FORGET ME NOT (Mark Kane Mysteries Book One) (9 page)

“I don’t think you are. There’s still the
possibility that Susan was hoping to gain something by contacting
Gloria. Not her estate at that stage, but perhaps some other
financial benefit. And whatever her original motive may have been,
if she has been responsible for any dishonesty or manipulation then
it should be investigated. Of course, the matter is entirely in
your hands. What concerns me is the amount of the bequest. It seems
disproportionate given your own situation and that of your
sons.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Yes,
you’re right. I’d like you to press on if you would.”

“There’s no indication of where this will was
signed. Can you to find out from Gloria’s attorney who the
witnesses are? I will need to see them if it can be arranged, to
try to determine what her mental state was at that time. I’d also
like to know if there was a prior will. It may be important if
there’s doubt as to the validity of this one.”

“Very well, I’ll look into it. How long do
you think it will take for the DNA analysis to be done?”

“I have a private lab where I take my work.
Hopefully we can get something within ten days – maybe less if they
work over the weekend. The thing is that the actual testing can be
done in less than five days; the rest of the delay is because of
the workload at the lab. They always have a significant backlog –
all the labs are the same – and I can’t really tell them that this
is especially urgent. But I use this lab quite a lot and they
usually do their best to accommodate me. Of course, even if it is
possible to obtain a satisfactory profile we shall still need
something from Susan’s to compare it with. I can’t insist on that;
it can only be obtained with her consent.”

I stayed with him for another half hour or
so, but we had no further discussion about the case. He was paying
my fee and if he wanted me to share a bottle of wine with him it
was fine by me. Although I’d spent relatively little time in his
company over the past few days I had grown to rather like him. He
had an apparent naivety that belied his physical appearance, and a
dignity and simplicity about him that was disarming. He wasn’t
exactly a bundle of laughs though.

Greg handed me the box of orchids as I left.
As I took the box from him he held onto it for a moment and looked
me in the eye.

“When there’s someone in your life that’s
important to you,” he said, “there’s no harm in letting it show
occasionally.” He smiled, and I nodded. “Life’s unpredictable,” he
said, as I placed the box in the trunk of my car, “no-one knows
that better than me.” He handed me the bag containing Gloria’s
hairbrush.

Immediately after leaving Philips I headed
straight for Cambridge with the contents of the plastic bag. I
doubted whether I would get the DNA results for more than a week,
but I knew that Jill Bloom, who ran a private forensic laboratory
called Complete Forensics in Cambridge, would pull out all the
stops for me. I called ahead, but Jill wasn’t available until late
afternoon and as I wanted to see her personally I drove home.
Testing for DNA would take at least seven to ten days and I needed
to make progress as quickly as possible, but a few hours wouldn’t
make much difference. I had made a call and arranged to visit Susan
again, this time at her home. I called Lucy to see if she’d had
time to research the plane crash. I made myself a sandwich and
coffee, as much to kill time as anything else. At four o’clock I
fired up the Chevy and headed for Cambridge.

Over the years Jill had handled a lot of work
for me. She’s a meticulously thorough researcher and a fearsome
expert witness with the ability to turn a prosecution case on its
head. Her strength is her ability to think outside the box; she’s
highly adept at lateral thinking. She’d helped one of my clients
who had been charged with arson. He’d been arrested in the vicinity
of a warehouse fire and forensic tests showed that there were
traces of a fire accelerant called toluene on his shoes which the
fire department examiners confirmed was the same accelerant used to
start the fire. As far as the police forensic laboratory was
concerned it was powerful evidence against him and the DA was
confident of a conviction. The client was adamant that he’d never
knowingly been near anything containing a fire accelerant. Through
meticulous research and correspondence with the manufacturer of my
client’s shoes Jill discovered that toluene was used in the formula
for the adhesive used to attach the sole to the upper part of the
shoe. The prosecution was abandoned.

