Solomon Creed

EPILOGUE

The computer pinged gently, cutting through the hum of air-con and the gentle tap of fingers on keyboards.

Harris looked up, his heart pattering a little faster inside the long-sleeved shirt he wore despite the heat outside to hide the tattoos on his arms. In the quiet world of forensic biology the sound he had just heard was the equivalent of the stadium roar that followed a touchdown or a home run.

They had a match.

He opened the documents the search engine had returned. Studied them. Frowned.

He glanced over at his boss sitting in the corner of the room, her large glasses reflecting the screen she was glaring at, making her eyes appear as if they had turned into mini-monitors. He was only a month into his placement and the main thing he had learned so far was that Dr Gillian (hard ‘G’) did not like being disturbed. She liked her people to think for themselves. She liked people who took responsibility for their shit, and she did not like people who wasted her time getting her to check their homework and rubber-stamp things that should be beneath her radar and were definitely below her pay-grade.

‘Why have a bunch of dogs and bark myself?’ she said — a lot.

Dr Gillian was old school and borderline abusive, but Harris also knew that the only reason this position had come up at all was because of those things and entry-level criminalist positions did not come up that often.

He glanced back at his screen and checked everything again, comparing the smudgy columns of PCR data from one lab sheet against those of another. It was a match, no question, a spot-on, no-room-for-error, bang-on match.

Except it couldn’t be.

He checked the dates on the two samples. The first was five years old, the second had been submitted two days ago. That in itself wasn’t surprising. Sometimes matches came from samples that had been collected decades apart. Since the lab had moved to the new building on Miracle Mile it had started processing more cold cases, digging back through evidence gathered way before the technology existed to pin crimes to the people who had done them. Their systems were linked to a wide network of other databases — CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database, Interpol’s DNA Gateway and several international foundations who kept and studied DNA samples for academic purposes. The five-year-old sample had come from one of these, and this was what told him something was wrong.

He checked the PDF files that had come with the sample, trying to spot what might have gone wrong. They had a match, but it couldn’t be. There was no way. He knew that what he was looking at must be wrong but he couldn’t figure out how. It had to be a mistake, and, most importantly, it was not his mistake, it was somebody else’s.

‘Doctor Gillian …’ He cleared his throat to try to make it sound less whiny. ‘Would you mind taking a look at this please?’

The other two criminalists in the room looked up from their terminals, exchanged a glance then got on with their work again.

Doctor Gillian’s bright reflected eyes fixed on him for what seemed like an age. ‘You want me to get out of my chair and come to you?’

‘Well, er … I guess I could forward you the files, but I have them open here and lined up, so it’ll be quicker if …’

She stood abruptly, sending her chair wheeling away behind her to a mark on the wall showing where chair and wall had met many times before.

‘This better be worth the trip, Mr Harris,’ she said, striding across the floor to his desk. ‘You better have a positive ID for Jack the Ripper or something, because anything less and I’m going to be most displeased.’

She came to a halt behind his chair and he pictured her windshield glasses reflecting his screens now.

He studied his monitors, seeing it all again, suddenly less certain now of what he had and what it might mean. Perhaps it was his mistake after all and he was about to be made to look like a dick in front of the whole office.

The silence stretched.

A hand reached down, took control of the mouse and started scrolling through the documents, checking the same things Harris had checked. ‘Well, that can’t be right.’ Harris breathed out. ‘You sure these files haven’t got mixed up?’

‘I checked them both; they’re genuine.’

‘They can’t be.’ She clicked on the lab submission form for the older sample and Harris re-read it, knowing Dr Gillian was doing the same. It was different from the standardized police forensics forms with lots of extra narrative detail and photographs showing the site the sample had been taken from. It had been filled in by a Dr Brendan Furst, lead archaeologist on the excavation of a burial site in Turkey known locally as Melek Mezar. They had found some remains including hair from which the DNA sample had been extracted. Carbon 14 tests had dated the remains as belonging to a man who had lived around four thousand years earlier. The other sample suggested the same man had been walking around a town in Arizona two days earlier — a man called Solomon Creed.

Dr Gillian clicked on this now then pointed at the screen. ‘There’s your answer. Look at where this came from and who filed it.’

Harris did as he was told. It had been filed by a Garth Morgan, police chief of the town of Redemption. The town name rang a bell. ‘Isn’t that the guy who was in bed with the cartels?’

‘Yep. Dirty cop,’ Gillian said, as if she was cursing. ‘Wound up dead and did us all a favour. What’s the case number?’

Harris hovered the mouse arrow over the number and a pop-up window appeared with a few headlines written inside. ‘It’s related to that plane crash,’ he said.

‘Then it’s a mistake,’ Gillian said. ‘I’m certainly not going to bother anyone with a match with a four-thousand-year-old corpse on a sample submitted by a dirty cop. Junk it. Good spot.’

She moved away and Harris stared back at the screen, relieved that he hadn’t been reamed out in front of his colleagues for asking a dumb question. He closed all the files, unlinked the match alert then opened a new search window and typed ‘Melek Mezar’ into it.

The top hit was a Wikipedia entry showing a photograph of a town that could have been lifted straight out of the Bible. The buildings seemed to rise from the ground in square blocks with small black windows cut into them, everything the same colour, like pale dust. Another photograph showed what appeared to be a cave, the flash of the camera throwing light into the darkness and picking out the outlines of bones half-buried in the ground.

The article mentioned Dr Furst, the archaeologist who had submitted the DNA sample taken from the body pictured in the photograph. He had spent years searching for the lost tomb, believed to be the final resting place of some powerful, Messianic prophet who had lived a full two thousand years before Christ. Harris skim-read the section detailing the legend of the prophet, a shining man who had walked out of a fire and possessed deep and sacred powers, including the power to heal and the gift of prophecy. Many at the time thought he was a god, but Dr Furst had discovered that he wasn’t. The DNA proved that he was only a man, despite the name the prophet had given the town in death. Melek Mezar is Turkish for ‘Tomb of the Angel’. Harris smiled when he read that and filed it away in his mind to tell his girlfriend later. She believed in all that shit — angels, demons, vampires. She’d love it if he told her he’d processed some angel DNA in the lab. He closed the Wikipedia page and went back to work.