Hyper Lynx (The Lynx Series Book 6) by Fiona Quinn (ebook reader for pc and android TXT) 📗

is if the follicle is still attached. That doesn’t happen in a normal hair shed. The hairs that fall out of our heads and the hairs that come out on our brushes and combs are hair at the end of the cycle. The follicles are gone. Hair, to be useful, would need to be pulled out to retain its follicle.

“I don’t see hair being a DNA ethical issue if it’s randomly found.” That got me a nod of approbation from Cho.

“I guess saliva on a cup might be a better example of someone inadvertently leaving their DNA behind,” DiSarro said.

“So this art installation has something to do with the artist using DNA?”

“Glenda Leibowitz is a Ph.D. candidate in electronic arts,” DiSarro said.

Striker leaned forward. “I’ve never heard of that.” Striker paints in oils, but he loves innovative ideas. He was going to enjoy this case if it had to do with applied art.

“Leibowitz collects a piece of DNA from the city’s assorted human debris. In her lab, she sequences specific genomic regions and enters that information into a software system that she developed. The program then creates a file of a model of the face of the person whose DNA she sampled.”

That’s messed up, I thought. But said, “Creepy.”

Casper tapped the computer, and a close-up of one of the masks was on the screen.

“How does she get from computer analysis to art object?” Striker asked.

“These are 3D printed portraits that are life-sized.” DiSarro pointed at the screen. “Those boxes underneath contain the street sample that started the process.”

“An artist did that? Not a geneticist?” I squinted at the screen, wondering how close she was able to get to reality with her project.

My friend, Dr. Zoe Kealoha, worked with blood markers. She had developed a number of ways to identify someone without going through the time and expense of using DNA testing.

I was trying to recall what she had said about what scientists could now tell with DNA. We had talked about this because of an article I’d read about how anthropologists wanted to see if they could find some functional DNA in a long-ago human. I had asked Zoe her thoughts on whether or not science could tell what they would have looked like.

Scientific algorithms could identify age, sex, even body mass index with fair accuracy.

It became a little more complicated with trying to get a face to match the sample. The whole nature versus nurture thing has an impact not only on our psychological development but also on our physical looks. Maybe the person’s DNA said the gal should have an athletic BMI, but she learned stress eating as a coping mechanism that wouldn’t line up. Maybe the DNA said she should have straight black hair, like the lady walking with Black earlier, but she wanted to dye it red and add a curly perm.

Zoe said that while DNA was better than a random guess at figuring out what folks look like. One of the main problems with developing a useful image—beyond what humans do to change their appearances—was that our facial features are a composite of gene interaction.

While Zoe’s research with blood markers was meant to determine if someone was wrongly accused, it could not say definitively that the person was innocent or not. For that, law enforcement needed DNA. It had its place. But using it to narrow a search by reconstructing the face of a possible criminal through the DNA sequence?

I was skeptical that this artist had the ability to produce statistically correct replications.

“It’s rather genius what she came up with,” DiSarro said, warming to the subject. “In the lab, she cuts the sample into the smallest size she can, puts it into a test tube with the proper chemicals to break it down, sticks it into a centrifuge, rinse repeat until she obtains the purified DNA. A Polymerase chain reaction helps her to focus on that targeted genome. Then she has to send it out to a lab for sequencing.”

“It’s a reputable lab?” I asked.

“In our case,” Cho said, “since this is about criminality and not art, we handed her about a thousand base pair sequences from our crime lab. There was a chain of custody and a high-level of forensic professionalism.”

I focused on him. “Until you handed it to her.”

“Even then. We set up a lab that would maintain the evidentiary integrity.”

I nodded. Set up a lab for her? With that expense and the expense of bringing Iniquus on, this was a big “get” then.

“Okay, you used Leibowitz’s artist skills to find a bad guy. But now, you’re not sure if you have the bad guy or some rando who happened to leave some DNA behind?”

“Exactly.” Cho shifted his weight in his seat and sent a fleeting glance toward Casper as if admitting such to me was a no-no.

“What did she collect?” Striker asked.

“CIA officers did the collection. Cigarette butts. Luckily, our target smokes.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“What?”

“That your target smokes. I mean, if you knew what your target looked like, you wouldn’t have needed this process, right?” I canted my head. “A crime happened, and there was a fresh butt on the scene. Someone thought, ‘Could be our guy, let’s test it out.’ But in practicality, you don’t know that.”

“With one sample, I would agree,” Casper said. “However, we have four instances where a butt was found at the crime scene, and the DNA matches on all specimens. We feel confident that we have the right DNA. So we offered it to the artist, she made a face mask. We found the guy on surveillance cameras at the time of the crimes.”

Knowing this about DNA, if I had ever become a serial criminal and had a vicious streak with an enemy who was a smoker, I’d collect their