Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller

by Bouchard, J. W.

  Alan wondered if he should give any credence to their proffered wisdom. Was he a recluse? Did they know something that he didn’t? He had always considered himself normal, if not average, and he thought he got out as much as the next guy. Was throwing yourself into your work a sin these days?

  He wasn’t in a relationship, wasn’t especially interested in trying to start one, and he didn’t have any hobbies. What else was a person to do?

  He focused on his job. It was something he was good at; the one thing that made him stand out from the crowd. No different than being a professional athlete. Their sport was their life as much as their livelihood. They put their blood, sweat, and tears into it. They trained religiously. Alan, in his own way, was as serious about his chosen profession as any athlete, and devoted the necessary time to it.

  Alan started from the beginning, consulting the incident reports as he played the details back in his mind.

  In both cases, the perpetrators of the crimes had been employees. Both Howard Sitka and Susan Carville claimed to have been attacked. Sitka at his home; Carville in her car after she had stopped at an intersection. Each of them claimed that their assailants had been exact duplicates of themselves, and that after being subdued, they were left bound and gagged. Shortly thereafter, their respective places of employment had been robbed. By either them or their mysterious doubles.

  Gant’s suggestion that the masterminds behind the robberies had used actors to play the roles of Sitka and Carville seemed ludicrous to Alan. It seemed too elaborate, too sophisticated. Not that he didn’t believe in the existence of highly intelligent and savvy criminals, but he still operated under the assumption that criminals obeyed the same law as electricity: they followed the path of least resistance. Hypothetically, using actors might seem like a good idea, a clever way to lower the level of suspicion. But it didn’t strike Alan as the least resistant path.

  Finding actor’s that resembled the victims closely enough, especially when they would be in close proximity to people that worked with them every day, would be a difficult task.

  Had they held a casting call? Had would-be actors auditioned for the part? And even if they had, why would the actors have agreed to it? It wasn’t just elaborate, it was on the verge of being preposterous. There were easier ways. An old-fashioned hold up would have been just as efficient, only less costly.

  Alan recalled his conversation with Howard Sitka in the interrogation room at the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department. Sitka had maintained his innocence and Alan had believed him. The man had been nervous and flustered, but he hadn’t given off any overt signs of deception. There were great actors in the world in addition to competent liars, but Howard Sitka didn’t strike Alan as either of those things. If the man was lying, he had no idea that he was doing so, and Alan felt himself wishing that his intuition and gut feelings were wrong. It would have made things easier. If he had believed Sitka to be guilty, it would have been an open and shut case. He could have closed it and moved onto the next. Instead, he was stuck believing in a man who claimed to have been attacked by himself.

  Worse, now there was a second case in which the details were nearly identical to the first.

  The only thing Alan could say with any level of certainty was that the cases were related.

  It was 9:30 and Alan was starting to doze off in the uncomfortable motel room chair when his phone rang. It was Detective Hodgens from the Peoria Police Department.

  “Sorry to ring you so late,” Hodgens said, “but I figured you’d want to know sooner rather than later.”

  “You assumed correctly, Detective. What do you have for me?”

  Please let it be good, Alan thought.

  “We managed to get DNA on Carville from the crime scene. She also consented to a swab. It seems like double duty seeing as how it’s one and the same, but I try to refrain from questioning men who wear suits and carry fancy badges. It’s on its way up to your lab there. You should have it by first thing in the morning.”

  Alan couldn’t help being disappointed. It wasn’t the breakthrough he had hoped for, but he tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice when he said, “I appreciate you following through on that, Detective Hodgens.”

  “Happy to oblige. Have a good night, Agent.”

  Alan glanced down at the open file folders. He shuffled the documents together, closed the folders, arranged them in a neat stack, and then closed his eyes as he tipped back in his chair.

