Lord of the Wolfyn and Twin Targets (24 page)

She rose on legs that threatened to buckle beneath her, and took the few steps necessary to bring her face-to-face with Sharpe. “Take me there.”

“We’re not finished here,” Emily protested, but Sydney waved her off.

“You’ll have to do the best you can without me. Call me if you have any questions. I’ll give you my—” She broke off, realizing she’d canceled her cell phone before she left for the island. She had no phone and no money, and her ID and credit cards were locked up. She was nobody until she retrieved her life from the safe in her bedroom at home.

A home that had been violated. Where two people had been killed.

An image flashed into her mind, that of Jenny Marie’s body after it had washed up on the beach down-current from Rocky Cliff. The cook’s dark hair had been matted with seaweed and sand, and blue crabs had nibbled at her fingers, toes and eyes, but that hadn’t been enough to disguise the horrible things Tiberius had done to her before he’d killed her and thrown her over the edge.

This,
he’d been saying to Sydney with his actions.
This is what I’ll do to you if you cross me. This is what I’ll do to the people around you
. Like Jenny Marie.

Like Celeste.

Tears filmed Sydney’s vision and a sob caught in her throat.

“Here.” Sharpe handed a business card to the lawyer. “My cell number is on it. You can call her at that number.” He turned for the door, gesturing for Sydney. “Come on. We have a plane to catch.”

He acted like he didn’t know—or didn’t care—that she was upset, like she didn’t have the right because she’d brought it on herself. A kernel of bitter anger took root in her chest, kindling and spreading through her body.

“Hey.” She grabbed his arm, trying to ignore the jolt of awareness that sang through her at the feel of hard muscle beneath his suit jacket. But the sensation was so strong, so unexpected, that she fumbled for a second when he turned back and looked at her.

“What?”

Are you completely insensitive?
she wanted to shout. What had happened to the guy on the boat? She wanted that Sharpe back, the one who’d held her, comforted her. But she didn’t ask those things, because what was the point? It wasn’t his job to comfort her—it was his job to catch Tiberius, and he’d already made it clear that he didn’t give a damn about her agenda or her feelings.

And maybe that was for the best, she realized, sucking in a breath. She had a feeling the sizzle she’d just felt wasn’t one-sided, and that could complicate things. She couldn’t become involved with him—getting involved would only serve to derail her from the important things.

She’d learned that lesson all too well before. It was her affair with Dr. Let’s-share-ideas-so-I-can-steal-yours Richard Eckhart that’d led to the loss of her university position and gotten her set on this path in the first place.

So instead of asking for comfort, she said, “Why aren’t you arguing about whether or not I should be at the scene?”

Sharpe looked down at her hand on his arm, then back up, so he was staring into her eyes when he said, “Because I never fight a battle I don’t think I can win, Ms. Westlake. You might want to keep that in mind.”

A thousand retorts jammed her brain, a thousand reasons why she should back off, back away and sit down with her lawyer while the FBI mobilized its forces to find Celeste. Instead of giving voice to any of that, though, she said simply, “Call me Sydney.”

“Okay.” But he didn’t offer the same in return. Instead, he gestured to the door and the world beyond, which she hadn’t seen in nearly a year. “Let’s go.”

She went.

T
HE FLIGHT FROM
B
OSTON
to D.C. was a short hop, but even so, John could feel the awful tension in Sydney increasing by the minute.

He could only imagine what was going on inside her head—the guilt, the fear, the shame, the hope. He could only imagine it because he didn’t have a sibling, didn’t have a strong relationship with his parents…didn’t really have anyone he truly loved, at least on the level other people seemed to feel the emotion. Iceman, indeed.

He had friends and coworkers, and that was plenty of attachments for him. However, that didn’t mean he was unaware of the lengths other people would go to protect the ones they loved, and the agonies they suffered when those people were hurt, missing…or dead.

Sydney might have chosen her employer unwisely, and she might’ve let herself be pressured into doing unthinkable things with her scientific knowledge, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t grieving for her sister.

She sat beside him on the plane, still wearing the borrowed sweats. She had her head tipped back against the seat and her eyes closed as though she’d fallen asleep, but the tension written on her face and in the lines of her hands, which were gripped tightly together in her lap, warned that she wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was thinking of what she should’ve said or done differently, or maybe she was remembering happier times with her sister.

“Do you think she’s dead?” she said, surprising him with the first words she’d uttered since they’d boarded.

“No.”

She opened one eye and looked over at him. “I’d ask if you were just saying that to make me feel better, but I have a feeling that’s not your thing.”

“Good guess. I don’t say things I don’t mean, and I don’t like repeating myself.”

She closed her eyes again, and her face looked a little more relaxed than it had moments before. “You think Tiberius will keep her alive because if she’s dead, he won’t have anything else to threaten me with.”

Except your own life,
John thought. But she’d already committed to that risk when she escaped from the island. “That’s the theory,” he agreed.

