More Than a Mission - Caridad Pineiro [50]
“Xander. It’s Lucia and Aidan,” she advised.
“I was waiting for your call,” he replied, an eager tone in his voice that told him that the younger man had good news.
Or bad depending on which camp you were in.
“Get on with it then,” Aidan said grumpily.
“Whew. Wrong side of bed this morning,” Xander said and after a short pause, his image filled Lucia’s screen. The young man winced and with a chuckle said, “Or maybe the wrong side of someone’s fist?”
Lucia was quick to explain. “I think it was a roundhouse kick judging from—”
“Enough,” Aidan barked and regretted it as the word echoed painfully in his skull. “Get to the important stuff, Xander,” he added more softly.
Xander shuffled some papers prior to beginning his report. “You were right about the prince not being able to resist the Sparrow. And may I say that I, too, find her babealicious.”
“Xander,” Lucia warned, heading him off before Aidan could admonish the young specialist.
“Okay, okay. On to the good stuff. Swabs from the prince’s mouth yielded two sets of DNA. I did the PCR test and ran the unknown sample against some blood that Ms. Moore had donated during Silvershire’s annual blood drive.”
“When was that?’ Lucia questioned and Aidan was thankful for her intercession, since his head throbbed so painfully, even speaking hurt.
“About two months ago.”
“And? Do we have a match?” he finally asked.
“That’s the strange thing,” Xander said and immediately began flipping through his papers again. “We had a clean sample from Elizabeth. The one taken from the prince—well, it should have been fairly good.”
“You’re doubting the integrity of the evidence you were given?” Lucia pressed and shot a worried look at Aidan, obviously not liking where this was going. Too much information had already leaked from an inside source. To think that the same source could manipulate the evidence…
“There’s nothing to say it was tampered with, only…It’s not a complete match, but it’s not far enough apart for it not to have come from the same person.”
“What?” Aidan snarled in low tones. “What do you mean?” After he spoke, he leaned closer to the laptop to get a better view of Xander’s face as he explained.
“About seventy-five percent of the DNA matched in the specimen from the prince and Ms. Moore’s blood. But not all, which is weird. Unless the sample was compromised somehow or…” Xander chortled before continuing, “…unless Ms. Moore has an evil twin out there somewhere.”
“You think the DNA can belong to someone other than Elizabeth Moore?” he pressed.
“Yes. Identical twins have identical DNA. Fraternal twins share fifty percent of the same DNA,” Xander answered.
Aidan cursed under his breath. “But you said we had a seventy-five-percent match. So where does that leave us?”
“There’s a theory about a third type of twin—polar body twins. Basically, the polar body is a remnant near the egg. Normally it dies, but if it should grow as large as the egg, it can be fertilized,” Xander explained.
“Which means that both the egg and the polar body have the identical DNA from the ovum, but fertilization by different sperm causes the difference in the DNA,” Aidan continued for him.
“And that results in what?” Lucia jumped in.
“In theory, twins that are nearly identical, but not quite. Of course, this is just a theory and some say that even if it is possible, it is quite unusual. Very, very rare.”
Aidan glanced at Lucia, and, as he met her gaze, it was obvious what she was thinking. “This is getting to be a nightmare, isn’t it?”
At her nod, he snapped at Xander. “Run the tests again.”
“I can do that, only—”
“Xander. Just run the tests again,” he repeated gruffly.
The young man nodded and signed off.
“Odds are the tests are going to come out the same way,” Lucia advised.
Aidan shook his head, but regretted the action since it brought pain. In fact, his headache had been steadily growing during the entire conference. “She really nailed me.”
“She did. Elizabeth did. Not some rare or nonexistent evil twin.”
He hated to admit it, but the