“Fine,” Ted exclaimed as if vexed. “The polymarker test shows that Franconi’s DNA and the DNA of the liver tissue you found inside him could not be any more different.”

“Hey, that’s good news,” Jack said. “Then, it was a transplant.”

“I guess,” Ted said without conviction. “But the sequence with the DQ alpha is identical, right down to the last nucleotide.”

“What does that mean?” Jack asked.

Ted spread his hands like a supplicant and wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Mathematically, it couldn’t happen. I mean the chances are so infinitesimally small, it’s beyond belief. We’re talking about an identical match of thousands upon thousands of base pairs even in areas of long repeats. Absolutely identical. That’s why we got the results that we did with the DQ alpha screen.”

“Well, the bottom line is that it was a transplant,” Jack said. “That’s the issue here.”

“If pressed, I’d have to agree it was a transplant,” Ted said. “But how they found a donor with the identical DQ alpha is beyond me. It’s the kind of coincidence that smacks of the supernatural.”

“What about the test with the mitochondrial DNA to confirm the floater is Franconi?” Jack asked.

“Jeez, you give a guy an inch and he wants a mile,” Ted complained. “We just got the blood, for crissake. You’ll have to wait on the results. After all, we turned the lab upside down to get what you got so quickly. Besides I’m more interested in this DQ alpha situation compared to the polymarker results. Something doesn’t jibe.”

“Well, don’t lose any sleep over it,” Jack said. He stood up and gave Ted back all the material Ted had dumped in his lap. “I appreciate what you’ve done. Thanks! It’s the information I needed. And when the mitochondrial results are back, give me a call.”

Jack was elated by Ted’s results, and he wasn’t worried about the mitochondrial study. With the correlation of the X rays, he was already confident the floater and Franconi were one and the same.

Jack got on the elevator. Now that he’d documented that it had been a transplant, he was counting on Bart Arnold to come up with the answers to solve the rest of the mystery. As he descended, Jack found himself wondering about Ted’s emotional reaction to the DQ alpha results. Jack was aware that Ted didn’t get excited about too many things. Consequently, it had to be significant. Unfortunately, Jack didn’t know enough about the test to have much of an opinion. He vowed that when he had the chance he’d read up on it.

Jack’s elation was short-lived; it faded the moment he walked into Bart’s office. The forensic investigator was on the phone, but he shook his head the moment he caught sight of Jack. Jack interpreted the gesture as bad news. He sat down to wait.

“No luck?” Jack asked as soon as Bart disconnected.

“I’m afraid not,” Bart said. “I really expected UNOS to come through, and when they said that they had not provided a liver for Carlo Franconi and that he’d not even been on their waiting list, I knew the chances of tracing where he’d gotten the liver fell precipitously. Just now I was on the phone with Columbia-Presbyterian, and it wasn’t done there. So I’ve heard from just about every center doing liver transplants, and no one takes credit for Carlo Franconi.”

“This is crazy,” Jack said. He told Bart that Ted’s findings confirmed that Franconi had had a transplant.

“I don’t know what to say,” Bart commented.

“If someone didn’t get their transplant in North America or Europe, where could it have taken place?” Jack asked.

Bart shrugged. “There are a few other possibilities. Australia, South Africa, even a couple of places in South America, but having talked to my contact at UNOS, I don’t think any of them are likely.”

“No kidding?” Jack said. He was not hearing what he wanted to hear.

“It’s a mystery,” Bart commented.

“Nothing about this case is easy,” Jack complained as he got to his feet.

“I’ll keep at it,” Bart offered.

“I’d appreciate it,” Jack said.

Jack wandered out of the forensic area, feeling mildly depressed. He had the uncomfortable sensation that he was missing some major fact, but he had no idea what it could be or how to go about finding out what it was.

In the ID room he got himself another cup of coffee, which was more like sludge than a beverage by that time of the day. With cup in hand, he climbed the stairs to the lab.

“I ran your samples,” John DeVries said. “They were negative for both cyclosporin A and FK506.”

Jack was astounded. All he could do was stare at the pale, gaunt face of the laboratory director. Jack didn’t know what was more surprising: the fact that John had already run the samples or that the results were negative.

“You must be joking,” Jack managed to say.

“Hardly,” John said. “It’s not my style.”

“But the patient had to be on immunosuppressants,” Jack said. “He’d had a recent liver transplant. Is it possible you got a false negative?”

“We run controls as standard procedure,” John said.

“I expected one or the other drug to be present,” Jack said.

“I’m sorry that we don’t gear our results to your expectations,” John said sourly. “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.”

Jack watched the laboratory director walk over to an instrument and make some adjustments. Then Jack turned and made his way out of the lab. Now he was more depressed. Ted Lynch’s DNA results and John DeVries’s drug assays were contradictory. If there’d been a transplant, Franconi had to be on either cyclosporin A or FK506. That was standard medical procedure.

Getting off the elevator on the fifth floor, he walked down to histology while trying to come up with some rational explanation for the facts he’d been given. Nothing came to mind.

“Well, if it isn’t the good doctor yet again,” Maureen O’Conner said in her Irish brogue. “What is it? You only have one case? Is that why you are dogging us so?”

“I only have one that is driving me bananas,” Jack said. “What’s the story with the slides?”

“There’s a few that are ready,” Maureen said. “Do you want to take them or wait for the whole batch?”

“I’ll take what I can get,” Jack said.

Maureen’s nimble fingers picked out a sampling of the sections that were dry and placed them in a microscopic slide holder. She handed the tray to Jack.

“Are there liver sections among these?” Jack asked hopefully.

“I believe so,” Maureen said. “One or two. The rest you’ll have later.”

Jack nodded and walked out. A few doors down the hall, he entered his office. Chet looked up from his work and smiled.

“Hey, sport, how’s it going?” Chet said.

“Not so good,” Jack said. He sat down and turned on his microscope light.

“Problems with the Franconi case?” Chet asked.

Jack nodded. He began to hunt through the slides for liver sections. He only found one. “Everything about it is like squeezing water from a rock.”

“Listen, I’m glad you came back,” Chet said. “I’m expecting a call from a doctor in North Carolina. I just want to find out if a patient had heart trouble. I have to duck out to get passport photos taken for my upcoming trip to India. Would you take the call for me?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “What’s the patient’s name?”

“Clarence Potemkin,” Chet said. “The folder is right here on my desk.”

“Fine,” Jack said, while slipping the sole liver section onto his microscope’s stage. He ignored Chet as Chet got his coat from behind the door and left. Jack ran the microscopic objective down to the slide and was about to peer into the eyepieces, when he paused. Chet’s errand had started him thinking about international travel. If Franconi had gotten his transplant out of the country, which seemed increasingly probable, there might be a way to find out where he’d been.

Jack picked up his phone and called police headquarters. He asked for Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano. He expected to have to leave a message and was pleasantly surprised to get the man himself.