Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (7 page)

Chapter 7

Alan hadn’t left
the Painted Horse until close to midnight. It had been a rough night after that.

Prior to leaving the Painted Horse, he had interviewed several of the security guards who had been working the floor, a cage boss, a banker arriving for the swing shift, and one of the employees that monitored the security cameras.

The banker he interviewed, Rebecca Sanders, was a slender woman with brunette hair and green eyes. She worked the 3 to 11 swing shift on Thursday through Sunday. She was cute in a plain sort of way, reminding him of Lucy for some reason. At first, she wouldn’t believe what Alan was telling her, couldn’t believe the Baier woman was capable of stealing from her employer, let alone masterminding a complex heist which entailed clearing out the casino’s vault. While they rarely worked the same shift (Baier typically worked the 7 to 3 shift), their time at the casino did occasionally overlap. Sanders described Teresa Baier as timid and soft-spoken, friendly and reliable. A woman who always showed up on time and didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone. “A person tends to remember things like that,” Sanders had said. “Around here, everybody talks smack about everyone else. Teresa was the rare type of person that kept her judgments to herself.”

Jose Herrera was a short Hispanic man in his late twenties that worked the floor during the same shift as Sean Hammond. Herrera’s description of Hammond was essentially the same as Sanders had given of Baier. Aside from the timid part, Hammond was considered to be soft-spoken, even-tempered, and completely trustworthy.

Unlike some of the other security personnel, Herrera had said, Hammond knew how to keep his cool when the shit hit the fan. Herrera had said, “Most of these other guys, they think they’re cops, only they don’t have what it takes to be real cops, so they try to act tough to compensate for it.”

It seemed like remarkable insight from a security guard bringing home less than 30K a year.

The man surveying the monitors in the surveillance room during the time the robbery had taken place was Archie Mayberry.

The casino was equipped with over three hundred cameras, most of them color, many of which had the capability of zooming in and out and tilting and panning.

Mayberry showed Alan the footage the cameras had captured, which showed Baier moving toward the entrance, heavily saddled with the strap of a duffle bag slung over each shoulder. In the video, she appeared to be having issues lugging around that much weight. She reached the glass exit doors, at which point the video showed Hammond opening one of the swinging doors, allowing her to step through, and immediately falling into step behind her.

“That’s when I sounded the alarm,” Mayberry said. “I knew something was rotten in Denmark.”

By the time 11:30 rolled around, Alan got the feeling that he had overstayed his welcome. Alan didn’t sympathize, but he could understand. For every minute the casino was shut down, it was losing money.

Following his time at the casino, Alan had driven back to the Patriot Inn. He had slept fitfully. He guessed he had had the same dream about the car accident that he’d had many nights before, but couldn’t remember. He had gone against Darrow’s suggestion and skipped the drink.

By 4:30 A.M., he was willing to give some credence to the man’s advice. A stiff drink might have delivered the peaceful slumber he had been hoping for, but he settled for a slice of cold pizza and a bottle of Ice Mountain water. After that, he had showered, dressed, and headed for the office.

He arrived at 6:30 A.M.

The seventh floor was mostly dead, but he could see a shaft of light spilling out beneath the door to Gant’s office. Alan knocked on Gant’s door before letting himself in. Gant was hunched over his desk, sifting through a pile of documents. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Did you even go home?” Alan asked as he slumped down into the chair opposite Gant’s desk.

“Long enough to kiss my kids goodnight,” Gant said. “What about you? You look like you might have missed out on an hour or two of sleep yourself.”

“More or less,” Alan said. “Nothing’s adding up. Do you know anything about an agent named Darrow?”

“His name’s come up a time or two.”

“I think he’s a spook. CIA maybe.”

“You think the CIA is involved?”

“He isn’t with the FBI, and when I inquired about what agency he worked for, he gave me the runaround. I don’t think they’re telling us everything they know either.”

“You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think there’s a time in a man’s life when things come down to the make-or-break point. Where the outcome of a situation doesn’t just cause a ripple in his life, but actually determines the course of his destiny. That’s what this thing feels like to me. Like the outcome of these cases is going to determine our fates. If we manage to solve them, we’re not going to get any praise for doing our jobs, but if we fuck it all up, it’ll probably lead to the systematic dismantling of the GCB. There are people out there that are of the mind that taxpayer dollars could be better spent elsewhere.”

“Isn’t that always the case?”

Gant nodded, kneading the creases in his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “It is. But I’ve spent enough time in this game that I’m reluctant to start over.”

“You’re not a dinosaur yet,” Alan said, feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the man.

“No. But I am a Neanderthal. A hairy guy who walks around with a club and grunts a lot. And when I swing my club, it doesn’t do as much damage as it used to.”

