Sacramento romantic suspense writers focus on media and culture in their novels as they take on the marriage of romantic intrigue with local suspense set in Sacramento and Davis. For example, here's an excerpt from this Sacramento author's novel of suspense fiction with romance or romantic intrique set in the Sacramento and Davis regional areas.
Numerous Sacramento-and Davis-set topics for a novel focus on ethnic and rural suburban Sacramento and Davis, as in the novel, Amazon.com: The DNA Detectives: Working Against Time and the novel, Sacramento Latina: When the One Universal We Have in Common Divides Us - Google Books Result. That novel is set in the Arden Arcade area of Sacramento in the late 1990s, imaginative fiction with twist of anthropology, psychology, and archaeology. There's a copy of the novel in the Carmichael public library. The idea is to portray the media through culture in a fictional thriller.
You might want to attend a meeting of the local Sacramento chapter of Sacramento Valley Rose, which is the local romance novelists group. There's a retreat for romance writers in May in Monterey. For example, May 13-15, 2011 is the now sold-out biannual SVR Writing Retreat with Margie Lawson at Asilomar, Monterey, CA. The 2011 Retreat is now sold out but you can still click here to see the program.
Later this summer is a meeting, July 23, 2011, featuring the author, Katey Coffey/Cate of Rowan Book Coaching: How and Why it Works. If mystery novel writing is your field, you also can join the Sacramento Mystery Writers groups. Check out the blog and find out more about upcoming meetings. See, Resources for Writers | California Writers Club, Sacramento Branch.
One idea for numerous Sacramento authors is to combine media with culture to write a novel and then publish it yourself or through print on demand publishing for a specific group of readers, whether it's for young students researching a particular topic or various age, ethnic, or special interest groups interested in fiction or science fiction, mystery, romance, adventure, or any other genre that marries culture to the media such as anthropology through fiction that moves from the novel to the thriller and then to video.
If you enjoy this suspense story excerpt below, you also can read a longer version of it as a paperback novel, since in 2002 it has been published it as a novel and is listed at Amazon.com. It's all imaginative suspense fiction with romance, and it's available in paperback, set in a fictional Sacramento movie theater and in the rural areas of the region around Davis.
If you want to read more, see the novel from which this story is excerpted, Amazon.com: The DNA Detectives: Working Against Time. Now, enjoy. This excerpt focuses on the media and culture of genetics, anthropology, and suspense or intrigue through romantic intrigue fiction. But first, you must in a theatrical way, suspend disbelief.
The Double Helix Mystery, copyright 2002, by Anne Hart
Deep in sultry sleep and slouching behind a column at the far right stage of the last balcony row, the young, barefoot woman dreamed motionless of a bleak and lonely plain, and a southwest sirocco that sent the summer temperatures up to a hundred nineteen for days at a time. Curvy, and of realistic weight, the figure in black twisted until she slowly became aware of the fading dream.
The film over, lights dimmed to a muted indigo. Only the long arm of a custodial mop ritually tapped a compelling tattoo against the back of the seats, moving closer to her feet. Suddenly, the orange lights on the ceiling switched on for the mop brigade. Slowly, she stirred, from her deep slumber, blinded for an instant. She woke to the loud Spanish chatter of the cleaners.
"What's going on?" She craned her neck. "Where am I?" Confused and cramped from sleeping in a cinema mall complex chair for what seemed like an eternity, she blinked to connect to reality. From the back, she resembled a cello poised against an antique column. Her fingers reached for an instinctively private space, a purse or wallet, then a pocket.
On bended knee, the swaying figure blindly searched the damp floor strewn with chewed popcorn floating on a sticky film of soda pop. She ran her hands along the floor mess and all around the nearby seats. Nothing. No keys or purse. Her wet feet stuck to the concrete floor and pulled away with a sucking sound.
No shoes or stockings. No coat. She shuddered in the unheated theater.
Her hands dove again into the deep pockets of her pants suit jacket, searching for anything to reveal who she was and what she might be doing there—any clue to what city this is or where she slept now and why. No money. Only a gum wrapper and a crumbled business card with canine bite marks, soggy and barely readable.
She looked at the faded business card, probably passed through a washing machine and still damp. Holes in the card as if it had been chewed by a dog obliterated most of the writing, except the University of California address and a name and department, "Molecular Genetics."
