by Randy Alcorn
Jake pawed through the huge garbage bins that hadn’t been dumped since this morning’s last printing, around 3:00 A.M. The evening edition printings started at 1:30, the first morning printing around 11:30 P.M. This was “the first draft,” hauled by coffee drinking, country and western singing truckers to the far corners of the state before dawn. The second printing, around 1:00 A.M., was for closer outlying areas. The third printing, the metro edition, designed for the city dwellers, rolled off the tired presses from 2:30 till 4:00, followed by a nine hour slumber.
The metro edition not only had the benefit of late breaking news, with updates and details, but was the most accurate. Night editors, chugging down their third cups of coffee, dutifully caught errors in the first two editions, quickly correcting them before the third and final edition, which reached the most people anyway, and from which the most complaints came when something wasn’t right. Final edition was the last shot—all that was good would be good forever, all that was wrong would have no chance to be redone. The corporate equivalent of each writer’s deadline, final edition was one last chance to get it right. People being what they were, though, getting it just right was a pipe dream. So too many writers and too many papers, Jake thought, became content with the lousy and congratulated themselves for the mediocre.
Jake rummaged through the papers in the garbage bin, the five hundred papers wasted while the presses were adjusted. He found a sample front page of each of the first two morning editions, the ones he hadn’t seen. Similar to the untrained eye, but Jake noticed in the later edition the extra details from Associated Press, the slightly smaller picture to make room for them, and the reworded headline. The headline had been changed from “Governor’s reelection campaign questioned” to “Governor’s campaign strategy still uncertain.” The uninitiated would suppose the headline was changed to reflect greater accuracy. Jake knew it had been changed for one reason—the original had too much trapped white space. It just didn’t look right. The different tone of the headlines would matter to the governor’s friends and foes but probably had nothing to do with why the change was made.
Mistakes in the Trib used to drive Jake nuts, but no longer. How accurate can something be that comes out 365 days a year, in three to five editions a day, then is gone forever? You can’t hold onto news until you’re sure it’s absolutely accurate, or by then it’s old news and nobody cares. Nobody wants to eat a week old sandwich. Get it while it’s hot. That’s what it’s about, Jake thought. There’s a lot more truth than error, and you have to learn to live with the error.
The black smudges of the castaway papers covered his hands now, but Jake didn’t mind. The huge bins of discarded newspaper, here today and gone tomorrow, commented on the industry, Jake thought. No matter how good or how bad what you wrote was, it wouldn’t last. Within two days the column Jake had just finished laboring over would be strewn under bus seats, absorbing parakeet droppings, and starting winter fires. When he looked at it that way, his life seemed small, his job insignificant. It was hard to make too much of your insights when you realized no one in the next generation would be reading them, and those who would appreciate them most two days from now were vagrants seeking warmth on their favorite park benches.
Here today, gone tomorrow. Such was the newspaper. Such, it seemed to Jake, was life. Still leaning up against the bin full of smeared and trashed news and opinions, he thought about what Finney’s pastor said about the brevity of life, and the heritage every man leaves. What would he leave behind after he was gone? What would the final edition of his life look like? How would other eyes, discerning eyes, read him? How would his life be measured by whatever audience ultimately mattered? Come deadline, what would the verdict be? Would his words outlast the paper they were written on?
Jake the newspaper man, recognized by a half dozen downtowners in the Main Street Deli, spread out his notes at the most remote table, up against the back wall. He’d just been served a turkey on whole-wheat for himself, a jumbo frank with extra onions and a large fry for his soon-to-arrive partner.
Ollie marched in the door right at 1:00, doing the familiar duck walk necessitated by his extra forty pounds. It wasn’t obesity but the sort of surplus poundage some tough cops carry—not like the Pillsbury Doughboy but like the street-smart warrior who could head butt you around the room and toss you into the salad bar without breaking a sweat.
“Jake! You already ordered. Looks great!”
