Wright, his face drained of color, stood up and, without a word, walked stiffly out of the room.
D’Agosta grinned as the door closed. “Softened up that bastard nicely,” he said.
[100] “What’s that again, Lieutenant?” Pendergast asked, leaning back in the leather chair and picking up the book with renewed enthusiasm.
“Come on, Pendergast,” D’Agosta said, looking cagily at the FBI agent. “I guess you can drop the genteel act when it suits you.”
Pendergast blinked innocently at D’Agosta. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I apologize for any unseemly behavior. It’s simply that I can’t stand pompous, bureaucratic individuals. I’m afraid I can become quite short with them.” He raised the book. “It’s a bad habit, but very hard to break.”
= 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 unusuaclass="underline" 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 colibacterium 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 -