She could barely make out the letters in the glow of the theatre's dim lights. The woman rode her panic like a mountain peak, leaving her pain standing forth, red-veined, bared, and dirty. Shattered, she looked around. Then the brighter lights overwhelmed her, and the cleaning crew approached.
She couldn't remember, not the time or the day or month, not her name, or anything before the moment she awakened in--what was this--an empty movie house? She heard only the Spanish conversation of the cleaning crew. It confused her. Where am I? What time was it? She glanced at her wrist as if to see a watch, but it was bare as her feet. As the soapy water began to flow toward her feet, the mop crew motioned for her to leave.
The young woman pulled herself up and rigidly staggered to the restroom, where she looked at a face in the mirror that she didn't recognize. She looked herself over only to discover her panties were put on backwards, but wait. It wasn't her panties.
She was wearing someone else's green, faded cotton underwear and nothing on top except a too-tight, wet, black wool sweater under a pants suit jacket. The knitted tube revealed mounds of ivory flesh peeking through the warp and weave of the sweater. Either these itchy rags weren't her own clothing or the wet wool had shrunk on her torso.
A pang of recognition told her she would never go out wearing clothing so tight, that the seams began to come apart. And whose green panties twisted inside out and backwards was she wearing? They weren't what any woman would wear.
She backed closer to the mirror. It was clearly a man's briefs with an opening in the front. Something was missing—a bra, a chemise, something she would have worn, but what?
She couldn't recall what she wore under her clothing—only that it wouldn't feel so wrong. No, these were not her clothes. They didn't fit. Looking down, white food or milk stains caked along the sweater and jacket on the inside as if they had been used as a rag. The clothes reeked of vanilla extract.
She panicked, yet managed to hold herself together and calmly walked out, past the ticket podium. For a moment she thought about questioning the concessionaire. She skipped it, too embarrassed to say a word as she passed the theater clock in the lobby. Ten o'clock. Muted morning light streamed through sheets of rain.
The woman bolted for the theater exit, looking around her for clues as to where she was. All at once the confusion became apparent. "Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing in this place? What city am I in? How'd I get here and when—in what looks like a shopping mall a movie theater complex?
She touched her arms now in the cold, morning air, feeling the dripping, muddy wet water ice cold against her goose bumps and prickly hairs at the nape of her neck.
Her shoulders sagged as if she'd been fished out of a body of water. Looking down, mud and animal bite marks covered her cold, wet feet. She fingered the white tape wrapped around a gum wrapper in her pocket and glanced at the array of numbers and letters scrawled in runny black ink.
As she moved toward the exit, torrents of rain tumbled in sheets. What month, what day was it? My God, I don't remember. Who am I? She exited the movie house and noticed a taxi with its engine loudly idling. She ran towards the cab, pulling anything out of her jacket pocket she could find--one business card and that taped chewing gum wrapper with bleeding chicken scratches.
She signaled the taxi, and the driver opened the door with his hand extended to help her step from the swirling flood at the curb into the heated car. The woman sucked in a deep breath and handed the card to the driver.
It was the only piece of information connected to her that she could cherish—her umbilical cord to reality. Nothing else linked her to her past, to whatever occurred an hour, a day, or a million years before she awoke in the fetid stench of the cinema. The taxi moved along ribbons of highway, rain-wracked by a thousand thongs. She squinted again at the gum wrapper sealed with a slice of white tape, blurred numbers and letters and a row of tildes. There was no way to decipher what the squiggles meant.
"What's the name of that place you picked me up at?"
"The Arden Fair Mall, lady. Biggest in Sacramento 'til the Roseville Galleria was built. I saw you running out of that movie theater complex waving at me. Why is it important to know? Are you looking for a job in the mall this morning? My wife applied yesterday at the vegetarian buffet place as a people greeter. Now she'll have to stand on her feet all day and take it out on me at dinner."
"What's today?" She asked hoarsely. Wind whistled through the windows.
"March third," he grunted. "Guess you skipped your newspaper today."
"Can I see that paper on your front seat?"
"Sure." He tossed it into the back seat. She looked up the weather section in the papers—49 degrees. The present year seemed natural enough, but she couldn't recall the month or day of the week. Losing time was the worst.
She glanced again at the year. It didn't mean anything. She could have woken this year or fifty years ago. It wouldn't have made a difference.
