Red Herring (23 page)

“No, no,” Joe joined in. “Me, too. They were great, and I thank you so much for suggesting them in the first place.”

Past the security door, they walked down a hallway much like what they’d just left—dark, old, built for abuse, and additionally cluttered with odd pieces of equipment that looked destined for the dump. As they went, they caught glimpses to both sides of lab technicians hard at work, dressed in white coats and—because of the setting—looking more like World War II researchers than the inhabitants of an up-to-date forensic lab.

Hawke finally led them into a room near the end, with a table in its middle and an assortment of counters, bookshelves, charts, and at least one projection screen lining the walls. From past exposure, Joe knew this to be their one conference room.

“Take a load off,” Hawke invited them, waving at the chairs circling the table, whose surface was littered with paperwork, some of which Joe recognized from Brookhaven.

“You want anything to drink?” he asked as they settled down. Both men shook their heads.

David nodded and addressed Joe. “I’m glad you called, to be honest.
This whole thing has been so unusual, and is beginning to attract so much attention, that even I was wondering if we shouldn’t compare notes.”

“You having problems with what was done?” Joe asked, suspicious of Hawke’s tone.

But he set them both at ease. “No, no. God, no. The science was top-notch—the kind of stuff I never thought I’d get my hands on, not before I retired, anyhow. I mean, synchrotrons? Copy Number Variations? Sweatprints and touch-DNA? For a guy like me, financed by the state, to get a whiff of some of this is right up there with getting a ride in the space shuttle. Maybe it’s only a trip up and back, but, oh, boy,” he said, laughing. “What a ride, huh?”

Bill and Joe remained silent, their expressions polite.

Still smiling, David confessed, “Okay, I know. Enough nerdiness. Why don’t you start, Joe? You called me, after all. Then I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

“You just touched on the biggest thing, David,” Joe said. “The press is going crazy and the politicians are ganging up. I just wanted your feedback about what you had me carry down to Long Island. I got the nerdy part,” he added quickly, raising his eyebrows. “But I meant the forensics. The publicity’ll only get worse, but if we get lucky and pull this crook in, my gut tells me it’ll be like a woodchuck version of O. J. Simpson. I’m curious how you feel about that kind of scrutiny, given the route we took with the evidence.”

All the glee had faded from Hawke’s expression. He looked at Joe carefully. “I did tell you that you can’t bring much of this into court. You remember that?”

“Of course,” Joe soothed him. “It was along investigative lines I was talking. I’ve got several dozen people out there right now chasing down gunpowder suppliers, oil undercoaters, acetylene distributors,
lumber mills, funeral homes, and Christ knows what else, all based on atom-sized evidence collected by a bunch of wannabe Nobel laureates. You’re the one who deals with us day in and day out; you know the scientific standards around which we base our cases. This is the first time I’ve seen you since Marine and Shepard pulled their rabbits out of the hat.”

David was nodding. “Okay. I got it. In short form, I like it. More importantly, I’ll defend it if it comes under attack. Fingerprints took forever to meet the legal standard; DNA was a lot faster. It’s reasonable to expect that forensic science will be making inroads on a regular basis and that its validity will be increasingly recognized in court. So, the cows are out of the barn; I have no problem lecturing whatever reporter or politician wants to ask me about any of this.” He waved his hand over the strewn paperwork before him.

“That’s good to hear,” Bill murmured.

“True,” Joe agreed, “although I didn’t have much doubt. You prepared us for that going in. What about the three blood drops, though? At Brookhaven, they wobbled between saying some of the blood came from dead people, or maybe was just left around in the sun too long. I did mention that I had people checking funeral homes and morgues. You think I’m wasting my time?”

Now David began looking vaguely uncomfortable. “Oh, yeah, the degradation and contamination. I looked into those.”

Both cops were struck by his tone of voice.

“And?” Joe prompted.

Hawke shrugged awkwardly. “Well, in retrospect, it’s a little embarrassing, but after all the data came in, I, too, was struck by those findings, so I did some checking. They seemed so obviously fundamental. Turns out we noticed both artifacts, too, back when we constructed the initial profiles.”

“What’s that mean?” Bill asked.

