Dead Girl Blues

by Lawrence Block

  AFTERWARD, AWAY FROM the others, Alden apologized. “All I thought,” he said, “was it would be interesting to know Kristin’s genetics, and it was all in the mail before I got that it’d mean poking into your background, because, you know, half of her DNA comes from you.”

  Unless, of course, it was someone else who’d fathered her. But that possibility never occurred to either of us. The physical resemblance was unmistakable, and Kristin’s mannerisms and facial expressions were an echo of mine, as was her sense of humor. She was my daughter, and half her DNA was mine.

  I told him not to worry about it. What was it all anyhow besides a few numbers and countries of origin?

  “And it’s not like there’s anything exotic in the print-out,” he said. “And all it is anyway is DNA, you know? I mean, you’re still my dad, right? No matter where my DNA came from.”

  I was touched by that, and assured him he was my son and I was his father, and that our recognizing the fact implied no disloyalty to Duane Shipley. I told him I was proud of him, and he told me he loved me, and it was a very nice moment.

  And everything was going to be fine, I told him, even as I told myself.

  AND WHY WOULDN’T it be?

  Because my individual DNA profile was still nowhere to be found. Kristin’s was on file at the firm charged with duly analyzing the swabs Alden had mailed in, but Kristin hadn’t left her DNA all over a dead woman in California. A CSI-style computer, flashing its lights to show off for the television audience, wouldn’t suddenly flash Match Match Match while its screen showed us her picture.

  My secret and I were as safe as we’d ever been.

  DID I REALLY believe that?

  I told myself I did, and perhaps it was so, because in certain respects belief is largely a matter of what you tell yourself. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in life after death? In reincarnation? In life on other planets? If you believe in any of these, isn’t it because you’ve elected to believe?

  Oh, evidence may play a part, but it’s like evidence in a judicial proceeding, with each side citing it as proof. Perhaps you remember the cartoon, two goldfish in a bowl. “If there’s no God, then who changes our water?”

  You believe what you want to believe.

  MY FAITH IN the matter, let’s be clear, was no Rock of Ages, firm and unyielding. I couldn’t help knowing that forensic technology was continuing to evolve at the speed of one of those flashing CSI computers, that what they could do yesterday was less than they can do today, and barely a shadow of what they’d be able to accomplish tomorrow.

  To keep everything in perspective, you ought to understand that the subject did not occupy my mind every moment of every day. Indeed, I had a life to live, and I spent my time living it. I had a business to run and I ran it. I had my clubs, Lions and Kiwanis and Rotary, and rarely missed a meeting. I bowled on Tuesday nights, and from my chair in front of the TV I followed the Bengals and Buckeyes, the Cincinnati Reds, the Indy Pacers, all in their respective seasons, and without ever really caring how the games turned out.

  If there was nothing compelling on television, I might be in my home office, possibly seated in this chair in front of this computer, keeping up with email or walking the unmarked trails of the internet. But more often than not instead of booting up the computer I’d be in my recliner with my feet up, reading one book or another. I’d had a good run with Civil War history, but something had pointed me toward Rome, and I was having a go at Gibbon.

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m sure an abridged edition would have told me as much as I needed to know, but I’d come upon a set of six boxed volumes online at a very good price, and before I knew it I’d signed on for the long haul. It proved to be absorbing for all that it was slow going, and I was in no hurry to get to the end. I mean, I already knew how it turned out.

  And didn’t I have all the time in the world?

  PERHAPS NOT.

  TV fare: Dateline, 48 Hours, Forensic Files. Sometimes those shows were what I wanted to watch. Other times they found their way unbidden to our large high-definition screen, and more often than not they drew me in.

  When they didn’t, the nightly news was obliging enough to come up with the occasional item. A man who’d served twenty years for rape and murder was released when DNA exonerated him—although the prosecutor still swore he was guilty.

