Red Herring (14 page)

Starr’s only response was to look at them wonderingly, which made Willy think that she was either truly clueless or among the best liars he’d ever known. But his gut told him the latter was wishful thinking.

Still, there was something about her that he couldn’t ignore—something guarded that they hadn’t squarely hit.

He tried a different approach, using her earlier distrust and sadness. “Michele,” he asked, “let me tell you how we do this. We spend days looking into people’s lives, layer by layer, figuring out what they were doing when and who with. It’s only after we’re finished that we finally conduct the interview. You’re a smart woman. You can figure out why we do it that way.”

“I didn’t know the McNaughton boy,” she insisted. “I swear. I have no reason to lie about that.”

Sammie saw her own opportunity to maneuver. “Mary is dead, too, Michele. She was found hanging by the neck a few days ago.”

Michele sat back in her chair as if pushed by a large hand, her face drained and her mouth open. “What? Mary? Oh, my God.”

She ducked her head, covered her face, and began sobbing.

Sammie rolled her eyes in frustration, but Willy followed up quickly. “Michele,” he pressed, handing her the napkin she’d given him with his coffee. “Talk to us. What’s going on?”

She raised her face to answer. “I was in love with Dory, but she wasn’t interested. Mary was the only reason I didn’t lose my mind and my job, both.”

“Dory was gay?” Sammie blurted.

“No,” Michele wailed. “That was the problem. I didn’t know what
she was, but I loved her anyhow. She was only in her mid-twenties; she didn’t seem to have anyone in her life. In those days, everything was perception and guesswork; it’s not like now, when you can just ask. It was subtler, more of a courtship, and I thought I was making a connection. But when I took the next step, she slammed the door in my face. I completely fell apart.”

“And that’s when Mary showed up,” Willy suggested.

“She knew about me,” Michele admitted. “All of us tended to know about each other; there were signs only we recognized. But she was older and committed to Elise, and she was incredibly discreet in any case, because of her position. Still, she sought me out, and gave me comfort, and by doing that, she saved my life.”

She wiped at her face ineffectively, still sobbing. “I can’t believe she’s dead. And she hanged herself? Why?”

“We don’t know,” Willy said blandly.

“What happened after Dory turned you down?” Sam asked.

Michele took a deep breath and straightened in her seat. “Nothing. She left. Most of the summer had gone by anyhow. I never heard from her again, or even about her until I read the papers.” She paused and shook her head. “And now poor Mary. What’s Elise going to do? Mary was her life.”

Both detectives ignored that question.

“In your conversations with Doreen,” Sammie asked after a pause, “when you were getting to know each other, did she ever mention that her boss had a son at the school?”

“McNaughton was her boss’s son?”

That clearly answered the question.

The conversation wound down from there. Sam and Willy took a couple of more halfhearted stabs at the subject, but what had seemed so full of potential hours ago now seemed to have dissolved into simply
another example of Vermont’s uniquely sparse population commingling as to defy all likelihood. It was no cliché that up here, far from the urban mob, almost everyone did in fact know everyone else.

Except for where it might have helped the case.

Eric Marine was a white-haired, bespectacled man with a face whose every feature mirrored the motion of his mouth. When he smiled, everything lifted with happiness, and when he frowned, it all sagged with disappointment. The man’s innate expressiveness, and his habit of reacting to everything said to him, led to an ever-shifting facial landscape that Joe, for one, couldn’t stop watching.

Fortunately, Marine was looking only at Joe’s companion. “David Hawke,” he was saying, shaking the latter’s hand. “How wonderful. Such excellent papers—informative, original, even challenging sometimes.” He suddenly took in Joe. “You are very fortunate. Dr. Hawke and his team were among the early ones to grasp the significance of DNA work—extraordinary, given the small size of your state.” His other hand suddenly shot up to his forehead as he blurted, “No offense.”

“None taken,” Joe said.

They were standing in the lobby of Burlington’s Hilton Hotel, just across Battery Street from a sweeping view of Lake Champlain, whose iron-gray surface was flecked with whitecaps. Far in the distance,
crowned by a solid plane of cold, bruised sky, the razor-sharp outline of New York’s Adirondack Mountains stretched out like an arrested tidal wave of snow-frosted rock—as dark and disturbingly ominous as the smaller, more benign Green Mountains to the east were rounded, gentler, and more inviting.

