“Can I get access to them?”

“Whatever for?”

“To see if some of them might have been misguided mercy killings, too.”

“Pierre, I don’t mean to be harsh, but, well…”

“What?”

“Well — Huntington’s. It does affect the mind, right? Are you sure you’re not just being paranoid?”

Pierre started to protest, but then just shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.

But you can help me find out. I only need tiny samples. Just enough to get a complete set of chromosomes.”

She thought for a moment. “You ask for the damnedest things, you know.”

“Please,” said Pierre.

“Well, tell you what: I can get you the ones we’ve got here. But I’m not going to go calling around to other labs; that would raise too many eyebrows.”

“Thank you,” said Pierre. “Thank you. Can you make sure that Bryan Proctor is included?”

“Who?”

“That superintendent who was murdered by Chuck Hanratty.”

“Oh, yeah.” Helen moved over to her computer, tapped some keys. “No can do,” she said after a moment. “Says here a tenant heard the gunshot that killed him. That fixed the time of death exactly, so we didn’t take any tissue samples.”

“Damn. Still, I’ll take anything else you can get for me.”

“All right — but you owe me big-time. How many samples do you need?”

“As many as I can possibly get.” He paused, wondering how much he should take Helen into his confidence. He didn’t want to say too much, but, dammit, he did need her help. “The person I have in mind is also under investigation by the Department of Justice for being a suspected Nazi war criminal, and—”

“No shit?”

“No — which explains the neo-Nazi connection. And, well, if he murdered thousands fifty years ago, he may very well have ordered a lot more than just the handful we know about murdered today.”

Helen thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do. But, look, it’s almost Christmas, and that’s our busiest time for crime, I’m afraid. You’re going to have to be patient.”

Pierre knew better than to push. “Thank you,” he said.

Helen nodded. “Uh-huh.”

Pierre hurried in the back door of the house. He’d given up fighting the steps to the front door a couple of weeks before. It was 5:35 p.m., and he went straight for the couch, scooping up the remote and turning on the TV. “Molly!” he shouted. “Come quickly!”

Molly appeared, holding baby Amanda, who, at eight months, had acquired even more rich brown hair. “What is it?”

“I heard just as I was leaving work that the piece on Felix Sousa is on

Hard Copy tonight. I thought I’d be home in time, but there was an accident on Cedar.”

A commercial for Chrysler minivans was coming to an end. The Hard Copy spinning typewriter ball flew out at them, making that annoying thunk-thunk ! as it did so; then the host, a pretty blonde named Terry Murphy, appeared. “Welcome back,” she said. “Are blacks inferior to whites? A new study says yes, and our Wendy Di Maio is on the story.

Wendy?”

Molly sat down next to Pierre on the couch, holding Amanda against her shoulder.

The image changed to some historical footage of the UCB courtyard behind Sather Gate, with longhaired flower children strolling by and a bare-chested hippie sitting under a tree, strumming a guitar.

“Thanks, Terry,” said a woman’s voice over the pictures. “In 1967, the University of California, Berkeley, was home to the hippie movement, a movement that preached making love not war, a movement that embraced the family of man.”

The image dissolved to modern videotape footage shot from the same angle. “Today, the hippies are gone. Meet the new face of UCB.”

Walking toward the camera was a trim, broad-shouldered white man of forty, wearing a black leather pilot’s jacket with the collar turned up and mirrored aviator sunglasses. Pierre snorted. “Christ, he’s even dressed like a storm trooper.”

The reporter’s voice-over said, “This is Professor Felix Sousa, a geneticist here. There’s no peace in the wake of his research — and no love for him on the part of many of the university’s staff and students, who are branding him a racist.”

The shot changed to Sousa in one of the chemistry labs in Latimer Hall, beakers and flasks spread out on the counter in front of him. Pierre snorted again; he’d never once actually seen Sousa in any lab. “I’ve spent years on this research, Miz Di Maio,” Sousa said. His voice was crisp and cultured, his enunciation meticulous. “It’s hard to reduce it to a few simple statements, but…”

The picture cut to the reporter, an attractive woman with a wide mouth and mounds of dark hair. She nodded encouragingly, urging Sousa to go on. The picture changed back to Sousa. “In simplest terms, my research demonstrates that the three races of humanity emerged at different times.

Blacks appeared as a racially distinct group some two hundred thousand years ago. Whites, on the other hand, first appeared one hundred and ten thousand years ago. And Orientals arrived on the scene forty-one thousand years ago. Well, is it any surprise that the oldest race is the most primitive in terms of brain development?” Sousa spread his hands, palms up, as if asking the audience to use its common sense. “On average, blacks have the smallest brains and the lowest IQs of any of the races. They’ve also got the highest crime rate and the most promiscuity. Orientals, on the other hand, are the brightest, the least prone to criminal activity, and the most restrained sexually. Whites fall right in the middle between the other two groups.”

The picture switched to footage of Sousa lecturing to a class. The students — all white — seemed rapt. “Sousa’s theories don’t stop there,” said the reporter’s voice over this. “He’s even suggesting that the old locker-room myths are true.”

They cut back to the interview tape. “Blacks do have bigger penises than whites, on average,” said Sousa. “And whites are better endowed genitally than Orientals. There’s an inverse relationship between genital size and intelligence.” A pause, and Sousa grinned, showing perfect teeth. “Of course,” he said, “there are always exceptions.”

Wendy Di Maio’s voice-over again: “Much of Sousa’s work echoes older, equally controversial studies, such as the research made public in 1989 by Philippe Rushton [still image of Rushton, a surprisingly handsome white man in his mid-forties], a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and the conclusions in the contentious 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve [slide of the book’s cover].”

An outside shot: Di Maio walking across the campus in the courtyard between Lewis and Hildebrand Halls. “Is it right that such obviously racist research is going on in our publicly funded institutions? We asked the university’s president.”

The camera panned up to what was presumably supposed to be the president’s window, but his office was actually clear across the campus from there. Then it switched to a close-up of the president in an opulent, wood-paneled room. His name and title were superimposed at the bottom of the screen. The elderly man spread his arms. “Professor Sousa has full tenure. That means he has full freedom to pursue any line of intellectual inquiry, without pressure from the administration…”

Molly and Pierre watched the rest of the report, and then Pierre clicked the off button. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “God, that pisses me off,” he said. “With all the quality work going on at the university, they pick crap like that to highlight. And you just know there are going to be people who think Sousa must be right…”

They ate dinner in silence — Stouffer’s lasagna done up in the microwave for them (it was Pierre the gourmet’s turn), and Gerber apple baby food for Amanda. At eight months, she had acquired a very healthy appetite.