Identical

22

The young colleague of Dr. Yavem’s with whom Tim had deposited the evidence surrendered by the state police left a message on his cell saying that they had concluded the tests and wanted to talk to him or Evon at 2 this afternoon. Tim met Evon at ZP and they taxied to the hospital. They were at the U in ten minutes and then walked in circles on their way through the med school to Yavem’s lab. The hospital, famous as a cancer treatment center, had itself grown like a tumor, spreading in all directions. Sometimes you had to go half a block to find an elevator. All in all, the hike to Yavem’s lab was longer than the drive out here.

Dr. Yavem emerged to greet them and brought both back to his small white office, with its long window into his laboratory. Tim realized that he might as well be looking through the glass at something occurring fifty or one hundred years from now, because the work taking place there was that far beyond what he would ever comprehend. DNA identification had not even been invented when Dita was killed in 1982. He’d heard the term because of Watson and Crick, and a book he’d read. Tim thought for a second about his father’s father, a sour, silent man who’d been born on a farm near Aberdeen and hadn’t even seen a railroad train until one started him on his journey to America. The old man lived to the time of television but refused to watch the set, convinced it was possessed.

In the taxi, Evon had described Yavem as a merry little guy, but to Tim he seemed pretty grave behind his spare moustache. There was barely room for two of them on the other side of Yavem’s desk, which ironically made Tim like him more. It meant Yavem had given up the space to his lab and his research and not his ego.

“I have quite a bit to tell you,” Dr. Yavem said, “but it will probably make the most sense if I explain my results in the order in which I performed the tests.

“Remember, Ms. Miller, I described a very basic testing protocol. The first step, in order to do things properly, was to confirm that the blood at the Kronon home had come from one of the Gianis twins. Then, assuming that was the case, we needed to confirm that they were identical twins. If so, we’d employ two different tests to prospect throughout each man’s genome for so-called copy-number variations. If we were successful in identifying a CNV, we’d then analyze the blood from the crime scene to see if we could find the same one at the same locus.

“Step one was the well-accepted part of the testing regime. Given the age of the specimens and the likelihood of contamination, we said we would try Y-STR testing first.” Clearly a practiced teacher, Yavem, as he spoke, turned now and then to Tim, who finally pointed back at Evon.

“Tell her, Doctor. She’s going to have to explain it all to me later. Very, very slowly.” Yavem laughed just a second before reverting to a somber expression.

“We had DNA specimens from a number of sources. There was the original blood from Hal and Zeus Kronon. I had a very good specimen from the water bottle that you told me Paul Gianis had drunk from. And I had fingerprints that had been positively identified as Cass Gianis’s.

“I began by analyzing the Kronons’ blood.”

“Why Zeus and Hal?” asked Evon. “Weren’t they excluded by blood type?”

“Yes, but in this case, specimen contamination was a considerable risk. That’s one of many reasons to look first at the Y chromosome. Because females at the scene present no chance of contamination. But we knew that both Hal and his father had spent quite a bit of time in Ms. Kronon’s bedroom before the police closed the scene, so I thought it would be helpful to have their Y chromosome sequenced. When you do a DNA analysis, you don’t know precisely what cells you’re analyzing. It may look like a blood drop to the naked eye, but even a single skin cell from someone else can show up in the results. So if we have a specimen large enough to test in several regions, it’s very helpful to understand what the DNA of a possible contaminating cell looks like, so you can understand a variation in results. With a father and son, you expect the same Y sequence, but we did both, basically as a way to validate ourselves. And that proved fortuitous because Hal and Zeus are not in fact genetically linked.”

Evon had one of those moments. The veins at her temples throbbed and her vision wavered. She understood why Yavem wasn’t smiling.

“Hal is not Zeus’s son?”

“Not genetically.”

Tim grabbed her arm now that he understood. His gray eyes, clouded and marked by age, swung her way and he made an indefinite sound with his mouth in a tiny o.

“I’ll flip you,” Evon said.

“Uh-uh. I ain’t telling him,” said Tim. “There’s not enough money, not in the whole entire world.”

“God,” Evon said. She took a deep breath and said, “OK,” meaning Yavem could go on.

“I then moved on to the Gianis twins. We got very good sequencing off the water bottle on Paul. So we then tried to extract DNA from some of the fingerprint lifts that were identified as Cass’s, and we succeeded at that. We didn’t get as complete a result, but there were still identifiable short segments at a number of loci.”

“What about the copy-number variations?” asked Evon.

“We weren’t looking for them at this point. That’s a whole different array of tests. We certainly confirmed that Paul and Cass are in fact monozygotic twins-identical twins from the same embryo.”

“No surprise there,” answered Evon.

“Yes, well,” said Yavem. A brief smile escaped him and he looked downward, seemingly to suppress it. “Forgive me,” he said. “Because once the Gianis Y was sequenced, there was another unexpected result. I actually hadn’t noticed. Teresa called my attention to it.” He gestured through the window toward a figure in a white coat in the lab, the woman Tim had met with.

“I hope it’s better than the first surprise,” Evon said.

“Of the same nature. Zeus Kronon was the father of the Gianis twins.”

Evon felt her jaw hanging. “Fuck,” she said, a word she spoke aloud in conversation no more than once a year.

Tim actually laughed. A few drunken wags at St. D’s had asked how Mickey Gianis, who could barely get out of bed, had fathered more children. Tim recalled one Sunday evening when Father Nik tore the head off someone at the men’s club for speaking such a malicious slur.

Evon was looking at him.

“Did you know that?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

Evon in the meantime had taken a moment to calculate.

“So that would mean that Zeus and the Gianises all share a Y chromosome?”

“Correct.”

“So the blood at the scene might have come from Zeus, too?”

“Looking solely at the Y chromosome we’d get that result. But we know there are other genetic differences between Zeus and his twins. Because Zeus is a different blood type than those men. They’re B. He’s O. Their mother must be type B. But if the twins’ Y chromosome matched the blood, we’d know it was one of theirs. We quickly concluded, however, that was not the case. Like Zeus, the blood could not have come from the Gianises either.”

A quick fear withered Evon’s heart.

“Please tell me it’s not Hal’s.”

“By all means. It is surely not Hal’s. Or Zeus’s. Or the Gianises’. Nor Hal’s mother, Hermione, for that matter.”

“The mother?”

“Yes, none of the blood collected at the scene contains a Y chromosome.”

Evon stopped for a second, before asking how that could possibly be.

“You can be sure that we examined a dozen of those blood spots to be certain. But we got the same result each time. All the blood on the walls and window came from a woman,” said Yavem.