Rebecca York - Moon 01 by Killing Moon

Author:Killing Moon [Moon, Killing]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-12T14:50:44.494000+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

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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. But this was different.

Walter had given her reason to worry about Hank's research skills. And even if he hadn't, what she'd

found out about Ross was something she didn't want to advertise.

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