Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller

by Bouchard, J. W.

  The law enforcement personnel on sight, which included uniformed police officers, special agents from the Division of Criminal Investigation and the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission were gathered in clusters much as the remaining employees were. Crime scene technicians dotted about, gathering evidence.

  Ten yards ahead of him, Alan spotted a man wearing a navy blue windbreaker, gray slacks, and black loafers. A badge dangled from a chain around his neck. Alan made a beeline for him.

  When Alan was within a few feet, the man turned and said, “Special Agent Lamb, I presume?”

  The man had short black hair, brown eyes, and was an inch or two taller than Alan. He offered his hand and Alan shook it.

  “Darrow,” the man said, flashing a smile that revealed a mouthful of perfectly even and brilliantly white teeth. “I’ve been wondering when our paths might cross.”

  “Let me guess,” Alan said. “You’re the guy that’s been dumping shit in our toilet?”

  Darrow’s smile widened. Alan wondered if the man used whitener. He could have been a TV model for Colgate. “Did I forget to flush?”

  “What I don’t understand is why the FBI keeps handing these off to us.”

  “Who said I was with the FBI?” Darrow asked.

  Alan stared at the man, sizing him up. “Your name’s on all the reports.”

  “So many forms. Who can keep track, really?”

  Alan didn’t care for riddles. “I’m guessing it has something to do with the deviation in DNA.”

  “I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to figure it out,” Darrow said. “I’m not sure I understand the confusion. Isn’t that within GCB’s wheelhouse?”

  “Why play games?”

  Alan realized that he was teetering toward the edge of a cliff. He was precariously close to violating one of Gant’s golden rules. As much as Gant hated playing the game, he did err on the side of politics when it came to extending the proverbial olive branch to their brothers and sisters in law enforcement. You didn’t shake the trees and you most definitely did not shit in their sandbox. Professionalism, in Gant’s eyes, was key. Alan was aware of this, but he was almost to the point of not caring.

  “I’m sorry. Games?”

  “Why keep us guessing? You were obviously aware of the discrepancies with both the prints and the DNA samples collected from the scenes.”

  Darrow nodded. “We had collected our own specimens from each of the crime scenes. Our own experts performed comparisons on both. We were made aware of certain…inconsistencies, you might call them.”

  “You would have saved us time and trouble if you had let us in on that fact to begin with.”

  “Think of it as a kind of independent corroboration. A second opinion, if you will. The minute differences sent the red flags flying. Everyone was using the word ‘contamination.’ We needed independent verification, and your man Davis is hailed as one of the best in the business. Now that we know our guys didn’t mess things up, it’s clear that we handed things over to the right people. It’s simply a matter of following protocol. The GCB’s involvement in all cases where the mishandling or modification of DNA is known or suspected to have occurred is mandatory. That’s a quote, directly from the policy manual.”

  “I’ve read the policy manual,” Alan said. “What else are you holding back?”

  “At this point, you know everything we know.”

  Alan didn’t buy it. His gut told him that Darrow was keeping secrets, but he also had the impression that any further information the man had regarding the DNA and fingerprint business wouldn’t be forthcoming.

  “I don’t necessarily believe that. Maybe that’s a discussion for another time. So what happened here?”

  “Teresa Baier,” Darrow said, glancing over his shoulder and then back to Alan. “She’s what’s known as a ‘banker’ in the casino trade. Bankers have access to the vault.”

  “Vault?”

  “Just like a bank. Millions. The bankers get money from the vault and provide it to the cages.”

  “Anyone see it?” Alan surveyed the room, noted the presence of security cameras everywhere.

  “You can’t spit without hitting a camera in this joint,” Darrow said. “It’s all on video. They’ve got eight security guards walking the floor at any given time, along with three guys whose sole function in life is to monitor the security cameras.”

  “How’d she manage to slip out the door?”

  “She had help. Sean Hammond. Security guard. Kind enough to hold the door open for her. Appears to be a two man operation this time.”

  “That’s new.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Where’s Hammond now?”

  “In custody. Him and the Baier woman. The footage shows Baier makng her way to the door with two duffle bags. On a normal day, an employee hefting around a duffle bag toward the exit would have been highly suspicious. Security would have stopped her. In this case, Hammond was manning the exit. She gets to the door, he opens it for her and steps out after her.”

  “How’d you snag them?”

  “By now you should already know the answer to that.”

  “Bound and gagged?”

  Darrow smiled again. Alan thought he smiled too much. “A few blocks from here. In one of the casino’s complimentary shuttle vans. Same story, too. No recollection of events other than being blitz attacked by unknown assailants.”

  “That were spitting images of them,” Alan said.

  “You’re on a roll. Maybe you should start playing the slots.”

  “They’re all connected somehow. I just can’t figure out how yet.”

  “We lifted prints off the duffle bags. DNA evidence in the van.”

  “In the van?”

  “Soda cans. There were several empties in the back of the van with them.”

  “Just like the one they pulled from Sitka’s office.”

  “And from Carville’s vehicle,” Darrow said.