What's my name? What's this city? Nothing was recognizable, not even her face, a stranger's face in the rear view mirror. Who is this young woman in the mirror? She could have blinked into consciousness with the chiseled face of someone else and not known it. It's not me. It's plastic surgery. Everything before she woke remained hidden, occult, and inaccessible.
"How long has it been raining?"
"Three days straight," he chided stubbornly after a long pause. "Been out of town?" She fell silent. Again she glanced at the taxi's mirror in front of her, and didn't recognize the face—young and blonde. She felt it should have been darker and older.
The taxi blazed an impressive trail on the wet asphalt. She watched the snaking ribbons of freeway undulate. Then the long stretches of farmland came into focus, finally the train depot, and then rows of modest cottages and homes winding to the manicured campus lawns.
The taxi pulled alongside the campus commons at the University of California, Davis, just outside of Sacramento County, California, and finally as the rain slowed, to the address on the card, a department office building called "Molecular Genetics." The name on the card read, "James Devon, PhD, Forensic Biology." It didn't ring a bell. What's forensic biology? She wondered. How old am I? Am I a student here? Do I work here? Am I a patient? Maybe someone will recognize me.
She raced to solve the most personal mystery of her life—who am I, and from where did I come? The young woman barged into Dr. Devon's office, the taxi driver next to her, asking who will pay the fare.
"Hold on," she stalled, resentment riding the lump in her throat. "Maybe someone can help me here. As you see, I don't know where my purse or wallet is or even if I had one with me. I don't recall leaving my house. Or even if I lived in a house or where it was. For heaven's sake," she sobbed, "Will somebody please help me?"
Dr. Devon looked up from his computer. "Do you know me?" He felt his body falling into a hole as his spine stiffened. Jim Devon familiarized himself with the curves of her body.
"Excuse me?" Her large, green eyes met his soft hickory gaze. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Her courage and determination peaked.
Dr. Jim Devon was taken aback by her iron will. His gaze fixed on her and moved up and down her curves as if he watched lights dying down a Christmas tree.
Unable to break eye contact, he mulled over his crinkled business card that she thrust in his palm. A shock of black hair fell across his arched brow as Jim handed her a box of tissues. He felt something give in him as his lips curved in a heart-stopping grin.
"Please sit down. What's going on?" He slowly shut his office door. "Who's he? Who are you? Look, I'll see what I can do to help you." For a moment he hesitated over the security button. Her constant gaze unmanned him as he slowly clenched his fingers and stepped back from the panic button.
Why are all the nuts on campus gathering in front of my office door? He thought. Yet he chose to listen. Jim paused to think, instead of going with his heartfelt impulse to summon security. He had trouble shifting his eyes from her trustful stare.
Damn, handsome Jim thought-- another damsel to rescue. You can't resist being a rescuer, an enabler again, can you, Jim? She was a contradiction of opposites at first glance. This one seemed more strong-willed than dependent, a Joan of Arc with the brain chemistry of an FBI agent, a little doll with blood-red lips.
The taxi driver held out his hand. "Ninety dollars for the fare, please. The lady's wallet is missing."
"Does this card mean anything to you? I can't remember anything, not who I am or where I've been."
"Sit down. I'm on break between two classes I'm teaching only for this semester." He poured two cups of tea. "Take it easy, you guys." Jim Devon raked his eyes over the card again.
"Where did you get my card? I haven't given it out publicly yet. I'm new on this job. It's only been a month since spring semester began. Last year I taught forensic biology."
The woman spoke, the tone of voice revealing her curiosity, "This card and your name is the only piece of evidence I found on my person that connects me to you, to this campus, or to your work. Look at me, Doctor Devon. Do you know who I am? Has anyone seen me here before?
"One thing I do know about myself. I'm not going to fall apart. I'm as strong as I am tough. There's something powerful about the work I do. My problem is I can't recall what it is at the moment, but somehow you must be involved. Will you help me find out?"
"Start at the beginning." He moved his chair next to hers. The taxi driver paced back and forth. "My meter's running, man."
"I'm telling you that I woke up in a darkened movie theater this morning in the Fair Mall not knowing who I am." Her charisma made her memorable in spite of the fact that she was at a loss for her own memory. She animated and entertained him.
