Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (6 page)

Chapter 5

Marvin Davis was
the GCB’s Chief Forensic Scientist. He supervised the main crime lab at Omaha as well as the technicians working the satellite offices in Seattle, Houston, and New York. Marvin was in his late-twenties, tall and gangly, frizzy haired, and wore glasses that were too big for his narrow face. At some point in his life (Alan guessed around the time he had hit puberty), Marvin had somehow achieved the pinnacle of what most people would consider extreme geekiness. He epitomized what it meant to be a nerd. He was a stereotype in the flesh.

But he was also a genius. He had obtained his bachelor’s degree at Notre Dame, majored in biology, minored in chemistry, and had worked summers as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He had gone on to pursue his graduate degree at Cornell, where he had graduated magna cum laude. After that, he had spent several years working for DuPont as an engineer, developing new kinds of plastics. His girlfriend had studied foreign languages, and he spoke fluent French after spending a year in Paris with her. By the time he was twenty-four, he had published several articles in various scientific journals and had received offers of employment at both Pfizer and Roche.

Alan had never questioned the fact that Marvin was intellectually gifted. He rarely understood more than thirty to forty percent of the geek speak that came out of the man’s mouth, but all Marvin’s quirks aside, he was one of the most brilliant forensic scientists in the world. How the GCB, on its rather meager budget, had convinced the Cornell graduate to come on board was a complete mystery, but Alan thought it might have something to do with putting the man in charge of a lot of really expensive toys.

The crime lab was on the eighth floor. Alan took the stairs. When he reached the lab, he gestured to Marvin through the thick glass window that looked into the lab beyond it. Marvin held up a staying finger as he carried a caddy of vials to a refrigeration unit. When he opened the unit’s door, a thick cloud of frigid air curled outward. Marvin carefully slid the dolly onto the top shelf, closed the door, and then joined Alan in the connecting room.

“I know why you’re here,” Marvin said and waved for Alan to follow him as he crossed into an adjoining room that was filled with all manner of lab equipment. There were microscopes, beakers, test tubes, vials, Bunsen burners, pipets, goggles, graduated cylinders, Erlenmeyer flasks, petri dishes, as well as a few dozen instruments that Alan didn’t recognize.

Marvin showed him to the far side of the room, to a long polished steel table that was home to even more equipment. A DNA sequencer, and electrophoresis machine, autoclaves…Alan wondered how many millions of dollars had gone into furnishing the laboratory and decided it was probably more than his 50k-a-year brain could comprehend.

“Any luck?” Alan asked as Marvin came to a halt in front of the table.

“Luck has nothing do with it,” Marvin said. “But if you had said
strange
you might have been on the right track.”

Marvin arranged two semi-transparent sheets side by side. Each sheet was filled with bars of various thicknesses, ranging in color from black to progressively lighter shades of gray. At the top of one sheet was the name CARVILLE, SUSAN and on the other was UNKNOWN SUBJECT. After a moment’s study, the bars on each of the pages appeared to match the other perfectly.

“Looks like an exact match,” Alan said.

Marvin smiled. “Are you familiar with how DNA profiling works?”

Alan was forced to admit that he didn’t.

“Around ninety-nine-point-nine percent of human DNA is the same in every person,” Marvin said. “But that still leaves enough room to make it possible to distinguish one individual from another. Unless the samples are from monozygotic twins.”

“Monozygotic?”

“Identical. We use STR analysis to look at loci targeted with sequence-specific primers that are amplified using PCR. The resulting DNA fragments are separated and detected using electrophoresis. We look at multiple loci simultaneously and search for patterns of alleles. It’s quick and accurate. CODIS 13 core loci are almost universal. We can generate match probabilities of one in a quintillion or more. Of course, we have to factor for the fact that there are over twelve million monozygotic twins on Earth, which lowers that and can lead to false profile matches. Understand?”

“About thirty percent of it,” Alan said. Truthfully, the real figure might have been closer to ten percent.

“Doesn’t matter. Your understanding or lack thereof doesn’t bear any weight as to the results, but I thought you might be curious to know how it works.”

“Looking at the results,” Alan said, “am I right about them being identical?”

Marvin pushed his glasses up on his nose, his eyes going to the two sheets laying side-by-side on the steel table. “Yes and no. For all intents and purposes, they
are
identical, but there is one slight discrepancy that is cause for speculation. According the data we received from the forensics unit in Illinois, both of these samples should be from the Carville woman. One sample collected directly and the other from the crime scene, but believed to be that of Carville.”

