Comeback in Broad Day

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

"A miracle!"

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart - -

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood.

- Sylvia Plath

Chapter One: Extraction

David Kiley was tired of waiting.

One minute, he'd been winning at blackjack, and the next, he was sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a tiny room while one man after another came in and asked him a boringly predictable series of questions. His name. His age. His job. His address. It was the way they were looking at him that started to be frustrating after a while - - they all looked like they were interviewing Lazarus, and stared too intently at him when he answered their questions. They all developed nervous tics. They sucked on the tips of their pencils, they chewed on the earpieces of their glasses, they drummed their fingers against the table. And every time he produced an answer, they visibly started, surprised.

As if there were something really strange, all of a sudden, about who he was.

A fourth man came in through the door, and David leaned back in his chair to try and get a glimpse of what was happening in the hall. He'd seen enough cop movies to know that someone was probably watching him behind the "mirror" of one-way glass, but he didn't see a crowd gathering outside. Maybe he wasn't such a phenomenon after all.

This man was different. He was a little younger than the guys that had been in so far. He looked haggard, though, a little worse for wear than the cops in their crisp blue uniforms. This guy had serious dark circles ringing his eyes, like a raccoon. He pressed his hands together into steeples, and David thought - - nervous tic. Already. Well, he was going to preempt this one. No way was he going to answer another round of questions without some answers first.

"What am I doing here?"

"No one told you?"

"Yeah, they did, except for the part where they didn't." David leaned forward and planted his elbows on the table a little too hard. Ow. "Listen, you look like a nice guy that got dragged out of bed at a seriously bad hour, and I don't really want to be a problem, but I've been here for hours and I'm getting a little sick of being kept in the dark."

"No one wants to keep you in the dark. I guess - - we were hoping that you'd know why you were here. I was hoping that. I just - - let's start at the beginning, okay?"

David nodded. "Okay. Who are you?"

"I'm Nick Stokes. I work with the Las Vegas crime lab."

"Tit for tat, then. I'm David Kiley. I work with a pharmaceutical research organization in Boston."

"I wanted to know if I could take your fingerprints and maybe a saliva sample for some tests we want to run. Nothing painful, nothing too inconvenient."

"Listen," David said, "if I'm wanted for some kind of crime, I'd like to know about it. I'd also like to know if I need a lawyer present. Because I've never done so much as illegally set off fireworks in my backyard back home, and what I could have possibly done to be wanted in Vegas is beyond me. I was here to interview a client, and I'm supposed to return tomorrow morning. I can't miss my flight."

"You haven't done anything wrong - - David. Everything's fine now."

"Okay. Then why the million questions and the million sample requests?"

"It's a problem of identification," Stokes said. "Three years ago, someone went missing from our organization. You happen to look - - remarkably like him. We've been looking for him for a very long time, and I think we finally have some luck. Please. It - - I promise not to make this take too long. But if you really are the person that we've been looking for all this time - -"

"You think I am," David said. He almost started laughing. "You think I'm some guy you used to know? I've never been to Vegas in my life."

"You look like him," Stokes said. "Please, let us run our tests. We've been waiting so long."

David felt sorry for him. Someone in the organization? This Stokes guy looked like he had lost his best friend, and he was hanging on to David's every movement as if he really, really thought that David might be the person he'd been waiting for. The least David could do for him was sacrifice a couple more minutes, rub his fingers in ink, and let someone stick a swab down his throat. The DNA samples might take a while to replicate, but the fingerprinting always worked much faster, especially if they were running a single comparison through AFIS instead of searching for any kind of - -

AFIS?

What did that mean?

"Um, sure," David said. He spread his hands out over the table. "I hope you find who you're looking for."

"So do I."

He let Nick Stokes roll the pads of his fingers in sticky black ink and press them one by one against the paper, letting the tips of his fingers spin like stamps. And he opened his mouth like a kid getting swabbed for strep throat so Stokes could swish something around in there, hollowing out his mouth and pushing against the insides of his cheeks. When he pulled it out, David grinned at him.

"Cheek cell sample," he said.

Stokes paused with the sample an inch above its sealed container. "Yeah. Do you - - do you remember what - -"

"Seventh grade chemistry class stuff," David said, shrugging. "You know. You swabbed your mouth and put that stuff under the microscope so you could look at the epithelials and do the little diagrams. You know, pointing out the nucleus once you'd stained the slide."

"And seventh grade chemistry is the only way you ever heard of this?"

I'm going to extract - -

Extract - -

"Extraction," David said finally. "Something about extraction. But I don't remember what."

"You can extract DNA from a skin cell," Stokes said. His hands were shaking as he pushed the sample into the container and clicked it closed. "And then you can run all the comparisons you wanted. That's what we're going to do."

"You're going to see if I'm your friend," David said.

"That's right."

Extract the DNA and compare it to the suspect's. Sorry. No match on the epithelials, no match on the blood. I can't use the hair samples because there's no - -

No tag.

He shook his head to clear it. "How long will it be before we know?"

Stokes looked down at his hands. "Can you guess? David?"

"Not so long for the fingerprints," David said. He looked over Stokes's shoulder and stared at the glass. Someone was watching. Right? Of course someone was watching - - wasn't someone always watching? "Longer - - longer for the DNA. It has to replicate."

"Junior high chemistry again?"

David hesitated a second too long.

"I don't know," he said.

Stokes gave him a sad, kind smile and stood, taking the samples and the paper with David's prints with him. He shook hands with David once, but the handshake, like David's pause, lasted just a little too long. Stokes didn't just think that David was who he was looking for, he was almost sure of it.

"Your friend," David said. "Who is he? What's his name?"

"Greg Sanders," Stokes said. "Your name - - his name. Greg Sanders. He went missing three years ago, during one of his first fieldwork assignments. Three years."

David smiled out of pure relief. Ridiculous, of course, to assume that he might be someone else. He knew who he was. David Michael Kiley, the son of Jackson and Sharon Kiley. He worked for a pharmaceutical research company. He had to get home so that he could take care of his father. And any definitions of DNA procedure that had wormed into his mind were just TV technical terms, and he didn't, under any circumstances, remember being someone else. The name Greg Sanders meant nothing. No twinge of familiarity, just a - -

Greg Sanders.

One more case, and you'll be certified - -

Not even a ghost of a memory. Not even.

"I'm sorry for your loss," David said.

Stokes paused at the door. "Don't be."

David leaned his head into one hand, rubbing at a spot above his right eye in a fixed circle. Getting a migraine, and he hadn't had one of those in forever. Might as well bite the bullet and get this over with, clear away any lingering hopes Stokes might have for him. "I'm not your guy. I'm not Sanders. I remember who I was three years ago."

Stokes said, "Do you?"

The crash.

The pain above his eye deepened, burrowed in.

Stokes didn't wait for an answer before he left.