Ollie plopped down on the chair and was half way through the jumbo frank before Jake could ask “how’s it going?”
Well, Ollie, nobody’s gonna mistake you for Gandhi.
Ollie smacked his lips, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and asked Jake, “What’s the difference between a catfish and a journalist?”
Jake rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“One’s a scum-sucking bottom dweller. The other’s a fish.”
Jake sighed and smiled more than he intended to. Ollie was a master at recycling lawyer’s jokes for reporters. Jake never took offense, especially knowing Ollie’s history with the Trib.
“Okay, Jake, here’s the deal. Tie-rod ends were cut—we knew that, but now it’s official. That makes it homicide. The sarge said I could go with it. Got some details. Tie-rod on the passenger side was cut three-quarters of the way through, driver’s side two-thirds. The passenger side was weaker, so it probably broke first, when your friend had to swerve or whatever. That would put instant stress on the driver’s side tie-rod, snapping it off and sending the car out of control.”
“Could you tell anything from the cut?”
“More than you’d guess.” Ollie checked his notes. “It was a hacksaw blade, but not the low-grade type that comes with the saw. Could have been any old saw, but the blade itself was a Snap On cobalt steel blade, with twenty-four teeth, never used before.”
“How do you know that?”
“It had the characteristic red smudge marks and not just trace amounts, but as much as could only come off in a first use. There’s some uneven cuts where the blade slipped and only made one run, and they can tell how many teeth it had. I’ll take their word for it. They’re never wrong. With this kind of blade, a guy with a strong arm, lying on his back under a Suburban, could cut a rod three-quarters through in one-and-a-half to two minutes. The second one would take him longer because his arm would be tired. But if he got right at it he could have the whole thing done in five minutes.”
“Come on, Ollie. How do you know all that?”
“Simple. I’m a hands on guy. I got hold of an identical tie-rod end this morning, set it up in a vise at the right height. I bought the identical hacksaw blade, cut the rods on the threads just like our guy did, lying on my back like he would have. I simulated the conditions, then sawed away and timed it. Of course, the guy probably wasn’t the stud I am, so it might have taken him an extra few minutes, even accounting for all the adrenaline. I put myself in the part—always do that—so I had some adrenaline too. If I did this in a private garage, no sweat, but if I was in the open, on a back street or in a driveway, I’d be stopping, turning my head this way and that, looking and listening for approaching feet. If he did it in the middle of the night there’d be less risk of being seen, but more danger of sound carrying, so it’d be a trade-off. If it was dark he’d need a little penlight or something to get his saw on the right spot. One other thing would slow him down—probably added 50 percent to my cutting time. He’d have to keep checking to make sure he was cutting far enough but not too far. If he cut too far, nobody would get hurt because the car wouldn’t get out of the driveway before it broke.
“So factoring all that in we’re probably talking a ten minute job. No more, unless he had to freeze under there till someone walked by. The cutting makes more noise than I would have guessed. It would seem really loud to a guy under the car, terrified of being caught. Unless he was a pro, this guy’s heart would be pounding like a jackhammer. But with average street background noise, nobody would
hear unless they were within, say, thirty feet of the car. If it was done at an off time in a low foot traffic area it would be easy to get away with.”
“I’m impressed.”
Ollie shrugged. “It’s my job.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Yep. Conclusive.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“Ollie, stop toying with me. Conclusive fingerprints?”
“We know conclusively the killer was Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, the only prints were smudged, so that’s all we know. But at least we can eliminate all other species. For instance, it definitely wasn’t an orangutan.”
Exasperated, Jake made strangling motions with his hands. “Ollie, how would you like to investigate your own homicide?”
“Hey, I once solved a case where orangutan prints were critical. You never know.”
Jake wasn’t going to bite. “Tell me now what you’ve got and what you haven’t got or some other detective is going to find my prints all over your throat!”
