Washington, D. C., Thursday & Friday, three weeks later…

During the next three weeks Jay made little progress in obtaining more information about either the Lexington Park murders or the Boston case. Kalidas educated both Chris and Jay about how difficult it is to make human clones because the differentiation of the blastocyst already begins at the four-cell level. It would be a major feat for even the best-equipped genetics lab, so it was hard to imagine terrorists achieving it. The plans for their attacks were usually low budget ones designed to create the most panic in the population affected. It was not clear what they would gain from having young versions of Johnson or Sweeney around. They couldn't be used to get close to any of their older look-alikes. On the other hand, even though both John Does had been much younger than their older twins, they were still in their twenties. How cloning technology twenty years ago could have been as advanced as today's was beyond Kalidas' comprehension.

The three of them began to have doubts, wondering if they were seeing conspiracies where there were none. No one involved with the case was threatened or harmed. Jay received her press badge back from the DHS. Things seemed boringly normal.

Yet Jay plodded on and encouraged her new friends to do the same. Clones or no clones, she wanted John Milton's killers. She called Bouncer and heard that Sam Fletcher had filed the cases away as five unsolved murder cases, one John Doe and four Lexington Park townspeople. Denise Rivera also suggested to Chris that he put the Boston murder in the database of cold cases. Kalidas bought a new laptop and attempted to reconstruct her preprint, hoping to make more progress along those lines, although she also began asking around in her small community of scientists about any secret government research.