He looked at me for a minute, then a look of disappointment and irritation showed in his eyes. “Man,” he said, “you want me to do something. Am I right? At the lab?”
I sighed. “Look. There’s been a development.”
He put his hands in his pockets, stared out at the street. “A development.”
“Yeah it’s—”
“Wait, wait, hold up. You and me, we got a thing, a little . . .” He made a backward-and-forward motion in the air between us with his hand. “You know what I’m saying? And that’s all good. But it seems to me, like, you know, like you’re taking advantage of that. You call me up, you act like you want to go out for a drink, I throw on my best frock, and, shit . . . All it is, you want me to do something for you. Mechelle, come on. That’s not right.”
“I know, I know. But I swear I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t important.”
He jingled the keys in his pockets. “Tell you what. We’ll go get a drink. Someplace nice. Have a little conversation. You’ll explain what’s going on. Then we’ll go over to the lab, I’ll do whatever you want.” He winked. “You can have your way with me.”
I thought about it for a minute. Not a real drink. Just a coke or something. What could be the harm?
“Fair enough,” I said.
We went to Holyfield’s, a bar owned by the boxer Evander Holyfield down in Buckhead, Atlanta’s party neighborhood, and sat at the bar.
As we walked in, I realized I hadn’t been in a bar for nearly a year. It was a weird feeling. When you’ve been as intensely involved with bars as I have over the years, the whole vibe comes on like a freight train. The loin-twisting beat of the hip-hop coming over the stereo, the smell of cigarettes, the vapid laughter of drunks. Holyfield’s caters mostly to upscale blacks, everybody dressed to the hilt, gold flashing, a row of Mercedes Benzes parked outside. A see-and-be-seen kind of place. I spotted one of the mayor’s deputies joking with an outfielder from the Braves. If blond-haired Mark felt conspicuous, he didn’t act like it.
We sat down at the bar. I felt the smooth surface with my fingers. A familiar tactile reminder of a certain kind of life that I’d left behind. Theoretically.
Mark held up a finger to the bartender. “Couple of vodka martinis. Stoli with a twist, lime.” He turned to me. “You don’t mind my ordering for you, do you?”
“Actually, I better get a Sprite.”
He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“I don’t drink anymore.”
“Oh. Oh! Shoot, I’m sorry, gosh!” Mark tried to wave at the bartender, but he already had his back turned, shaking the martini mixer.
“So.”
“So. You been fidgeting all the way over here,” Mark said.
“This thing with Lt. Gooch. I don’t even know what to say.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not just that.”
“What then?”
“I don’t even know where to start.”
The bartender turned around, and the two martinis were sitting there in front of us in a couple of huge, extravagant blue glasses. I’d picked mine up and taken a long pull on it before my mind had even had taken a solid bite on the notion that I was supposed to not be drinking this shit.
“Aw, man,” I said.
My fingers rested on the rim of the glass. I sat there for a minute then finally reached across the bar, poured the martini into the little sink hidden under the bar, and then turned the glass upside down. I could feel the booze burning in my throat.
“You okay?” Mark said.
“Not really.”
It took three Sprites to explain the whole thing. The only thing I left out was that I finally had what I believed to be a firm suspect. When I had wrapped up the story, Mark was staring at me. “You can’t be serious,” he said finally. “Seventeen kids?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you’re sure Gooch didn’t do it.”
“Ninety-nine percent.”
“So what is it you need from me?”
“I want some help on the forensic side. The DNA, the blood evidence—that whole side of this case has been so screwy we never were able to make sense of it. We think he must have been planting evidence. But we’re not sure. I’d like to just sit down with you, go over every single case, see if there’s something we missed.”
“You got a suspect?”
I looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe.”
“Who?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You are too much. I don’t know why I put up with you.” Mark crooked his finger at the bartender. “Lemme get the check, dawg.”
I dropped a twenty on the bar. “You mind if I run to the girls’ room?”
I went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet. I didn’t really need to go, I just needed a second to think. Problem is, I wasn’t thinking too straight.
I’d been up early, and it was getting late. I was feeling tired, depressed, pissed off at myself. Back in the day, this was the point when I’d usually gone for the crank. Brought me right back to happy. Happy and full of enthusiasm and energy, feeling sexy and full of myself.
Next thing I knew, I was dumping the entire contents of my purse onto the nice marble counter next to the sink. Lipstick, eyebrow pencil, Dentyne, brush, wallet, mirror scattered all across the counter. I pawed through it, as though if I kept looking, maybe I’d find an ancient bindle of crank that I’d somehow overlooked for the past year. I mean, I knew there wouldn’t be. But still, a part of me was hoping that maybe there was something from back in the day, just a taste of something that would get me back on my feet. But there was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
“You okay, baby?” A tall, dark-complected woman in a beautiful gold dress stood behind me, looking at me with concern.
“I was just looking for something,” I said, wiping my face. I realized a couple of tears were running down my nose.
“Something like . . .” She was looking at me with a funny look on her face, like she was halfway suggesting something. I had a hunch I knew that look.
“I need a little something to pick me up,” I said.
