Page 69 of Destiny

“For the same reason she does everything,” Ruby says. “Manipulation. My guess is… This is so screwed up.”

“What’s your guess?” Jack asks.

“My guess is shedoeshave sperm, and this is her way of letting us find out. And my guess is she has Sean Murphy’s sperm”—she gestures to Jack—“and that heisyour father.”

Jack shakes his head. “But I’m thirty-one. He died sixty years ago.”

“Not all sperm survives the freezing process,” Ruby says. “But the sperm that dies usually does so within forty-eight hours of freezing. Sperm can be stored for as long as fifty years without additional deterioration beyond that caused by the original freezing process.”

“You’re saying…” My father shakes his head, rakes his fingers through his graying hair. “You’re saying that my uncle, who died at Brad Steel’s wedding, is actually the father of Jack here?”

“That’s what this would suggest. Your DNA indicates that you share paternal grandparents. Which means your fathers are full-blooded brothers. So unless your father had another full brother that we don’t know about, which I doubt…”

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Dad says. “All this time… Here it was under my nose. Our connection to the Steels and my uncle.”

“How the hell did she get your uncle’s sperm?” I ask. “He was dead.”

“I’m not sure you want to hear this,” Ruby says, “but itispossible to extract sperm from a dying man or a recently dead body.”

“God,” Dad says. “What did she do? Stick a needle in my uncle’s balls?”

“To put it crudely,” Ruby says. “Depending on who did the extraction. You can also do it through a testicular biopsy or complete removal of the testicles.”

“So she fucking castrated him?” Dad yells.

“Look, Sean,” Ruby says. “None of us knows how she got the sperm. For all we know, he could’ve jacked off into a cup some time before he collapsed at Brad Steel’s wedding. With Wendy Madigan, anything is possible.”

I gulp down nausea. “I suppose it would’ve been easier for her to convince him to jack off in a cup than for her to sneak into the hospital and extract sperm from his comatose body.”

“Exactly,” Ruby says.

“And apparently she got the same thing from Brad Steel.”

“Actually…” She grabs her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. “I need to talk to Ryan.”

“You need to talk tous, Ruby,” Dad says. “I’ve waited this long to figure out what the hell happened to my uncle. I want to know all your secrets now.”

“My father, Theodore Matthias, is one of these men. And I think…” Color drains from Ruby’s face. “I think they may have submitted their sperm knowingly.”

“What the hell makes you think that?”

“Sixty years ago, this was a new technology. And knowing Wendy Madigan, she wanted to get in on it. You see, the future lawmakers club was all about money, about profit. About all of them getting rich. And this was something new. In fact… I’d bet they gave their samples while they were still in high school.”

“Nope, that doesn’t fly,” Dad says. “My uncle didn’t know them in high school. He and Brad met in college.”

“Right,” Ruby says. “Which was right after high school. And Brad Steel was still funding the future lawmakers club at that time.”

“God, so he talked Uncle Sean into…” I shake my head.

“I said it’s only a theory. But I’m a detective. I know how the criminal mind works. And, unfortunately, I know Wendy Madigan.”

I pull my phone out, do a quick search.

“The timing doesn’t quite add up. This source says that sperm freezing dates back to eighteenth-century Italy.”

“Sure,” Ruby says. “Everything starts way before it actually starts.”

I check a new source. “All right, the first sperm banks began as early as nineteen sixty-four… So maybe the timing does add up.”

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