chapter forty-five

“Talk to me,” I said to Jo. For the second time that day a prickling sensation rippled up and down my skin. That feeling I get when a case starts to break wide open.

“Patents,” Jo replied, leaning close from her seat next to me. “Standard format. Patents typically have seven digits and some prefix. 0 stands for a utility patent. X denotes patents dating prior to 1836. RE is a reissue and so forth.” Jo pointed at the file. “D stands for design. AI means additional improvement.”

“Additional improvement on the initial design?”

She nodded. “Probably—given that the series of numbers in both is the same. Eddie, what do these patents have to do with your case?”

“I don’t know yet. Can you tell from the numbers what the patents are for or when the initial design or the additional improvement was made?”

“Medical research,” Jo said after a quick check of her own on the public registry for patents. “Awarded to a Dr. Lee. Patents are valid for twenty years from the filing date. In the U.S., whoever made the invention first, and can prove it, is awarded property rights for those twenty years.”

“Why would a blood spot, a genetic partial prelim, be tied up with a design patent?” I asked. “A human genome’s not an invention.”

“Now I have proof you don’t listen to me,” Jo said with a groan. “It was briefly outlawed about thirty years ago, but that changed about the time gene editing for humans was approved: around 2029. Genetics are one of the hottest areas of intellectual property.”

“You can patent somebody else’s genome?”

“Only a part of it,” she said. “The part that would be useful as a building block for basic research in the field. Patent holding companies sequence the genes and convert them to another form called cDNA. Then a patent is sought on the cDNA rather than the gene itself.”

“That’s a shell game, isn’t it?”

“Not if you’re the one who put all the time and resources into discovering the useage.” She shrugged. “It’s common practice, and it’s legal.”

“So other scientists would have to pay the patent owner licensing fees every time they used your research to further their own.”

“That’s right,” Jo said.

“How much money are we talking for a licensing fee?”

“Depends,” she said. “If you have the rights to a common diagnostic, that can mean serious money over time. For example, back in 2001, an American company got a European patent for BRCA1.”

“The breast cancer gene?”

Jo nodded. “That company can and does charge a substantial fee to test people in order to determine whether or not somebody carries the mutation that virtually guarantees cancer down the line. Six figures is a low estimate on value.”

“But a big motive,” I said, “for murder.”

Britney’s partial prelim had the D-3331110 identifier, so that had to be the original design. Since Lee’s name was on the registration for the patent, the scientist had evidently patented part of that genome for his work on Alz-X. And his encrypted file with the AI prefix must hold an improvement of some kind. What was the improvement? A diagnostic that predicted the onset of the disease, or some form of resistance to it?

I leaned over and kissed Jo, then activated my phone. “This is big, Jo. Thanks.”

It was four o’clock. As Jo went to shower first, I put in a call to Lee’s boss, Maclaren. What patents did Lee’s Alzheimer’s X research entail, how much money was involved, and most important, what happened to the patents now that he was dead? Maclaren would know. Unfortunately, it also seemed to be the day that everybody I wanted to talk to was out of the office.

I called Shin again and updated him on what Jo had said about the patents. Shin listened with interest.

“Okay,” he said, his holo-image nodding. “I’ll pass it along to Vice.”

“Don’t,” I said, pulling up Lee’s vlog on the hotel’s giant wall screen.

Shin shot me a look. “Why not?”

“We’re not done with the case. Salazar’s statement is a web of lies.” The home invasion by Salazar and Ramirez had slowed me down, but my brain was starting to come back online, thoughts skipping ahead. The thing I’d forgotten, the important thing nagging at me since the hospital, had finally inched its way back to me. “About Lee’s vlog.” I pointed to the image on the wall screen. “Look at the timestamp, Shin. If my shooting the Ramirez kid was the trigger for everything the Aztekas did to me and to Dr. Lee, how could Lee have mentioned my name a week before the shooting happened?”

Shin’s eyes grew rounder. “Why would Salazar corroborate AzteKa involvement?”

“Sleight of hand,” I said. “He put the blame on a dead man.”

“Send me the whole vlog,” he said. “ASAP. I’ll go see the captain as soon as I’ve watched it.”