Last Requests 
Part 7

Patrick was already waiting in the living room with a pot of coffee and two mugs. He took the now-drowsy boy while Andrea settled herself in the corner of the sofa and then looked up at him expectantly, raising an eyebrow as she sipped the hot drink.

“Come to any conclusions, doc?”

He smiled. “Just one. You need to talk to Jarod's mother tomorrow – today,” he corrected himself as he glanced at his watch. “I can’t help wondering if there’s a biological connection somewhere in the two families that allows Jarod to speak to his son through the inner sense.” 

She looked skeptical. “So you think he really is talking to Jason that way?”

“Don’t you?” he returned.

Andrea shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know. But, if that is it, why did it take so long?” she asked. “I mean, Jason’s been here all day. Why now?”

“It had to start some time. And besides,” he added with a tiny smile, “Jarod always liked late-night messages, remember?” 

She nodded, but without really paying attention to this. Instead she was remembering what she had read in the letter, about him watching over them if it was possible, and wondered if this was Jarod's way of letting her know that he was. Andrea fixed the man on the sofa with a firm gaze.

“Did he write you a letter?”

“So you got one, too,” he responded. “I saw him writing it and thought it was yours. It took him a long time,” he reminisced. “I offered to help, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He was determined to do it all himself.”

“Who wrote the one for the Centre?” 

“His mother. She finally refused to let him exhaust himself on them, as you can probably imagine he was doing, and took over as his secretary, apart from the letter he dictated to me for her. I was going to do the one he planned to have sent to the Centre,” he continued, “but Jarod reminded me that people who read it who knew my writing, which would let them know where I was, or rather, who with, so I let Kim do it.”

Andrea nodded, seeing that her son was asleep against Patrick’s shoulder. Her mind dwelt briefly on the notes, but rapidly returned to the fact that her son heard his father’s voice. Then another point struck her and she looked up sharply. 

“How did you know?” she demanded. “How did you know Jason was saying what he did?”

“Ang – Paul woke me,” Patrick responded readily. “He said it was important.”

“How did he know?” she persisted, a thought occurring to her, and the man turned a startled gaze on her.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” he admitted. “Why?”

“Well, I can’t help wondering,” she began slowly, “if he somehow gets told things, too.”

The man shot her a startled looked. “You mean he’s somehow related as well? He has the inner sense?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” she prompted. “He’s always been uncovering the Centre’s secrets and giving them to use. I’m sure he was sneaking out long before he saved Broots and we found out he had that key. If he’s only what Raines always thought – a sponge for absorbing emotion – he’d have no reason for doing that sort of thing. But if Momma or someone was telling him to find out things and tell us, that would explain a lot.”

Patrick looked thoughtful, and then glanced at his watch. “I wonder if someone could have got to the tests and switched the results somehow.” 

He picked up the phone, checked a number in the directory that stood on the table beside it, and then dialed. It was answered within moments.

“Jon? It’s Patrick. Have you got a minute?” 

He fell silent, listening to the response, before agreeing with whatever was suggested and then hanging up. As Andrea opened her mouth expectantly, he jumped it.

“He’s finishing work in twenty minutes and will come over to discuss it then.”

“Is it so late?” She glanced at her watch and was startled to discover that it was four o’clock in the morning. Then her gaze traveled to her sleeping son and she stood up. “I should probably put him back to bed.”

*~*~*~*~*

Patrick handed the child over and then headed into the kitchen to get out another mug for their visitor. Once that was prepared, he took down the tin that stood on the shelf above the bench and opened it, gently extracting the envelope that lay on top. Opening it, he gently withdrew the folded sheets and flattened them out, running his eyes over the first few lines, written in Jarod's familiar, if very faint and shaky, script, and then the others, in Kim’s hand. 