“Which means that I should expect a ransom demand. The password in exchange for her life.”

“There hadn’t been any contact by the time the plane took off, and the locals were still searching the property and the nearby houses. She might’ve gotten away.” He’d already passed on that update, but repeated the info because he thought it might help her to hear it again.

The realization brought him up short. He’d not only repeated himself, which he almost never did, but he’d also done it for no other reason than to make Sydney feel better. The very fact had faint warning buzzers going off in the back of his brain.

Keep it simple,
he reminded himself.
Keep it in perspective.

“It’s unlikely she escaped,” she said, her matter-offactness ruined by the hitch in her voice. “It’s hard for her to get around these days, even in the wheelchair.”

He heard the hollow ring of guilt, and wondered how much of it was from the immediate situation, and how much was from the fact that the disease had apparently struck one twin and left the other untouched. He imagined there could be a large burden there, and wondered what it might motivate a person to do…like sign on with a killer.

And perhaps worse?

He stared at her in repose, trying to gauge what was happening here. His gut told him she’d gone into the job with good intentions. The question was how far would she be willing to go now to reach her goal.

“I never meant for any of this to happen,” she said without opening her eyes. “Please believe that, if you believe nothing else about me.”

Because he never said anything he didn’t mean, he didn’t respond to her statement. Instead he said, “Tell me more about the weapon.”

A faint smile touched her lips and then fled to a frown, as though she was proud of the work, even as she hated what it had become. But when she spoke it was to ask him, “How much do you know about DNA fingerprinting?”

He’d done a quick info dump while she’d been speaking with her lawyer. “I know the standard fingerprint focuses on twenty places where the human DNA sequence varies in length from one person to the next. Each segment by itself might be the same length in two different people, but it’s statistically impossible—or close enough for government work—for two people to be the same at every one of those segments by random chance. That’s why they use twenty markers, to increase the statistical power of the analysis to the ‘well beyond a shadow of a doubt’ point.”

She nodded, eyes still closed. “That’s all true, but do you know why those segments vary in length?”

“Something about repeated letters.” He’d skimmed over the techno-babble, figuring he’d get back to the nitty-gritty if he needed it.

“Not letters,” she corrected, “dinucleotide repeats. The letters stand for the four nucleotides that make up the DNA molecule—A, C, T and G. They can be combined in all different orders for hundreds or even thousands of bases, and the cellular machinery reads them like a blueprint.” She paused. “Anyway, the segments of DNA used for fingerprinting are essentially stretches of junk DNA—that means they’re not used to encode a protein—made up of the nucleotides C and A, repeated over and over again. They’re different lengths in different people because the repeats let the cellular machinery slip during DNA replication, meaning that a ‘CA’ unit might be added or deleted. As people have evolved over time, the repeats change in length.”

John more or less got that, but not how it related to her sister. “If the fingerprints are taken from junk DNA, how does a technology aimed at Singer’s syndrome morph into an antifingerprinting weapon?”

“Because there are other types of repeats. In particular, some coding genes have trinucleotide repeats, like the triplet CAG over and over again, for example. When these repeats slip and get bigger, the malfunctioning proteins translated from these genes can cause serious problems, like Huntington’s disease.”

“And Singer’s syndrome,” he finished for her.

“And Singer’s,” she repeated sadly.

“Your parents didn’t know they carried the disease?”

“They died in a car crash when we were very young.” Her voice was soft and sad. “And no, they didn’t know. Repeat diseases like Singer’s can lurk in what’s called a ‘premutation’ form where the repeat is longer than normal, but not long enough to cause the disease. When the sperm or egg that became Celeste was forming, the repeat expanded further, meaning that she got the disease.” She glanced at him from beneath lowered lids. “We’re nonidentical twins. If we’d been identical, I’d probably be sick, too, depending on when the slip occurred.”

“Do you blame yourself?” he asked, surprising himself with the question.

“That would be silly.” They both knew that wasn’t really an answer. “Besides, that’s not the point, is it? The point is that Celeste does have it and I do feel guilty on some level. I also love my sister and want her alive and able to live her life to the fullest, so I went into Singer’s research. Then my funding dried up….” She paused. He had a feeling there was more to that story than she was letting on, but before he could ask, she continued, “Tiberius made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, and I convinced myself it was okay to let him use me as a legitimate front, as long as my work was going to help people.”

“Only it wasn’t.”

“Exactly.” She exhaled. “After about five months, once I’d designed the vector capable of suppressing the cell’s ability to transcribe the expanded region and tricking it into making a normal protein instead, Tiberius gave me twenty new repeats he wanted me to work on in parallel. The moment I saw they were dinucleotide repeats, I knew what he was actually after.”

John sent her a sharp look. “Just like that?”

She shifted uncomfortably and turned to look out the window, where the sky was starting to lighten with dawn. “Not exactly. I’d mentioned once or twice in passing that I thought repeat recognition technology could be used to block DNA fingerprinting.”