“Touchy today, aren’t we? Catching the PMS that’s been going around? Okay, the only prints on the tie-rod or anywhere under the car were smudged. The weather’s been perfect for long-term prints, nice and moist, so I had some hopes. And usually there’s lots of oil accumulated underneath a car and clear prints are a possibility—but your friends car was amazingly clean, even underneath.”
“You didn’t know Doc. Wouldn’t surprise me if he polished the tie-rods every week.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the prints on the note card?”
“No, I’m not. You’ll tell me if you want to.”
“From the look of it, whoever sent the yellow card wasn’t a heavy sweater and hadn’t been eating onion rings, so I didn’t expect good prints on it. Except yours of course. By the way, they need to get your prints to verify those beauties all over it are yours, but I assured them they were.”
“Thanks.”
“But anyway, besides your prints, there was a partial of a thumb and a perfect index finger. They ran AFIS and no match. So probably it’s someone without a criminal record, unless it’s in Lower Slobovia or something. But if we get a specific suspect, we can make a positive ID with that print. Meanwhile, Jimmy gave me odds that narrow the card’s sender to half the human race.”
Jake looked uncertain.
“He says it was probably a woman.”
“How does he know that? From the fingerprints?”
“You can’t tell gender from prints. What they found was a tiny particle. Little red thing that hung on the card, but you couldn’t see it with the naked eye.”
“And?”
“Guess.”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Go ahead and guess.”
“Ollie, I’m gonna…”
“Fingernail polish.”
“No kidding?”
“So, I figure…it was either a woman or a transvestite.”
Ollie laughed hard and long at this one, and Jake cringed as everyone in the room turned and looked at them. Everyone except the one closest to them, a sandy-haired, stocky man in a business suit two tables over, whose head was buried in the morning issue of the Trib and whose eyes emerged only when tilting his head back to drink his wine cooler. Jake noticed it was his own favorite, Red Sangria.
“All right, here’s the scoop,” Ollie was keeping it down now. “The boys found two things under the car that could help us, and they’re still looking them over in the lab. Both look recent. First, there were a few short hairs, black and gray mixture, caught in a few joints and crevices under the Suburban. Human hairs, not animal. From that picture of your friend you gave me, it definitely isn’t his hair. I called his regular mechanic—there was a receipt in the glove compartment—and the guy hadn’t worked on the car for five weeks, and his hair doesn’t match either, so we figure it had to come from the perp. Even with the high suspension, it was a snug fit under there, assuming it wasn’t hoisted up. So it would be easy to snag your hair. Could have come from the scalp or beard or mustache. So I told the guys, ‘Thanks a lot, now we know it was a woman with nice red fingernails and a crewcut or a beard.’”
Jake rolled his eyes. “That’s only if the person under the car was the one who sent the note. We don’t know that, right?”
“Right. Actually, I doubt it was. If a woman sent the note, could be her husband or boyfriend who cut the tie-rod. A woman could have cut the tie-rods, but not likely. Cutting tie-rods is a man sort of thing and typing a neat little note on a yellow note card is a woman sort of thing, don’t you think?”
“I outgrew sexual stereotypes years ago. I wouldn’t know.”
“Spoken like a true journalist. Don’t let the realities of human nature sway you, huh?”
“You said there was another clue?”
“Right. A tiny snag of navy blue fabric. They found it way underneath, nearly four feet from the tie-rods. I think the perp snagged his sweat pants. Possibly sweatshirt, but my money’s on pants. The guy’s knee—or girl’s knee if we’ve got a liberated short-haired female murderer—was bent up when he hacked away on the rods. I laid on my back under a Suburban to figure all this out, and it made sense. They’re running more tests on the fabric. The hairs are another story. They have potential.”
“Really? What can you do with hair?”
“Sometimes you can identify race. You can narrow down your suspects because you can conclusively prove hair isn’t from certain people. You can say it’s probably from this person, but hair doesn’t usually nail anybody in court. It’s hard to prove anything from a strand of hair, unless…” Ollie paused, as if to see if Jake knew the answer.