“Dr. Hillstrom was telling me that you two gentlemen were interested in the forensic capabilities of BNL,” Marine said brightly, not pausing to add, “Of course, as you might have gathered from my talk at this conference, this is an area of some interest to me. I have been thinking for quite a while what a shame it is that our life sciences and especially our NSLS and CFN technologies have been so rarely considered as potential resources.” He laughed and held up a finger for emphasis. “Not that I don’t recognize the standard barrier, which is money, as always.”

He walked away suddenly, forcing them to follow him to a small cluster of comfortable armchairs, grouped out of the way near a gigantic window facing the view. Joe noticed that David was smiling broadly, clearly in his element. For his part, Joe had only deciphered that BNL stood for Brookhaven National Laboratory. This was going to be a challenging conversation.

Marine happily plopped into one of the chairs and sighed. “You people live in the most beautiful part of the country. The lab is located in a very pretty setting, too. Don’t get me wrong. Five thousand acres of fields and forest.” He laughed again abruptly. “And lots and lots of wild turkeys, not all of them employees.”

Joe and David joined in politely, making Marine wave dismissively. “I know, I know. Bad joke. No need for flattery. My wife already tells me what a bore I can be. Still, it is so nice to get out and see another part of the world.”

He changed gears and slapped his hands on the arms of his easy
chair. “Okay, enough of that. You gentlemen have a problem, and I am wasting your time.”

He stared at them both expectantly.

Joe was the first to jump in. “Dr. Marine, we have . . .”

“Eric,” the scientist interrupted.

Joe smiled. “Right. Thanks, and please call us Joe and David. Eric, we have three homicides, two of them not known as such by anyone but us so far . . .”

“Why?” Marine interrupted again.

Joe thought fast to figure out what he meant. “Because one was disguised by the killer as a suicide, and the other as a car crash involving alcohol.”

He paused. Marine nodded, smiling widely. “And all three were conducted by the same person? How intriguing.”

“The evidence suggests it,” Joe agreed cautiously. “But that’s one big reason we’re knocking on your door. As you know, whenever we’re lucky enough to get a picture of a bad guy, or a fingerprint or a DNA sample, we always have to cross our fingers that somebody or some database will give us a match. So far, even though we have a pretty decent collection of samples, we’ve gotten no matches.”

Hawke cleared his throat to contribute, but Marine stalled him with a raised index finger. “Hold on, David. I’d like to hear Joe’s wording first. It’s often useful to build from the layman’s view upward.”

Joe laughed awkwardly. “Well, you’ll get what you’re paying for. Okay, as of this morning, after David delivered his latest from the third killing, we have a collection of three carefully placed blood deposits, two male, one female, all laced with anticoagulant . . .”

“Ah,” Marine exclaimed. “Beverly told me about these, but the findings hadn’t come in for the third. So it’s looking like a calling card, too.”

“Right,” Joe agreed, relieved that Hillstrom had done some groundwork. “We don’t know how or why, but more than anything, they connect all three cases, like three different paintings all bearing the same signature. And we also have these.”

He reached into his pocket and extracted a stapled sheaf of paper, which he handed to the Brookhaven biologist. It was a documented listing he and David had prepared earlier of everything from Doreen’s sliced nightgown and bloodstained underwear, through Mary’s electric cord and supposed suicide note, to Bob’s truck bumper and empty Scotch bottle, along with the three mysterious blood drops and all of Hillstrom’s autopsy findings.

Marine took his time with the pages, nodding occasionally and muttering things neither of his companions could overhear. Eventually, he placed the pack on his knee and addressed David Hawke.

“And you can do what with all this?”

“The standard entry analyses,” Hawke replied. “Trace, DNA, and biological sampling for starters. We can also farm out things like the touch-DNA we hope may be adhering to the electrical wire used in the hanging. But I know our limitations, and I’m pretty sure that what we have so far is what we’ll end up with in the long run. I was crossing my fingers that with your resources, you could save us a lot of time and money and give all or some of this the best shot possible, instead of our nibbling away at it until we have nothing left to test.”