The woman studied me for a while. I’d been an undercover narc long enough to understand what was happening here. She was scoping me out, trying to see if she could trust me. Then her face changed, like I know this person. Like she knew what made me tick. And maybe she did.
“What’s your poison, baby?” she said, giving me a cool little smirk.
“How’s it work?” I said.
“You tell me what you like, then you go out, fold your Benjamin lengthwise, set it down on the bar. When the valet delivers your car, you’ll find what you need inside. Me, I don’t touch nothing. You and me, we just having a conversation.”
I looked at her for a minute, took about three long deep breaths, then flipped open my badge holder.
She saw the badge, and her face went tight with fear and anguish and self-loathing. All that beauty just drained away, and all I saw left on her face was something dead and ugly and halfway destroyed. She grabbed my hand. “Please. Please don’t. Please. Please! I can’t go back inside.”
“Don’t let me see you here again, sister,” I said.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It ain’t about that,” I said.
We drove over to the crime lab in Decatur. I paced up and down next to Mark’s cubicle for about an hour while he sat there with the stack of seventeen folders in front of him.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “You’re a hundred percent right. Somebody left a false trail. Somebody monkeyed with the blood, the semen, the whole bit.”
“But how?” I said. “Take for instance the first murder, Gooch’s daughter. It was Gooch’s DNA.”
“I don’t know what attracts people to this kind of work. But you sit around thinking about crime and evidence all day, ideas start popping into your head. Like, if I wanted to kill my—I don’t know—my best friend’s wife or something and get
away with it, how would I do it?” Mark Terry smiled a thin, ironic smile. “This one? This one’s easy.”
“Tell me, then.”
“My guess, Lt. Gooch used condoms for birth control. Your perp goes through Gooch’s garbage, finds a used rubber, throws it in the freezer. When the time comes, he’s got everything he needs. Just thaw it out, stick it in a trocar or a syringe or a turkey baster, squirt it into the little girl’s vagina. Boom, Daddy is suddenly a cold-blooded child-raping sicko.”
“And the rest of them?”‘
“It’s all stuff like that! A human being is nothing but a big bag full of DNA. DNA, man, it’s just seeping out of you all the time. You lick a stamp, hey, you just mailed off enough DNA to clone yourself five thousand times. You spit on the ground, there’s DNA in the dirt. You comb your hair, there’s DNA in the comb. You cut yourself on the job, there’s DNA on your shirt, on your Band-Aid, on a paper towel in the men’s room. It’s everywhere! Any fool could do this.” He looked at me curiously. “The only thing that amazes me is that criminals don’t do it more often.” He shrugged. “Hey, maybe they do. But we’d never know, would we? Because DNA testing is . . .” He gave me his ironic smile again. “ . . . foolproof!”
“Okay, but there were five cases that all had the exact same DNA. Why?”
“Maybe I’m overstating the case when I say an idiot could do this. Sometimes maybe it’s easy to get DNA, sometimes not. He probably kept some of these samples in the freezer for years. It doesn’t take much. Maybe that first one, Hank’s condom? He swizzles some saline solution in the condom, pours it out into five or six vials, pops them in the freezer out in the garage. Then if he ever needs it, Good Ol’ Hank Gooch is right there, next to last year’s venison and a big stack of TV dinners, waiting to be a pervert child murderer all over again.”
“Damn!”
Mark Terry closed the files. “Okay, here’s what I don’t understand. I get the impression you haven’t told anybody in the chain of command about this.”
“My chain of command had his head shot off by the SWAT guys at eight this morning.”
“Okay, but beyond that. Go to the chief of detectives.”
“I think the perp is a cop,” I said.
Mark studied me for a while. “Like, a particular cop?”
I nodded.
“Okay, so go straight to the Chief. I hear he’s got an open-door policy.” He paused. “Besides, you know, the Chief was head of the crime scene unit back when he was a lieutenant. He knows all about this forensic stuff. If anybody would understand what you’re talking about, he would.”
I stared at him.
“What?” Mark Terry said.
“Head of Crime Scene?”
“Oh, yeah. Back in the eighties. Yeah, his college degree is in chemistry. Or bio, I forget. But, yeah, he wrote a big paper back in the early eighties about how DNA was going to be this big forensic tool and all that. Everybody laughed at him back then.”
“So he’s known all about DNA for years? Knew about it even before it had come into common use by law enforcement?”
“Yeah. So?” He kept looking at me, then his eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute! The Chief ? The Chief is your suspect?”
I nodded. “Right now? Yeah.”
“Holy mackerel!” He cocked his head, eyes wide. “You aren’t serious, are you? You’re yanking my chain.”
“Nope.”
He stroked his chin, eyes narrowed, looking up at the ceiling. I could tell he was thinking something, but it was obvious he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. “Hm.”
“Hm, what?”
“I got to think about this for a minute.”
“What’s there to think about? A little girl is dying somewhere. We don’t get off the dime, she’s dead.”
He pulled the files over in front of him again. “Let me take another look at this.” He laid out several of the files, looked through them carefully.