  He had worked difficult cases before. Cases that had gone stone cold before the investigation had even gotten underway. But there was a differentiating factor to those cases compared to the cases he was working now. In those cases (which he had eventually solved despite the difficulty involved), it had been a complete lack of forensic evidence that had made it hard to find a starting point; had made it difficult to uncover the trail. Regarding the Sitka and Carville cases, they had all the evidence they needed. They had suspects in custody. They had security camera footage that had committed the suspects to video during the commission of the crimes.

  It should have been open and shut.

  Unfortunately, none of it quite added up.

  Chapter 5

  Marvin Davis was the GCB’s Chief Forensic Scientist. He supervised the main crime lab at Omaha as well as the technicians working the satellite offices in Seattle, Houston, and New York. Marvin was in his late-twenties, tall and gangly, frizzy haired, and wore glasses that were too big for his narrow face. At some point in his life (Alan guessed around the time he had hit puberty), Marvin had somehow achieved the pinnacle of what most people would consider extreme geekiness. He epitomized what it meant to be a nerd. He was a stereotype in the flesh.

  But he was also a genius. He had obtained his bachelor’s degree at Notre Dame, majored in biology, minored in chemistry, and had worked summers as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had gone on to pursue his graduate degree at Cornell, where he had graduated magna cum laude. After that, he had spent several years working for DuPont as an engineer, developing new kinds of plastics. His girlfriend had studied foreign languages, and he spoke fluent French after spending a year in Paris with her. By the time he was twenty-four, he had published several articles in various scientific journals and had received offers of employment at both Pfizer and Roche.

  Alan had never questioned the fact that Marvin was intellectually gifted. He rarely understood more than thirty to forty percent of the geek speak that came out of the man’s mouth, but all Marvin’s quirks aside, he was one of the most brilliant forensic scientists in the world. How the GCB, on its rather meager budget, had convinced the Cornell graduate to come on board was a complete mystery, but Alan thought it might have something to do with putting the man in charge of a lot of really expensive toys.

  The crime lab was on the eighth floor. Alan took the stairs. When he reached the lab, he gestured to Marvin through the thick glass window that looked into the lab beyond it. Marvin held up a staying finger as he carried a caddy of vials to a refrigeration unit. When he opened the unit’s door, a thick cloud of frigid air curled outward. Marvin carefully slid the dolly onto the top shelf, closed the door, and then joined Alan in the connecting room.

  “I know why you’re here,” Marvin said and waved for Alan to follow him as he crossed into an adjoining room that was filled with all manner of lab equipment. There were microscopes, beakers, test tubes, vials, Bunsen burners, pipets, goggles, graduated cylinders, Erlenmeyer flasks, petri dishes, as well as a few dozen instruments that Alan didn’t recognize.

  Marvin showed him to the far side of the room, to a long polished steel table that was home to even more equipment. A DNA sequencer, and electrophoresis machine, autoclaves…Alan wondered how many millions of dollars had gone into furnishing the laboratory and decided it was probably more than his 50k-a-year brain could comprehend.

  “Any luck?” Alan asked as Marvin came to a halt in front of the table.

  “Luck has nothing
do with it,” Marvin said. “But if you had said strange you might have been on the right track.”

  Marvin arranged two semi-transparent sheets side by side. Each sheet was filled with bars of various thicknesses, ranging in color from black to progressively lighter shades of gray. At the top of one sheet was the name CARVILLE, SUSAN and on the other was UNKNOWN SUBJECT. After a moment’s study, the bars on each of the pages appeared to match the other perfectly.

  “Looks like an exact match,” Alan said.

  Marvin smiled. “Are you familiar with how DNA profiling works?”

  Alan was forced to admit that he didn’t.

  “Around ninety-nine-point-nine percent of human DNA is the same in every person,” Marvin said. “But that still leaves enough room to make it possible to distinguish one individual from another. Unless the samples are from monozygotic twins.”

  “Monozygotic?”