“This is a hugely important case to us, Eric,” Joe picked up. “In the rest of the country, a stranger killing three apparently unrelated people is third-page news. In Vermont, if word got out, it would spread like a wildfire and the politicians would go nuts. Roughly speaking, we get ten to twelve homicides a year here, total. We really need to give this everything we can.”

Marine pressed his lips together briefly before responding. “I will
see what I can do. Speaking for myself, I can run those three unknown blood samples through several tests not available to David, and I won’t have your constraints. Just to confirm, you are following a purely investigative route, is that correct?”

Both men nodded in unison.

“That’s perfect. Some cutting-edge research into genetic predictors of externally visible characteristics may come in handy here. Traits like ethnic origin and hair and eye color are starting to surface with a higher and higher degree of predictability. This is a subject of interest I’ve been exploring and promoting for years.”

“With all that in mind,” David cautioned, “we will have to follow some basic rules of evidence. Someone from Joe’s office will accompany or at least account for the whereabouts of whatever you take at all times, and my office will supply you with known control samples to be subjected to the same tests you administer to the actual ones. That way, down the line, nobody can claim that any results mysteriously appeared just because of your process.”

“Understood,” Marine agreed, adding, “Which brings up another route I’m hoping to follow. We have a synchrotron light source at BNL, capable of extraordinary things, and with the additional advantage that it doesn’t alter or destroy samples. So, once we’re done, and you find reason to either preserve the evidence or use it for more tests, it’ll be available. The same’s not true for the drops of blood, though. You do understand that?”

“Yes,” Hawke told him, “but it doesn’t matter. The three samples are large enough that you’ll have plenty to test and have some left over. We can live with that.”

“I hate to sound stupid here,” Joe volunteered, “which was bound to happen sooner than later, but what is a synchrotron?”

Marine laughed. “Good question. Not stupid at all. Let me explain
it this way: If you’re about to read something small, and the failing daylight isn’t quite enough, you turn on a lamp and put on your reading glasses. Not only does the page brighten up, but the words seem to jump out at you.”

“Okay,” Joe encouraged him.

“Well, the synchrotron is a pinpoint light source,” Marine continued. “But of a brightness to rival the sun’s, and we use it to produce X-rays, ultraviolet light, and infrared rays to study things at their atomic level in all sorts of different ways. It’s the ultimate reading lamp for objects down to a billionth of a meter small. As a result, it can allow us to see all the various components that constitute a sample. That’s where the reading light metaphor falls apart, naturally, since now we’re talking about characteristics unique to a specific sample, which is more like a fingerprint, no?”

He looked at Joe happily, content that his explanation had been like the light itself. But David knew to add a bit more.

“Remember Beverly’s idea that something might have come off the knife and been deposited along the edges of the cut in Doreen’s nightgown?” he asked. “That’s way beyond what I can do here at the lab, but the synchrotron would be like a flashlight in a dark cave, as Eric was saying. It could give us trace evidence at the atomic level, if there is any, which might help us identify what environment that knife had been exposed to earlier. Plus,” he added, “if he runs the electrical cord through the light source before he runs any DNA tests, the fact that the synchrotron leaves everything intact means we virtually get a free sweatprint test thrown in.”

Marine picked up on Hawke’s educational tone. “Sweatprints are a perfect application of the light source, since they represent the minerals and other compounds that adhere microscopically to a person’s skin, and are often left behind when something is touched. That’s in
addition to any DNA that might be there, too—what we were calling touch-DNA—even in the absence of an actual fingerprint.”

“And you have access to this light source?” Joe asked.

Marine gave him a wink. “That’s the beauty of how we do things down there. It’s more like a college than a lab. That can mean jealousies and rivalries and cliques, of course. We’ve earned seven Nobels, after all; the stakes are high. But by the same token, there is the kind of collegiality, collaboration, and friendship that overrides all that, and allows for much work that often stays off the radar. Of course, it depends on the device—there’s not much leeway using the ion collider, for example; people are on that to discover the source of the universe. Best not to mess with them. But the light source has some sixty-eight beams to work from, and more researchers using it than anything else on campus. People slip in quick projects all the time with a wink and a nod. Besides, one of our missions is improved national security. This kind of fits that bill, not to mention that forensic applications are begging to be better explored with the synchrotron—it’s a journal article in the making, easy. I can make this work all sorts of ways. Don’t give it a thought.”