Relic

= 17 =

The laboratory looked out over the East River and across to the warehouses and decaying industrial buildings of Long Island City. Lewis Turow stood in the window and watched an enormous barge, piled with garbage and surrounded by countless seagulls, being pushed out to sea. Probably one minute’s worth of New York City garbage, he thought.

Turow turned away from the window and sighed. He hated New York, but one had to make choices. The choice for him was enduring the city and working in one of the best genetic labs in the country, or working in some halfassed facility in a nice rural spot somewhere. So far he’d chosen the city, but his patience was running out.

He heard a low beeping, then the soft hiss of a miniprinter. The results were coming through. Another soft beep indicated the print job was finished. The threemillion-dollar Omega-9 Parallel Processing Computer, which took up a series of large gray boxes along one wall, was now completely silent. Only a few lights [102] indicated that anything was happening. It was a special, hardwired model designed for sequencing DNA and mapping genes. Turow had come to the lab six months before specifically because of this machine.

He fetched the paper out of the bin and scanned it. The first page was a summary of the results, followed by a sequence of nucleic acids found in the sample. Next to those were columns of letters that identified primer sequences and mapped genes from the target group.

The target group, in this case, was unusual: big cats. They had asked for gene matches with Asiatic tiger, jaguar, leopard, bobcat. Turow had thrown in the cheetah, since its genetics were so well known. The outgroup chosen was, as usual, Homo sapiens, a control to check that the genetic matching process had been accurate and the sample sound.

He scanned the summary.

Run 3349A5 990

SAMPLE: NYC Crime Lab LA-33

SUMMARY

TARGET GROUP

% matches degree of confidence

Panthera leo 5.5 4%

Panthera onca 7.1 5%

Felis lynx 4.0 3%

Felis rufa 5.2 4%

Acinonyx jubatus 6.6 4%

OUTGROUP CONTROL

Homo sapiens 45.2 33%

Well, this is complete bullshit, thought Turow. The sample matched the outgroup a lot more than it matched the target group—the opposite of what should have [103] happened. Only a 4 percent chance that the genetic material was from a big cat, but a 33 percent chance it was from a human being.

Thirty-three percent. Still low, but within the realm of possibility.

So that meant trying GenLab for a match. GenLab was an enormous international DNA database—two hundred gigs and growing—that contained DNA sequences, primers, and mapped genes for thousands of organisms, from the Escherichia coli bacterium to Homo sapiens. He would run the data against the GenLab database, and see just what this DNA was from. Something close to Homo sapiens, it looked like. Not high enough to be an ape, but maybe something like a lemur.

Turow’s curiosity was piqued. Till now, he didn’t even know that his laboratory did work for the police department. What the hell made them think this sample came from a big cat? he wondered.

The results ran to a hefty eighty pages. The DNA sequencer printed out the identified nucleotides in columnar format, indicating species, identified genes, and unidentified sequences. Turow knew that most of the sequences would be unidentified, since the only organism with a complete genetic map was E. coli.

C-G G-C Unidentified

G-C G-C *

G-C Homo sapiens T-A *

C-G T-A *

A-T A-1 allele T-A *

T-A marker T-A *

C-G G-C *

A-T Al C-G *

A-T Polymorphism C-G *

A-T begin C-G *

A-T * T-A *

G-C * G-C *

T-A * T-A *

G-C * T-A *

T-A -

A-T -

T-A -

G-C -

C-G -

C-G A1 Poly end

[104] Turow glanced over the figures, then carried the paper over to his desk. With a few keystrokes on his SPARC-station 10, Turow could access information from thousands of databases. If the Omega-9 did not have the information he sought, it would automatically dial into the Internet and find a computer that did.

Scanning the printout more closely, Turow frowned. It must be a degraded sample, he thought. Too much unidentified DNA.

A-T Unidentified A-T Hermdactylus

A-T - T-A turcicus

A-T - C-G cont’d

A-T - T-A *

A-T C-G *

A-T - T-A *

T-A - G-C *

G-C - G-C *

G-C - G-C *

A-T *Hemidactylus G-C *

T-A turcicus G-C *

C-G * G-C *

G-C * G-C *

G-C - G-C *

T-A * G-C *

C-G * G-C *

A-T * G-C *

[105] He stopped flipping the pages. Here was something truly odd: the program had identified a large chunk of DNA as belonging to an animal named Hemidactylus turcicus.

Now what the hell is that? thought Turow. The Biological Nomenclature Database told him:

COMMON NAME: TURKISH GECKO

What? thought Turow. He typed, EXPAND.

HEMIDACTYLUS TURCICUS: TURKISH GECKO.

ORIGINAL RANGE: NORTHERN AFRICA

PRESENT BIOLOGICAL RANGE: FLORIDA, BRAZIL, ASIA MINOR, NORTHERN AFRICA.

MEDIUM-SIZE LIZARD OF THE GECKO FAMILY, GEKKONIDAE, ARBOREAL, NOCTURAL, LACKING MOVEABLE EYELIDS

Turow flicked out of the database while the information was still scrolling by. It was pure nonsense, obviously. Lizard DNA and human DNA in the same sample? But this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. You couldn’t blame the computer, really. It was an inexact procedure, and only the smallest fractions of the DNA sequences of any given organism were known.

He scanned down the printed list. Less than 50 percent of the matches were human—a very low proportion, assuming the subject was human, but not out of the question in a degraded sample. And there was always the [106] possibility of contamination. A stray cell or two could ruin an entire run. This last possibility was looking more and more likely to Turow. Well, what can you expect from the NYPD? They couldn’t even get rid of the guy who sold crack openly on the corner across from his apartment building.

He continued his scan. Wait, he thought, here’s another long sequence: Tarentola mauritanica. He punched up the database, entered the name. The screen read:

TARENTOLA MAURITANICA: WALL GECKO

Give me a break, Turow thought. This is some kind of joke. He glanced at the calendar: April first was Saturday.

He started to laugh. It was a very good joke. A very, very good joke. He didn’t think old Buchholtz had it in him. Well, he had a sense of humor, too. He started his report.

Sample LA-33

Summary: Sample conclusively identified as

Homo Gekkopiens, common name Gecko-man ...

When he finished the report he sent it upstairs immediately. Then he went out for coffee, still chuckling. He was proud of how he’d handled it. He wondered where in the world Buchholtz got his gecko samples from. Probably sold them in pet stores. He could see Buchholtz blending up sample cells from two or three geckos in the ultrablender with a few drops of his own blood. Let’s see what our new man Turow makes of this, he’d probably been thinking. Turow, returning with the coffee, had to laugh out loud. He found Buchholtz waiting for him in the lab, only Buchholtz wasn’t laughing.