Page 56 of Flint
On the relationship front, I’m still wearing his property cut, and not only is everything golden with us, but I’ve also decided that he’s a demon in the sack. He does things to my body that would make a wild animal blush. We go places and do things, so it’s not all sex morning, noon, and night. But I’m not turning it down when it’s offered. Sometimes, I even help myself to some, much to Flint’s delight.
This morning, Onyx and Jinx come through the main room, looking around until they see us. I set my coffee down and whisper to Flint, “We’ve got company.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Flint’s expression turns hopeful. “Please tell me we got those fuckin’ DNA tests back. I’m about to go stir crazy waiting for them.”
Onyx slides into the seat across from Flint, and a smiling Jinx takes the remaining seat.
Onyx replies, “Yep. And you’ll never believe the story. It’s like something out of a fucking soap.” Pulling out his laptop, he angles it so we can both see the screen. He looks at me and asks, “So you thought it was your friend’s father, right?”
I nod. “Mr. Allen. The man looked so much like him I would have put money on it. Though they say everyone has a double.”
“Try a twin,” Onyx says.
“A what?” I sit upright and try and look at what he’s showing me on the screen.
“Turns out your Mr. Allen has a secret sibling.” Onyx starts scrolling through the ancestry website.
“I don’t remember my friend Lauren ever talking about uncles.”
“I’m not sure if he knows he has a twin. We got the DNA test back with a twin sibling match. It was performed four months ago.”
“It was around three months ago when I saw the abduction,” I tell him.
“That makes even more sense when you see who the match is,” Onyx adds.
Onyx turns the laptop. The screen shows the relative-finder page of the account they set up. The match at the top is Robert Allen, Pasadena, California, parent, child, or identical sibling. My friend’s dad.
Onyx scrolls down, and the match below it shows the same tier and same percentage but a different name. Daniel Terrance. Long Beach, California. Last time active: ninety-two days ago.
“That,” Onyx says, “is the man in the trunk. His last name is the same as the mobsters who sent those assholes to our town looking for you and Flint. He submitted a DNA sample a month before you saw him get abducted.”
“But if he’s their adopted son, why would they take him?” I ask.
My hands start to shake so badly that I have to set my coffee aside. This is proof that I wasn’t wrong about what I saw. Daniel Terrance is Mr. Allen’s identical twin.
“Let’s go through it from start to finish,” Flint tells them. “I want to understand all the fuckin’ details before I decide how to proceed.”
Onyx points at Robert’s line. “Robert took his kit six years ago. It’s likely that someone bought it for him as a Christmas gift because he took it the first week of January. He mailed it in, got his ancestry breakdown a few weeks later, logged in once to look at it, and never came back.”
“How in the hell do you know that?” Flint demands.
“Striker managed to hack into Mr. Allen’s account by using his social media to look for password clues. It’s a combination of his daughter and wife’s names. That’s how we pulled the information. The information Mr. Allen never saw because he never logged back into the system. The relative finder page only activated when Daniel submitted his sample. Before that, there was nothing to match.”
“And the brother, this Daniel Terrance? He took the test four months ago, right?”
“Yes. It was a different lab but the same database. Several of the big labs cross-reference results.”
“I guess he got one as a gift too. Maybe by someone who knew about the adoption.”
Onyx shakes his head at Flint. “Once we had his name, I asked Striker to dig up everything he could on Daniel. I think he bought it himself. Daniel caught a bullet eight months back. He’sgot a rare blood type, B-negative, and the medical center was out of it. They had to get some airlifted in.”
I ask before thinking, “Why didn’t his family donate…” I trail off when I realize if he was adopted, others in his adoptive family might not have that blood type, particularly if it’s rare. When I snap my mouth closed, Flint reaches across the table to take my hands in his.
Onyx states, “Daniel probably asked himself the same thing. All we know is that a few months later he bought a kit, mailed in the swab, and four weeks later he had Robert Allen’s name and city sitting at the top of his match list.”
Glancing at the screen, which shows Robert’s image, I know all the way down to my bones that Daniel took one look at his twin and did his best to get to him.
“Why didn’t Daniel just message him in the system like you’re supposed to?” I’m full of questions this morning.
