Black-Eyed Susans (24 page)

“My patient understood right and
wrong, he just didn’t care,” he continues. “He studied carefully how
to behave. He was able to simulate empathy because he regularly sat in hospital waiting
rooms and observed it. He spent a year selling suits at Brooks Brothers to figure out
how to dress and speak. He used the newspaper to manufacture biographies about himself
as he moved around. But serial killers make mistakes. This guy did. He carried the
remains of his victims in the trunk of his car because he couldn’t help himself.
The point is, they don’t think they are human, but they are.”

“I still don’t get … the
why.”

“No one really knows. Maybe we will
never know. For a while, doctors used to think it had something to do with phrenology.
How many bumps you had on your skull. My patient turned out to be a cliché. He
blamed his mother.”

“Because …”

“We’re getting a little off
track here.”

“Were you trying to cure this
guy?” I pester him.
Or were you trying to figure out if he is the one who took
your daughter?

“Yes, against all odds, against all
the rules of psychiatry, I was trying to see if that was possible. But it didn’t
turn out well. He is a psychopath, Tessie. He is perfectly happy the way he
is.”

Jo has asked me to meet her at Trinity Park,
near one of the running trails, about a half-mile away from the duck pond. It seems a
little strange. Too close to the bridge. Too much of a coincidence. Did someone besides
a home-schooled juvenile delinquent see me digging? Is Bill reporting everything I say
to Jo?

The Susans are quiet this morning. It
happens that way sometimes, when my paranoia roils into such hurricane force that they
can’t catch their breath.

My body hasn’t stopped jangling since
Saturday night when I clutched my gun and pointed it toward the ghostly shape on the
front lawn. On Sunday, I tried to rebound and put my daughter’s life back in a
normal place. I called Bill and told him to please not show up again on my doorstep with
alcoholic beverages. That it was a mistake, that we had let overwrought emotion sweep us
into the bed, that Swedish Scientist Girl and Assistant DA Girl would be more apt
partners for him.

There was sturdy silence before he said:
“We didn’t touch the wine. And you’re pretty apt.”

Later, Charlie and I had swept the aisles at
Walmart in search of blue hair gel, peppercorns, licorice, and lima beans for her 3-D
re-creation of an animal cell. She chattered about turning Fruit
Roll-Ups into a Golgi body. I listened to soothing snatches of nearby conversation
that floated in the fluorescent light like a country western song.
My brother just
lost his house
in frozen foods and
God will find a way
by the potato
chips and
Daddy’s going to kill him
in front of the boxed wine
.
Soothing, because it seems like very few people at Walmart are pretending that things
are OK, or that the world is going to end just because they
aren’t
OK. I
wheeled my cart through this stew of misfortune and daily kicks-in-the-ass and plain old
tenacity. No one at Walmart cared a whit who I was. I arrived home with ten potatoes for
$1.99 and churned out my mother’s recipe for corn chowder. All of this effort at
ordinary seemed to work: Charlie slipped under her fluffy comforter at the end of the
night, full of starch and bacon bits and her belief that our bad guy was just a coward
of a sign-maker with bad grammar.

Now it’s Monday morning, and I want to
say no to meeting up with Jo, but I can’t. As soon as Charlie leaves for school, I
strap on ASICS and yank my hair into a ponytail, every movement angry. I woke up with a
deep, persistent need to run, to sweat out every bit of poison. Running is the one thing
that always works. I can still manage four miles before my ankle begins to ache, and
then two more miles to spite him. But, first, Jo.

The south side of the park is almost
deserted when I swing the Jeep beside a shiny silver BMW. It’s the only other car
in this lot, which serves a small picnic area. I glance inside the BMW as I slam my door
shut. A Taco Bell bag and an empty Dr Pepper can are tossed on the floor. A handful of
change is mingled in the console with a movie ticket stub. Innocent enough. As I circle
behind the car, heading for the path, I glance down at the BMW’s license plate:
DNA 4N6.

OK, so definitely Jo’s car. I say it
out loud,
“DNA 4N6.”

