Slipping Into Darkness (23 page)

 

Francis had a sudden dropping sensation.

 

“So whose blood
was
it under Allison Wallis’s fingernails?” he asked as calmly as he could.

 

“Well, that’s a very good question,” Dave said, nodding. “Because again, I noticed there was no Y chromosome involvement.”

 

“You’re kidding me. It wasn’t even a man’s blood we found?”

 

“Well, here’s where it
really
gets strange.” Dave fussed with his papers. “I mentioned that your friend Detective Ali also brought in part of a pillowcase that was labeled as having the victim’s blood on it.”

 

“Right.”

 

“So just to keep things straight for our filing system, I compared the sample from under Allison’s fingernails to the blood on the pillowcase, thinking one would be from the assailant and the other would be from the victim.”

 

“And?”

 

“They were the same.”

 

“Come again?”

 

“They were identical. That’s not the strange part. It sounds like your crime scene was quite a mess back then. There was blood all over the place. It’s very likely Allison touched her own wounds and blood got under the cuticles. I’ve certainly seen it happen.”

 

“But?”

 

Francis felt himself drawing up to meet a scientific caveat.

 

“But then I realized there was something familiar about the electropherograms I was looking at.”

 

“The . . . ?”

 

Dave presented him with a stapled stack of three charts. Francis turned the pages, seeing graph peaks sticking up here and there like stalagmites.

 

“Doc, I have not a fucking clue what I’m looking at,” he confessed, noticing a series of small boxes under the peaks with numbers in them.

 

“Oh, you masters of the soft sciences.” Dave allowed himself the briefest twitch of a smile as he reached across the desk with a pen.

 

“Okay, I was a C student in bio at Regis. I admit it.”

 

But I’d like to see you running around West Harlem at four in the morning, looking for some fucking angel dust-smoking psychopath who’s just cut up his wife and shot three cops,
Francis thought.

 

“This is a report converting DNA into numbers on a chart. To come up with a profile, we look for variations at thirteen different locations on twelve different chromosomes. Basically, you get one set of genes from your mother and one set from your father. The numbers you see on the chart represent how many times the DNA segments are repeated at each location. And all the little variations help account for the fact that I’m not sitting here talking to a carbon copy of your father.”

 

They call that evolution?
Francis wondered which number on his chart was making him go blind.

 

“Then we look at something called the amelogenin locus, which tells us gender identification.” Dave made a circle on one graph with his pen. “When you see a single peak like this, it’s a woman.” He made a second circle on another graph. “When you see two peaks, it’s a man.”

 

“Okay.”

 

Francis began to flip back and forth between the three pages. The first page, clearly marked “Christine Rogers, 2003,” had a graph with a single peak near the top and the number 103.01 displayed underneath it. He turned to the next page, tagged “Allison Wallis, 1983,” and saw an identical graph with the same peak and the same 103.01 below it. The third page was exactly the same as well.

 

“I don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t see any differences between these.”

 

“Exactly.” Dave sat back, satisfied that his job was done.

 

“You’re showing me that both these victims twenty years apart had the same
female
DNA under their nails?”

 

“
And
it matches the blood found on Allison’s pillowcase.”

 

Francis stared at the last chart, the stalagmite peak turning into a long jagged spike pressing into the top of his skull.

 

“You fucked up.”

 

“I did
not
fuck up.” Dave squeaked forward in his seat. “We run a clean shop here. This is one of the most advanced professional offices of its kind in the world. I personally checked these samples when you brought them in. The one from Christine Rogers was almost still wet to the touch. The two from ’83 were dry and crusty. There was no mistake here. The chain of custody was never broken.”

 

“And so you’re seriously telling me you found Allison Wallis’s blood under Christine Rogers’s fingernails?” Francis found himself doing the pan-and-scan around the office, as if someone else were standing nearby who could explain it all to both of them.

 

“What can I say?” Dave turned his palms up, Francis noticing how soft and white they looked from being snug in rubber gloves all day. “You asked me for a match and I found you one. It happens to be female. Beyond that, I don’t know. . . .”