"No identification, no money, no shoes or stockings, no coat or umbrella, and no keys are in my purse or pockets—only your name on this card—Dr. Jim Raleigh Devon—Molecular Genetics, the office hours, and this University campus address. Why would the only identification on my person be your card?"
"I don't know you." Dr. Devon stopped himself from talking loudly to the driver with a finger to his lips. Her pants suit jacket swung open as she took a deep breath, and he ogled the barefoot, curvy blonde in the tight, rain-drenched black sweater.
Jim Devon found her exciting and full of enthusiasm for life. Joy simmered below the surface of her frenzy. He didn't see sadness in her gaze, not even fear, but wild agitation. Her whole body exuded energy, and her eyes radiated passion.
Stepping between them, the taxi driver thrust his feta-cheese scented upturned palm in the lawman's face. Jim noticed creases of mud caking in the driver's wet hand.
"That will be ninety dollars. Who's going to pay me?" The breathless taxi driver sounded annoyed. "Ninety, please."
"Is this some kind of prank to get me to take out my checkbook or wallet?"
"The young lady told me to drive to the address on this card."
"May I sit here?" She swiped a stray blonde hair off her face.
"Please do. Are you one of my graduate students in genetics?"
The driver leered showing nicotine-stained, broken teeth. He narrowed his eyelids to slits, tensely furrowing his brows, arching and expanding them like bat wings. "You addressing me?"
"No, the young lady." His brows rose. Tall, athletic Jim Devon paused to size up the two. "I'll pay your fare." Jim looked to his right and left, then sidled closer to the door. He opened it quickly.
She hooked her hand behind Jim's knee. "Did you ever see me before?"
He caught the flash of pain in her face and felt as if the floor gave way beneath his feet. Jim shook his head, no—twice. She grimaced and loosened her wet jacket buttons, revealing cleavage deeper than the genetic split between ape and man. She suddenly felt aware of eyes on her torso and pulled up the neckline of her soaked black sweater.
The sight of her curves suddenly aroused him harder than Manchurian arithmetic. The scientist didn't want this fantasy at work. Jim cleared his throat, took a sudden interest in his sneakers, and gawked at a computer screen as his software examined and decided which peaks had the strongest color at each position, interpreting the DNA sequences along the top.
She saw chicken scratches that looked like the blurred-ink tape twisted around the gum wrapper. "May I have a pen and some note paper?"
"Here." He handed her the writing materials. She quickly copied exactly the capital letters, numbers, squiggles, tildes, dots, and other barely visible figures on the piece of white tape twisted gently around the crumpled gum wrapper. Then she carefully placed the clear copy in her pants suit jacket pocket.
"Does this mean anything to you?" She handed him the wrapper. "That and the card are all I found in my pockets."
He looked briefly and tossed the crinkled wrapper in his desk drawer. She saw he locked his desk.
"Well, what could it be? Any clue?"
"Y chromosome and nuclear DNA sequences. Also haplogroup data, HV1 sequences from a world-wide DNA database. The genome project also had a goal of collecting DNA samples from as many people in the world as possible and putting the sequences into a giant database. It helps to understand how the world was peopled through expansions after the end of the Ice Age and long before. You have Paleolithic people and then the newcomers—Neolithic farmers. These sequences can help us understand who came first and who came last to various geographic locations around the world."
"But what of those squiggles?"
"Sequences." He gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, and then settled back in his seat, but he wasn't able to take his gaze from her face or figure.
"You haven't been sent by one of my undergraduate students planning a surprise birthday party for me? I expected them to send a belly dancer jumping out of a cake like they did last year. I heard this time my students were sending Meenay of Istanbul to dance at my birthday bash. Are you Meenay, the drama student?"
"No. The city isn't familiar, and I can't recall the name of anyone, honestly. Do I work here? Would I be listed in your computers any way other than by name, like a fingerprint file?"
The tall, slender honey blonde sat, numbed to the whirling computer lights surrounding her in the shadows of a small red-brick building at the University of California, Davis Medical School. A millennium of tears flowed.
She buried her face in his chest, sobbed and grunted. The young lawman-turned-professor studied her silken blonde-all-over skin, sea-green eyes, mannequin-chiseled nose, and honey-hued curls feather-cut in a waist-length Buster Brown do. The pleasure was enough to slay the idealistic gene hunter. She felt the warmth explode inside him. Startled, the strangers suddenly stepped back from a familiar threshold. "Oh, please tell me you know me," she moaned.