4N6?
I try again.
DNA Foreign
Sex.
Um, probably not, but it’s taking my mind off the gun riding at my
hip and what things a bone doc might store in the trunk of her car.

On the horizon, a straight black line. The
predicted cold front and 30-degree temperature drop by nightfall. A sixtyish woman in
pink fast-walks past me, pumping her arms, hurrying away from it. I
stop at a homeless man curled into a fetal position, asleep on a concrete picnic table
near a shopping cart crammed with useful trash. I stick a $10 bill deep into the empty
coffee cup he’s clutching. He doesn’t move.

I do that whenever I can. For Roosevelt. I
made Lydia go visit Roosevelt on his street corner after they found me, because I knew
he’d be worried. I never got to say goodbye myself. He was found dead leaning
against a tree, like he fell asleep there, a week before the trial.

DNA 4N6. Four-en-six.
Forensics!
I’m an idiot.

I pick up the pace once I see Jo, who is
right where she said she’d be—under a landmark live oak rumored to have once
been a hanging tree. She’s cross-legged on a bench, sipping out of a green
neoprene water bottle with a red biohazard sticker. Her black North Face windbreaker
bears a
CSI Texas
logo. I’m figuring the bottle and the jacket are
high-end graft from a forensic science conference.

“Thanks for meeting me here.”
She unfolds her lean legs and pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “I worked
in the lab all weekend and needed some air. I heard about what happened at your house.
Have the police caught him?”

“No. I didn’t get a good look.
There’s an anti-death-penalty newsletter that mentions me on a regular basis, so
the cops are checking that email list. The editor posted my street address in her last
blog that ranted about Terrell’s case. I’m not hopeful, though. I’ve
been through this before.”

“It’s odd and scary … that
these people would target you.” She doesn’t say it, but I know what
she’s thinking.
The victim.

I shrug, used to it. “The trial was a
trigger for a lot of anger. And the jury foreman was very public in saying the case
turned on my testimony.”
Even though I was just painting in the
scenery.

She nods sympathetically. I don’t
really want to talk about what happened Saturday night. It’s bad enough that
it’s rolling on an endless loop in my head: Charlie crouching in the shed under a
compulsive array of garden diggers. The police, at my insistence,
breaking down Effie’s back door. She had drifted off in her La-Z-Boy wearing
noise-canceling headphones that she’d ordered off eBay. “You know, to maybe
quiet the voices,” she had told me conspiratorially while a policeman searched her
house. For a brief second, I thought she was also hinting at the ones in my own head,
but her eyes had been darting around like a feral cat. It seems most likely that Miss
Effie’s digger snatcher lives under her own roof. So I didn’t tell the cops,
and I hadn’t yet figured out how to bring it up to Effie.

“I thought maybe you could use some
good news,” Jo says. “The red hair on the jacket found near the field? The
mitochondrial DNA analysis proves there is a 99.75 percent chance it didn’t come
off your head. And there is no evidence of Terrell’s DNA on the jacket
itself.”

“Is it enough to get Terrell a new
trial?” I wonder if she’s told Bill.

“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a
relatively new law in Texas that allows prisoners to successfully appeal a case when
scientific technology can shed light on old evidence. But I talked to Bill this morning.
He’s been through this wringer before with Death Row clients and he’s pretty
adamant that a single red hair and a sloppy expert who used junk science aren’t
going to be enough to convince an appeals court to overturn anything. He wants to throw
more than that at the judge. Unfortunately, Terrell only has his mom and sister as
alibis for the time Hannah Stein disappeared. And the cops have been unable to draw a
line between Merry Sullivan and Hannah. Of course, the cops aren’t exactly on
Terrell’s side—they are mostly focused on getting the girls identified for
the families and getting the media off their backs every time the anniversary rolls
around. Working at the behest of the district attorney who wants a little TV time. Did
you happen to catch his press conference on Hannah?” I can tell she’s not
expecting an answer. “Ferreting out the real killer … well, that would just
be a bonus for
us.
”

The bitterness from her surprises me.
“Sorry.” She grimaces. “I’m usually the one assuming
everyone’s doing the best they can. I wish Bill and Angie had pulled me in much
sooner.” Her face turns more pensive.
“I’m trying
something else in an effort to identify the other two girls. I just don’t know if
there’s time to do it.”