“That’s correct.”

“As you noticed yourself, the patterns do in fact seem to match, but what happens if we overlap them.” Marvin laid one sheet over the other. “Here,” he said. “Do you see it?”

Alan leaned forward. There was a single dark gray bar floating off on its own on the sheet marked UNKNOWN SUBJECT. It was missing from the other sheet.

“You’re right. I wouldn’t have caught it if you hadn’t pointed it out.”

“Some kind of contamination?” Alan asked, taking a stab in the dark.

“Unlikely.”

“So they aren’t both Susan Carville?”

Marvin cupped his chin with his hand and stared down at the test result sheets. He didn’t answer right away, but seemed to weigh the question carefully. “Technically, there’s a ninety-nine percent likelihood that it’s a match.”

“Despite the discrepancy?”

“Yes, despite the discrepancy. But the discrepancy exists. I might not have brought it to your attention if I hadn’t taken the liberty of reading the case file in its entirety and noted a similar discrepancy existing in the matter of the fingerprint analysis. In both cases, we have a slight inconsistency in the samples. I find it very intriguing.”

“If you had said
strange
you might have been on the right track,” Alan said.

“
Touché,”
Marvin said.

“Have you seen anything like this before?”

“I haven’t, but you can bet that I’m sufficiently bemused to want to get to the bottom of it.”

“You said you can get a false profile if the two specimens are monozy…
identical
twins. Do you think Carville could be a twin?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” Marvin said, “but I’ve also studied the file on Howard Sitka. It seems an amazing coincidence that each of the crimes would have been committed by a different set of identical twins.”

“I don’t think coincidence has anything to do with it.”

“Either do I.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“In need of more data,” Marvin said. “Two cases make for a coincidence. An unlikely coincidence, but a possible coincidence just the same. If we were to add similar cases to the series, we might be on to something.”

“Somehow I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” Alan said.

Lucy seemed eager to speak with him when he returned to his office, but he put up a staying hand as he sat down at his desk and searched a pile of documents until he located Nancy Sitka’s cell phone number. He dialed it. She answered on the third ring.

“Yes?”

Alan apologized for bothering her again and then asked the million dollar question: “Mrs. Sitka, does your husband by chance have a twin?”

“Heaven’s no,” Nancy Sitka responded. “Why would that make any difference?”

“No reason. It was a longshot. Thanks for your time.”

Alan hung up. Despite having expected to receive the answer that Nancy Sitka had given him, he couldn’t help being disappointed. If she had responded in the affirmative, they might have been onto something, and the case would have become significantly less mysterious. Unless Howard Sitka had hidden the existence of a twin sibling both from his wife and on paper, they were barking up the wrong tree. He didn’t bother following up with Hodgens on whether Susan Carville had a twin.

He swiveled his chair until he was facing Lucy and said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Lucy?”

Chapter 6

Alan wished he
hadn’t asked.

It turned out that Lucy had two more cases for him. One was a bank robbery in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The other was a casino robbery in Iowa.

Both crimes had been reported within an hour of each other.

“This happened in our own backyard,” Alan said, scanning through the case folder Lucy had given him on the Painted Horse Casino robbery, which had taken place less than seven miles away in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Alan felt himself getting drowsy again. Perhaps he had gotten some much needed sleep the night before, but his brain had never stopped crunching data. It had gone on and on, twisting, turning, and examining information from all angles. It wouldn’t rest until it had reached its conclusion and presented it to the conscious part of Alan’s brain for further analysis.

Unsurprisingly, the details of the Cheyenne case resembled those of the robberies that had taken place in Augusta and Peoria. The casino heist in Council Bluffs differed from the others only in regard to the setting. The perpetrators had followed a pattern by only robbing banks up to that point, but had deviated slightly from their previous M.O. by targeting a casino.

They were escalating, expanding, branching out, becoming bolder. On any given day, a casino would typically see more foot traffic than a bank.

Why the sudden change in venue?

Were they trying to rub his nose in it?

Don’t make it personal.

“I’ve already opened files in the system for the new cases,” Lucy said. “Is there anything I can do to make life easier?”

“Marvin should have sent some dictation to transcribe.”

“Already finished.”

“How about some actual field work?”

Lucy’s eyes lit up. “Like what?”