  “They’re messing with us. Somebody wants us to figure it out, and they’re leaving clues behind to make sure we do. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s a head scratcher to be sure.”

  “You’ll send the samples over to us I take it?”

  “They’re on the way to your lab as we speak.”

  “What is it you aren’t telling me?”

  Darrow was still smiling, but it faltered the tiniest bit. “I told you, you know as much as I do. Anything more than that…let’s just say you’d have to speak with the men above my pay grade.”

  “You aren’t with the Bureau, what does that make you? A spook?”

  “I’m not a fan of labels, Agent Lamb.”

  Alan scanned the room. A group of casino security guards, three burly men who could have been former football players and a petite brunette woman, stood huddled together, speaking in hushed tones. No doubt they worked closely with Hammond. Probably discussing how one of their own could have pulled off the heist.

  He glanced back to Darrow. “CIA?”

  “We’re about finished up here,” Darrow said. “I’ll drop by County and interrogate Hammond and Baier if it suits you. Save you some time. I assume we won’t get anything more out of them.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you.”

  “We’re all about building healthy relationships.”

  Darrow reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. He handed it to Alan. When Alan looked it over, he wasn’t surprised to find that the card was completely blank except for a handwritten phone number on its face in blue ink. “Do you drink?”

  “Rarely,” Alan said.

  “Tonight might be a good time to start.”

  Chapter 7

  Alan hadn’t left the Painted Horse until close to midnight. It had been a rough night after that.

  Prior to leaving the Painted Horse, he had interviewed several of the security guards who had been working the floor, a cage boss, a banker arriving for the swing shift, and on
e of the employees that monitored the security cameras.

  The banker he interviewed, Rebecca Sanders, was a slender woman with brunette hair and green eyes. She worked the 3 to 11 swing shift on Thursday through Sunday. She was cute in a plain sort of way, reminding him of Lucy for some reason. At first, she wouldn’t believe what Alan was telling her, couldn’t believe the Baier woman was capable of stealing from her employer, let alone masterminding a complex heist which entailed clearing out the casino’s vault. While they rarely worked the same shift (Baier typically worked the 7 to 3 shift), their time at the casino did occasionally overlap. Sanders described Teresa Baier as timid and soft-spoken, friendly and reliable. A woman who always showed up on time and didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone. “A person tends to remember things like that,” Sanders had said. “Around here, everybody talks smack about everyone else. Teresa was the rare type of person that kept her judgments to herself.”

  Jose Herrera was a short Hispanic man in his late twenties that worked the floor during the same shift as Sean Hammond. Herrera’s description of Hammond was essentially the same as Sanders had given of Baier. Aside from the timid part, Hammond was considered to be soft-spoken, even-tempered, and completely trustworthy.

  Unlike some of the other security personnel, Herrera had said, Hammond knew how to keep his cool when the shit hit the fan. Herrera had said, “Most of these other guys, they think they’re cops, only they don’t have what it takes to be real cops, so they try to act tough to compensate for it.”

  It seemed like remarkable insight from a security guard bringing home less than 30K a year.

  The man surveying the monitors in the surveillance room during the time the robbery had taken place was Archie Mayberry.

  The casino was equipped with over three hundred cameras, most of them color, many of which had the capability of zooming in and out and tilting and panning.

  Mayberry showed Alan the footage the cameras had captured, which showed Baier moving toward the entrance, heavily saddled with the strap of a duffle bag slung over each shoulder. In the video, she appeared to be having issues lugging around that much weight. She reached the glass exit doors, at which point the video showed Hammond opening one of the swinging doors, allowing her to step through, and immediately falling into step behind her.

  “That’s when I sounded the alarm,” Mayberry said. “I knew something was rotten in Denmark.”

  By the time 11:30 rolled around, Alan got the feeling that he had overstayed his welcome. Alan didn’t sympathize, but he could understand. For every minute the casino was shut down, it was losing money.

  Following his time at the casino, Alan had driven back to the Patriot Inn. He had slept fitfully. He guessed he had had the same dream about the car accident that he’d had many nights before, but couldn’t remember. He had gone against Darrow’s suggestion and skipped the drink.

  By 4:30 A.M., he was willing to give some credence to the man’s advice. A stiff drink might have delivered the peaceful slumber he had been hoping for, but he settled for a slice of cold pizza and a bottle of Ice Mountain water. After that, he had showered, dressed, and headed for the office.

  He arrived at 6:30 A.M.

  The seventh floor was mostly dead, but he could see a shaft of light spilling out beneath the door to Gant’s office. Alan knocked on Gant’s door before letting himself in. Gant was hunched over his desk, sifting through a pile of documents. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “Did you even go home?” Alan asked as he slumped down into the chair opposite Gant’s desk.

  “Long enough to kiss my kids goodnight,” Gant said. “What about you? You look like you might have missed out on an hour or two of sleep yourself.”

  “More or less,” Alan said. “Nothing’s adding up. Do you know anything about an agent named Darrow?”

  “His name’s come up a time or two.”

  “I think he’s a spook. CIA maybe.”

