Michelle dressed quickly in the dark, awake before the alarm, anxious about the task before her. She cracked the door and surveyed the parking lot. Reassured, she left the motel room and got into the car, the cast wrapped in paper in her purse. She drove out to the house and arrived as dawn brightened the eastern sky.

The barn was still open, and she replaced the cast on the shelf surrounded by the plaster scraps, near where she’d originally found it. She then touched as many surfaces outside as possible, rubbing the doorknobs, running her hands along the window sills, leaving DNA traces.

Relieved, she got back in the car and pulled out. Now I’ve got to get that piece of fossil back, she thought. As if on cue, her phone trilled. It was Izzy.

“Hey, it’s Michelle.”

“I hope this isn’t too early. Can you get down here this morning? I’ve got some news about our, um, project.”

“Sure. You can’t just tell me?”

“In person. You’ll see why. What time?”

Michelle consulted the time, made some calculations. “I can be there by nine thirty.”

“Okay, see you then. Come to the lab.”

“That was quick,” Michelle complimented her.

“Yeah, well it’s a pretty straightforward run, and Coakley pissed me off, so I let his stuff wait. Plus, it’s really interesting. The chromosome…oh, never mind. Just get down here.”

She stopped at the Daisy for breakfast and chatted with Jeanette, then got back on the road. Michelle was thankful for the lack of police on I-15 on the way down, and she arrived earlier than she expected. Buzzing with anticipation, she took the stairs two at a time to the laboratory in the Anthropology department. She knocked at the door and was immediately buzzed in. Izzy looked up from a terminal with a wicked grin. She held out the baggy with the fossil and shook it.

“Okay, first thing. This isn’t a fossil. This is living bone, or, at least was.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s bone, it’s not mineralized. A quick look under the microscope tells you that. Which gives me great material to work with. A very strong signal from lots of living cells.”

“How can it be alive?”

“Well, I assume the source, the donor, is dead, but the tissue hasn’t broken down yet, certainly not the DNA. A great sample, which leads me to the second thing. Superficially, it looks like ape DNA, but it’s not.”

Michelle’s confusion was somewhat comical, eliciting a chuckle from Izzy.

“How do you know?” Michelle asked.

“My mitochondria girl tipped me off. I sent her some sequences to analyze. But wait, I’m jumping ahead.”

She gestured for Michelle to follow her to an adjacent room. She pointed up to a chart on the wall, a graphic of the evolutionary relationships among all the major primate species.

“See up there? Humans, chimps, gorillas, orangutans: we all have a lot of genetic material in common. However, humans have 46 chromosomes. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans have 48. Those light and dark stripes are from a chemical stain, and they’re called bands. Each chromosome has a unique pattern of bands. If you look at some of them between apes and humans, they are identical, like chromosome 6 there. See how the light/dark pattern is the same?”

Michelle squinted up at the diagram, trying to appreciate the similarities.

“So?”

“Well, that’s the first level of analysis: chromosome count and banding patterns. At that level, first glance, it looks like your bone fragment is from a gorilla or some other ape.”

“Gorilla?”

Izzy smiled.

“Just based on chromosome count and high-level banding pattern. That’s what I told Charlene, in Minnesota.” She gave a conspiratorial smirk. “But it’s not. Here’s why.” She gestured to the row of machines on the lab table. “These babies here are my sequencers. Not the latest stuff, but still pretty good. After she called me back, I ran your sample yesterday and then started comparing the results to my databases.” She sat at a terminal and tapped in a login code, then pulled up several files.

“At the level of specific genes, there are even more similarities between ape DNA and human. We have many, many genes in common that perform similar functions, but have subtle differences. Human genes have particular DNA sequences with a certain amount of variability.” She pointed to a row of tables listing strings of gibberish on the computer screen.

“This is the output of a comparison program for genome matching. There are some strange exceptions on this sample which I can’t explain, but when I look for some common, exclusively human gene families, this sample looks human. But it can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the chromosome count! Nobody has 48 chromosomes. Okay, well, nobody normally has 48 chromosomes that look like that,” gesturing at the poster. “When Charlene told me it couldn’t be gorilla because of the mitochondrial genome length, I kept digging.”

“You think it’s been engineered?”

Izzy nodded. “Somebody went to great lengths to make this look like gorilla genetic material.” She half turned and pointed back to the chart on the wall. “Looks like they split the 2, flipped the pieces and made them look like the gorilla 12 and 13. They moved some others around as well. I haven’t finished the detailed sequencing analysis, but I bet they spliced in some centromere fragments and tails. Nice work. But there are a bunch of other anomalies, and this one is the smoking gun,” she said, tapping the terminal screen. “Chimps, humans, and bonobos have a piece of DNA on their Y chromosome that is a transposition of an earlier version from another chromosome, probably chromosome 1.”

“Transposition?”

“A piece of genetic material was moved from one chromosome to another during replication, probably a million years ago with some common ancestor. Happens all the time. Anyway, this piece is about 100 kbp, and gorillas don’t have it. So even though this sample looks like gorilla in terms of chromosome count and banding pattern, it can’t be because of this Y chromosome. Add in the mitochondrial DNA problem, and no way.”

“It looks like gorilla but it’s not. You think someone made this.”

“Right.”

“But why? What’s it for?”

Izzy shrugged. “I don’t think it’s human. Or at least, it’s not like any human I’ve ever seen. I sequenced the whole thing, and it’s mostly human, but there are some genes, a lot actually, that clearly aren’t. Charlene is doing the same with the mitochondria. She says there’s interesting stuff there, too.”

Michelle frowned and pulled on her lip, thinking about the rows of teeth on the plaster cast and what Coakley said about fraud and deception. Izzy watched her, then sat back arms folded on her chest. Michelle looked up.

“What do you know about the Research Lab?”

“Up by Rexburg? Federal, lots of security. Used to be about nuclear weapons, then switched to combat drones. A lot of people around here work there, but I know there’s hush-hush stuff. Why?”

“Where I found this, it’s not too far from there, at least part of it.”

Izzy raised her eyebrow and mouthed a dramatic ‘ohhhhh’.

“Maybe that’s your next move.”

Chapter 37