“Sounds dramatic.”

Gant laughed for a moment before becoming serious again. “You see many Neanderthals walking around lately?”

“No.”

“Yeah, know why? Because they went extinct.”

Chapter 8

Later that morning,
Marvin Davis paid them a visit on the seventh floor. This was highly unusual. Marvin rarely left the confines of the crime lab. It was his comfort zone; his security blanket. The area that existed outside of it was considered hostile territory.

When Marvin stepped out of the elevator onto the seventh floor, he looked like a scared animal that had suddenly been transported out of its natural habitat and into an environment much more dangerous.

Marvin walked past the desks situated throughout the floor’s bullpen, making his way toward Alan’s office. His eyes darted back and forth, surveying this new landscape for potential threats. The agents seated at their desks in the bullpen (there were four of them that morning, which included Doug Ziman, Ron Keller, Frank Holland, and Daymond Hart) glanced up from what they were doing long enough to examine the tall and skinny man wearing the pristinely white lab coat as he strode past them. Marvin refused to make eye contact with any of them.

Lucy noticed Marvin coming toward Alan’s office first. She rose from her chair and said, “Hi Marvin,” before he had fully entered the room, “what brings you to these parts?”

Marvin stepped through the doorway, paused long enough to take a deep breath, and then sat down in a chair on the other side of Alan’s desk. Alan wasn’t sure, but he thought he caught a glimmer of infatuation in Lucy’s eyes. Was she interested in Marvin? He couldn’t say it surprised him much, but he questioned the subtle pang of jealousy that rose up inside of him.

The walk from the elevator to Alan’s office was a short one, and shouldn’t have been cause for exerting more than the minimal amount of physical effort, but when he spoke, Marvin sounded as though he were out of breath.

“I finished with the samples that came in last night,” he said.

“And?”

“Don’t rush him,” Lucy said.

“I wasn’t rushing him,” Alan said unbelievingly. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t rushing anything.

“As you might have guessed, they are the same as the others. Quite mysterious. Nearly perfect matches, except for the most minor of discrepancies.”

“So maybe they have twins after all,” Alan said.

Marvin shook his head. “That’s not what I was thinking at all. I did a little digging, and even in monozygotic twins, the differences would be more pronounced than we’re seeing in the samples taken from the crime scenes. Identical twins occur when a single egg is fertilized to form one zygote, which then divides into two separate embryos. It isn’t as common to see it occur naturally as it is in IVF when artificial splitting is involved to increase the number of available embryos for transfer.”

“Here,” Lucy said, handing Marvin a bottle of water. “So identical twins aren’t really identical?”

Marvin accepted the water gratefully. He unscrewed the cap, took a drink, and then continued on. “Genetically, they are very similar, but in a study of half a million nucleotide polymorphisms, differences appeared in two of the roughly thirty-three million comparisons. Which translates into potentially hundreds of differences across the entire genome. There is also the matter of the fingerprints. Because of having contact with different parts of the environment inside the womb, twins don’t share the same prints.”

“But wouldn’t they be close?”

“Perhaps. But they wouldn’t be as similar as the specimens we’re seeing.”

Alan hadn’t lent any credence to the possibility that each case involved the use of identical twins to aid the commission of the crime, but this also meant that he had hit another dead end. Given the testimony of the victims/suspects, and the similarities of both the fingerprints and the DNA, it had been shaping up to be the only viable theory he had to go on.

“That leaves us exactly nowhere,” Alan said.

“Maybe not,” Marvin said.

“You have an idea?”

“I have a theory.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Do either of you remember the story of Dolly?”

Alan shook his head.

Lucy said, “Dolly the sheep?”

Marvin nodded. “Finn-Dorset ewe to be precise. Dolly was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell. This occurred in the mid-nineties. A cell was taken from the udder of her biological mother. Dolly was created by inserting a cell from her mother into a sheep ovum where, after four hundred failed attempts, it formed into an embryo. The embryo was then placed inside a female sheep and brought to term via normal pregnancy.”

“You think we’re dealing with clones?”

“Admittedly, it’s a stretch.”

“I’ll say. Is that even possible?”

“It’s impossible to say,” Marvin said. “Bringing a human embryo to adulthood is light years ahead of anything I’ve read about. A company called Advanced Cell Technology created the first hybrid human clone back in the late nineties, but the embryo was destroyed after twelve days. After Dolly, human cloning became a hot topic and was outlawed by many countries. If someone had managed to perfect a technique, it’s likely we wouldn’t have heard about it given the potential for ethical backlash. Most of the work involving cloning is kept under wraps. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the science had made leaps and bounds without us hearing about it. But this would be extremely advanced.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Alan said. “Even if cloning a human was possible, wouldn’t it take years to grow into an adult? Wouldn’t you have to teach it?”