“The reason Marine and Shepard were equivocal,” David explained, still sounding unhappy, “was because they ended up with the samples. They didn’t collect them.”

“Why does that matter?” Joe asked.

David tilted his head slightly. “It goes to the degradation. You now know that blood degrades in the body or outside of it and that it’s pretty hard to tell which happens where, but there are indicators that help you figure it out—or at least take an educated guess.”

“Okay,” Joe urged, wondering where this was going.

“Take a drop of blood deposited on a pillow versus one found on a tabletop,” Hawke suggested.

Joe began to have an inkling. “Or a forehead,” he said.

Hawke nodded. “Or a forehead. The pillow sample soaks in, is sheltered from air and sun to a limited degree, and takes time to dry.”

“And degrades in the meantime,” Bill contributed, also on board.

“Right,” Hawke agreed. “The sample on the flatter, nonabsorbent surface, though, dries pretty quickly and stops degrading almost immediately.”

“Especially if that surface is a dashboard, in the cold, in the middle of the night,” Joe finished. He looked at Hawke inquiringly. “So, what you’re saying,” he added, “is that we’re on the right track. All three drops were deposited where they would dry quickly, and therefore two of them must’ve been degraded beforehand, like inside dead people. And to wrap it up even tighter, we have one sample slightly contaminated by one of the others, painting a picture of two bodies lying side by side. What’m I missing?”

“Nothing,” Hawke conceded. “It’s just that we already knew all that as soon as we received the samples from you, way back when.”

There was a stunned silence in the room.

Hawke continued. “Our protocol is to produce a DNA profile and the gender of the donor. That’s what you ask for and that’s what we give you, along with running the profile through the computers for any hits. The lab technician here who processed all three blood drops noticed at the time not only that one was slightly degraded, but that the other one was even more so. Not only that, he picked up on some DNA white noise in the background of the more degraded sample, although he didn’t bother pursuing it. He was following procedure, which is to run the samples a few times more if the results are unsatisfactory to begin with.”

“As when they’re degraded or dirty?” Bill asked.

“Exactly. The higher end alleles, or genes, if you will, are the ones to go first with degradation, leaving the smaller, molecular alleles. In fact, when the samples are too poor, we can’t even enter them into CODIS—the national data bank. We have to settle for just our in-state inventory. That’s what happened with the one found on the dashboard. CODIS demands a minimum of ten alleles out of the standard thirteen; we accept a lower threshold, largely because of our much smaller population base.”

Joe was studying his friend quizzically, feeling somewhat at sea. “I get it, David, but he was following the rules. Thanks for being embarrassed, and I guess you’ll be issuing an interoffice memo for future work, but we figured it out in the end, right?”

“Only because of Brookhaven,” Hawke said mournfully.

Joe chose to move on, impatient with this kind of morbid navel-gazing.

“There’s something I didn’t ask when I was in Long Island,” he therefore brought up. “Couldn’t they have done a profile of the DNA on the electrical cord? They found genetic material.”

“They did get DNA,” David agreed, “but not the kind we enter
into our data banks. That’s where they can do things I can only dream about. What they found was that the same man left his DNA at both Doreen’s and Mary’s scenes—on the underwear and the cord, respectively. But they didn’t get enough to actually enter it into any system.”

“The thirteen alleles you were talking about?” Bill asked.

“Exactly.”

Joe was rubbing his temple, trying to extract a memory. “David, I get it that we’ve got the wrong kind of DNA there. But what about the three blood drops? They’re huge and relatively healthy. I know you ran them through the national system and our own and got nothing, but isn’t there another way of analyzing them? I thought I read something . . .”

Hawke’s face cleared a little as he laughed. “Wow—don’t I wish. No, those’re all criminal profile databases. We don’t know who belongs to those three drops—they’re just people, as far as we know.”

“He’s talking about familial profiles,” Bill suggested.

Joe snapped his fingers. “That’s what I was looking for. Familial DNA, where one family member shares some of the same profile as another.”

Hawke was shaking his head. “God, you guys read too much, or watch too much TV.”

“But it’s true,” Joe protested.

Hawke held up both hands. “It is, it is. You’re right.”