I knew that if DNA could be extracted from
Gloria’s hair by anyone then it would be her. If she was
unsuccessful then nobody else could do it either. I’d arranged to
see her at five but I was late because of unusually heavy traffic.
I had a security pass into the car park and into the building
itself because I was a regular visitor. Jill was tied up in a
meeting, so I waited in the reception room and tried unsuccessfully
to find something interesting to read. She came down to the
reception at five forty five to receive the sample. She knew that I
needed no advice relating to the DNA test itself since she had
performed other similar tests for me before, but she had
thoughtfully prepared a typed leaflet for my client to explain the
intricacies of testing for DNA on hair samples.

In particular her leaflet pointed out that
although it is sometimes possible to extract DNA from a shaft of a
hair it is far more likely to be successful if the root is present,
because that’s where the blood supply was. Even then experience has
shown that
chemical treatments, including dyes,
can alter the hair cuticle. Dyes can easily penetrate the spaces
between the scaly cells forming the hair cuticle or even raise them
in order to be better absorbed by the hair. Peroxides, one of the
main constituent chemicals in hair dyes, heavily contribute to the
degradation of DNA in hair. Peroxides act by specifically breaking
the bonds in DNA, once the hair is exposed to water on washing; the
DNA is then easily washed out of the hair fibers. The greater the
number of washes, the more DNA is lost from the hairs. This loss of
DNA is not only due to the degradation and breaking down of the
bonds in DNA but also to the damage caused to the hair by simply
washing it.

I was well aware of the limitations so I was
hopeful rather than confident of a positive result. Jill told me
she would call as soon as she had fully analyzed the samples. There
were probably hundreds of hairs in the bristles, she said, so it
might take quite a while. If it was necessary to test every strand
then obviously it would take a lot longer, but she would start by
examining the hairs to see if any of them had the follicle intact.
We didn’t waste time with any small talk, so less than five minutes
after giving her the samples I was climbing back into the Chevy and
heading home.

I stopped at a grocery store on the way home
and stocked up for the week. Liquor and food. After all, a balanced
diet is good for you. I took the box of orchids out of the trunk
and placed them on my dining table in the living room. I decided I
deserved a barbecue so I lit the burner and prepared some dogs and
home-made patties and put the buns on the heat to toast. I cracked
open a Budweiser and treated myself to a cigarette. I couldn’t
invite Lucy because she would go on and on about it. The cigarette,
not the beer; or maybe both. Anyway, I’m one of life’s curiosities:
I often like to be alone. I’ve never been to a party that I’ve
enjoyed and I even prefer to watch the Red Sox and the Patriots on
TV rather than sit amongst the hordes. The great thing about being
by yourself is that you don’t have to please anyone or moderate
your behavior. And there’s another thing: I talk to myself. And I
sing to myself too, sometimes. Now who else would want to listen to
that?

All my instincts told me that Susan wasn’t
the genuine article. I would visit her again tomorrow to try to get
a DNA sample from her, even though I was far from certain that it
was going to be any use. If Susan was really Gloria’s daughter then
she wouldn’t hesitate to provide a sample. Even if my instincts
were right, however, I figured she would be savvy enough to believe
that her DNA sample was no use. Maybe I’d telephone her in the
morning and tell her about the request before our meeting; that
would give her plenty of time to trawl the internet. On the other
hand I’d prefer to see her unrehearsed reaction when I made the
request. She knew already that Gloria had been cremated and that
there were no other blood relatives for a comparison, so she would
probably query the point of my request. I’d tell her it was routine
for probate consultants to make such requests in the circumstances,
and she’d also know that a refusal to comply with such a request
would only bring suspicion. If I was right in my analysis of the
situation then whether or not she was really who she said she was I
was confident she’d agree. I told Philips that I would drop by on
my way to Concord which involved a bit of a detour, but I wanted to
know what he had been able to find out about the signatories on the
will, and anyway, as a matter of professional courtesy I prefer to
speak directly with clients whenever possible rather than over the
telephone.