Jake shrugged his shoulders.
“Unless there’s a follicle.” He paused for effect. “Never would have thought we could still have a good one after ten days, but the moisture in the air saved the day. One of our hairs has a decent follicle.”
“So?”
“So when you’ve got a follicle and it hasn’t dried out or rotted, you can get a DNA fingerprint.”
“What’s that?”
Ollie sighed. “Everybody has forty-six chromosomes, twenty-three from Mom and twenty-three from Dad.” Ollie the biologist. “Each chromosome contains a hundred thousand genes. So the combination is absolutely unique. We use it when there’s blood on a scene and to test semen in rape cases. It’s expensive, but when you can make a positive match it’s 100 percent reliable. In fact, the military now keeps a little genetic sample from every soldier, so even if there’s not much left of the body, there won’t be any more unknown corpses in battle. Would have ended a lot of uncertainties in Nam, huh?”
Jake nodded, thinking about missing soldiers who couldn’t be identified because so little was left.
“Genetic fingerprinting? Interesting. Sounds like what we need.”
“Hopefully, but only to nail an existing suspect. There’s no master computer file that’s got everybody’s DNA fingerprint, so we have to go out and get them from suspects. But if we get to that point, we can ask for voluntary contributions. Of course, if we have enough evidence we can demand it. Even if we can’t, though, we’ve got some pretty clever ways of getting it.”
“What do you mean, voluntary contributions? If someone’s guilty, they wouldn’t volunteer.”
“One time we had a rape and there was some dried semen on the woman’s clothes. The genetic fingerprints proved the primary suspect was innocent. We had reason to believe the rapist lived in the same neighborhood, so we asked for voluntary blood tests from every guy on the block. They didn’t have to cooperate, but of course if they refused they knew they’d become a suspect. Well, everyone agreed, but this one guy got a friend to do the blood test in his place. Almost got away with it. But we caught him, got a judge to order a blood test on the real guy, and sure enough, he was our perp. The test nailed him. The lab gives us a form, and at the bottom it computes the chances of any other human being havin
g the same results. The answer is usually ‘less than one in ten billion.’ When you consider the population of the world, that’s pretty conclusive, even to the most bleeding heart juror. The guy’s in jail, probably earning a college degree as we speak.”
“You’ve impressed me again, Ollie.”
“Hey, your job isn’t the only one that takes skill, you know.”
“I’m realizing that. Maybe we’re not wasting our tax money on you guys after all.”
Ollie looked at Jake. “Well, I’ve done my part. So what do you have for me, detective?”
Jake handed over his lists, dispensing profuse disclaimers about how unlikely everybody was. Then he eyed his list of compromised women and their husbands.
“Wait a minute, Ollie. You think a man cut the tie-rods and a woman did the note card? How about this scenario? The woman’s upset that her husband caused this accident, maybe she even loved the guy he killed—in fact, that’s exactly why he killed him. Okay, so she finds out about it. Either she’s angry or she has a conscience attack. Maybe she wants her husband or boyfriend or whoever to be caught, but doesn’t want to come right out and be the one to nail him. Maybe because she’s afraid of him or feels guilty because of her affair? So she sends me the note card.”
“Great movie plot, Jake. You sound like a soap opera screenwriter. Actually, I like it. We’ll take a close look at Doc’s girlfriends and their men. Okay, what else?”
“I’m getting some info on anti-abortion activists. I called Sue, Finney’s wife, and I’m meeting with her tomorrow morning. I meet with Mary Ann, Doc’s secretary, this afternoon. I hope she can fill me in on the scene at the hospital. I’ll get the doctors’ names I left blank on your list. Then if I need to, I’ll talk to Betsy, Doc’s wife. But I just don’t want to upset her, Ollie. Does she have to know there’s a homicide investigation?”