The Third Twin Page 0,68

positive to say. "He was very cooperative."

"He always had beautiful manners," Charlotte said in the southern drawl she used for her most outrageous utterances.

"Mrs. Pinker, may I double-check his birthday with you?"

"He was born on the seventh of September." Like it should be a national holiday.

It was not the answer Jeannie had been hoping for. "And what hospital was he born in?"

"We were at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, at the time."

Jeannie suppressed a disappointed curse.

"The Major was training conscripts for Vietnam," Charlotte said proudly. "The Army Medical Command has a big hospital at Bragg. That's where Dennis came into the world."

Jeannie could not think of anything more to say. The mystery was as deep as ever. "Mrs. Pinker, I want to thank you again for your kind cooperation."

"You're welcome."

She returned to the lab and said to Lisa: "Apparently, Steven and Dennis were born thirteen days apart and in different states. I just don't understand it."

Lisa opened a fresh box of test tubes. "Well, there's one incontrovertible test. If they have the same DNA, they're identical twins, no matter what anyone says about their birth." She took out two of the little glass tubes. They were a couple of inches long. Each had a lid at the top and a conical bottom. She opened a pack of labels, wrote "Dennis Pinker" on one and "Steven Logan" on the other, then labeled the tubes and placed them in a rack.

She broke the seal on Dennis's blood and put a single drop in one test tube. Then she took a vial of Steven's blood out of the refrigerator and did the same.

Using a precision-calibrated pipette - a pipe with a bulb at one end - she added a tiny measured quantity of chloroform to each test tube. Then she picked up a fresh pipette and added a similarly exact amount of phenol.

She closed both test tubes and put them in the Whirlimixer to agitate them for a few seconds. The chloroform would dissolve the fats and the phenol would disrupt the proteins, but the long coiled molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid would remain intact.

Lisa put the tubes back in the rack. "That's all we can do for the next few hours," she said.

The water-dissolved phenol would slowly separate from the chloroform. A meniscus would form in the tube at the boundary. The DNA would be in the watery part, which could be drawn off with a pipette for the next stage of the test. But that would have to wait for the morning.

A phone rang somewhere. Jeannie frowned; it sounded as if it were coming from her office. She stepped across the corridor and picked it up. "Yes?"

"Is this Dr. Ferrami?"

Jeannie hated people who called and demanded to know your name without introducing themselves. It was like knocking on someone's front door and saying: "Who the hell are you?" She bit back a sarcastic response and said: "I'm Jeannie Ferrami. Who is this calling, please?"

"Naomi Ereelander, New York Times." She sounded like a heavy smoker in her fifties. "I have some questions for you."

"At this time of night?"

"I work all hours. It seems you do too."

"Why are you calling me?"

"I'm researching an article about scientific ethics."

"Oh." Jeannie thought immediately about Steve not knowing he might be adopted. It was an ethical problem, though not an insoluble one - but surely the Times did not know about it? "What's your interest?"

"I believe you scan medical databases looking for suitable subjects to study."

"Oh, okay." Jeannie relaxed. She had nothing to worry about on this score. "Well, I've devised a search engine that scans computer data and finds matching pairs. My purpose is to find identical twins. It can be used on any kind of database."

"But you've gained access to medical records in order to use this program."

"It's important to define what you mean by access. I've been careful not to trespass on anyone's privacy. I never see anyone's medical details. The program doesn't print the records."

"What does it print?"

"The names of the two individuals, and their addresses and phone numbers."

"But it prints the names in pairs." "Of course, that's the point."

"So if you used it on, say, a database of electroencephalograms, it would tell you that John Doe's brain waves are the same as Jim Fitz's."

"The same or similar. But it would not tell me anything about either man's health."

"However, if you knew previously that John Doe was a paranoid schizophrenic, you could conclude that Jim Fitz was, too."

"We would never know such a thing."

"You