I finished eating, drank a couple more beers
and headed to the bathroom and bed. On the way I realized I was
singing to myself: “If you knew Suzie, like I know Suzie…”

Greg’s dress was smart casual as usual and
again the sun was shining. This time we didn’t linger over coffee
or wine. I explained my proposed plan of action and the reason why
I was confident that Susan would comply, and I gave him Jill’s
leaflet with a brief but detailed explanation about the
possibilities of extracting DNA from hair. He had already been in
touch with Bill Saunders and determined that the signatures of the
witnesses on the will were genuine. Bill had contacted both
witnesses and they confirmed that they were casual acquaintances of
Gloria’s from the Boylston club. Gloria had simply told them that
she needed her signature to be witnessed. They were not shown the
contents of the will itself, and there was no requirement that they
had to be. They confirmed that only the three of them were present
when they signed the will.

I told Greg that until we got the DNA
analysis result I would have to work on the assumption that it may
not be helpful.

“I’m seeing Susan at her home today and will
have time to delve more deeply into her background: where she grew
up, where she went to school, whether she had any friends or
contacts from her childhood days. My assistant has drawn a blank so
far in her search for newspaper coverage of a plane crash in Idaho
in late 1989. She’ll keep digging.”

Greg said that he would try to arrange a
meeting with the signatories to Gloria’s will and try to get more
details of the circumstances at the time, and specifically to see
if either of them had felt she was acting at all strangely: he’d
arrange for me to meet with them myself if I thought it might be
helpful.

“During that time we hadn’t told anyone
about Gloria’s problem. If she was at the club that day then it’s
likely she was feeling alright. I don’t personally know either of
the witnesses but I expect I’ll recognize them when I see them.
Golf widows probably; there are lots of those in the club.”

I left Greg shortly after nine and hoped the
sun would continue to keep me company after I left the Philips
house. It did. I headed for Concord. There are few parts of Concord
that aren’t picturesque, but Susan had found one of them. She lived
in a single room on a second floor walk-up in a nondescript
clapboard duplex on the outskirts of the small town. Nobody had
apparently thought it worth lavishing loving care on the outside of
the building since the Civil War. The house had once been painted
white but what was left of the paint job was patchy and peeling.
The only exception was the front door which was scabbed with
blisters of paint that can’t have been more than twenty years old.
Susan was outside washing her car when I arrived. It was a two door
Plymouth sedan from the nineteen seventies, painted lime green with
a black vinyl roof. Unlike the house it looked to be in almost
pristine condition. She wore the same outfit as the first time I
saw her, although it was probably a duplicate. She obviously hadn’t
made an effort to smarten herself up for my visit. Some women can
look smart effortlessly; Susan wasn’t one of them.

She led me up to her room, telling me as we
climbed the stairs that it was a furnished rental and that she’d
lived there for about six months, but she’d been in Concord for
more than a year. “Because of Gloria,” she said. Unsurprisingly
there was nothing in the room that told me anything of significance
about its current occupant; thrift shop furniture and walls
unadorned by any personal decorative touches. There was a single
bed in the corner over by the window and a small cluttered kitchen
annex on the other side of the room. There was a single bookshelf
well stocked with paperbacks. A computer and aging plasma TV were
the only signs of the twenty first century. There was a single
armchair and no sofa, so we sat at the small dining table which was
flanked by two straight-backed cane chairs.

“Sorry, it’s a bit of a dump, but I don’t
usually have visitors,” she said.

“I live alone so I know what you mean,” I
said.

“I’ve got the copies you asked for; my birth
certificate and stuff.” She indicated a brown manila envelope lying
on the table between us. I opened it to take a look.

“I can make some tea if you like. I’m out of
coffee.”

“Tea will be fine, thanks.”

She busied herself in the
kitchen while I looked at the documents she had provided. There was
everything that I’d asked for that she said she had. The birth
certificate named her place of birth in a small town in California,
her date of birth as 21
^st
June 1971. I strolled
over to the bookshelf. It was the only thing in the room that might
tell me something about herself, if only her taste in literature.
Most of the books were new, in the sense that they were recently
published novels by mostly well-known authors, some of them in the
mystery crime vein, and some romances. I looked inside some of them
to see if Susan had written her name inside the front cover or on
the flyleaf. Some of the books had a single name, Josette, written
inside, and one had ‘Josette, with love.’ I couldn’t find any with
the name Susan, or Granger. There were some older books but none of
them had anything written inside.