Free Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller by J.W. Bouchard Page A

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