"I will admit this is rather unusual." Jim took four twenties out of the petty cash box in his desk. The driver quickly grabbed the bills and turned to leave.
"Why molecular genetics?" His rueful hazel eyes painted the woman's striking symmetry of face and torso. "Is this some clever approach for an informational interview? Didn't I see you apply for a job here a few weeks ago carrying a resume?
"Are you maybe from the media? If it's an interview you want concerning my part in cracking the human genome code a few years ago, that wasn't this Dr. Devon. You want my father, Robert Devon. You want Timothy Devon, my twin brother. He's the psychiatrist. We're identical in looks. Maybe that's why I'm into forensic genetics research."
"It's possible I've been given something to forget. Wait a minute! Call your brother and ask him to order a blood test. Wouldn't traces of something nasty show up?"
"Not if it disappears quickly from the system, like nitrous oxide mixed with some of the psychetropic drugs prescribed for psychotics who break with reality."
"I'd like a blood test."
"What should the technicians be looking for?"
"Sodium pentothal, if someone wanted to give me truth serum before blocking my memory, or some of the newer anti-psychosis drugs. Check for the nasty stuff under current litigation used to scratch memory. Now how'd I know that?"
"Think you may work in any of the scientific or legal fields, Miss?"
"Is there anything about me that shows I understand what you're talking about?"
"Do you even know what we do here?" Jim tried to sound casual.
"Test DNA? Teach? Counsel couples?"
"I'm a law man and a forensic biologist. I'm all those things, but mainly, I'm into legal genetics."
He paced around her with an agility and passion she'd never guess such a learned person could display at work. "I'm on loan this semester only to teach forensic genetics to my graduate students in archaeogenetics—all about the peopling of the world. That's the history and geography of human genes—analyzing expansions after the end of the Ice Age. You need this background to tell a fossil from a homicide and also to testify and test DNA for the courts."
"Is any of this supposed to sound familiar to me?"
"You came to me." He clenched his jaw. "Why would my card be in your possession and nothing else? I had those cards printed only a week ago and don't remember ever giving them out to anyone. They were on my desk for two days, in plain sight, but my office was locked—except for the cleaning crew. Anyway, why would I lock up my temporary faculty business cards? I'm only teaching for a year, and then I go back to being a lawman in forensic biology."
"Cleaning crew? Is it an independent contractor team, perhaps the same crew I awakened to in the movie theater?"
"I can check that."
"Can you search your computers to see whether my ID photo is in there?"
"I need a number or a name. Oh, my God. Let me see the back of your feet."
"Can you help me at all?"
He reached for her bare foot, noticing how sensual a woman she was. Everything about the mystery woman screamed sex. The pulsating computer lights painted the curves of her high-boned cheeks. He sniffed the vanilla scent.
"Did you work in a bakery or confectionary?"
"That doesn't ring a bell."
"You haven't been walking barefoot long—no calluses or dirt imbedded deeply in the skin. I'm trying to find out who made such a clerical error of putting one man's name on another's DNA years ago. That man whose DNA was switched now is two weeks away from a lethal injection on Death Row—unless I can prove his DNA is different from the sample taken at the crime scene years ago. You walked in just as I'm under extreme countdown pressure to get him an appeal. I'm working with his attorney."
"So I guess I rushed in on you at a busy time?" Her large, sad eyes looked up at him.
"That look in your eyes," he sighed. "Like my yellow lab."
"It's no joke." The woman looked up at him with a waif-like glance.
"Maybe you're connected to my client's late defense attorney. So many people would prefer me to back off the case, but the attorney took a bullet for me last year.
"I'm carrying on his work alone—doing the work of a law man and a scientist. So you didn't know it's my birthday today, and my students are up to something that will make an impact?"
"My memory of everything before this morning is gone."
"What has your medical doctor told you? I'm a geneticist, not an MD or DO."
"I didn't go to a doctor. There's nothing wrong with me."
"How do you know? Can you read this book?" She read aloud from his textbook like she knew the DNA sequencing process by heart.
"I feel fine, energetic. I'm not under stress. My speech is not slurred. My neurological reactions seem fine. Now how would I know all this medical stuff about myself? Could I have been drugged? What's my occupation? Do I have kids? Am I married? Are you?"
