She ran back to her bedroom and opened her jewelry box. The one-carat diamond nose stud Will Temple had given her had gone.

  The phone rang and she picked it up automatically.

  “It’s Steve Logan,” the voice said. “How are you?”

  “This is the most terrible day of my life,” she said, and she began to cry.

  24

  STEVE LOGAN HUNG UP THE PHONE.

  He had showered and shaved and dressed in clean clothes, and he was full of his mother’s lasagne. He had told his parents every detail of his ordeal, moment by moment. They had insisted on getting legal advice, even though he told them the charges were sure to be dropped as soon as the DNA test results came through, and he was going to see a lawyer first thing tomorrow. He had slept all the way from Baltimore to Washington in the back of his father’s Lincoln Mark VIII, and although that hardly made up for the one and a half nights he had stayed awake, nevertheless he felt fine.

  And he wanted to see Jeannie.

  He had felt that way before he had called her. Now that he knew how much trouble she was in, he was even more eager. He wanted to put his arms around her and tell her everything would be all right.

  He also felt there had to be a connection between her problems and his. Everything went wrong for both of them, it seemed to Steve, from the moment she introduced him to her boss and Berrington freaked.

  He wanted to know more about the mystery of his origins. He had not told his parents that part. It was too bizarre and troubling. But he needed to talk to Jeannie about it.

  He picked up the phone again to call her right back, then he changed his mind. She would say she did not want company. Depressed people usually felt that way, even when they really needed a shoulder to cry on. Maybe he should just show up on her doorstep and say, “Hey, let’s try to cheer each other up.”

  He went into the kitchen. Mom was scrubbing the lasagne dish with a wire brush. Dad had gone to his office for an hour. Steve began to load crockery into the dishwasher. “Mom,” he said, “this is going to sound a little strange to you, but …”

  “You’re going to see a girl,” she said.

  He smiled. “How did you know?”

  “I’m your mother, I’m telepathic. What’s her name?”

  “Jeannie Ferrami. Doctor Ferrami.”

  “I’m a Jewish mother now? I’m supposed to be impressed that she’s a doctor?”

  “She’s a scientist, not a physician.”

  “If she already has her doctorate, she must be older than you.”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Hm. What’s she like?”

  “Well, she’s kind of striking, you know, she’s tall, and very fit—she’s a hell of a tennis player—with a lot of dark hair, and dark eyes, and a pierced nostril with this very delicate thin silver ring, and she’s, like, forceful, she says what she wants, in a
direct way, but she laughs a lot, too, I made her laugh a couple of times, but mainly she’s just this”—he sought for a word—“she’s just this presence, when she’s around you simply can’t look anywhere else.…” He tailed off.

  For a moment his mother just stared at him, then she said: “Oh, boy—you’ve got it bad.”

  “Well, not necessarily.…” He stopped himself. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m crazy about her.”

  “Does she feel the same?”

  “Not yet.”

  His mother smiled fondly. “Go on, go see her. I hope she deserves you.”

  He kissed her. “How did you get to be such a good person?”

  “Practice,” she said.

  Steve’s car was parked outside; they had picked it up from the Jones Falls campus and his mother had driven it back to Washington. Now he got on I-95 and drove back to Baltimore.

  Jeannie was ready for some tender loving care. She had told him, when he called her, how her father had robbed her and the university president had betrayed her. She needed someone to cherish her, and that was a job he was qualified to do.

  As he drove he pictured her sitting next to him on a couch, laughing, and saying things like “I’m so glad you came over, you’ve made me feel much better, why don’t we just take off all our clothes and get into bed?”

  He stopped at a strip mall in the Mount Washington neighborhood and bought a seafood pizza, a ten-dollar bottle of chardonnay, a container of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—Rainforest Crunch flavor—and ten yellow carnations. The front page of The Wall Street Journal caught his eye with a headline about Genetico Inc. That was the company that funded Jeannie’s research into twins, he recalled. It seemed they were about to be taken over by Landsmann, a German conglomerate. He bought the paper.

  His delightful fantasies were clouded by the worrying thought that Jeannie might have gone out since he had talked to her. Or she might be in, but not answering the door. Or she might have visitors.

  He was pleased to see a red Mercedes 230C parked near her house; she must be in. Then he realized she might have gone out on foot. Or in a taxi. Or in a friend’s car.