“Contact the Cheyenne PD and the Laramie County Sheriff’s Department. Get the details about the bank robbery there. When you’re finished with that…” Alan paused to look over one of the field reports. “Contact the FBI. See if you can get a line on a Special Agent Darrow. Leave him a message to call me.”

“Darrow?”

“His name is on all of their reports. I’m guessing he’s the reason we keep catching their cases.”

“What am I trying to find out from him?”

“Find out why he’s such a lazy asshole,” Alan said. The look on Lucy’s face said she didn’t recognize his brand of sarcasm. “Just have him contact me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to roll the dice.”

The Painted Horse Casino was a small player compared to Ameristar or the Horseshoe, but when Alan flashed his badge and a police officer lifted the crime scene tape so that he could pass, he found it to be a sprawling place, filled with row upon row of slot machines that stood sentinel like an army of brightly colored robots adorned with an excess of bling.

Past the slots, the main room opened up and Alan caught sight of the table games: Texas Hold ‘Em, craps, roulette, baccarat, and blackjack.

There was a restaurant called the All American on the east side of the building; on the west was a place called the Kaishi Grill. Down a long corridor, there was a small bar, and past that a buffet.

Alan wasn’t a gambler. In his rather plain world of blacks and whites, he had never taken to letting things ride on chance, even if it was only money. But he had been in casinos before, and he could scarcely remember visiting one that had been so devoid of life. Save for a handful of law enforcement personnel and a skeleton crew of employees, the place was deserted.

The Painted Horse was being treated as a crime scene. The entire building was on temporary lockdown.

The few employees that remained had grouped themselves into small clusters, huddled around each other and speaking in whispers.
Spreading gossip,
Alan thought.

He wondered if they had interviewed any witnesses, wondered how the various accounts differed. In times of crisis, people tended to process things differently. One witness might swear a suspect was wearing a red hat, while another would testify that it had been a black one. Peoples’ perceptions of events often varied tremendously, especially if they were being asked to describe the details of a criminal act.

The smell of desperation and cigarette smoke clung to the air. There had been a five year stretch where Alan had been a heavy smoker. He had picked up the habit when he was sixteen and hadn’t quit until he had started his career in law enforcement. Quitting had been tough. He had done it cold turkey. There were people who claimed that the craving returned whenever they were around that familiar smell. Alan felt exactly the opposite. He hated the odor of secondhand smoke. Whenever the stench hit his nostrils, it induced a small, tense rage within him; a rage that threatened to compromise his objectivity.

The law enforcement personnel on sight, which included uniformed police officers, special agents from the Division of Criminal Investigation and the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission were gathered in clusters much as the remaining employees were. Crime scene technicians dotted about, gathering evidence.

Ten yards ahead of him, Alan spotted a man wearing a navy blue windbreaker, gray slacks, and black loafers. A badge dangled from a chain around his neck. Alan made a beeline for him.

When Alan was within a few feet, the man turned and said, “Special Agent Lamb, I presume?”

The man had short black hair, brown eyes, and was an inch or two taller than Alan. He offered his hand and Alan shook it.

“Darrow,” the man said, flashing a smile that revealed a mouthful of perfectly even and brilliantly white teeth. “I’ve been wondering when our paths might cross.”

“Let me guess,” Alan said. “You’re the guy that’s been dumping shit in our toilet?”

Darrow’s smile widened. Alan wondered if the man used whitener. He could have been a TV model for Colgate. “Did I forget to flush?”

“What I don’t understand is why the FBI keeps handing these off to us.”

“Who said I was with the FBI?” Darrow asked.

Alan stared at the man, sizing him up. “Your name’s on all the reports.”

“So many forms. Who can keep track, really?”

Alan didn’t care for riddles. “I’m guessing it has something to do with the deviation in DNA.”

“I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to figure it out,” Darrow said. “I’m not sure I understand the confusion. Isn’t that within GCB’s wheelhouse?”

“Why play games?”

Alan realized that he was teetering toward the edge of a cliff. He was precariously close to violating one of Gant’s golden rules. As much as Gant hated playing the game, he
did
err on the side of politics when it came to extending the proverbial olive branch to their brothers and sisters in law enforcement. You didn’t shake the trees and you most definitely did not shit in their sandbox. Professionalism, in Gant’s eyes, was key. Alan was aware of this, but he was almost to the point of not caring.