"No. You'd feel like you'd been drugged when you woke up. I'll have your blood tested by a physician. Let me call my brother's office. He's an MD—a psychiatrist."
"I felt like I had a great nap, and energized."
"Then you probably haven't been drugged—except by dental anesthesia, the kind used for pulling out compact wisdom teeth. You'd wake up refreshed and feeling fine from that, but that wouldn't explain what was used to erase your memory—unless you're under extreme stress and fell into a fugue to back away from the experience."
"Then why would I be in a movie with no identification or money and forget who I am? I know enough to realize I'm not in a fugue. Does that mean I'm trained in medicine, nursing, law, or psychology?"
"I can't say for sure. You could have seen movies on TV about people in fugues. The learning channel has videos on DNA processing for the general public. What's more immediate is where are you staying?"
"I don't know. I woke up in a darkened theater at ten in the morning and came straight here because it's the only address on this card found in my pocket."
"No clues?"
"Only your name and your card with the office hours. I can't recall the film, either. Was I dumped there? Or did I go to the cinema alone? Or with someone?"
"Oh, for heaven's sake. Why don't you stay at my vacation ranch? I inherited it from my grandmother when she passed on last year. It's up in Reno. She used the ranch to rescue homeless dogs. That's if you don't mind the kennels in the back."
"Excuse me while I tweak this system." In the molecular genetics laboratory, forensic geneticist, Jim Devon purified DNA away from other parts of the dried cells on a small cytobrush as he studied each copy of the human genome, one from each of the young woman's parents.
He plunged the brush in a hot solution and swirled the enzymes and chemicals until the cells broke open. Using a Polymerase Chain Reaction technique, Jim copied the mitochondrial DNA—mtDNA—until he had enough to read the sequence. He tagged each with a different color dye and ran the specimen through an electric field until the colored bands appeared, passed a laser and printed out on his computer in a series of peaks and troughs. He showed her the final electronic impression printed out on an autorad, a card-like image with dark dots that showed the DNA sequences on his screen.
"Maybe we can find out whom else matches your DNA in our ten thousand strong database," Jim Devon sighed. "Here! Swab the inside of your cheek and under your tongue with this cytobrush, but don't touch your teeth with it."
She circled the small brush on the inside of her cheek and waved it triumphantly as he took it from her. "Call me Jim." He gently touched her hand as he handled the swab by its stem.
"What shall I call you?"
She shrugged. "Ah, here's your mtDNA printout. Well, your maternal haplogroup is H with substitutions at 189, 356, and 362. See those three little "Cs"? Those are three mutations from our resource against which we compare some of our DNA research to identify prehistoric maternal geographic origins.
"It's called the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS). This print out shows that you are three mutations away from the CRS we use to compare European mtDNA, that's what you inherit from your mother's side and all female relatives from your maternal line.
"It's very old with a coalescence time of 20,000 years in Europe. Started right in those ice caves of the Dordogne Valley in what today is France. Just think, twenty thousand years ago one woman with H haplogroup like you had two or more daughters and started a clan that now represents forty-eight to sixty percent of all Europeans today.
"You all came from that one woman—directly....born when the Ice Age was at its fiercest cold. It pushed her smack up against the Pyrenees until the glaciers began to melt twelve thousand years ago, and her descendants expanded east to the Urals. You're probably Ukrainian, German, Polish, or a Bashkir, or maybe Karelian or Bulgar/Turk."
"Never mind where my maternal direct ancestor might have camped in prehistoric times. What's my name now? What do you want to call me?"
"What do you want me to call you?"
She thought for a moment. "Lara."
"Why Lara?"
"Don't know, but I dimly remember something....I remember something. My dog, Lara....Something you said—a yellow Labrador retriever. I had a foxfire yellow lab named Lara. That I remember....It seems so long ago."
"And nothing else comes to you?"
"No."
"Your accent, perhaps. It's regional." Read this into my tape recorder."
Jim handed her his device and a page to read. She read it. He played it back.
"Listen, Lara. Everyone has a regional accent."
"What do you hear from mine?"