  “Identical. We use STR analysis to look at loci targeted with sequence-specific primers that are amplified using PCR. The resulting DNA fragments are separated and detected using electrophoresis. We look at multiple loci simultaneously and search for patterns of alleles. It’s quick and accurate. CODIS 13 core loci are almost universal. We can generate match probabilities of one in a quintillion or more. Of course, we have to factor for the fact that there are over twelve million monozygotic twins on Earth, which lowers that and can lead to false profile matches. Understand?”

  “About thirty percent of it,” Alan said. Truthfully, the real figure might have been closer to ten percent.

  “Doesn’t matter. Your understanding or lack thereof doesn’t bear any weight as to the results, but I thought you might be curious to know how it works.”

  “Looking at the results,” Alan said, “am I right about them being identical?”

  Marvin pushed his glasses up on his nose, his eyes going to the two sheets laying side-by-side on the steel table. “Yes and no. For all intents and purposes, they are identical, but there is one slight discrepancy that is cause for speculation. According the data we received from the forensics unit in Illinois, both of these samples should be from the Carville woman. One sample collected directly and the other from the crime scene, but believed to be that of Carville.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “As you noticed yourself, the patterns do in fact seem to match, but what happens if we overlap them.” Marvin laid one sheet over the other. “Here,” he said. “Do you see it?”

  Alan leaned forward. There was a single dark gray bar floating off on its own on the sheet marked UNKNOWN SUBJECT. It was missing from the other sheet.

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t pointed it out.”

  “Some kind of contamination?” Alan asked, taking a stab in the dark.

  “Unlikely.”

  “So they aren’t both Susan Carville?”

  Marvin cupped his chin with his hand and stared down at the test result sheets. He didn’t answer right away, but seemed to weigh the question carefully. “Technically, there’s a ninety-nine percent likelihood that it’s a match.”

  “Despite the discrepancy?”

  “Yes, despite the discrepancy. But the discrepancy exists. I might not have brought it to your attention if I hadn’t taken the liberty of reading the case file in its entirety and noted a similar discrepancy existing in the matter of the fingerprint analysis. In both cases, we have a slight inconsistency in the samples. I find it very intriguing.”

  “If you had said strange you might have been on the right track,” Alan said.

  “Touché,” Marvin said.

  “Have you seen anything like this before?”

  “I haven’t, but you can bet that I’m sufficiently bemused to want to get to the bottom of it.”

  “You said you can get a false profile if the two specimens are monozy…identical twins. Do you think Carville could be a twin?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out,” Marvin said, “but I’ve also studied the file on Howard Sitka. It seems an amazing coincidence that each of the crimes would have been committed by a different set of identical twins.”

  “I don’t think coincidence has anything to do with it.”

  “Either do I.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “In need of more data,” Marvin said. “Two cases make for a coincidence. An unlikely coincidence, but a possible coincidence just the same. If we were to add similar cases to the series, we might be on to something.”

  “Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Alan said.

  Lucy seemed eager to speak with him when he returned to his office, but he put up a staying hand as he sat down at his desk and searched a pile of documents until he located Nancy Sitka’s cell phone number. He dialed it. She answered on the third ring.

  “Yes?”

  Alan apologized for bothering her again and then asked the million dollar question: “Mrs. Sitka, does your husband by chance have a twin?”

  “Heaven’s no,” Nancy Sitka responded. “Why would that make any difference?”

  “No reason. It was a longshot. Thanks for your time.”

  Alan hung up. Despite having expected to receive the answer that Nancy Sitka had given him, he couldn’t help being disappointed. If she had responded in the affirmative, they might have been onto something, and the case would have become significantly less mysterious. Unless Howard Sitka had hidden the existence of a twin sibling both from his wife and on paper, they were barking up the wrong tree. He didn’t bother following up with Hodgens on whether Susan Carville had a twin.

  He swiveled his chair until he was facing Lucy and said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Lucy?”

  Chapter 6

  Alan wished he hadn’t asked.