Remembering the chalky, almost gray, appearance of Jarod's face, and the visible pain in his eyes as he had struggled to make the pen shape the letters on the page, before the woman had forcibly removed the pen from her son’s hand, the psychiatrist was thankful that she had come into the room. It had amused Patrick to find that she was as obstinate as her son, and that her concern for his welfare meant that she had won most of the battles they had had over what he could and could not do for himself. 

His eyes traveled swiftly over the paragraphs, arriving at the last few words, in which Jarod had promised to protect them all, as far as he was able, after his death. Looking up, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the opposite wall, Patrick’s lips pursed slightly as he wondered if speaking through his son in this way was the proof that he had managed to fulfill that promise. If so, he wondered whether Tyler would also be able to hear him. And if he could, why had Jarod waited so long before saying anything, when he must have known how much they were suffering because of his death?

The questions piled up and, as there was no way for Patrick to get the answers to any of them, he also felt his frustration mount. Expelling his pent-up breath in a loud sigh, he returned the letter to the tin, which contained the few papers he had felt he couldn’t leave behind, and replaced it on the shelf. 

Carrying a clean mug into the living room, he checked that there was sufficient coffee in the pot and then looked up at Andrea came back into the room. 

“Any problems?”

“He never even stirred,” she assured him, returning to her seat on the sofa and staring at the fire. After a moment, she looked up again. “I couldn’t find Angelo.”

“Paul,” he corrected. “Remember?”

“Same thing,” she retorted dismissively. “I went looking for him after I put Jason to bed, but I couldn’t find him.”

“He’s always liked hiding,” Patrick reminded her. “I set up several places – cupboards, and a spot in the attic – where he can hide himself if he wants to.” He sat down in an armchair and eyed her somewhat sadly. “No matter what we do from now on, he’s been pushed into that behaviour by Raines for so many years that we can’t change it.”

“I guess so,” she agreed, before her brow lowered. “I’m almost starting to wish that I hadn’t just shot him. Raines, I mean. He really deserved some other, more painful punishment first, to make up for all the things he’s done and the lives he’s ruined.”

“People rarely get what they truly deserve,” the man replied quietly, with a rueful sigh. 

The sound of the doorbell interrupted the silence that had fallen after this statement, and Patrick jumped up to let in their former colleague. After a warmer greeting of his former boss than had occurred at their earlier meeting, Jon sat down, accepted the drink Patrick offered, and then considered the problem they presented to him.

“Of course it’s possible the results were tampered with,” he said finally. “I mean, it takes 24 hours to run a DNA test, and then the results have to be checked. The report came through from the lab on an official form, which has to be double-checked, so that provides a lot of occasions when it could have been switched for something else.” He sighed, rubbing his balding pate with his hand. “I didn’t know how easy it was until I got here, but I do now.”

“And would the results from every stage still be available?” Andrea demanded.

“I guess so.” The technician picked up the bag he had carried into the house and pulled out a new laptop, which he opened onto the coffee table. “I’ll check the paperwork first. If the figures on that are consistent, there’s always the chance that both samples were swapped for others, if someone knew what we were trying to find out at the time.”

“Both?” Andrea looked skeptical. “Why both?”

“Because – have you seen what the DNA testing process looks like?” he interrupted himself to ask. 

When she shook her head, he pulled a pad of paper and a pen out of his pocket and drew a long rectangle with two small squares at one end. 

“The samples are put in here,” he told her, indicating the squares with his pen. “The box contains gelatin. When an electrical current is run through it, the samples begin to separate into long lines. DNA fragments of different sizes move at different rates – the smaller ones are quicker. At spots along the lines, various fragments of DNA settle, with the heavier ones closest to where the DNA sample was originally put in. The fragments are then compared, and those from the same places in lines of the same length that contain the same genetic pattern must be from people who share the same genes.”

“Is there a point to this?” Andrea demanded, and Patrick had to smile at the familiarity of it.

“Well, the samples separate at the same speed. If you took out one and replaced it with another, it wouldn’t be at the same stage and so it would be obvious that something had happened. But if they swapped both, nobody would be able to tell.”

