Polar Quest

48

Kilkenny and Balogh sat by the window in the visitation room as a deputy brought in Eames. The deputy removed Eames’s handcuffs, then stepped outside and closed the door. Eames slowly walked over to the window; the days of imprisonment had clearly eroded his confidence.

‘How are you holding up?’ Kilkenny asked.

‘Okay, I guess,’ Eames lied.

Kilkenny turned to Balogh. ‘If he’s convicted, what kind of time is he facing?’

‘The prosecution is going for double life on the murder charges, plus additional time for the rape. With those kind of numbers, the first shot at parole is about thirty years away.’

Eames’s head dipped lower as Balogh spoke, as if the years were piled on his shoulders like a great weight.

‘I’ll be well over seventy then, not that it matters. The men in my family rarely get past sixty-five.’ Eames let out a halfhearted laugh. ‘Bad genes, I guess.’

‘Then we’d better make damn sure we prove you’re innocent. To do that,’ Kilkenny said, ‘I need your help in figuring something out.’

‘Shoot.’

‘I don’t know how else to put this, but how is it possible that the police found your DNA inside your ex-wife’s body?’

Eames stared at Kilkenny for a moment before he realized the question wasn’t an accusation. ‘I can’t explain it. Tiv and I reviewed the lab report, and the only suspect DNA sample recovered from the crime scene was semen. Now I haven’t ever donated semen and I haven’t had sex with anyone since separating from Faye. I also haven’t undergone any surgical procedures that required a general anesthetic, so there’s never been an opportunity for someone to take a sample from me while I was out. Since I don’t have an identical twin brother, the only explanation I have for the DNA match is lab error. Unfortunately, I haven’t found anything wrong with their procedures, and I’m an expert.’

‘There might be another way,’ Kilkenny said. ‘What if someone acquired a sample of your DNA, and from that sample manufactured the evidence being used against you?’

Eames stared incredulously into Kilkenny’s eyes. ‘Nolan, that is one humongous giant if.’

‘I know,’ Kilkenny admitted, ‘but is it possible?’

‘In theory, but it sure wouldn’t be easy. You’d need some good clean copies of DNA to work with and someplace to implant it — host cells of some kind. Once that was done, you’d have to find a way to dedifferentiate these cells.’

‘Dedifferentiate?’ Kilkenny asked.

‘In the first few weeks after conception, all the cells present are undifferentiated — that is, all the cells are identical, and each has the potential to become any part of the body. The offspring of some of these cells will become muscle, others nerves and organs, but at this stage they are all the same. By the time you are born, your cells have become differentiated, specialized, and a skin cell can no longer produce a bone cell. Something happens to the DNA in the differentiated cells that makes it ignore any information that is irrelevant to that cell’s specific task.’

‘So the DNA in a nerve cell will only use the instructions dealing with the operation of nerve cells and ignore everything else?’

‘Exactly. Now, it’s possible to dedifferentiate DNA, which is how one group of researchers cloned some cows, but it’s not easy. Of course the real trick would be to insert the DNA into the nucleus of some stem cells and train the cells to grow specific tissues, say skin, blood, and hair, in a petri dish.’

‘If they can clone a cow, why not just make a copy of you and harvest the cells they need to plant the evidence?’ Balogh asked.

‘Maturity,’ Eames replied. ‘Human males don’t get pubic hair or produce semen until puberty, which means they would have to have started making this clone ten, twelve years ago. This is all just bull anyway. The stuff we’re kicking around isn’t possible now, and certainly wasn’t possible back in the nineties. Just to do the blood, you’d have to make not only the blood cells, but also the plasma and everything else that’s in a normal blood-stream. Sperm cells and semen would be even trickier. I’d be surprised if anything like this got pulled off before the end of the century.’

‘I believe it may be possible now,’ Kilkenny said.

‘Can you prove it?’ Balogh asked skeptically.

‘No, but let me show you something.’

Kilkenny pulled out the sample capsule and held it in front of the window. Eames studied the capsule for a moment, then his eyes widened.

‘Oh my God. Is that…’

Kilkenny nodded.

‘I thought the probe was destroyed in the crash. Where did you get it?’ Eames asked excitedly.

‘It was in a Vielogic lab in New Jersey, along with the rest of the undamaged Ice Pick probe.’

‘How did it get there?’

‘I can’t say, and for the time being neither of you saw this, understand?’ Kilkenny asked as he pocketed the capsule.

Eames and Balogh both nodded.

‘Hypothetical question,’ Kilkenny said, looking through the glass at Eames. ‘If Vielogic manufactured the DNA evidence used to incriminate you, where would I find proof that they could do it?’

‘There’s only a handful of people in the world who could even attempt this,’ Eames replied, ‘and only one of them works for Vielogic — Dominique Martineau. I met her last month in New York at that dinner with Lafitte; it looked like they were very close. Martineau’s brilliant. She’s done a lot of pioneering work in cellular mechanics and genetics — mostly to do with how cells reproduce and what tells them to stop. From the papers I’ve read, she’s interested in cancer, aging, and fertility. She’s got a private lab near Paris and carte blanche from Vielogic to pursue her own lines of research.’

‘An artist with a wealthy patron,’ Balogh opined.

‘You think Martineau and Lafitte are responsible for killing Faye and Lloyd?’ Eames asked.

‘I don’t know for sure, Oz,’ Kilkenny replied, ‘but it sure looks that way to me.’

‘A case like this boils down to three things,’ Balogh said, ‘means, motive, and opportunity. Nolan, can you prove any of this?’

‘I’m making progress on motive, and someone like Lafitte makes his own opportunities. Unfortunately, the means used here are so unbelievable that I have to find the smoking gun, or in this case a test tube with your DNA in it, to prove these people set you up.’