Like Father, Like Son
Timothy Paterson
Copyright 2012 Timothy Paterson
When David walked into the house, he tossed his backpack onto the couch and hung his jacket in the hall closet. His mother walked into the living room at the same time.
“Oh good, you’re home,” she asked. “Could you please help me with dinner?”
“Why can’t the girls help you?” asked David, somewhat annoyed.
“Because they’re all upstairs doing homework,” said his mother. “Please, David? I would really appreciate it.”
David suddenly remembered something and said; “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll help you with dinner, if you’ll help me with a project for my genetics class.”
“Okay,” said Mrs. Browning. “What do I have to do?”
“Well,” said David, “the lab assignment is to compare DNA profiles of relatives. I need to compare my DNA with the DNA of one or both of my parents. If I can get both yours and Dad’s profiles, I will get extra points.”
“Well, you might as well forget about asking your father,” said Mrs. Browning. “You know that he doesn’t like to have needles stuck in him. Besides, he gets light headed at the sight of his own blood, which is odd, since he sees blood all of the time with his job. In fact, let’s not ask him. I think that it might embarrass him.”
“Okay,” said David, and he followed his mother into the kitchen, to help with dinner.
David was not a typical college sophomore. He was only sixteen years old. He had a very high IQ, approaching the genius level. He lived at home, while attending UCLA, because his parents thought he would feel out of place living in a dorm living with students who were two to six years older than him.
While Mrs. Browning put dinner on the table, she asked David to call his sisters downstairs. David loved his younger sisters, and was very protective of them. He considered himself the man of the house when his father worked the evening shift. David had three younger sisters. Elizabeth was fourteen, Megan was eleven and Pamela was eight. They all looked up to their older brother, and even though they were of average intelligence, they weren’t jealous of him.
David Browning Sr. was a police sergeant with the Los Angeles Police Department, where he had worked for over fifteen years.
After dinner, while his sisters were cleaning up, David and his mother went to the UCLA clinic, where a medical technician drew blood samples from them, and placed the samples into the collection tubes for the DNA analysis. The samples were immediately sent to the genetics lab for processing. David was informed that he would have the profiles within two weeks.
During his next genetics class, David scanned photos of his family into a computer program. The program was a state of the art program that would compare facial characteristics such as eye color and facial shape, as well as hair color, etc. between the generations, and show which ancestors that the students had inherited their family traits from.
Luckily, David knew where all of the family photos were kept, because he had forgot about the assignment until after his parents had gone to work. David’s parents had traced their genealogy back several generations, and had color photos of David’s four grandparents and his eight great grandparents. David scanned all of those photos, as well as photos of his parents, sisters and himself, into the computer. He also typed in additional information, such as ethnic background, etc. for each person.
After waiting for ten minutes, the photo analysis was completed. However, the results were somewhat confusing to David. According to the results, some of David’s facial features came from his mother’s side of the family, but none of them came from his father, or his side of the family. When David questioned his instructor about the accuracy of the program, he was told that family traits can sometimes skip several generations.
David checked the results for his sisters, and learned that they had inherited traits from both his mother’s and father’s side of the family. David began to wonder if his father was indeed is biological father, or his stepfather.
Over the next few days, David began secretly going through family documents to see if he could find anything that seemed out of place. He found his parents’ marriage certificate, and it showed that they were married fifteen months before he was born, but upon closer examination of it, he noticed that the date had been altered. They were married in Chicago, so David began checking for marriage licenses on a genealogy site on the internet. He checked files two years before and after he was born, using his father’s name and his mother’s maiden name. He finally located his parent’s marriage records, and discovered that they were married one year after the date on their marriage certificate, or three months before he was born.
David told his parents told his parents nothing about his investigation, because he wanted to be certain of the facts before he confronted them. Two days later, when David got home from school, he sorted through the mail and found that the DNA profiles for his mother and him had arrived. The results showed that David and his mother were related, so it ruled out the possibility that he was adopted.
Because of his busy class schedule, David had to put his research on hold for a while. In late April, while he was looking through some genealogy files, David found a DNA profile for his father that had been obtained several years earlier to determine where his ancestors had come from.
The next day, David took the DNA profiles for his father and him to the genetics lab to have an expert compare them. After carefully examining the profiles, the professor told David that the two people were not related.
Even though David had a high IQ, he was still physically and emotionally sixteen years old, and his emotions were out of whack due to puberty. He was upset and angry that his mother never told him that his father was not his biological father. He didn’t want to confront her until he found out who his real father was.
Over the next few weeks, David spent most of his free time on the internet searching for answers. He was a genius when it came to computers and the internet. He began searching all of the DNA databases, hoping that his biological father had also entered his DNA profile into some genealogical database.
After coming up empty-handed after searching several sites, David found a DNA site that had restricted access. This was only a minor setback for him. David hacked his way past the security. David entered his DNA markers that he didn’t have in common with his mother, into the database. He deduced that the remaining markers represented the DNA that he had inherited from his father.
After David had entered all of the information, he pressed the enter button and held his breath. In a matter of seconds, the computer found a match for his DNA. It gave him the name of James Humphrey Wallace. However, what David didn’t know, was that he had hacked into a criminal data base, and all of the files in the site belonged to convicted criminals.
When David entered the name of his biological father into the internet, he soon received a lot of information about the man. The more he read, the more upset he became. James Humphrey Wallace was a serial killer who had killed more than seventy people across the nation, including several in Chicago, over a period of twenty years. He had raped all of his female victims before killing them, and had tortured all of his male victims before they died. David learned that his father had been executed six years earlier in Texas.
David knew that his parents were married in Chicago, and that he was born there as well. He began hacking into police files of the Chicago Police Department. He searched all files around his birth. What he found only upset him. He learned that his mother had been raped. After she discovered that she was pregnant, she decided to keep the baby. The police never found her attac
ker. David Browning had been the investigating officer on the case.
After David was able to absorb all of the information, he began to put together the pieces of the puzzle. David knew that his mother was against abortion, and that’s why she went through with the pregnancy. David suspected that his stepfather took a personal interest in his mother, as he investigated the rape case. David guessed that Officer Browning fell in love with David’s mother, and they eventually got married. To protect David, they changed the wedding date on their marriage certificate, and they moved to Los Angeles, to start a new life, away from all of the bad memories. They eventually had three daughters together; which were David’s half-sisters.
David was no longer angry with his parents, as he understood why they did what they did. But, other things weighed heavily on his mind. After reading everything that he could find on James Wallace, David learned some troubling things. Experts believed that Mr. Wallace was criminally insane. As a child, he had a very high IQ. He was actually considered to be a genius.
David needed to talk to someone about what he was feeling. David made reservations for his father and him at a nice restaurant for Father’s Day. He told his mother that he wanted it to be a