Joe was on the edge of his seat. “So, hear me out. We have the killer’s DNA but can’t do anything with it; we have three other DNAs that may not be on record, but we sure as hell know that they were collected and deposited at crime scenes by the killer. Is it an absolute certainty that some relative of even one of them isn’t a crook on file?”

Bill and David exchanged glances.

“No,” Bill said cautiously.

Joe sat back. “Then let’s run all three samples at least through the Vermont database and see if we get lucky. Can’t hurt, can it?”

Bill was mulling it over without comment, but Hawke merely shrugged. “We’ve never done it before. I’ll have to run it by the lawyers for permission, but I don’t see where it would be a problem.”

“It’s just knocking on doors,” Joe stated. “Like we’re already doing.”

The Back Stop had always struck Lester as a better name for a bar than a gun store, not that the name sounded all that great for either. Nevertheless, it was Windham County’s biggest supplier of weapons, ammunition, and—most importantly to Les—reloading equipment. And in a state unique for its lack of gun laws, that was a statement of substance.

It wasn’t located in Brattleboro, the county’s anchor town, but west of there, on Route 9, more toward Wilmington and the magnet of the ski resorts sprinkled along the backbone of the Green Mountains, from Massachusetts to Canada, 175 miles to the north. The owners of the Back Stop weren’t idiots or woodchucks—they fully appreciated the allure of Vermont romanticism, the appeal of the gun to the American male, and the convenience of being near a cluster of vacation-ready condos. The Back Stop had figured out that while the rest of the family might find joy in visiting outlet stores, spas, ski slopes, or golf courses, the males would eventually find a way to rationalize a trip to a gun emporium.

And Lester had to admit, they’d done a hell of a job. He wasn’t a
gun fancier himself. He carried one from obligation, qualified with it twice a year, as required, cleaned it perhaps just as often, and otherwise worked hard to forget he even had it. But he conceded that the carefully orchestrated aura of the Back Stop revived the same faint childhood cowboy stirrings in his chest that they clearly did with more gusto in the people he saw trolling the aisles of new and used long guns, occupying an entire wing of the building. The place was dark, woodsy, handsomely dinged and bruised, and smelled of leather, wood, and oil.

Sadly, though, he also knew that the owners weren’t locals who’d figured out how to separate well-heeled flatlanders from their cash. They were two Realtors from Stamford, Connecticut, who’d identified an extra wrinkle in the exploitation of Vermont.

Still, he was a realist, and recognized a couple of faces working behind the glass counters. Whoever had set all this up was aiding the local economy, and in a small, rural state of this size, that was only a good thing.

He approached one of the men he knew, who’d once owned a small hardware store before the economy had overwhelmed him.

“Hey, Ed,” he said quietly, extending a hand in greeting.

Ed Silverstein cocked his head and smiled. “Detective. It’s a real pleasure. How’ve you been?”

“I’m not complaining. Keeping busy.”

“I guess,” Ed commented. “They got you working on that triple murder? That sounded terrible.”

Les gestured dismissively. “Among other things. It reads worse than it really is. You know newspapers.”

Silverstein chuckled. “Oh, yeah. The family okay?”

“They’re fine. My son’s almost as tall as me now.”

The older man laughed outright. “Oh, my God, Lester. No offense, but in your case, that’s a scary thing. Does he have to bend over for more oxygen?”

Lester shook his head. “Very good, Ed. I never heard that one before.”

Ed looked slightly apologetic. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. What can I do you for—other than more insults from me?”

“No—no problem. I’m too old to be thin-skinned anymore. I need a little research question answered.”

Silverstein nodded, his face now serious. “Give me a try.”

“I’m wondering about folks who come in here who do their own reloading.”

Ed’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ve got just the man for you—he’s our specialist. Come with me.”

They both walked down the length of the counter, one on each side, until a gap allowed Silverstein to usher Les inside the barrier, and from there to a door leading to an employees-only back room.

They wandered through a storeroom and a shipping area before reaching the store’s highly advertised gun repair and customizing section—a large, well-lighted room totally lacking any Vermonty kitsch, lined with workstations and anchored in its middle with several large, felt-covered tables, all covered with guns in various stages of disassembly.