Chapter 40
“You didn’t clock in, I hope,” said Romanski as Reno eased into the shadowy laboratory, closing the door with care so as not to make noise.
“Hell no,” said Reno, slipping off his pack and setting it down.
He snagged a lab coat off a hook and threw it on over his T--shirt, covering up his tattooed arms. He pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves and face mask.
No hairnet, Romanski noted—-Reno had no hair so he didn’t need one, he supposed, but it still was against protocol.
Fuck protocol; Reno was doing him a solid.
Fully gowned now, he came over. “So where are we?”
“Still waiting for the alignment program to finish,” Romanski said.
It was three o’clock in the morning, and Romanski had been working off the clock since eleven, sequencing the DNA of the little brown square that now sat in a sealed vial back in the lab safe. That chip was supposed to be nothing less than a fragment of bone from the head of Saint John the Baptist.
Romanski had run the PCR amplification process earlier that evening, then through the genome assembler, and he was now waiting for the computer to finish analyzing the results. He’d asked Reno in because he was a savant when it came to reading genome sequences.
“I guess I’m Catholic,” said Reno. “Even if I can’t work up the nerve to go to confession. But this worship of the body parts of dead saints feels primitive to me. Someone once said there are enough bones of Saint Peter in all his so--called reliquaries to reassemble three cows.”
“If this one’s also from a cow, we’ll find out in a moment.”
“The things we do for Frankie Cash,” said Reno. “I mean, what exactly are we supposed to be looking for?”
“Cash was kind of vague about that.”
“And why off the clock?”
“It’s like this,” Romanski said. “You know our victim, Castillo, went to Rome, broke into a church, and stole a piece of bone from a reliquary supposedly containing the head of Saint John the Baptist?”
“Yeah. That’s some crazy shit.”
“Cash said he did it to analyze its DNA. Cash asked Holmes for authorization, but Holmes nixed it. There’s some priest here from the Vatican who wants the sacred head bone back, and Holmes was worried there’d be a scandal if we messed with it. So Cash asked me to sequence the DNA on the Q.T.”
“So what kind of analysis did you do?”
“Since it’s supposed to be human and male, I figured I’d run an analysis on a bunch of well--known SNPs on the Y chromosome. Of course, if it’s a bone from a female cow, we’ll get some wild results.”
The computer program halted with a ding!
“Avon calling!” said Romanski.
“Oh boy,” said Reno, sitting down at the workstation and rubbing his hands together, then waggling his fingers. “Let’s have a look.” He began to type.
Romanski watched him work. This part of the process was recent, an innovation since he had graduated from CU forensics, and it was one he’d never mastered.
Reno, on the other hand, had devoured the four--hundred--page digital use manual to the GeneMapp software like it was a Dan Brown novel.
The PCR machine had amplified the DNA a millionfold, then the strands had been fed through a nanopore reader and the sequences recorded.
That was fed into the computer to be aligned and compared against a known human genome sequence.
The program then spit out the differences, or variants—-a far more accurate mapping than gel electrophoresis.
It was now Reno’s job to examine the variants and figure out what they meant.
As Reno paged through the screens, one at a time, he issued little grunts and whistles. Romanski listened to this for a while and began to get a little irritated.
“So—-is it human or cow?” he asked sarcastically.
Reno didn’t answer immediately. He paged through a few more sets of numbers and graphs, ran a few quick programs, and then he sat back in his chair, looked at Romanski, and issued a loud sigh.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Romanski.
“It ain’t cow,” said Reno. “It’s partly a human male and a whole lot something else.”
“Like what?”
“It’s hard to say without running it through a bunch of DNA databases looking for matches, which would take days. Which is a waste, because I already know what the problem is.”
“What?” Romanski asked.
“We—-or rather you—-fucked up. The sample was contaminated.”
“I did not fuck up!”
“How did you extract DNA from the sample?” Reno asked.
“In the clean lab, I used a microdrill to come into the side of the sample, so there wouldn’t be a hole in it. I found a closed cell in the cancellous bone, opened it, took out a microscopic bit of tissue—-all by the book in a totally sterile environment.”
“Well, it’s contaminated.”
“Son of a bitch. I was so careful.”
“You gotta realize, Romanski, if this really is a piece of Saint John’s skull, or even if it’s just some random dude, it’s been handled by the grubby fingers of God knows how many priests and worshipers for centuries.
You also gotta consider that after someone dies, their remains are invaded by bacteria and other organisms, all of which leave their own DNA.
Problem here is that over the centuries, the DNA in this sample has been totally swamped.
It’s a hell of a job to tease it back out.
It’s not really your fault—-what you need is an aDNA lab. ”
“A--DNA?”
“Ancient DNA. There are labs that specialize in exactly this: sequencing ancient DNA that’s been heavily contaminated over the centuries.”
“Which ones?”
“Well, CU School of Medicine has an aDNA lab. They’ve been working with Harvard on the paleo--DNA mapping project.”
“So if we brought this sample over to CU, they’d be able to do it?”
“Sure.” Reno grinned. “And the guy who runs the lab’s a good buddy of mine, Greg Strickland. If I called him and asked a favor, I bet he’d do it for free.”
“On the Q.T.? Right away?”
“Sure.” He rubbed his cheek. “I’ll take it to Strickland tomorrow. You’re gonna owe me, boss.”
“Reno, I owe you so many favors, I might as well sign you over the deed to my soul.”
Reno winked and shut down the program and got up from the workstation. “I’ll close up. You go home.”
“Okay, pard.” Romanski gave him a fist bump, shucked the lab gear, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and left.
Whistling cheerfully, Reno went through the process of shutting down the lab.
He took a moment to text Dr. Strickland about the DNA sequencing in between tasks.
Twenty minutes later, he was done. He went over to the refrigerated safe, punched in his code, and took out the sample.
He eyed it in its sealed tube, not much larger than a big pill.
Incredible to think it might really be from Saint John the Baptist.
He wondered again why Castillo would go to so much trouble and risk to steal it, just to sequence its genome. A carbon--14 test made more sense: That would have returned the age of the bone and possibly proven it a fraud. But why DNA? What could that prove?
He slid the vial into his pocket. Tomorrow, he’d bring it over to CU School of Medicine and put it in Strickland’s hands.
He let himself out of the building and walked across the parking lot toward his car. At four o’clock in the morning, it was the only one there—-the rest of the lot was an empty space dotted with pools of sodium light.
As he pressed the unlock key, his car beeped at him, and the lights flashed. Funny, he thought. In his rush, he must’ve forgotten to lock the car when he arrived at eleven—-and no wonder, because he was nervous about what they were doing.
He got in the car and started it. As he moved the transmission into drive, he felt something cold press against the point at the base of his skull. A low, calm voice said, “CBI has something we want, and you are going to get it for us.”