DNA Never Lies E-Book

Kari Kilgore

• Herausgeber: Spiral Publishing, Ltd.
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Betty Falconen: the most overqualified low-rent geneticist in Atlanta.

Overwhelmed by old insecurities and struggles to pay the rent.

Her dreams of cutting-edge research withering on life-support.

Betty wanted more from life and work.

Will a stranger in a coffee shop bring the change she craves?

Or prove her fears right after all?

An excerpt from DNA Never Lies:

An offer too good to refuse, but at what cost?

One last surprise waited for Betty: an application to qualify as a contractor for the Baron County Police Department. Specifically, to re-examine evidence from recent crime scenes. A background check, a confidentiality agreement, and…an offer of payment.

“Wow,” Betty whispered, shaking her head.

Payment equal to what she’d earned over the last six months of work her lab assistants could do in their sleep.

Turning Detective Willa Belladeux down cold didn’t seem nearly as easy as it had the night before, but not because of the money.

Well, not only because of the money.

The feeling of being in demand, of being appreciated, carried a lot more weight and influence. The idea of getting to work in the field she’d wanted. Yes, what she’d trained for. What her talents and skills were best suited for.

All of that together got Betty up and dialing the number on the business card clipped to the application before she could change her mind.

Leseprobe

For Joyce

Who can always imagine an alternate scenario

DNA Never Lies

Bending the Code ∞ Book One

Kari Kilgore

Spiral Publishing, Ltd.

Chapter 1

Why did the boring jobs always pay the best?

Betty Falconen leaned back in her rickety rolling lab chair, far enough to get a good stretch but not enough to dump herself on the faded pea-green tile floor. Again.

Everyone else had long gone home for the weekend, so she had her tiny lab in all its dubious glory to herself. Antique florescent light fixture in the corner that blinked no matter how many times they changed the bulb. The squat dorm-style refrigerator covered with rust circles from distant college beers past, complete with strange clanky noise. The row of tall lab bench tables with clean but chipped and stained white plastic surfaces.

At least the office surplus shop across town hadn’t charged Betty for those.

Janie’s Second Chance Office Emporium was struggling, just like Betty was, but Jane wasn’t desperate enough to charge someone to haul off her junk. Especially junk donated from the biology department at Georgia Tech that no one but Betty would want.

Betty sat up, her scuffed black tennis shoes hitting the floor with a flat smack. She tilted her head to the side, brushing her wavy dark hair away from her round granny reading glasses. A low gronk, too quiet for anyone not quite so neurotically observant to notice, sounded again from the matte black sequencer workstation hunched under her desk like a gargoyle.

Sure enough, one of the machine’s cooling fans was about to go on the fritz, and just in time for the mortgage on this office to come due. Janice, her low-rent IT guru, kept telling her to yank this place kicking and screaming out of the 2020s and upgrade the equipment already. Easy for her to say.

A hell of a lot easier to do back before everyone and their auntie decided they were genetics experts. Just because testing was so cheap nowadays didn’t mean the results were worth a damn. At least not if you couldn’t understand them.

Betty leaned toward the hulking black cube, almost close enough to rest her ear against the surface. At nearly three feet on each side, the biggest problem with the sequencer would be moving the silly thing so Janice could check it out. A warm plastic smell wafted up, but it wasn’t to the burning red alert panic stage just yet.

If the antiquated solid state monstrosity could just get this batch of DNA samples processed and cross-matched, Betty promised herself she’d get the new photonic drives Janice kept mentioning. Not very subtly, either.

The gronks settled down, allowing Betty to mentally walk back that promise a bit.

Soon. She’d upgrade everything soon.

This overflow work for the wildlife services from more than one state along the Eastern seaboard was about as exciting as watching a centrifuge spin, but the states paid on time. Figuring out if the latest big cat capture qualified for federal funding wasn’t exactly the kind of exotic puzzle solving Betty daydreamed about during her college days.

Before it all went bad, she thought she’d be out there in the middle of the action, maybe tracking the Big Bads, or even the big cats, herself.

A steady supply of this kind of mundane but plentiful work sure could help pay the bills around this joint, though. Bills that included the convenience of trudging upstairs to her not quite so shabby apartment when she was finished rather than commuting to an equally dreary apartment she could afford. Which would mean far, far away from Atlanta’s city limits.

After a couple of minutes of gronk-free processing, Betty felt safe enough to lean back again. She frowned as she picked up her stainless steel coffee tankard. Way too light, so obviously way too empty.

Rows of narrow test tubes waited on the desk beside her, every one filled with drops of blood from cougars or panthers or whatever they were calling them these days. She wasn’t going to get early completion bonuses on these contracts and earn favored-contractor status for more by punking out early and heading upstairs.

Well, working at nine o’clock on a Friday evening might not seem early to most, but most didn’t have Betty’s bills to deal with.