"It has to be Cajun, probably Bayou backwoods or delta. I should know. I was born on a houseboat in the Louisiana Bayou marshes. My childhood is a product of the city of Sulphur, Louisiana in the heart of Calcasieu Parish . Loved to collect and then free bugs, giant blue butterflies, and baby swamp alligators when I was a kid, and I loved all my dogs. I'll bet my eyetooth that you're a daughter of Calcasieu Parish from that lazy drawl.
His hazel eyes shone with a welcoming beacon like a lighthouse to a tempest-tossed raft. "Before graduate school, I was a Bayou law man who wanted more than a BS in Biology. Molecular genetics is an interest that I carried all through life. So I went back to school in forensic genetics and entomology, and look at my office now. Biotechnology is big news, molecular genetics, bioinformatics...cutting edge technology in law enforcement and pathology. Forensic DNA analysis is about eventually navigating and recording every single one of your thirty million genes."
He blew dust off of his computer screen. "Anyway, it was a toss up between med school and the law. Three MDs in the family is enough, I guess—my brother, dad, and mom."
She stared at him and scowled in a voice dark as lava. "You mean you weren't transferred out here from somewhere else for your job?"
"I'm always being transferred somewhere else, miss." His fingers moved up and down her neck and then circled through her hair.
She looked up and him and realized she'd never seen a more sexy professional man, but then remembered she couldn't recall seeing any man before this morning other than the people she passed on her way here. "Are you asking me what I do instead of what I am all about--even before you know I can tell you my name?"
He wanted action, but he needed to be cleverly coy. "You tell what you'd like me to call you. Bamboo Honey? Cajun lady? Desired? Tempestra? Give me a clue what you'd like. You have my utmost respect and chivalry. That's the new code of the biotech scientist here—chivalry, action, and involvement. How about Milady?"
She tingled as he named her, and his touch upset her balance.
"What are you looking for?"
"Identifying marks, lockets, hair ornaments. What does the label in your jacket or blouse say? May I look? Do I have your consent?" He fumbled inside her jacket looking for pockets sewn in the lining, when he realized that her firm breasts jutted heavily over his wrists poking through the open weave of the too-tight sweater.
She nodded. "Thanks for asking my permission before you touched. Even if you aren't a doctor. I'm sorry. I can't believe these clothes are my own."
"I'm a doctor, just not in medicine...in forensic biology. Only my patients don't complain. On this year's assignment, most already are dead. I assist the forensic entomologist and our pathologist with DNA analysis. My work aside from the DNA switch case mainly is about taking samples from the pulp of Neolithic teeth found in bogs and analyzing them."
He looked at her for too long a stretch of time, his eyes motionless, fixed on her face and curves as she leaned against the backlight of his electron microscope.
"No labels. Odd, the labels are cut out. Would you cut out the labels?"
"I can't think of any reason to. The looks of these clothes are shabby. Would someone cut out labels of modestly-priced clothing? What do you know about labels?"
"Only what I see at the morgue when the pathologist has his technicians remove the clothing. As I said, I test for DNA when my technicians bring me samples mounted on slides. The idea is to match the DNA at a crime scene with the DNA found at the perpetrator's site."
Her body stiffened in shock. "What am I doing here?"
"I'm sorry to be so morbid, but as I said, I'm a law man. I'll make you a copy of the keys to my grandmother's ranch. The place has been empty for more than a year. "
He looked at a point over her head to avoid her eyes. His voice cracked. There was a sob he barely stifled, and he coughed to clear his throat.
"Ten years ago I met my late wife in the FBI DNA forensic lab after she left military service. She made sure the right things got to the right people at the right time, to quote Keirsey. My wife was in charge of issuing uniforms and shoes, weapons, and everything else you get in the military to the new recruits.
"When she finished her DNA training, she came to work where I was a law man, at the FBI DNA forensic lab headquarters, and my FBI special agent colleague and friend, Rich Redling, introduced us. She was engaged at the time to her best friend, Dr. Fred Lore, the plastic surgeon, who also left the military at the same time. She had to choose between Lore and I, and I won her hand in marriage. My darling wife died from pancreatic cancer three years ago, and left me with a two-year old girl. We were married only a few years and were still taking second and third honeymoons each year, even with our baby daughter, and even when she began to fall ill."
"You have a child?" She blinked, feeling as if she needed to step forward and take some responsibility for herself at this moment.