  “You think the CIA is involved?”

  “He isn’t with the FBI, and when I inquired about what agency he worked for, he gave me the runaround. I don’t think they’re telling us everything they know either.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think there’s a time in a man’s life when things come down to the make-or-break point. Where the outcome of a situation doesn’t just cause a ripple in his life, but actually determines the course of his destiny. That’s what this thing feels like to me. Like the outcome of these cases is going to determine our fates. If we manage to solve them, we’re not going to get any praise for doing our jobs, but if we fuck it all up, it’ll probably lead to the systematic dismantling of the GCB. There are people out there that are of the mind that taxpayer dollars could be better spent elsewhere.”

  “Isn’t that always the case?”

  Gant nodded, kneading the creases in his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “It is. But I’ve spent enough time in this game that I’m reluctant to start over.”

  “You’re not a dinosaur yet,” Alan said, feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the man.

  “No. But I am a Neanderthal. A hairy guy who walks around with a club and grunts a lot. And when I swing my club, it doesn’t do as much damage as it used to.”

  “Sounds dramatic.”

  Gant laughed for a moment before becoming serious again. “You see many Neanderthals walking around lately?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, know why? Because they went extinct.”

  Chapter 8

  Later that morning, Marvin Davis paid them a visit on the seventh floor. This was highly unusual. Marvin rarely left the confines of the crime lab. It was his comfort zone; his security blanket. The area that existed outside of it was considered hostile territory.

  When Marvin stepped out of the elevator onto the seventh floor, he looked like a scared animal that had suddenly been transported out of its natural habitat and into an environment much more dangerous.

  Marvin walked past the desks situated throughout the floor’s bullpen, making his way toward Alan’s office. His eyes darted back and forth, surveying this new landscape for potential threats. The agents seated at their desks in the bullpen (there were four of them that morning, which included Doug Ziman, Ron Keller, Frank Holland, and Daymond Hart) glanced up from what they were doing long enough to examine the tall and skinny man wearing the pristinely white lab coat as he strode past them. Marvin refused to make eye contact with any of them.

  Lucy noticed Marvin coming toward Alan’s office first. She rose from her chair and said, “Hi Marvin,” before he had fully entered the room, “what brings you to these parts?”

  Marvin stepped through the doorway, paused long enough to take a deep breath, and then sat down in a chair on the other side of Alan’s desk. Alan wasn’t sure, but he thought he caught a glimmer of infatuation in Lucy’s eyes. Was she interested in Marvin? He couldn’t say it surprised him much, but he questioned the subtle pang of jealousy that rose up inside of him.

  The walk from the elevator to Alan’s office was a short one, and shouldn’t have been cause for exerting more than the minimal amount of physical effort, but when he spoke, Marvin sounded as though he were out of breath.

  “I finished with the samples that came in last night,” he said.

  “And?”

  “Don’t rush him,” Lucy said.

  “I wasn’t rushing him,” Alan said unbelievingly. As far as he could tell, he wasn’t rushing anything.

  “As you might have guessed, they are the same as the others. Quite mysterious. Nearly perfect matches, except for the most minor of discrepancies.”

  “So maybe they have twins after all,” Alan said.

  Marvin shook his head. “That’s not what I was thinking at all. I did a little digging, and even in monozygotic twins, the differences would be more pronounced than we’re seeing in the samples taken from the crime scenes. Identical twins occur when a single egg is fertilized to
form one zygote, which then divides into two separate embryos. It isn’t as common to see it occur naturally as it is in IVF when artificial splitting is involved to increase the number of available embryos for transfer.”

  “Here,” Lucy said, handing Marvin a bottle of water. “So identical twins aren’t really identical?”

  Marvin accepted the water gratefully. He unscrewed the cap, took a drink, and then continued on. “Genetically, they are very similar, but in a study of half a million nucleotide polymorphisms, differences appeared in two of the roughly thirty-three million comparisons. Which translates into potentially hundreds of differences across the entire genome. There is also the matter of the fingerprints. Because of having contact with different parts of the environment inside the womb, twins don’t share the same prints.”

  “But wouldn’t they be close?”

  “Perhaps. But they wouldn’t be as similar as the specimens we’re seeing.”

  Alan hadn’t lent any credence to the possibility that each case involved the use of identical twins to aid the commission of the crime, but this also meant that he had hit another dead end. Given the testimony of the victims/suspects, and the similarities of both the fingerprints and the DNA, it had been shaping up to be the only viable theory he had to go on.

  “That leaves us exactly nowhere,” Alan said.

  “Maybe not,” Marvin said.

  “You have an idea?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Do either of you remember the story of Dolly?”

  Alan shook his head.

  Lucy said, “Dolly the sheep?”

  Marvin nodded. “Finn-Dorset ewe to be precise. Dolly was the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell. This occurred in the mid-nineties. A cell was taken from the udder of her biological mother. Dolly was created by inserting a cell from her mother into a sheep ovum where, after four hundred failed attempts, it formed into an embryo. The embryo was then placed inside a female sheep and brought to term via normal pregnancy.”