“The to-be-determined kind. Nothing drastic, but sometimes a favor owed is better than money in the bank. Don’t worry, I would never ask you to compromise your delicate moral sensibilities.”
Alan took another drink of his rum and Coke. “Somehow I doubt that.”
“At present, that’s neither here nor there. What do you say?”
“Why do I feel like I’m making a deal with the devil?”
“Every man has some devil in their heart,” Guy said. “Surely, you of all people know that. You’ve dipped your toes in the abyss the same way I have. It’s just most people are smart enough to keep the devil where he belongs.” Guy finished off his drink and moved over to the counter to mix himself another. “Anyway, tell me about this little research project you have for me.”
Alan ran into Bruno on the stairs as he was headed back to his room.
Bruno was seated on the top step, face buried in his hands. For a moment, Alan thought the bull of a man might be crying.
“That was quite a show you put on across the way,” Alan said.
Bruno glanced up. His face was red but his eyes were dry. “It’s always the little guys,” he said. “They always try to act bigger than they are. Like they have something to prove. They always try to solve their problems with violence. But that’s no excuse. I lost my temper and I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have resorted to laying my hands on them.”
Bruno didn’t come across as the type of man that would illicit sympathy, but Alan couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him. He was like anyone else. A man constantly striving to become a better version of themselves, but always trying to come to grips with the fact that there would be failures along the way.
“I think it’s normal to lose your temper once in a while,” Alan said. “God knows I have on more than one occasion.”
“Still…I know better. And I was really making progress.”
“I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“Funny you should say that,” Bruno said. “That’s what my therapist always says. That, and to live in the present. Because we can’t change the past and we can’t predict the future.”
“Sounds like good advice.”
“Typical psycho babble. But she’s nice though, my therapist. Hot, too. Like a nine. Pretty cliché, huh? Having the hots for my therapist?”
“If it wasn’t common, it wouldn’t be a cliché.”
“I appreciate you trying to cheer me up. Did you work out your business with the boss man?”
“I did.”
“He’s a good man,” Bruno said. “I hate the smell of his fucking cigars, but he’s still a good man. One thing though.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t get yourself in a position where you owe him any favors.”
“What makes you say that?”
Alan discovered that Bruno was shrewder than he had given him credit for.
Bruno smiled and said, “You already owe him, don’t you? Well, never mind then. It’s too late now.”
Chapter 10
Alan didn’t read much these days, but back in high school he had been an avid reader. He had spent summers cooped up in his room reading for hours. Some of his favorite books had been the James Bond series by Ian Fleming. It was only now that he remembered a passage from Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
This came to mind as he was poring over another case file Gant had left on his desk.
One, two, three, four…Augusta, Peoria, Cheyenne, and Council Bluffs.
All of them possessing similarities that couldn’t possibly be chalked up to coincidence.
No apparent connection between any of the suspects. Or victims, Alan thought, depending on how you chose to look at it.
He had sat down at his desk at 6:45 that morning to find a fresh case waiting for him with a sticky note stuck to the manila folder, one sentence written on it in Gant’s barely legible scrawl.
Come see me.
Only Alan hadn’t. Not yet. He wanted to peruse the contents of the folder first, and what he discovered inside of it drove a white hot spike into his stomach.
This case was different than the rest. There were similarities, but the differentiating factor was that there had been a fatality, making it a homicide.
Doris Browning, a thirty-three year old mother of two, had been driving along I-29 on her way to work. As she was passing a stalled car parked on the shoulder of the road, the car exploded. The blast had enough force to blow out all of the windows of Browning’s car before incinerating her almost instantly. Along with Browning’s remains, a charred and partially melted child’s carseat had been pulled from the back seat of the car. Fortunately, it had been empty. Doris Browning had dropped her three year old daughter off at daycare only twenty minutes prior to that.
The stalled car, what investigators now believed to be what was known as a Trojan Horse, had been a dark green ’01 Chevy Impala. It had been equipped with a platter bomb, which, from the scant amount of evidence pulled from the scene, had most likely been remotely detonated. Meaning that someone had been monitoring the stalled car and waiting for someone to drive past it. For the time being, it looked as though Doris Browning had been a victim of opportunity rather than an intended target.
Alan, somewhat morbidly, wondered if Browning had been unlucky in her life. She had definitely suffered from a serious case of bad luck on that particular morning.
Despite the significant damage sustained to the suspect vehicle, investigators found a bent and misshapen license plate thirty feet from the blast area. Based on the plates, it was determined that the owner of the vehicle was one Gerard P. Wilson of Bonner Springs, Kansas.
Gerard Wilson owned a car dealership called Wilson’s Chevrolet. When investigators had descended upon his dealership, they discovered Wilson bound to the leather-backed executive chair in his office. He was taken into custody, claiming to have no involvement in the planting of a bomb in his own vehicle, or the detonation of the device. Forensics had been able to lift a set of prints from the Impala’s damaged license plate, which had matched those obtained directly from Wilson.