She could still taste the foul, overcooked sludge the office machine grudgingly spit out in the back of her throat. Overcooked budget or not, a night like this called for desperate measures.

Betty pulled out her cracked smartphone to place an order from the expensive hipster coffee shop down the block. The staff annoyed her almost as much as the ads on every other website and TV show these days, trumpeting how fast and cheap you could solve the mysteries of your own DNA and cure all your ills and even find your perfect mate with only a drop or two of spit.

The coffee was fantastic, though.

Even better, the app saved her from having to actually speak to anyone, since no one who worked there was likely to do more than grunt when Betty picked up her order.

One more glance at the aged and badly in need of retirement sequencer, a quick investigation of her pockets to make sure she had enough cash, and Betty headed out into the early evening.

Even well away from any sort of excitement or nightlife, the street wasn’t the least bit dangerous after dark. It was way too dull for that. Just a row of ordinary red brick buildings that probably didn’t even seem stylish or new when they were built decades ago around the end of the last century. Only a couple of the ground-level offices stood empty, and they wouldn’t for long.

The rest were full of accountants and lawyers who couldn’t afford the rent in the skyscrapers downtown, office supply stores with mostly new stuff for people who could afford such things, and a couple of mediocre delis and lunch places locked up tight for the night.

The streetlights kept everything bright enough to feel safe but not so well illuminated that it would be depressing. The rows of cars lined up more or less within the boundaries of the parking meters were in decent enough shape. Mostly more than five years old, but less than fifteen, with no gas-powered clunkers fighting the outdated fight against the electric car revolution. Clean, but nowhere flashy enough for any self-respecting thief to take a second look.

Not that any self-respecting thief would be caught down here on a bet.

Betty breathed in the crisp October air, several blocks away from the interstate, so relatively free of the exhaust still spewed by those surviving gas clunkers. Even though her brain felt almost as noisy and ill-maintained as her favorite sequencer after weeks of these kinds of routine jobs, she had to admit getting out and walking around helped.

She made yet another in a series of promises to herself to do more of this and start taking better care of herself before what passed for winter in Atlanta really settled in.

A couple of blocks down, the lights overhead brightened up and so did the general atmosphere of the neighborhood. Nothing too trendy or expensive. That was still several blocks on toward the university. But enough to have modest crowds wandering and eating and shopping.

Maybe not people who couldn’t afford to go to the latest hot spot, like Betty. But those who were smart enough to avoid those hotspots on purpose.

She turned left and nearly walked right into a shiny metal fence that hadn’t been there the last time she made this late-night coffee run a couple of weeks ago. A brand new restaurant had sprung up out of the concrete sidewalk like they tended to do around here. A collection of tiny little round tables somehow managed to hold color-changing lights, angular metal vases full of flowers made of various kinds of wire, and miniature plates of colorful food that likely cost a fortune.

The young people sprawled around the space all looked like they would soon get up and wander back into the pages of the edgy fashion holo-zines they’d escaped from. All asymmetrical hair and rather adventurous clothing and pale, carefully bored faces.

Betty felt an uncharacteristic burst of self-consciousness at her typical work uniform of baggy black pants, an oversized t-shirt, and hair that had last seen a brush dragged through it hours ago.

On the other hand, she seemed more or less invisible to these people, which suited her just fine.

She dodged around the fence and kept heading for her coffee.

The shop was two doors down, past a bookstore that stubbornly refused to carry any variety of holo-novel, which Betty heartily approved of. She wasn’t willing to shell out for the fancy reader, for one thing. And she still loved the feel and smell of a printed book, thank you very much.

A huge stylized bright blue cup of very dark coffee complete with steam wafting up projected itself from Betty’s destination, looking and smelling realistic enough to pick up and take home. The Bean had no problems embracing new technology in their advertising, but thank goodness they roasted and ground up their beans the old fashioned way.

The much stronger coffee aroma inside woke Betty up almost enough that she could have skipped her dose. But not quite enough for her to do it.

The crowd inside the bare-brick-and-exposed-ductwork space wasn’t too bad, not for a weekend night. A few clusters of young people with their noses buried in computers or holo-books clearly belonged to the university. A group of women laughing loud enough to make Betty’s ears hurt surely were coming from or heading to some bar or other.

All typical for The Bean.

Another woman closer to Betty’s age, sitting at a table by herself without a book or computer or even a phone in sight, wasn’t typical at all. She even sipped from a reusable water bottle rather than from anything caffeinated.

Short-cropped brown hair standing on end, too irregular to be anything but the result of an absent-minded person running her hands through it. A rumpled button-up brown shirt with slacks to match. And a sharp, angular face and piercing blue eyes that obviously didn’t miss a single thing that happened anywhere close by.

Betty glanced at the strange woman again, somehow not surprised to to find her looking back. Betty nodded once, then stepped up to the pickup counter.