“I really thought Alex Zhukovsky killed Christina. I think you have given us the real killer, Ginger. But I still don’t understand the crime.”

“Is he subpoenaed? Put him on the stand after me.”

“I’ll do that. Anyway, congratulations. As always, you’re a prodigious intelligence.”

“Same to you, baby. You pestered it out of me.”

Paul’s head appeared on the landing as he came up the stairs. He saw the two women high-fiving in the hall and said, “What’d I miss?”

“Come on in and watch the show,” Ginger said.

“Here’s the death certificate on Constantin.” Paul held it out to Nina, but Ginger grabbed it.

“Let me see that.” She read it, read it again, and said, “Huh. I’ll be damned!”

“What?”

The door opened. “The judge is ready,” the bailiff said.

Nina said, “Ginger, you’ll be damned in what way?”

“Destruction of the world as we know it on a volcanic scale! Yeah, this is living!” Ginger said nonresponsively as they marched back into the jungle. The natives were already getting restive in the back pews. The jury looked hyped-up after the bomb threat. They expected some action.

Nina didn’t waste another second. “Call Dr. Ginger Hirabayashi.”

They spent some time going through Ginger’s stellar curriculum vitae, her medical degree, her certifications, her years as a chief medical examiner, her long experience as an expert. Jaime had offered to stipulate that she was an expert in the field of forensic pathology, but Nina wanted the jury to have an exact knowledge of the worth of her testimony.

“You asked me to perform DNA testing on blood evidence found at the scene of the crime, to determine whether the blood found there matched the blood of various other parties in the case.” The main party, of course, was Stefan, who had asked Nina what was going on the minute she came back in.

“Trust me,” Nina had told him, “all the way to the end here. I think you’re going to be okay.”

Plainly wondering where “okay” could possibly enter into this equation, he swallowed twice and clutched the edge of the table. Then he scrutinized Nina’s face for clues. He knew that the blood was the single most damning evidence against him.

Nina asked open-ended questions, and Ginger began discussing the work she had done in the case. She had performed one set of tests comparing Stefan’s blood with the blood found on the glass shards, she testified.

“The result was a match with Stefan Wyatt’s blood sample,” she said.

Expecting something different from this witness who was supposed to save him, Stefan let out an appalled gasp. Jaime smiled tightly. He seemed to have decided to humor the daffy defense, which was doing a lovely hatchet job on itself.

A complete set of Ginger’s lab records was provided to Jaime and the judge, confirming her testimony. Ginger authenticated the records and, holding her breath, Nina asked that they be accepted in evidence as defense exhibits. She knew that Jaime had a legitimate objection to make-he had the right to examine them first and discuss them with Susan Misumi and others.

But the results so far were attractive to the prosecution. Nina was dangling a good chance for a conviction and hoping Jaime would be too pleased to take the time to see around it. It reminded her of playing chess with her brother Matt. She beat him now and then by sacrificing her queen. Matt would get so excited about grabbing it that he wouldn’t notice her sneaky rooks setting up the checkmate from the other side of the board.

Behind the professional mask, Jaime’s eyes glittered triumphantly. He rubbed his back against his chair as if he was itching to finish destroying Stefan on his cross-exam. “No objection,” he said. “Subject to cross, of course.”

But wait, as the infomercials always said. The Nina and Ginger act was just getting started.

“I also asked you to perform a second series of tests, didn’t I?” Nina asked.

“Yes. You provided me with the left femur and hip bone from the remains of Constantin Zhukovsky. You asked me to run a series of tests on the bones and also to obtain a DNA profile on the bones.”

She felt Jaime’s eyes narrowing behind her. What was this? Those bones were old news. Weren’t they? “And what were the results obtained from those tests?” she asked quickly.

“Well, several things. I wasn’t sure what we were looking for. I found no sign of poison on the standard tests for toxins. Physical examination of the bones didn’t show anything. I ran the DNA panel, didn’t find anything unusual. I took some bone-marrow samples and stored them the night I was assaulted and the bones were taken.” Briefly and without hand-wringing, Ginger described her fight with Sergey Krilov.

“That night, I noticed a resemblance between the two samples, one from the bones, and one from your client. They were related.”

“Your Honor,” Jaime said, but he seemed dubious, “that’s established.” Maybe he shouldn’t be objecting? He didn’t have enough time to decide.

They were invited to speak to the judge up close.

“I’m going to show that the blood found at the crime scene did not, in fact, belong to Stefan Wyatt,” Nina said, “if I can have a few more minutes. It’s science, Your Honor. It takes time. It takes a few logical steps.”

Jaime said, “You just showed the blood was your client’s. Now you want your expert to contradict herself?”

“She’ll explain her finding.”

Salas said, “Don’t get us into some inexplicable dither. I won’t let you confuse the jury.”

“I’ll keep it simple. Even Jaime will understand,” Nina said.

“Do it in ten minutes,” Salas said. They went back to their seats. Ginger stretched out in the witness box, enjoying herself. Nina, on the other hand, had sweated right through her silk blouse to her jacket. She had thought she could let Ginger run through her findings with just a few questions, but she wasn’t sure she was helping much.

Ten minutes to revolutionize the case. Get to it.

“As I was saying, in establishing paternity, I ran a number of additional tests on samples obtained from the bones,” Ginger said. “The results were so subtle, I would have missed them if I hadn’t been looking. As I said, I compared the two samples and saw that there was a close blood relationship between Constantin Zhukovsky and the owner of the blood found at the scene of Christina Zhukovsky’s murder.”

Jaime leaned forward, puzzled. They knew this. Stefan was his son.

“I went back to the original evidence sample found at the crime scene and compared it with results from a blood test performed on Stefan Wyatt,” Ginger said, “and discovered I was getting a very few sort of rogue cells, not Stefan Wyatt’s. It was weird. I wasn’t satisfied. I discussed my findings with a colleague who runs a company called BloodTech in San Francisco.”

“And what, if anything, did you do next?”

“Based on that conversation, I ran a special battery of tests, PCR-based assays analyzing polymorphic STR markers to try to detect what those rogue cells were.”

“STR markers?”

“Short tandem repeat systems. It’s a sensitive and rapid way to analyze DNA.”

“And what did you learn by using this very sensitive technology?”

Ginger smiled broadly, revealing an outstanding veneer job. “I found a situation called mixed chimerism. The blood found at the scene of the crime was a mixed chimera sample.”

Nobody appeared enthusiastic at this pronouncement. Yeah, so what? juror Larry Santa Ana’s expression said. Nina had no idea what Ginger was talking about, either. The examination was out of control, but Ginger was an intelligent lady and on their side.

Nina asked Ginger to spell “chimera,” then asked, “So what is this mixed chimerism?”

“It’s named after a mythical monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. It poetically describes a mix that can occur after a bone-marrow transplant.” Good old Ginger, she knew to turn back to the jury and speak earnestly.