With a few minor discrepancies.
DNA evidence had also been obtained from the scene in the form of a soda can that had survived the blast. This hadn’t been an accident. The soda can had been located inside a metal lunchbox. The lunchbox, which depicted Spider-man swinging merrily over a backdrop of the skyscrapers of New York, belonged to Wilson’s five year old son, Dylan, who had just started Kindergarten. Analysis of the DNA hadn’t been completed yet, but Alan had a pretty good idea of what the results would be.
Lucy wandered into the office around quarter after seven.
“You look like you haven’t slept,” she said as she sat down at her desk.
“Then I look how I feel,” Alan said.
Lucy’s eyes found the open folder on Alan’s desk.
“Another one? Same as the others?”
“Yes and no.” He handed her the folder. “Take a look. I have to see Gant.” As he was leaving the office, he paused and added, “Do me a favor, run a check with VICAP and see if they come back with anything similar to the cases we’re dealing with. Robberies and homicides especially. Anything noted about discrepancies in fingerprints and DNA.”
“I’m on it,” Lucy said, her fingers already beginning to flutter swiftly over her keyboard.
He didn’t expect VICAP to come back with anything related to the cases they were working, but he didn’t think it could hurt to check. You never knew when you might catch a lucky break.
When Alan reached Gant’s office, Gant frowned when Alan appeared in his doorway. He was talking on the phone. Alan took a seat and waited.
“I know,” Gant said into the phone and hung it up. To Alan he said, “Tell me you’ve got something.”
Alan debated telling Gant about Marvin’s theory that the crimes were bein
g committed by human clones and decided against it. Alan still thought it sounded like a plot you would find in a cheap science fiction novel, and he could hardly tell Gant that despite how ridiculous it sounded, he was putting government resources into validating such an absurd theory.
“We’re working on a few leads,” Alan said.
“Anything promising?”
Alan shrugged. “Too early to tell.”
“That was our good friend Deputy Director Strickland on the phone. The man’s not as patient as I am. In fact, he’s a total asshole. At least give me something I can use to keep the hounds at bay.”
“We’re checking with VICAP now,” Alan said. “Given the similarities in all of the cases, our guess is that it’s being orchestrated by the same individual.”
“I’ve already made that deductive leap and I’m not the one actively investigating this. Did you follow-up on my actor idea?”
“We’re still considering it a viable option.” It wasn’t a total lie, but Alan thought the prospect of the orchestrator of the crimes using actors who bore strikingly similar characteristics to the actual suspects seemed about as plausible as a secret organization mass producing human clones with the express purpose of using them to commit crimes. “We’ll catch a break,” Alan said. “We have to.”
“Just do me a favor and catch one sooner rather than later, would you?”
“Did you run the check through VICAP like I asked you to?” Alan asked when he was back in his office.
“Of course.”
“Anything.”
“Nothing back yet,” Lucy said. “I wouldn’t expect to hear anything back for twenty-four hours at the earliest.” She picked up the case folder that Alan had handed her earlier. “This is a homicide.”
“I know.”
“Things are escalating.”
“I know.”
“I like Marvin a lot. He’s really smart. But his theory…well, it’s really out there. I mean, human cloning? It’s almost as bad as calling it…”
“Supernatural?”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Lucy said.
“The game is afoot,” Alan muttered to himself.
“Sherlock Holmes? You know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in all of that stuff, don’t you?”
“What stuff?”
“The supernatural. He believed in fairies and psychic phenomenon.”
“I would believe in fairies, too,” Alan said, “if it meant we could catch a break on this thing.”
“Well, they’re all linked. We know that much. Even if the crimes themselves are changing, several of the same factors keep repeating. The prime suspects are always caught and have no recollection of doing what they’re accused of doing.”
“Or at least claim not to,” Alan said.
“And then there’s the fingerprints and the DNA. They always find traces at the crime scenes. They always nearly match up, but not quite.”
“Soda cans,” Alan said.
“Huh?”
“The soda cans. They’ve found one at every crime scene. Always intact and they’re always able to collect a DNA sample from it. That can’t be a coincidence.”
Lucy said, “Lots of people drink soda, Alan. It’s one of the most popular drinks after water and coffee…and tea.”
“I’m not questioning that. But what are the chances they would find one at each of the crime scenes and it would be the only thing with the suspect’s DNA on it? At least with the irregular DNA. Same goes for the fingerprints. Let’s say for a minute that Marvin’s right, that someone is cloning humans in order to have them carry out these crimes. He said it would take millions of dollars in equipment and materials, and the technology they would use to do it more advanced than anything Marvin knows about. So why leave fingerprints at the scene?”
“I’m not sure I know what you’re saying.”
“Why make such a simple mistake? Not just once, but each and every time. They didn’t just find an irregular set of prints or DNA at one or two of them, but all of them.”
Lucy’s eyes widened as though a lightbulb had just gone off in her head. “You’re saying they did it on purpose?”