“Good questions, but I’m afraid I don’t have the answers. As I said, it’s only a theory. And a somewhat farfetched one at that. I could get in touch with several former colleagues and see if they’ve heard of any advances in the last few years.”

“It seems like a logical assumption,” Lucy said.

Alan watched Marvin take a sip from his water bottle. He noticed that Lucy took a sip from her own bottle at the same time. It wasn’t accidental. It was called body language mirroring, and Alan had seen it before. It occurred most commonly when two people were interested in each other. It was the same behavior responsible for two people yawning at the same time.

“Now isn’t the time, Lucy,” Alan said.

“Now isn’t the time for what?” Lucy asked, screwing the cap back onto her bottle. She appeared utterly perplexed by his statement.

She probably doesn’t even realize she’s doing it,
Alan thought.

“Nothing,” Alan said. He looked at Marvin. “I’m not convinced that we’re dealing with human cloning here, but let’s just say you’re right. Where would you go from here?”

Marvin sat in silence as he pondered this. He sat that way for a long while.

“It would take millions of dollars of lab equipment to get something like that off the ground. Not to mention the cell samples, which wouldn’t be readily available, at least not by a company that wasn’t licensed to conduct that type of research. In the scientific world, things like that are strictly regulated. There would be records of any such purchases. The company would have to be well funded.”

“Through public grants? We can get that information.”

“Doubtful. Remember I mentioned the ethical implications. My guess is that they would be private companies, financed by wealthy owners or by donations from an interested third party.”

Alan leaned forward in his chair. He snapped his fingers and said, “A tiger doesn’t change its stripes.”

“Huh?” Lucy asked.

“A legitimate organization wouldn’t perfect a technology for the express purpose of doing something insidious.”

“Again…
huh?
”

“Whoever is behind this is doing it to commit crimes.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it would have been a criminal enterprise to begin with.”

Lucy didn’t try to hide her confusion. She glanced from Alan, to Marvin, and back to Alan again. “Huh?”

After Marvin left Alan’s office, stealing quick glances around the bullpen as though he expected an unseen predator to pounce out of the shadows on his way to the elevator, Lucy said, “Call me slow, but I still don’t understand what you were getting at.”

“What I meant was that I don’t believe that any good-hearted company would suddenly become bad. You wouldn’t expend time an effort into scientific research to later put it to nefarious use. So my assumption is that whoever is behind this thing had criminal mischief on the agenda to begin with. It began as a criminal effort and is continuing on that way. Which leads me to believe that the millions of dollars of equipment and supplies they would have needed to succeed in such an operation probably wasn’t obtained legitimately.”

“You think it was stolen?”

Alan nodded. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think.”

Lucy’s gaze went to the elevators on the far side of the bullpen.

“You like him don’t you?” Alan asked.

“Who?”

“Our mad scientist friend.”

“Marvin?”

“That’s the one.”

“I don’t know what would make you say that,” Lucy said, but Alan noticed that she wouldn’t allow her eyes to meet his. Not quite.

“Just an observation.”

“We’re co-workers,” Lucy said. “Nothing more, nothing less. He seems like a nice person. I’m not as gifted an empath as some of my friends, but he has a gentle aura about him. And he seemed very nervous. Being around him made me anxious.”

Alan studied her. He found he couldn’t read her anymore. Couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth or not.

“We’re supposed to have built in lie detectors,” Lucy said. “Empaths. Mine doesn’t always work, but it does most of the time. I can usually tell when people are lying or being deceitful. Their emotions give it away.”

“I was reading your body language. The way your eyes kept shifting from his eyes to his mouth. The way you kept wetting your lips. Those are generally unspoken tells when someone is interested in another person.”

“Sometimes I don’t think you know me at all,” Lucy said.

“He was interested in you, too.”

“Is that right?”

“I think so. He was a little jittery. Makes it hard to judge as accurately, but that would be my educated guess.”

“Well, I’m telling you that your professional opinion is wrong.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Do you think he’s right? About them using clones?”

Alan hadn’t decided that just yet. For all the advances in the various fields of biology, mapping the human genome, and manipulating DNA, he hadn’t heard any rumors of anyone perfecting the art of human cloning, let alone growing them to adulthood and using them to commit criminal acts. It sounded more like science fiction than science fact. The fact that he was even entertaining the idea proved Lucy was wrong. He knew how to keep an open mind.

“I don’t know,” Alan said. “It seems like a longshot. But I do know one thing. It gives us a place to start.”