(Moon 1) - Killing Moon by Rebecca York

Author:Rebecca York
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-25T11:54:53+00:00

MEGAN'S hand shook slightly as she washed the slide of Ross's tissue with a salt-detergent solution.

Get a grip, she ordered herself. You've done this a hundred times. But she hadn't done this analysis on genetic material from someone she'd gotten to know personally, someone whose deep, sexy voice had aroused her over the phone the night before.

Someone she would be speaking to again after she finished this analysis—unless she chickened out and gave the job to Hank.

Lips pressed together, she added a series of dyes designed to make the details of each chromosome stand out. There were two basic classes of chromosome aberrations, numerical and structural, one or the other found in association with many abnormalities of development: Turner's syndrome, Klinefelter's syndrome, fragile X syndrome, complex malformation syndromes.

With the advent of chromosome banding techniques in the 1970s, it was possible to identify with certainty all chromosome pairs and to characterize more accurately abnormalities of number and structure. She was looking for either or both, although Ross had told her she wasn't going to find anything that had already been described. But she'd check that out for herself.

While the traditional method of analysis was very labor intensive, she had access to an automated system that used an interferometer similar to ones employed by astronomers for measuring light spectra emitted by stars, with the results analyzed by a computer program and displayed on a monitor.

Afraid of what she was going to find, she waited for the computer to complete the analysis, then looked at the screen, prepared to settle down to the process of checking for any of the known abnormalities. What she saw made her jaw drop open.

After glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody was standing behind her, she looked at the screen again, touching each set of chromosomes with her finger, counting carefully to verify what she thought she was viewing. The correct number of human chromosome pairs was twenty-three. Ross Marshall had an extra twenty-fourth chromosome. Impossible.

Yet there it was on the monitor. Once more, she made sure that her eyes weren't playing tricks on her. But the results were the same. No mistake in her counting.

Had the computer program made some kind of error? Carefully she went through the steps of the procedure again, waiting with her pulse pounding in her temples for the analysis to finish. The picture on the screen was the same one she'd viewed a few minutes earlier.

She knew of abnormalities caused by an extra chromosome, but the anomaly was always an extra one of the known chromosomes, like the extra Y chromosome responsible for a documented type of violent-aggressive male personality. She had never heard of a case of a totally undocumented twenty-fourth chromosome.

After saving the analysis onto a disk, she exited the program, went back to her desk, and sat down. Glancing at Hank, she saw he was bent over his computer. Ordinarily she wouldn't hesitate to confide in her colleague when she found something as startling as what she'd just seen.

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