“I’m sorry. Games?”

“Why keep us guessing? You were obviously aware of the discrepancies with both the prints and the DNA samples collected from the scenes.”

Darrow nodded. “We had collected our own specimens from each of the crime scenes. Our own experts performed comparisons on both. We were made aware of certain…
inconsistencies
, you might call them.”

“You would have saved us time and trouble if you had let us in on that fact to begin with.”

“Think of it as a kind of independent corroboration. A second opinion, if you will. The minute differences sent the red flags flying. Everyone was using the word ‘contamination.’ We needed independent verification, and your man Davis is hailed as one of the best in the business. Now that we know our guys didn’t mess things up, it’s clear that we handed things over to the right people. It’s simply a matter of following protocol. The GCB’s involvement in all cases where the mishandling or modification of DNA is known or suspected to have occurred is mandatory. That’s a quote, directly from the policy manual.”

“I’ve read the policy manual,” Alan said. “What else are you holding back?”

“At this point, you know everything we know.”

Alan didn’t buy it. His gut told him that Darrow was keeping secrets, but he also had the impression that any further information the man had regarding the DNA and fingerprint business wouldn’t be forthcoming.

“I don’t necessarily believe that. Maybe that’s a discussion for another time. So what happened here?”

“Teresa Baier,” Darrow said, glancing over his shoulder and then back to Alan. “She’s what’s known as a ‘banker’ in the casino trade. Bankers have access to the vault.”

“Vault?”

“Just like a bank. Millions. The bankers get money from the vault and provide it to the cages.”

“Anyone see it?” Alan surveyed the room, noted the presence of security cameras everywhere.

“You can’t spit without hitting a camera in this joint,” Darrow said. “It’s all on video. They’ve got eight security guards walking the floor at any given time, along with three guys whose sole function in life is to monitor the security cameras.”

“How’d she manage to slip out the door?”

“She had help. Sean Hammond. Security guard. Kind enough to hold the door open for her. Appears to be a two man operation this time.”

“That’s new.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Where’s Hammond now?”

“In custody. Him and the Baier woman. The footage shows Baier makng her way to the door with two duffle bags. On a normal day, an employee hefting around a duffle bag toward the exit would have been highly suspicious. Security would have stopped her. In this case, Hammond was manning the exit. She gets to the door, he opens it for her and steps out after her.”

“How’d you snag them?”

“By now you should already know the answer to that.”

“Bound and gagged?”

Darrow smiled again. Alan thought he smiled too much. “A few blocks from here. In one of the casino’s complimentary shuttle vans. Same story, too. No recollection of events other than being blitz attacked by unknown assailants.”

“That were spitting images of them,” Alan said.

“You’re on a roll. Maybe you should start playing the slots.”

“They’re all connected somehow. I just can’t figure out how yet.”

“We lifted prints off the duffle bags. DNA evidence in the van.”

“In the van?”

“Soda cans. There were several empties in the back of the van with them.”

“Just like the one they pulled from Sitka’s office.”

“And from Carville’s vehicle,” Darrow said.

“They’re messing with us. Somebody wants us to figure it out, and they’re leaving clues behind to make sure we do. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s a head scratcher to be sure.”

“You’ll send the samples over to us I take it?”

“They’re on the way to your lab as we speak.”

“What is it you aren’t telling me?”

Darrow was still smiling, but it faltered the tiniest bit. “I told you, you know as much as I do. Anything more than that…let’s just say you’d have to speak with the men above my pay grade.”

“You aren’t with the Bureau, what does that make you? A spook?”

“I’m not a fan of labels, Agent Lamb.”

Alan scanned the room. A group of casino security guards, three burly men who could have been former football players and a petite brunette woman, stood huddled together, speaking in hushed tones. No doubt they worked closely with Hammond. Probably discussing how one of their own could have pulled off the heist.

He glanced back to Darrow. “CIA?”

“We’re about finished up here,” Darrow said. “I’ll drop by County and interrogate Hammond and Baier if it suits you. Save you some time. I assume we won’t get anything more out of them.”

“That’s mighty kind of you.”

“We’re all about building healthy relationships.”

Darrow reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. He handed it to Alan. When Alan looked it over, he wasn’t surprised to find that the card was completely blank except for a handwritten phone number on its face in blue ink. “Do you drink?”

“Rarely,” Alan said.

“Tonight might be a good time to start.”