Despite my resolve to pull back from the
case, I feel that relentless tug in my gut.
I’m the one with the answers,
a Susan had insisted that day in the lab. Was it the Susan who belonged to the
chattering skull? Or the new girl, lost and found in the pile of bones?

“A forensic geologist I know in
Galveston is examining the bone evidence,” Jo continues. “He might—a
big might—be able to narrow down the area or areas where they lived. Then we could
check out the cases of missing girls in those places.”

“I’ve seen websites where you
can send in a sample of your DNA and they will decipher your ancestry. Is this anything
like that?”

“It is nothing,
nothing
like
that. My geologist will use isotope analysis to examine the elements in her bone and try
to match it to a region. It’s a tool kind of in its infancy stages when it comes
to forensic identification. It was first used on a boy whose torso was found floating in
the Thames over a decade ago. Scientists were able to trace his origin to
Nigeria.”

“And it helped them identify the boy?
Catch his killer?”

“No. Not yet. It’s a process.
When you’re trying out new technology, each case is a single step on a
million-mile road.” Her voice is softening. “We are so much a part of the
earth, Tessa. Of the ancient past. We store strontium isotopes in our bones, in the same
ratio as in the rocks and soil and water and plants and animals where we live. Animals
eat the plants and drink the water. Humans eat the animals and plants. The strontium is
passed along, all stored in our bones in the same ratio unique to the region.” The
simplicity of her explanations always astounds me, and I think what a good professor she
must be. “The problem is, it’s a big world. And there is a relatively small
database at this point when it comes to identifying geological regions. It’s
another long shot.”

Jo has fallen silent. It still isn’t
clear exactly why she’s asked me to the park.

“Tell me again how you deal with all
of the dead ends,” I finally say.
“There’s just so
much futility. Don’t you ever think you can’t take it anymore?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“But you
choose
this.”

“I’d say it chose me. I’ve
known since I was fourteen this is what I was supposed to do. That’s why, when a
kid tells me he’s going to be a third baseman for the Yankees, I don’t doubt
him. Did you ever hear about the Girl Scout Murders in Oklahoma?”

“No,” I say, although it stirs a
vague memory. Lydia would know.

“Every scientist has a cold case that
pulls at them for years. This Girl Scout case is mine. I was in high school when three
Girl Scouts were pulled out of their tent in the middle of the night on a campout near
Tulsa. They were raped and murdered and left out for show. A local man—who’d
been a popular high school football player—was accused, tried, and declared not
guilty. DNA evidence was collected at the time, but there was zero technology to examine
it. And before you ask, the evidence is now too degraded to be useful. I’ve used
my connections to see every single crime scene photo and read every single word on the
police reports and forensic testing. The point is, if I could beam myself back to 1977,
I could give those parents some answers. And it’s all because scientists in labs
keep trying to do futile things. My work is as much in the future as the
present.”

“I understand,” I say.
“It’s possible there won’t be answers in my case. For years. Why
exactly did you ask me to the park? Just to update me?” It comes out rudely, which
I didn’t intend. I’m just so tired.

“No. I wanted to say … to make
sure that you know that you can always come to me. I don’t want you to ever feel
alone.”

She’s really saying,
Don’t
dig without me. Not at this park. Not anywhere.

“Tessa, have you ever thought that
maybe I need you, too? That I’m not as tough as you think I am?”

The first whisper of the cold front is
stirring the trees.

“Lori, Doris, Michele,” she says
softly. “The names of the dead Girl Scouts.
My
Susans.”

“I’m thinking of not
testifying.”

It sounded way more defiant when I practiced
in front of the mirror this morning with the toothbrush in my hand and aqua bubbles
drizzling out of the corner of my mouth.

I’m NOT testifying, Mr. Vega.

There. That’s better.

I open my mouth again to say it more
emphatically but the district attorney is on his tiger prowl around the office, not the
slightest bit interested in what I
think.
The doc is bent over his desk with a
pile of folders, certainly listening to every word. He’s the master of staying
still.