"1 do believe I've upset her."
Levy cleared his throat. "The only way to truly upset Doctor Vecca is to threaten her protocol. She's got a lot invested in this clinical trial.'"
"Enough to want Gerhard dead?"
"She did not 'sic' Bolton on Gerhard. I told you—he was with us the night you say Gerhard was murdered." He cleared his throat. "You mentioned oDNA last night. Tell me honestly: Where did you hear of that?"
"The stuff that doesn't exist?"
"It's obvious that you know it does, so I see no point in denying it. But where—?"
"Let's trade. You tell me about it and I'll tell you where I heard about it."
"You heard about it from Gerhard, didn't you."
"First time I ever laid eyes on him he was dead." Jack wasn't giving anything away. "You first."
Levy looked around the half-full parking lot. Vecca had putt-putted off in her junker.
"Let's move the car."
"Where?"
"I'll show you."
Jack leaned forward for a look over the backrest and saw Levy's RF detector resting on the console.
"Afraid somebody's listening?"
"No, of course not. I'd just like a change of scenery."
The RF detector was reading only background, but Levy could be worried about a laser eavesdropper—bounce a beam off a window and hear everything inside. Then again, he could have something arranged…
Jack reached back and pulled out his Glock. He held it low and racked the slide. The cartridge in the chamber popped out and bounced off the rear of the front seat. All for show, but the sound effect brought the desired result.
Levy said, "You brought a gun?"
"Of course." He pocketed the ejected cartridge. "Didn't you?"
"No! I don't even own one."
"Probably should. Okay, take us where you want to go."
5
Julia watched Aaron's car pull out of the lot with that private investigator, John Robertson, still in the rear seat.
She'd made a circuit and come back to the A&P to talk to Aaron after the detective left, but apparently they'd made other plans. She wondered where they were going and what they could possibly be talking about. She was tempted to follow but had a better idea.
Before, as she'd driven away, she'd realized she'd seen the investigator get out of his car shortly after she'd pulled into the lot. She hadn't paid it much mind at the time, just a man getting out of a big black car. But that man had turned out to be Robertson.
He was gone but his car remained.
Julia pulled up before it and wrote down the license plate number.
Probably thought he was smart. Aaron had told her about his assuming the identity of a dead investigator. She'd noticed he wore gloves so as not to leave any prints. Probably thought he had all bases covered, that he'd fully insulated his identity.
Well, he'd better think again. He wasn't dealing with the hoi polloi here. He was dealing with another kind of investigator—a scientific investigator used to probing the secrets of life itself. Probing the secrets of one man's miserable life would be a cakewalk.
That remark about her underwear still rankled. How embarrassing. Had he been spying on her? Well, turnabout was fair play.
She'd give the plate number over to the agency and let them run with it. In a matter of hours they'd know everything there was to know about this man. His life would be an open book.
Smiling, she pulled away.
John Robertson, or whoever he really was, had made his last snide remark. He'd rue the day he dared to cross swords with Julia Vecca.
6
After driving in a meandering loop that brought them to a construction site, Levy parked on a dead-end street in the growing development. Apparently the workers had the weekend off.
"Well," Jack said, peering around. "This is intimate."
"I work for suspicious people. Now, tell me where you heard about—"
"Uh-uh. You first, remember?"
Levy sighed. "Very well…"
Very well? Who said very well?
"One of the fallouts of the human genome project has been the realization of how much—ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent—of our DNA is noncod-ing. In other words, junk. Or at least seems like junk. Since we can't find any useful purpose it serves, we call it that. But that doesn't mean it was never useful. Most of us think it's mainly leftovers from viruses and the evolutionary process."
Jack was disappointed. He'd heard of junk DNA. But Levy seemed too interested in oDNA for it to be junk.
"I don't buy oDNA as just junk."
"It is and it isn't. Some junk DNA is oDNA, but not all oDNA is junk."
"Thanks for clearing that up."
"I know it's confusing. Let me go back to the beginning. Back in the eighties I began working on an NIH-funded project that was looking to identify genetic markers for 'antisocial' behavior. This was all very hush-hush because of the controversial nature of the work."
"What's so controversial about that?"
"Politics, my boy. Politics. A number of NIH conferences on the subject were canceled because of protests. They're all afraid that if these markers are identified and confirmed beyond doubt, how will the information be used? Specters of the eugenics movement and the holocaust get invoked and everyone shrinks away. And then come the religious fanatics: it's original sin, not God-given DNA that causes mankind to break the Commandments."
"The good old creationists, sabotaging knowledge wherever it rears its ugly head."
"Recently they've tarted up creationism with some pseudoscientific gob-bledygook and are trying to slip it into schools as 'intelligent design,' but it's still creationism." He snorted. "Intelligent design! It's laughable. Look at the cetaceans—creatures that must live, feed, and mate in a medium they can't breathe."
Jack nodded. "Yeah. If that's intelligent design, God must be a blond."
Levy laughed. "Exactly. And has anyone who pushes intelligent design ever looked at the human genome? It's a mess—an absolute mess."
"But it somehow gets the job done."
"That it does, using only one or two percent of what's there. Back in those days, we hadn't yet mapped out the genome. The Human Genome Project was just a dream. But I did find consistent markers in certain violent criminals. Not all of them, but in enough to keep the funding going. Adapting a fluorescent antibody test developed by Julia Vecca allowed me to stain nuclei to show the presence of this DNA variant.
"Once we had that, we needed a criminal population to test. We collected samples from all the federal prisons, and the ones who scored highest were moved to Creighton, which became dedicated to researching the variant."
"Were they all violent?"
"The top scorers, yes, though some white-collar criminals were up there too. But just because they were locked up for nonviolent crimes didn't mean they weren't violent. We could only go on their convictions. We didn't know how they treated their wives or kids or the family dog."
"The closet sadists."
"Right. But with the explosion of knowledge and investigational techniques in the late nineties and early aughts, we found a subset of pseudogenes among the junk."
"Fakes?"
"How do I put this? They're ancient ancestors of functioning genes, but they have no coding ability. They fall under the junk umbrella. But these particular pseudogenes are so unique that you could almost say they indicate a variant strain of humanity… another evolutionary line… another human race that got pushed aside."
Jack held up a hand. "Just a sec. I don't know a lot about evolution but I do know the evolutionary tree has a lot of dead branches."
"Yes. But this is different. These genes are so distinct that it almost looks as if they were—I hesitate to say this—manipulated."