  It turned out that Lucy had two more cases for him. One was a bank robbery in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The other was a casino robbery in Iowa.

  Both crimes had been reported within an hour of each other.

  “This happened in our own backyard,” Alan said, scanning through the case folder Lucy had given him on the Painted Horse Casino robbery, which had taken place less than seven miles away in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  Alan felt himself getting drowsy again. Perhaps he had gotten some much needed sleep the night before, but his brain had never stopped crunching data. It had gone on and on, twisting, turning, and examining information from all angles. It wouldn’t rest until it had reached its conclusion and presented it to the conscious part of Alan’s brain for further analysis.

  Unsurprisingly, the details of the Cheyenne case resembled those of the robberies that had taken place in Augusta and Peoria. The casino heist in Council Bluffs differed from the others only in regard to the setting. The perpetrators had followed a pattern by only robbing banks up to that point, but had deviated slightly from their previous M.O. by targeting a casino.

  They were escalating, expanding, branching out, becoming bolder. On any given day, a casino would typically see more foot traffic than a bank.

  Why the sudden change in venue?

  Were they trying to rub his nose in it?

  Don’t make it personal.

  “I’ve already opened files in the system for the new cases,” Lucy said. “Is there anything I can do to make life easier?”

  “Marvin should have sent some dictation to transcribe.”

  “Already finished.”

  “How about some actual field work?”

  Lucy’s eyes lit up. “Like what?”

  “Contact the Cheyenne PD and the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department. Get the details about the bank robbery there. When you’re finished with that…” Alan paused to look over one of the field reports. “Contact the FBI. See if you can get a line on a Special Agent Darrow. Leave him a message to call me.”

  “Darrow?”

  “His name is on all of their reports. I’m guessing he’s the reason we keep catching their cases.”

  “What am I trying to f
ind out from him?”

  “Find out why he’s such a lazy asshole,” Alan said. The look on Lucy’s face said she didn’t recognize his brand of sarcasm. “Just have him contact me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to roll the dice.”

  The Painted Horse Casino was a small player compared to Ameristar or the Horseshoe, but when Alan flashed his badge and a police officer lifted the crime scene tape so that he could pass, he found it to be a sprawling place, filled with row upon row of slot machines that stood sentinel like an army of brightly colored robots adorned with an excess of bling.

  Past the slots, the main room opened up and Alan caught sight of the table games: Texas Hold ‘Em, craps, roulette, baccarat, and blackjack.

  There was a restaurant called the All American on the east side of the building; on the west was a place called the Kaishi Grill. Down a long corridor, there was a small bar, and past that a buffet.

  Alan wasn’t a gambler. In his rather plain world of blacks and whites, he had never taken to letting things ride on chance, even if it was only money. But he had been in casinos before, and he could scarcely remember visiting one that had been so devoid of life. Save for a handful of law enforcement personnel and a skeleton crew of employees, the place was deserted.

  The Painted Horse was being treated as a crime scene. The entire building was on temporary lockdown.

  The few employees that remained had grouped themselves into small clusters, huddled around each other and speaking in whispers. Spreading gossip, Alan thought.

  He wondered if they had interviewed any witnesses, wondered how the various accounts differed. In times of crisis, people tended to process things differently. One witness might swear a suspect was wearing a red hat, while another would testify that it had been a black one. Peoples’ perceptions of events often varied tremendously, especially if they were being asked to describe the details of a criminal act.

  The smell of desperation and cigarette smoke clung to the air. There had been a five year stretch where Alan had been a heavy smoker. He had picked up the habit when he was sixteen and hadn’t quit until he had started his career in law enforcement. Quitting had been tough. He had done it cold turkey. There were people who claimed that the craving returned whenever they were around that familiar smell. Alan felt exactly the opposite. He hated the odor of secondhand smoke. Whenever the stench hit his nostrils, it induced a small, tense rage within him; a rage that threatened to compromise his objectivity.