“It’s like they’re leaving us a trail of breadcrumbs to follow.”
“You think they want to get caught?”
Alan shook his head. “No, I don’t think they want to get caught, but I don’t think they want the trail to go cold either. They’re giving us clues because someone is playing a game, and a game isn’t any fun if you don’t have anyone to play it with.”
“They want to make sure we keep playing the game,” Lucy said. “That makes sense. Let us know that they’re smarter than we are.”
“But they’re not giving us all the pieces. They’re baiting us with just enough to keep us running in circles.”
“What do we do then?”
“We find better breadcrumbs.”
Chapter 11
Later that day on his way out of the office, Alan stopped off on the eighth floor to speak with Marvin Davis. He had received an email from Marvin earlier saying that the DNA results from Gerard Wilson had come back.
Outside the crime lab, Alan listened to Marvin tell him exactly what he had expected to hear: that the samples were almost identical, except for a few slight deviations. Alan didn’t make any attempt to mask his disappointment. The results didn’t surprise him, but he had hoped for something more. Something that would make the trail of breadcrumbs make sense.
“I’ve spent some time studying the samples more closely,” Marvin said. “Operating under the assumption that my theory is correct, I was looking for anything in the crime scene samples that might indicate that cloning has taken place.”
“Is that possible?”
“For the most part, this is virgin territory. All I have to go on is research data for animals such as Dolly the Sheep. Obviously, we’re talking about humans and not animals, but it was a starting point. Most of the advances in cloning have been accomplished through a process called somatic-cell nuclear transfer or SCNT. Basically, somatic cells are taken from the organism to be cloned and a nucleus is inserted into an egg cytoplasm. This is introduced to an electrical current which stimulates the embryo into development. Once you have a successfully developed embryo, it is placed in a surrogate recipient.”
“Like the mother’s womb?” Alan asked, doing his best to keep up.
“Yes. But in this case, I would doubt they’re using another animal for gestation purposes. They would probably do it artificially. Through some form of surrogate chamber perhaps.”
“A machine?”
“Correct. Research shows that the cloned animal isn’t completely identical however. There is mitochondrial DNA left behind. The massive amount of failures in the process are partially due to these incompatibilities. I would guess that at some point along the way, they found a way to minimize the failure rate. My hypothesis was that we could discern if the cells were cloned judging by these inconsistencies in the mitochondrial DNA.”
“Did you find anything?”
Marvin allowed himself the beginnings of a smile. “I did. I found numerous inconsistencies between the host DNA and that taken from the crime scene. I found this in the comparison of all the samples. I also found another interesting disparity.”
“Just keep it simple, Marvin,” Alan said. “So far I’m keeping up, but I feel like my mental train might jump the tracks at any moment.”
Marvin nodded. “There were certain pathologies in the samples from the crime scene samples that aren’t present in the directly acquired DNA. The pathologies showed signs of accelerated aging.”
“Which would fit the scenario that they are being brought to adulthood in some artificial way,” Alan said.
“That’s one explanation. In the case of Dolly, there were claims that these same pathologies were present. Since cloning hasn’t ever been done on a mass scale, there isn’t sufficient data to say if this is the rule rather than the excepti
on, but speculation was that these pathologies were related to a shortening of the telomeres, DNA-protein complexes that protect the end of linear chromosomes. It was believed to be a side effect related to the cloning process itself. We’re assuming that whoever is doing this has also developed a way to expedite the aging process significantly in order to bring an embryo to adulthood in a rapidly accelerated matter. Because of this assumption, we can’t predict whether it’s a deficiency in the cloning process itself or if it has something to do with whatever procedure they use to initiate the accelerated growth. But there’s an icing on the cake.”
“Which is?”
“Remember that discrepancy I showed you in the Carville samples? It appears in every sample collected from the soda cans.”
“Okay.”
“I think it’s a marker.”
“A marker?”
“Yes. A unique identifier. Purposely placed in the suspect DNA to establish a differentiation from the host and its clone.”
“What’s your guess?”
“My guess?”
“How sure of this thing are you?”
Marvin cocked his head and thought about it. Much like Alan, he wasn’t a risk taker. Speculation was one thing. Putting a number on it was another. Any scientist that Alan had ever met was reluctant to put too much faith in a theory if there wasn’t ample data to back up the claim.
“Overlooking the fact that technology like this doesn’t exist, at least not publically, I would say somewhere around seventy-five percent.”
Seventy-five percent, Alan thought. Higher than I thought.
But it wasn’t bulletproof.
“I’d like it if the odds were better,” Alan said.
“I feel exactly the opposite.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it would be one hell of a lot less frightening,” Marvin said.
Back at the Patriot Inn, Alan headed straight to the second floor to Guy Bernard’s office. Guy had left him a message earlier saying he had information regarding the task Alan had set him on.
Alan knocked on the door to Room 255 and when it opened he was greeted by Bruno. He stepped aside to allow Alan to enter.
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