I paced around his cubicle for a while, picking things up and looking at them. A human skull, a vial of some milky substance I wasn’t sure I wanted to identify, a broken ashtray, a beer can cut in half.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Here’s what I notice. You’ve got a lot of hair samples that you didn’t run DNA on. How come you didn’t run these?”
“I think it was a budgetary thing. Lt. Gooch didn’t want to run every single hair. He said there were too many of them. I mean, there’s like a hundred hair samples between these seventeen case. Plus, hair, you can pick that up anywhere. Rubbing up against somebody in the line at the grocery store. Semen’s definitive.”
“Screw it, let’s run them. Maybe we’ll learn something new.”
“We don’t have time. It’ll take days. And we don’t have that long.”
Mark smiled. “The state passed a law last year saying we had to run DNA on every felon. They decided it would be cheaper to run them in-house, instead of sending them to a commercial lab. We’ve just started getting the equipment in the past couple of weeks. The process is fully automated. If I can figure out how to work it, I can run this stuff tonight. Maybe there’s something you’ve missed.”
“Seems like a long shot.”
Mark Terry drummed his fingers on the table for a minute. “Here’s the thing. The semen evidence doesn’t add up to anything here. Same with the blood. But for an organized criminal, semen and blood are the easiest things to plant, and the easiest to avoid leaving on a body. But hair? Forget it. Everybody on earth sheds hundreds of hairs a day. Even a criminal mastermind can’t avoid that.”
“Okay, okay, suppose that’s true. What good does that do me right this minute?”
“What’s your goal right now? You suspect the Chief. But you really don’t know, do you?”
I nodded.
“We run the hair, we’ll know.”
“But we don’t have a sample of his DNA.”
Mark gave me his mysterious smile.
“What, Mark?”
“Last year Captain Goodwin came to me, said that one of his friends had somebody threaten a paternity suit. He asked if I could run some DNA. Off the books, so to speak. Didn’t want to go through the APD forensic guys for the same reason you and Lt. Gooch didn’t: because the word might get around the department.”
“And?”
“The Chief is a ladies’ man, you know.”
I stared at him. He turned around and rummaged around in a file, came out with a printout, little black bars on a white field. “Right here. The Chief’s DNA.”
“Wait. Are you sure this is the Chief’s? Maybe it’s Goodwin’s. Maybe it’s somebody else’s.”
“Look, he didn’t say it outright. But he implied it so strongly that there’s no doubt in my mind what he was saying.”
“I don’t have the samples,” I said.
“The evidence lockup is open all night, correct?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll make a list, you go get the stuff and come back, and we’ll spend all night with the new equipment. By morning you’ll know if it’s the Chief or not.”
“You sure this’ll work?”
“A hundred hairs? If the Chief really did this, his DNA’s in there somewhere. I feel highly confident about that.” He paused. “I mean, look, all you need is one hair. Put him at one single solitary crime scene among these seventeen, and you know he was there at all the others.”
“Wait here,” I said. I felt something rising inside me, like a shaft of light coming out of a cloud. I sprinted for the door. There wasn’t much time, there couldn’t be.
It took an hour and half to get all the evidence from the slow-moving loser who worked the night shift at the evidence lockup. I nearly came across the desk at him once or twice, but I knew it wouldn’t help.
Finally, loaded with little bags of hair, I jumped in my car and headed back over to the GBI lab. It was 12:15 AM.
“How long’s this going to take?” I said.
“We’re still g
etting things calibrated. My guess, it’ll be morning before we start getting results.”
“Can I help?”
Mark frowned. “You know what? I’d like to say yes, but I’m afraid it’ll take longer for me to show you what to do than it will just to do it myself.”
“I guess I’ll just hang around then.”
“You sure? Why don’t you go home, get some rest?”
“I hate to do that while you’re here busting your ass all night.” I was so wired there wasn’t a chance I’d sleep.
Mark shrugged. “Hey, under the circumstances, it’s a pleasure to do this job. Even in the middle of the night.”
“There is one thing, though . . .”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
I headed for the door again.
FORTY-SIX
I entered City Hall East at about 12:45, wearing dark glasses, a Braves cap, and carrying a duffel bag.
Captain Goodwin had said that the Chief was spending the weekend at his lake house. What I needed to do was figure out where that was. Obviously Captain Goodwin would be no help. That meant drastic measures would be required.
At the time that he had demanded them, I hadn’t let Goodwin confiscate the symbols of my authority because I was pissed off. But now I was glad I hadn’t. Badges you can buy at the dime store, guns you can pick up on the corner. But the ID card with the electronic swipe key built into it, the one that that would let me into the innermost recesses of City Hall East—that was irreplaceable.
Once again, the lackadaisical nature of the City of Atlanta’s IT department paid off for me. Like everything else electronic, the swipe key worked not just for places where I needed to go for the Cold Case Unit, it also was still activated to let me in to places I had needed to go back when I was doing temporary duty in Admin.
The Admin people don’t work nights, so there was nobody to ask why I was wandering into the Admin area, a long row of offices where I very much didn’t belong. I skulked through the dark, echoing hallways, trying not to make any noise. Finally I reached the office where I’d worked before. It appeared that nobody had replaced me. Just as well—I hadn’t done much work there anyway.
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