 

“But why can’t you definitively tell me that this is or isn’t Allison Wallis’s blood? That should be the easiest thing in the world.”

 

“It would be if your Detective Ali brought me a larger sample to work with.” David shrugged. “But all he had were those fingernail scrapings and the pillowcase with her name on it from 1983. He couldn’t find that bloody tampon that was supposed to be in the original case file, so I have nothing else to compare it with.”

 

Another flush of adrenaline made Francis’s vision narrow a few more degrees. It was just getting worse and worse here. He pictured that little bloody stub of cotton crammed in with other dead people’s things in a barrel on a high shelf, secretions dripping in the heat and cross-contaminating one another.

 

“God
damn.
” He twisted his neck. “What about the hair that we found wrapped around her finger?”

 

“Doesn’t have a root, so we can’t get nuclear DNA out of it, and it’s not long enough for us to send out for mitochondrial testing. We’d have to do a consumption test. Which means we’d need permission from both the prosecution and the defense, because afterward there won’t be any evidence left.”

 

“Fuck.”

 

Eels wrestled in his gut. He’d seen some bizarre things in twenty-five years of police work. He’d seen a 350-pound gangster pull a pork chop out of his suit pocket in the middle of a trial; he’d seen a Chihuahua hanging by its neck from a shower curtain rod in a tenement bathroom like it had committed suicide; he’d seen a guy on angel dust who’d peeled his own face off and fed it to his German shepherd; he’d seen a man fall twenty-five floors and land on his back on top of a car, somehow ending up with his palate under his ass. But he’d never come across a murderer who’d saved his victim’s DNA while he was in prison so he could leave it at another crime scene.

 

But what were the other options? The eels thrashed and the jagged peaks in his head sharpened. That Allison Wallis was still alive, as her mother thought, and going around killing other girls? That she had some identical twin that nobody had bothered to mention? Each scenario was more ridiculous than the one before it, but the common element in all of them was that he’d sent the wrong man to prison for twenty years.

 

But that was impossible. That was Antarctica, a whiteout, a place you could never come back from. That was the sun fading and the sea freezing up. He pictured himself standing at the edge of a precipice, a howling icy crevice opening at his feet. Snowflakes spiraled down into the bottomless void. Once you started to fall, there’d be no saving you, no bringing you back. No rope could reach that far. The walls would close in and trap you there forever.

 

“So, what do we do now?” he said.

 

“We?”
The jazzbo beard dipped.

 

“Yeah, ‘we.’ You’re gonna have to testify about what happened in this case too.”

 

“Well . . .” Dave waggled a ballpoint between his fingers. “Obviously, first you want to start looking at female suspects. . . .”

 

“I still don’t believe this,” Francis said. “Has to be a mistake.”

 

“Then the other thing we have to do, if you’re so sure there’s been an error, is eliminate your 1983 victim Allison as the person whose blood we found under Christine Rogers’s fingernails.”

 

“And so how do we do that?”

 

“Unless you want to start digging up bodies, I’d suggest you try to get comparison DNA from a member of her family. Any of them still around?”

 

“A mother and a brother,” Francis said.

 

He remembered hearing back in ’84 that the father had keeled over from a heart attack at fifty-seven, trying to play soccer with the eleven-year-old daughter from his second marriage. Another middle-aged man in Paris done in by young women and heavy sauces.

 

“Mom’s better.” Dave made a circle on his graph. “Then you can see which number in the genetic profile came from her directly.”

 

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

 

“Why, is that a problem?”

 

“Mom’s a little in and out on the whole reality issue,” Francis said. “She thinks Allison is still alive.”

 

“Now
that’s
interesting. Any chance of it?”

 

“Jesus Christ, Dave, I saw the body myself.” He massaged his eyes, noticing how tender and sensitive they were to the touch. “I’m not sure how I’m going to finesse getting a sample off her.”

 

“Better do it soon,” Dave warned him. “I got a call from Deb A. this morning asking for the test results off her client’s DNA. I put her off, but you know it’s all going to end up in the case file eventually.”

 

“Yeah, I know.”

