Page 220 of Dark Love

“Not all of them. Some have disappeared. There are missing persons reports on a few, but most were loners already. They just stopped paying their bills one day, and no one cared. I’ve sorted them into dead, missing persons, and just vanished.” Shock pulls up three sets of images.

Not everyone has a match. “Where are the twins?”

“That’s the thing. Their DNA says they are identical, but every one of these matching siblings had something different about them. They weren’t actually identical.”

Why would people look for identical siblings that aren’t identical? “How can that be? Is it a mistake on the computer’s part? Maybe it was a test they were running on their system.”

“Thought about that. It’s not. This wasn’t a test. The DNA doesn’t lie. These people are too perfectly matched not to be what’s considered identical. In each case, one single change was made to their DNA.”

“How do you even know that? Wouldn’t you need to be a geneticist to understand what all that means?” Payne steps away from the computer. “You’re a hacker, not a doctor.”

“But I can read. I can’t tell you what all of those individual genes mean. But I can tell you these two women have different colored eyes. And these three men have different hair colors. These three are all different heights.”

“And that can’t happen naturally?” I want a different explanation than where my brain is going. Something that doesn’t make my skin crawl.

“According to research, yes, but it’s extremely rare.”

But he doesn’t think that’s what happened. The dead bodies and missing people contradict natural causes. “Get back to Barb. How does this have anything to do with her?”

“Barb has an identical sibling.”

What? Barb has family?

Family that might get her killed.

“Which one is she?” Payne leans forward to search the images.

“She’s not dead or missing.” Shock clicks the button again and a woman with Barb’s face and brown hair pops up onto the screen.

“You prevented the match from happening.” I didn’t really need to ask that. Shock has a crush on Barb. He wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

Shock nods. “No information is getting sent about matches anymore, but if someone looks, it still appears to be working.”

“What’s really happening?” Payne stares at the screen with unblinking eyes.

“I’m collecting information on all the identical siblings.”

“And do you know who was running the program in the first place?” Because I’d like to ask them a few questions.

“No. All the information gets parked on a dark website. The only way to tell would be…”

To give them a name. And find them when they come to kill the person. “We can’t risk Barb like that.”

“How long is there between the name posting to that site and them disappearing?”

Don’t even think about it. “Payne.”

“It’s just a question.”

“Two weeks on average. But it can vary from a day or two to a month.”

There’s no consistency for time. “What about dates?”

“Checked that too. No common dates.”

“Day of the week?” Payne catches on to my thoughts.

“Slightly. All the deaths happened on a weekday.”

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