Frameshift

The door opened, and Shari Cohen came in. “I’ve finally got the last of those reports, Pierre,” she said. “Sorry it took so long.”

Pierre waved her closer and had her place them on his desk. He thanked her, added the new reports to the pile of other genetic tests of murder victims that had been submitted earlier, squared all the pages off by tapping them on their four sides, then started going through them.

Nothing unusual on the first. Nada on the second. Zip on the third. Oh, here’s one — the Alzheimer’s gene. Bupkes on number five. Diddly on six.

Ah, a gene for breast cancer. And here’s a poor fellow who had both the Alzheimer’s gene and the neurofibromatosis gene. Three more with nothing. Then one with a gene for heart disease, and another with a predisposition to rectal cancer…

Pierre made notes on a pad of graph paper. When he’d gone through all 117 reports, he leaned back in his chair again, flabbergasted.

Twenty-two of the murder victims had major genetic disorders. That was — he rummaged on his cluttered desk for his calculator — just under 19 percent. Only 7 percent of the general population had the genetic disorders Pierre had asked the grad students to test for.

The samples Helen had provided had all been labeled, but Pierre didn’t recognize any of the 117 names, let alone the 22 of them who had had major genetic disorders. He’d hoped some of them would have been people he knew of from the UCB/LBNL community, or people he’d heard Klimus mention in passing.

And there was still the problem of Bryan Proctor. The only murder conclusively related to the attempt on Pierre’s life was Proctor’s; Chuck Hanratty had been involved in both. But there was no tissue sample from Proctor, and nothing Proctor’s wife had said to Pierre indicated that he’d had any genetic disorder. He’d have to find the time to visit Mrs. Proctor again, but—$

Merde! It was already 14:00. Time to leave to pick up Molly. His stomach started churning. The murders could wait; this afternoon, they were going to find out what was wrong with Amanda.

“Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Tardivel,” said Dr. Gainsley. He was a short man with a fringe of reddish gray hair around his bald head, and a completely gray mustache. “Thank you for coming in.”

Pierre shot a glance at his wife to see if she was going to correct the doctor by pointing out that it was Mr. Tardivel and Ms. Bond, but she didn’t say a word. Pierre could tell by her expression that the only thing on her mind was Amanda.

The doctor looked at each of them in turn, a grim expression on his face. “Frankly, I thought your pediatrician was just humoring you when she referred you to me; after all, lots of kids don’t speak until they’re eighteen months or more. But, well, have a look at this X ray.” He led them over to an illuminated wall panel with a single gray piece of film clipped to it. The picture showed the bottom half of a child’s skull, the jaw, and the neck. “This is Amanda,” he said. He tapped a small spot high up in the throat. “It’s hard to see the soft tissues, but can you see that little U-shaped bone? That’s called the hyoid. Unlike most bones in the body, it’s not attached directly to any other bone. Rather, the hyoid floats in the throat, serving as an anchor for the muscles that connect the jaw, the larynx, and the tongue. Well, in a normal child Amanda’s age, we’d expect to see that bone down around here.” He tapped the X ray farther down in the throat, in a line directly behind the middle of the lower jaw.

“And?” said Molly, her tone perplexed.

Gainsley motioned for them to take the two chairs in front of his wide glass-topped desk. “Let me see if I can explain this simply,” he said. “Mrs. Tardivel, did you breast-feed your daughter?”

“Of course.”

“Well, you must have noticed that she could suckle continuously without pausing to breathe.”

Molly nodded slightly. “Is that abnormal?”

“Not for newborns. In them, the path between the mouth and the throat curves very gently downward. This allows air drawn in by the nose to flow directly into the lungs, bypassing the mouth altogether, making it possible to breathe and eat at the same time.”

Molly nodded again.

“Well, as a baby begins to grow up, things change. The larynx migrates down the throat — and with it, the hyoid bone moves down, too. The path between the lips and the voice box becomes a right angle instead of a gentle curve. The downside of this is that a space opens up above the larynx where food can get caught, making it possible to choke to death.

The upside, though, is that the repositioning of the larynx allows for a much greater vocal range.”

Pierre and Molly looked briefly at each other, but said nothing.