"My daughter lives with me and her nanny. Darcy's five now, with hair as red as my foxfire yellow lab. I worry about the nanny, Mrs. Barnes. She's sixty-eight, and last week she gave me notice that she wants to retire and take up figure sculpture."
"What you need is a house sitter you can trust."
"Can I trust you?" He exchanged a glance with her as she wiped a tear rolling down her cheek.
She took a sudden interest in her muddy, bare feet. "Yes. I don't need my memory to know my virtues."
"I'd do anything to fulfill my late wife's dream. She made me promise to find an ideal mother for my child. You know how hard that is to do in reality? My little girl stays with me here in Davis. I don't just let her go with any nanny. Mrs. Barnes was my nanny. I tracked her down all over New Orleans and brought her out to Sacramento."
"We're both a long way from home." She matched his rising passion.
His face was flushed and swollen from trying to hold back tears. "The empty ranch house is in Reno. If things don't work out, I'll have to send for my mom, but she's back in New Orleans teaching a cable TV class in Cajun cooking. Ever watch it? Mom's show is called Marie Louise Devon's Cajun Culinary Show. Her favorite is blackened catfish crawling in turmeric with candied yams. She's a retired pediatrician who happens to like cooking on TV."
"Sorry, my sluggish brain is trying to make sense of this predicament. I didn't mean to beg you for a job as your nanny replacement. It's just that I can't remember anything, even if you say I have a Cajun accent like you. Is that what it sounds like?"
"Enough, I hope to check your fingerprints with the department of motor vehicles. If I can have you ask for a duplicate of your driver's license or state identity card based on a thumb print search, it's a start." He rolled her thumb in black ink and took impressions like the law men he managed before taking a sabbatical to teach.
"Are you an identity specialist, then?"
"You might call me that. When fingerprints are not working, there's always the DNA. When a body is found, I can tell how long it's been dead by the age of the fly larvae in it. Then there's the iris print on your eye, then your palm print. These identifiers won't help much if someone's erased your database at the root in all systems."
"Someone like the FBI or CIA?"
"Now that's my brother's field of interest. As a psychiatrist interested in identity theft, he researches people who claim the CIA or the FBI have erased all claims of their identity in every government database—from their birth certificates to all records of their school graduations and transcripts. Tim sees a lot of those people as a psychiatrist."
Jim's tone made it seem as if she wanted him to say that. She could feel the warmth of his muscled thighs behind her. The urge to lean back into his open arms was overpowering. As she keeled, would his arms enclose and gently catch her, she thought? Can I trust him with my life?
"Somehow I have the feeling I know you, but you haven't yet met me." She looked at her bare feet. "Were you in the newspapers when deciphering the entire human genome code made news?"
"No. Don't move until I get you some slippers from the campus notion shop. What size do you wear?"
"I can't remember."
His strong hands cupped her dainty ivory foot and shell pink polished toenails. "I'll measure your foot with this string wrapped around the newspaper."
"You've been so kind to me, a stranger."
"Who could pass up such a mystery? Why was only my card on your person?"
"Would you be willing to talk to a psychiatrist?"
"I don't know."
"My brother, I mean. He's had experience with people who have had this experience."
"I guess science is in your family—in your genes." She leaned back, and her sweater stretched laterally against her full-figured breasts. He stepped back, his elbow buttressing a small figurine, a copy of the blackened Willendorf Venus, a pre-classic relic fired in the ceramic pits of Ice Age Central Europe about twenty-six thousand years ago. The figurine spiraled to the tile floor and shattered.
"Oh, I'm sorry." She gawked and glowered at the huge pendulous breasts of the Paleolithic Venus miniature. "I've got one from Ireland just like that Shelagh. Now why did I say that? You said I had a Cajun regional American accent probably from Louisiana."
"It's all right. I'll pick up some slippers for you. Answer my phone and take a message if it's about that prisoner I'm trying to prove innocent by DNA testing." He bolted, leaving her sitting at his desk. Turning back, he glowered over his shoulder.
"I'll see what I can uncover. Maybe your husband gave you something to wipe out your memory so you wouldn't recall his affair. I saw a TV movie with that plot recently. He was a doctor trying to get custody of his daughter."
She tried to smile. "I don't feel married unless it's to my job. Happy birthday, Jim. Now if only I knew what I am instead of what I do, I could ask for a vacation."
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