"Because he didn't want Josh's identity to be questioned."
"What about military records?" Carly asked.
"If I'd been in the Senator's shoes, I'd have asked for all the military records of my brave Taos TypeCounty boys, switched some pertinent dental, blood, and fingerprint records, and built a monument to the dead soldiers."
"Could the Senator get away with that?"
"Sure, as long as nobody looked at the records too closely. And why would they? People see what they expect to see. Nobody expected the Senator's son to be anything but what he said he was."
"A chip off the rotten old block."
Dan's smile wasn't pleasant. "Yeah. No wonder Mom was too frightened by the past to talk about it."
"Do you think she knows?"
"I-" He stopped abruptly and pulled the buzzing, vibrating cell phone out of his pocket. The caller was from Genedyne. "Duran here," he said into the phone. "What do you have for me?"
"Do you have a pen and paper," Cheryl said, "or do you trust your memory?"
"Both."
"All females share the same mtDNA, with a very minor variation in the fourth female. Perfectly normal. Nothing stays the same forever. And I went the whole nine yards on this one. The chance of these women not being from the same mtDNA line isn't worth mentioning. Probably within the same three- or four-generation group."
"Translation?" Dan asked, writing quickly on a tablet.
"Same grandmother or great-grandmother. As far as mtDNA goes, they could have been sisters. When you throw in the Y-DNA it turns out you have two sisters and two daughters."
Dan wrote quickly.
"The male sample you sent me has precisely the same Y-DNA as two of the female samples. Ergo, they're his daughter."
Dan's eyes narrowed. Not unexpected, but not nice. The Senator indeed had had a child with his daughter, and that child was Dan's mother.
"Got it," Dan said. "Is the second male sample done yet?"
"Just finished."
His pulse kicked. "And?"
"Definite match for mtDNA on mother's side and Y-DNA on father's side."
Dan couldn't believe what he'd just heard. "What? You're certain?"
"It's my job, sweetie. I'm certain. And considering the stature of the people involved, I'm really certain."
"Well, shit." He rubbed his eyes wearily. "Send me e-files of the tests on all subjects."
"Can I take a coffee break first? I've been working fourteen straight hours."
"Go ahead," Dan said. "And thanks."
He was talking to a dead phone. Cheryl had disconnected. "You don't look happy," Carly said.
"I'm not. A bulldozer just drove through our beautiful circumstantial web and ripped it to atoms." "What?" "Josh Quintrell is Sylvia's son."
Chapter 66
TAOS
TUESDAY NOON
THE SOUND OF HELICOPTERS RATTLED THE SILENCE OF THE SNOWY PASTURES AND penetrated through ancient adobe walls.
"World War III?" Carly asked sardonically.
Dan glanced away from his computer, where he was writing reports, and looked at her. She looked flat, exhausted, and altogether on the losing side of the war. He looked and felt the same way. That will teach me to fall in love with a glittery chain of circumstantial evidence.
"Probably the governor and the press corps heading for the ranch for the 'intimate' interview they've been promoting every fifteen minutes for the last four hours."
Carly grimaced. Dan's TV was small, but loud. She had heard every single word of every single promo for Jansen Worthy's exclusive interview with Governor Josh Quintrell at the home ranch, with hints of a breathtaking exclusive announcement, exclusively on this channel, exclusively for you.
"You're a masochist," she told Dan, gesturing at the TV
"It helps to remind me of just how wrong circumstantial evidence can be. And it reinforces the roll of coincidence and randomness in everyday life." He shook his head. "Gotta admit, it's the first time my instinct for patterns has led me so far astray. Like to a whole different universe."
"I was with you every step of the way."
He smiled crookedly at her. "Best part of the trip."
His cell phone rang. He looked at the window and switched to message text.
Open your e-mail, sweetie.
"Anything interesting?"
"I'm guessing it's the Genedyne file of test results."
"Print them, okay?"
"Now who's the masochist?" he asked.
"Except for your mother's results, they're part of the history Winifred paid for."
Dan opened his e-mail and started printing stuff that looked like nothing he'd seen before. "If you can understand this, you can be a computer programmer."
"I'll leave that to you." She collected the tests results, labeled each with the name of the person.
Carly spread the charts out on the bed. The Senator and Josh shared the same Y-DNA to the limit of testing ability. He was the Senator's son. She pulled out the mtDNA for Sylvia and Josh, compared them, and sighed. A very slight variation in haplotype number, the kind of subtle, meaningless mutation that happened in the DNA of a germ cell.
"Well, damn," she muttered.
"Hoping Cheryl was wrong?" Dan asked.
"Yes."
"She wasn't."
Carly didn't bother to answer. She lined up Sylvia's and Winifred's results and checked the haplotype number. Exactly the same. The mutation in the mtDNA had occurred in Sylvia's germ cell and was passed to her son, where it stopped. Unless it was also passed on to her daughter, Liza…
After shifting papers quickly, Carly had Liza and Sylvia together. Their haplotype sequence was precisely the same.
"Okay," Carly muttered. "One got it and one didn't, which means the mutation was limited to one egg. So Diana won't have it."
Carly put the last chart in place and looked at it.
And looked again.
Then she started twisting a strand of hair around her finger.
"What is it?" Dan asked.
She shifted some of the sheets around without answering. Then she picked up a yellow marking pen and began highlighting parts of each chart.
"Carly?"
"The haplotypes-"
"English, please," he cut in.
She looked up. "That's going to be tough. Like putting a computer program into English."
"Give it a try."
"Y-DNA, mtDNA, any DNA is just a series of sequences of compounds. The makeup and order of those compounds determines if you get a man, a woman, an elephant, or a guppy."
"Gotcha."
"Apparently there are a lot of nonsense sequences in germ cell DNA, sequences that don't appear to do anything to the final organism. Some of those nonsense sequences are called haplotypes. Every so often a mutation will occur when a sequence is being reproduced and you'll have two identical sequences where before you just had one. And if my genetics professor could hear me now, he'd be tearing out his hair with all the stuff I'm not mentioning."
"Keep skimming the surface," Dan said, smiling.
Carly blew out a frustrated breath. "The change in the sequence is passed along to the next generation. To way oversimplify, you have a haplotype 5 where you had a haplotype 4, that is, five repeats of a specific sequence instead of four, but nothing material changes in the organism that is born. It's a mutation that doesn't matter to anyone but geneticists. Still with me?"
"Just don't give me a pop quiz."
She narrowed her eyes. "Hey, you're the one who asked me to explain. I'm doing my best."
"I'm listening, Carolina May."
She looked at his intent, intensely green eyes and believed him. 'The numbers going down the right-hand column on each page of the sheets are various mtDNA haplotype sequences. Winifred's and Sylvia's and Liza's are exactly the same through all haplotype sequences. The Senator's is very different, of course. He got his mtDNA from his own mother. Josh got his from Sylvia. See this number? Then this one?"