the Third Twin (1996)

Jeannie knocked at the door and came in. She was wearing a white laboratory coat over her skirt and blouse. Berrington liked it when the young women wore those coats as dresses, with nothing else but their underwear. He found it sexy.

“Good of you to come by,” he said. He drew out a chair for her, then pulled his own chair around from behind his desk so there would not be a barrier between them.

His first task was to give Jeannie some plausible explanation for his behavior on meeting Steven Logan. She would not be easy to fool. He wished he had given it more thought instead of counting up his conquests.

He sat down and gave her his most disarming grin. “I want to apologize for my weird behavior,” he said. “I’ve been downloading some files from the University of Sydney, Australia.” He gestured at his desktop computer. “Just as you were about to introduce me to that young man, I realized I had left my computer on and forgotten to hang up the phone line. I just felt kind of foolish, that’s all, but I was pretty rude.”

The explanation was thin, but she seemed to accept it. “I’m relieved,” she said candidly. “I thought I had done something to offend you.”

So far, so good. “I was on my way to talk to you about your work,” he went on smoothly. “You’ve certainly got off to a flying start. You’ve only been here four weeks and your project is well under way. Congratulations.”

She nodded. “I had long talks with Herb and Frank over the summer, before I officially started,” she said. Herb Dickson was the department head and Frank Demidenko a full professor. “We figured out all the practicalities in advance.”

“Tell me a little more about it. Have any problems come up? Anything I can help with?”

“Recruitment is my biggest problem,” she said. “Because our subjects are volunteers, most of them are like Steve Logan, respectable middle-class Americans who believe that the good citizen has a duty to support scientific inquiry. Not many pimps and dope dealers come forward.”

“A point our liberal critics haven’t failed to make.”

“On the other hand, it’s not possible to find out about aggression and criminality by studying law-abiding Middle American families. So it was absolutely crucial to my project that I solved the recruitment problem.”

“And have you?”

“I think so. It occurred to me that medical information about millions of people is nowadays held on huge databases by insurance companies and government agencies. That includes the kind of data we use to determine whether twins are identical or fraternal: brain waves, electrocardiograms, and so on. If we could search for pairs of similar electrocardiograms, for example, it would be a way of identifying twins. And if the database was big enough, some of those pairs would have been raised apart. And here’s the kicker: Some of them might not even know they were twins.”

“It’s remarkable,” Berrington said. “Simple, but original and ingenious.” He meant it. Identical twins reared apart were very important to genetics research, and scientists went to great lengths to recruit them. Until now the main way to find them had been through publicity: they read magazine articles about twin studies and volunteered to take part. As Jeannie said, that process gave a sample that was predominantly respectable middle-class, which was a disadvantage in general and a crippling problem to the study of criminality.

But for him personally it was a catastrophe. He looked her in the eye and tried to hide his dismay. This was worse than he had feared. Only last night Preston Barck had said, “We all know this company has secrets.” Jim Proust had said no one could find them out. He had not reckoned with Jeannie Ferrami.

Berrington clutched at a straw. “Finding similar entries in a database is not as easy as it sounds.”

“True. Graphic images use up many megabytes of space. Searching such records is vastly more difficult than running a spellcheck on your doctoral thesis.”

“I believe it’s quite a problem in software design. So what did you do?”

“I wrote my own software.”

Berrington was surprised. “You did?”

“Sure. I took a master’s in computer science at Princeton, as you know. When I was at Minnesota, I worked with my professor on neural network-type software for pattern recognition.”

Could she be that smart? “How does it work?”

“It uses fuzzy logic to speed up pattern matching. The pairs we’re looking for are similar, but not absolutely identical. For example, x-rays of identical teeth, taken by different technicians on different machinery, are not exactly the same. But the human eye can see that they’re the same, and when the x-rays are scanned and digitized and stored electronically, a computer equipped with fuzzy logic can recognize them as a pair.”

“I imagine you’d need a computer the size of the Empire State Building.”