"Tilyn?"
Tilyn turned in his chair. The police technician, Viona, stood nervously just outside his barricade of bookshelves and filing cabinets. She lifted a handful of papers.
"Your results are here," she said. "May I come in?"
"Please. What results?"
"That DNA sample. The hair?"
Tilyn shrugged. "The case is closed. I must have forgotten to tell you."
"So you found out who she is?" Viona looked so disappointed Tilyn took pity on her.
"Show me anyway. I don't have any other cases right now."
Viona brightened immediately. She spread two pages on his desk. He looked down at the strange squiggles. It made no sense to him.
"Do you see it?" Viona asked.
"See what?"
"These," Viona pointed to a wavy set of lines. "This DNA is really different."
"How?" Tilyn asked, intrigued.
"Whoever this is, she isn't like everyone else on Tivor. This here," she circled one set of squiggles with her finger, "I've never seen that before."
"A problem with the test?"
She shook her head. Her short dark hair bobbed with the movement. "I ran it three times to make certain. And then I cross referenced it with our files. This is what I found."
She spread her other pages across his desk. He looked at more squiggles.
"Please explain," he said when she stood back in satisfaction, as if it were perfectly clear.
"This one," Viona said, pointing to one sheet, "is what I call the standard reference. Tivorans will closely resemble this with only minor variations. Hold them up, like this."
She took the sheet and the one from Tilyn's hair sample and held them up to the light, one on top of the other.
He could see where they varied. The squiggles were offset from each other.
"She's close enough to a native Tivoran that there is only a mild shift," Viona explained. "I found these in our files."
She picked up two more sheets. She watched as Tilyn raised them overhead, comparing the squiggles to the standard.
"Very different," he commented.
"Yes," Viona agreed. "But check where the samples came from."
Tilyn looked at the pages again. There was a criminal case number on each.
"I looked them up and printed out the summary," Viona offered. She slid two more sheets out of her pile. "This one is a man picked up three years ago outside one of the work farms. He died of exposure not long afterwards. His results are very different. And this," she indicated the other squiggle page, "is a man caught shortly after the food riots twenty five years ago."
"His scans match the other man's, not the standard," Tilyn said.
"The name he gave was Noruti'nei. There are no records of him other than his arrest record. What's really puzzling, though, is this scan." She handed him a last page. "Halfway between the men and your subject."
"So what does it mean?" Tilyn asked.
"If I were to guess," Viona said, leaning back against his desk as he compared the sheets, holding them up to the light one after another, "I'd say that this Noruti'nei was the father of this one, and that she is the mother of your subject. There are other markers that support that conclusion."
Tilyn froze. If that were true, he held a potential bomb in his hands.
"I couldn't get a name or a case for the woman," Viona said, unaware of his sudden fear. "All I could get was the number, the rest is classified."
"For good reason." Tilyn glanced up at the tech. He'd always liked her. She was more interested in the puzzle of her data than in finding someone guilty. She enjoyed the challenge of figuring it out, like he did. He wanted to trust her.
She cocked her head, watching him out of deep blue eyes. With her dark hair and fair skin she was quite pretty. "What reason? It's an old case. At least twenty years old. How does it relate to your current case?"
"It isn't my case anymore," Tilyn said. "It doesn't all fit, though."
"Tell me and maybe I can help," Viona offered.
He leaned back in his chair, sliding the papers onto his desk. "This woman has to be Lirondalla Muberretton. Her daughter, Zeresthina Dasmuller, was sent here as a spy by the Patrol. She's at a work farm now."
"That's where you got the hair sample from." Viona picked up one of the scans and studied it. "This means she's only partly native to Tivor. But that doesn't make sense."
"Her father was Patrol, stationed here some time ago." Tilyn scrubbed a hand through his hair. "I don't even know if any of this is important."
"What about the mountain people? I heard a story once that there are other people there, not human. They have some kind of mind power. No one ever sees them, though. They're probably just stories."
"And maybe not. Doesn't this prove something?" He waved his hand over his desk.
"That the woman you arrested is not quite human and that her mother was only half human and her grandfather was completely different."
"And that the mountain people aren't just a story," Tilyn said. He swept the papers into a pile. "The case is solved. The woman is not a problem. I'm sorry to have wasted your time."
"It was entertaining," Viona answered with a smile. "I enjoyed the challenge. And," she stood up smoothing her tunic, "I wouldn't dismiss the puzzle quite yet. I think there's more here than you think."
She walked out of his corner. He watched her. His gut instinct told him she was right. There was a lot more to this story than he thought.