He could tell from her body language she wasn’t talking about a passing conversation among colleagues. “Let me guess. Research conference?”

She winced. “Worse. A review article.”

He just shook his head. “Great.” Now that the thought was out there, Tiberius probably wasn’t the only one trying to develop the technology. Even once they took him down, they’d need some serious damage control, and probably a backup plan for CODIS.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He said nothing, because right at that moment he didn’t have anything nice to say.

W
HEN THEY REACHED
D.C., one of the newer field agents was waiting to lead them to a big black SUV of the type most field offices were buying these days. The younger agent slapped a bubble light on the roof of the vehicle, and that, combined with a few strategic horn blips, was enough to get them through the city traffic and over to Glen Hills, Maryland, in under an hour.

Still mulling over what he’d learned from Sydney on the plane, John checked his messages and called for an update while they were en route.

He got his team’s forensics expert, Drew Dietz. “There’s practically nothing for forensics to work with,”

Drew reported. “And most of what we do have is probably going to trace back to the victims. Whoever was in here was good.”

“Probably, but we’re better,” John said. “Keep at it.” He hung up, and when Sydney looked over in inquiry, he shook his head. “Nothing yet.”

She looked fragile and lost, sitting huddled against the far door with what felt like a mile between them, and for a second he was tempted to tell her everything was going to be okay.

But he didn’t.

It was almost full light out when they pulled up in front of a stately old Victorian that easily dated back to the late 1800s but looked like it had been carefully updated in the years since, with modernizations that had maintained the historical charm. The shingles were painted some pale color he couldn’t distinguish in the false light of dawn, the shutters and trim were accented in a darker hue and the grounds were landscaped neatly, if simply.

It might’ve looked like something out of a magazine, except for the police cruisers and black SUVs parked in the driveway and on the street in front of the house, in the typical hurried scatter that John knew indicated that violence had been done inside.

“Nice house.” John decided he should just expect the unexpected when it came to Sydney Westlake. He would’ve pegged her for an ultramodern, superefficient condo. Instead, she lived in a painted lady.

“Before she got sick, Celeste wrote some seriously groundbreaking security programs. They pretty much paid for this place,” Sydney said, answering his unspoken question. “The technology has moved on, though, and the residuals started drying up a couple of years ago. That was why—” She broke off, then correcting herself said, “That was partly why I took the job with Tiberius. We needed the money to keep this place up. I couldn’t ask her to move, though. She’s so happy here.”

What about you?
John wanted to ask, but didn’t. Instead he said, “You ready to go in now, or would you rather wait until they’ve removed the bodies?”

She shuddered, but visibly collected herself and reached for the door handle. “Let’s go. Maybe I’ll see something that’ll help us find Celeste.”

As he followed her to the front door, John thought that was highly doubtful, given that she hadn’t been in the house for a year, but he also knew she needed to go inside, needed to prove to herself that her sister was gone. He’d seen it before with victims’ families, and would no doubt see it a thousand times more over the next couple of decades, because he was in this for life.

Major crimes—and the apprehension of major criminals—were in his blood. He hadn’t gotten it from his globe-trotting musician parents, who lived for the next concert, the next party, and freely admitted they never should have reproduced. No, he’d gotten the cop gene from the uncle and great-uncle he’d visited during the short gaps between boarding school and sleep-away camp. Both of the older men had lived and died on the job, one as a cop, one as a Fed, neither married to anything but police work.

John figured he’d learned most of what he needed to know from them, including the dangers of becoming too friendly with witnesses, victims or snitches.

We’re cops, not social workers,
his great-uncle used to say.
Friendship doesn’t change the evidence, but it
can sure as hell change your perception of it. Better to leave affection out of things.

Now, as he watched Sydney hesitate before pushing open the front door, the cynical part of John hoped she’d break down and tell him everything without waiting for execution of the immunity deal, and without withholding the parts she thought might help her if things went south. Another, deeply buried part of him—the part his great-uncle would’ve warned against—wished he could shield her from walking through her front door and seeing a handprint-size smear of blood on the lowest tread of the center stairwell, right beside the mechanical track her sister must’ve used to move her wheelchair from one floor to the next.

But he didn’t shield her and he didn’t stop her, and because he knew he wouldn’t be able to talk her out of walking through to the kitchen, where the aide’s body still lay where it had fallen, he didn’t try to prevent her from heading to the scene of the crime. He walked beside her instead.

When she reached the threshold separating the kitchen and dining room, she stopped and swayed a little, but didn’t back away, and John dropped the hand he’d instinctively raised to catch her if she fell.

The aide, a dark-haired twentysomething identified as Danielle Jones, lay on the tiled floor, sprawled where she’d fallen. She had two dime-size holes in her forehead, one centered, one off-center to the right and higher than the first. Both had leaked thin blood trails to the floor, where the droplets had fallen into the larger stain that spread from the exit wounds at the back of the victim’s skull.