“If that happened, though, we could see who did it on the security footage,” the woman surmised, and Jon nodded. 

“I don’t think it’s likely they did it, though,” Patrick offered. “Doing all that is a lot more work than swapping one page of results with another. 

Jon brought up the pages of data and began to visually scan them, while Patrick refilled the mugs from the coffeepot. Finally an exclamation from the technician made the other occupants of the room look at him.

“This is totally different!” he declared, turning the screen so that the others could see it. “In the first table, the data was the same in the first two columns, but now there’s a big difference, which couldn’t have happened during the process.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Andrea asked as she read the details.

“I started asking questions when I talked to Jamie once – he was one of the guys who worked in the Centre’s lab,” Jon replied. “He told me how the process worked and guided me through the program they use to classify results.” He pointed at the discrepancies he had noticed. “He told me that the figures in these columns would have to remain the same throughout the test. They’re like the control in a science experiment.” 

“So that tells us someone tampered with them,” the woman remarked as she handed back the laptop and sat down again on the sofa. “But how can we find out what they were?”

“Do another test,” Patrick suggested. “From what we’ve found tonight, you can only guess that there’s some big secret being revealed, and my guess is that it was intended to hide the fact that Angelo really is your twin brother and Lyle probably isn’t. Otherwise it makes no sense to go to such deceptive lengths. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “the real reason is why it had to be done at all. Ideally, I suppose, Raines and Mr. Parker would have preferred to keep it all quiet – the fact there was another baby, that Raines was the biological father, and the fact that they – Mr. Parker and Raines – were related. Maybe when they realized that secrets weren’t being kept, they went into damage control mode and chose options that would keep everything hidden as long as possible.”

“Kind of,” Jon offered, and the other two people looked at him sharply. 

“What do you mean ‘kind of’?” Andrea demanded.

The younger man sighed deeply, his shoulders slumping slightly. “It’s something I found out when I joined security. I wasn’t going to tell you about it. Didn’t think it mattered that much anyway, not now…”

As he trailed off, Andrea slapped her hand down on the coffee table, making the pot jump and the mugs leap into the air, sloshing their contents over the timber surface.

“Lyle was hired to spy on us,” Jon burst out, before she could say anything. 

“By whom?” Andrea growled back, after she had exchanged startled glances with Patrick and had managed to regain her breath.

“The Triumvirate.” Bringing up another file, Jon handed over the laptop. “They were the people who appointed Lyle. But Raines and Mr. Parker didn’t know about it. They chose their own guy to keep an eye on us all.”

“Cox?” Patrick suggested, as the man’s sudden appearance at the Centre occurred to him. 

“Right.” The technician closed down the file once Andrea had finished looking at it. “Bridget was a possibility for the job, early on, but then they realized she was playing both sides against the middle when she tried to kill Mr. Parker, so they sent her back to the branch where she’d been working before they got her transferred.”

“And then transferred her back when they needed someone for Project NG,” Andrea murmured. 

“Yeah,” Jon agreed. “They’ve got samples of every Centre employee in labs at various Centre offices, and it was easy for them to find someone with a tissue match. The fact that Bridget could take up her spying role again was a further benefit.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Andrea demanded rhetorically, as she stood up and began to pace. 

“Nothing that place does should surprise any of us,” Patrick responded quietly. He paused as the clock on the mantel chimed six and then spoke again. “I think we all need to get some sleep. We can discuss it later, maybe on the weekend, when Jon’s not working.”

“Good idea.” Andrea knew that they wouldn’t get definite answers to the question of the identity of her real twin until they had a chance to carry out DNA tests, and besides which, she was starting to feel weary. 

Jon left the house and Patrick watched from the front door as he drove away before turning the key in the lock. He stifled a yawn as he returned to the living room, halting in the doorway. “I’m going back to bed,” he told her. “I dread to think what time Jason will wake us up.”

She smiled in response. “I’ll try to keep him from disturbing you.”

“I never said I’d mind,” he responded in teasing tones. “G’night.”