 

Francis brooded, wondering how he would even broach the subject.
Sure, happens all the time. We always ask the family of victims to give samples twenty years after a case is closed. Nothing to be alarmed about.

 

“I’m just asking myself.” He closed his eyes and saw afterflashes. “What happens if it turns out that we
did
find Allison’s DNA under Christine Rogers’s nails?”

 

“Then it might be time to forget the genetic analysis,” said Dave. “And invest in a decent Ouija board.”

 

 

25

 

 

 

D
RAWING HIM.
The girl on the train was drawing him.

 

Hoolian felt something tugging at his attention as the 1:56 pulled out of Syosset early Sunday morning, just after he finished his first night’s work washing dishes at the West Side Jewish Center. But then he got distracted, reaching for the second half of his round-trip ticket. The conductor, a mildewed tub of a man in a blue uniform, round and damp in all the wrong places, punched the holes as the car heaved forward and then looked across the aisle, where the girl was sitting.

 

“You’re not allowed to have your feet up on the seat like that,” he said.

 

The sketch pad remained defiantly up on her bent knees, blocking Hoolian’s view of her face. The fierce sound of pen on paper scribbling attested that a feat of artistic derring-do was in progress.

 

“Ma’am?” The conductor bent solicitously at the waist.

 

She ignored him with a kind of fizzing impatience. More lines were drawn, an angle shifted, the small feet in sporty red socks flexed impertinently and remained firmly on the seat. Only after satisfying herself for the moment did she hand her ticket over the top of the pad.

 

“Thank you.” The conductor bowed and moved on, acknowledging defeat.

 

But she was already drawing again, shoulders tensed in steely concentration, the occasional sustained hiss of felt-tip on pad telling Hoolian that a long arching line had been drawn.

 

He started to turn back to
Neuromancer,
having finally given up on
Les Misérables
a couple of weeks ago. The pen paused. He glanced over and brown eyes flicked on top of the sketch pad and then dropped out of sight again.

 

A cop. Maybe she was working for the police as some kind of undercover sketch artist. Following him around and trying to catch him in the act. The conductor departed, his blue cap tilted at a jaunty cockeyed angle, and let the door close behind him, leaving the two of them alone in the car.

 

Her focus felt like a compression of air. He nervously faced forward, hearing the dry squeak and pivot of her felt-tip.

 

He shouldn’t be on his own with a woman. He remembered from studying the map that it was a long way between stations on this line and the ticket taker would not be returning soon.

 

The brutish churn of wheels on the tracks got louder. He started to gather his things up in his duffel bag. This girl was trouble for him; he could feel it. He wouldn’t even have to do anything wrong this time. She could just point and scream and they’d haul him off in cuffs at the very next stop.

 

But then the sketch pad tilted back and he saw her gnaw on her pen in a familiar way, resting it in the corner of her mouth like a cigarillo. The waitress from the bat mitzvah.

 

He’d noticed her while he was standing in the kitchen doorway a few hours back, marveling at the scale of the reception. A hundred and fifty guests in evening clothes cruising steam tables that groaned with the weight of brisket, boiled chicken, and guinea-pig-size baked potatoes. He was lucky to be there. After he’d been fired from the market, Ms. A. had wangled him a tryout with the catering company; a friend of her cousin’s agreed to give a poor boy a break, on the condition that Hoolian keep a low profile.

 

The deejay was cranking out
Fiddler on the Roof
tunes for the grandparents and new jack hits for the kids—
“It’s gettin’ hot in herrre, so take off all your clothes”
—while crews of Rebecca Epstein’s thirteen-year-old friends gyrated like little Lolitas in their spangly outfits, hotsy-totsying their hips and twitching their pert grapefruit butts like there were small frisky animals trapped in the back of their dresses. The boys, however, moved like they were made of spare parts, clumpy clueless junior Frankensteins in undersize blazers, barely staying afloat in the sea of raging hormones.

 

Their parents sat around the linen-covered banquet tables, getting tanked on Moët and Cristal, oblivious to the adolescent bacchanalia behind them.