  And, while the lucky man’s enterprising attorneys were suing the state for some optimistic sum, surely no more than a drop in the bucket for all those years the system had stolen from their client, his prison cell didn’t stay empty for long. Cold cases, capital crimes long forgotten by all concerned, were being solved and resolved left and right.

  All over America, rape kits and crime scene evidence lay in storage. While everyone had known for years that the cases would never be solved and the evidence would never prove useful, it was apparently easier to kick the evidentiary can down the road than to clear the shelves and make room for the next batch of rape kits.

  So it had been for years and years. And now specialists of a new sort, cold case investigators, were going through old files and processing old rape kits.

  And making new arrests.

  Sometimes scientific advances enabled them at last to build cases against men they’d suspected all along. In other instances, men who’d never raised the slightest blip on the radar screen, men who’d never been linked in any way to the case or the victim, were suddenly caught in the investigators’ crosshairs, under arrest and charged with having committed a crime they and the world barely remembered.

  But not all of them were there to be found. One 48 Hours episode brought an earlier show up to date, documenting the solution of a thirty-three-year-old rape and murder in Kearney, Nebraska. The victim was a recent high school graduate, engaged to a classmate who’d been the prime suspect until alibi witnesses cleared him. Now DNA indicated she’d been killed by a man who’d evidently never met her until the day he raped and strangled her. He was a unemployed day laborer, forty-four years old, passing through Kearney on his way home to Grand Island, and how they met and what passed between them we’ll never know, because by the time his DNA pointed to him he was as dead as she was, spirited away by liver cancer before the law took the slightest interest in him.

  48 Hours couldn’t show Kearney cops making an arrest, or even knocking on a door in Grand Island. By the time cancer got him, the perpetrator had moved several times, winding up in Alpine, Texas. The best feature of the updated show was an interview with the officer, now retired, who’d been on the case at the very beginning.

  “You have to wonder what good it does after all these years,” he told the camera. “I promised Vicki’s parents I’d find the person who’d done this, who took her away from them, and I guess I thought I would, but then I came to know I wouldn’t. And then the father passed, and once a year I’d call on the mother, just to let her know somebody still cared. And then she died, and just two years ago Ken Silbergaard, and that was the worst part for me.”

  Silbergaard was the victim’s fiancé, cleared thirty years ago.

  “We knew he didn’t do it, but we couldn’t say who did, and I know there were people who were never entirely sure about Ken. Maybe he was genuinely innocent and maybe he managed to get away with it, and as long as the case was unsolved there was a shadow falling on him. Who knows how different his life might have been otherwise? I wish he’d lasted long enough for me to apologize to him. I don’t know what I did that I could have done any different, but still, you know?”

  THAT SENT ME to Google. I’d never even considered the possibility of collateral damage in the death of Cindy Raschmann. Grieving parents? A boyfriend under suspicion?

  I couldn’t find anything, and I was reluctant to look too hard. Anything I did online would leave evidence, on my computer if nowhere else.

  Early on the cyberworld had appeared to be one in which anything could vanish forever with a single keystroke. You hit DELETE and the s
late was clean.

  Except I’d come to realize the opposite was true, and that anything done on a computer had a half-life that was essentially eternal. You could delete it all you pleased, and a teenager who knew what he was doing could find it somewhere on your hard drive.

  If you removed the hard drive and pulverized it, if you consigned the whole computer to a river bottom, that might be enough. But if you backed up your data automatically to another drive, that was one more thing you had to deal with. And if you backed up everything automatically to the Cloud—whatever that is, exactly—well, you were screwed, weren’t you?

  But why should I worry about records of my Google searches? There’s this unending document I’m working on at this very moment, utterly incriminating from its opening sentence onward. “A man walks into a bar.” And so he does, and it’s all here, where anyone could read it.

  It’s password-protected, so at least I don’t have to worry about one of the kids borrowing Dad’s computer for a quick check of Instagram and stumbling onto evidence that the old man is a monster.

  If I should come to the attention of the authorities, if the long arm of the law should manage to reach all the way to Lima, the password would prove about as impenetrable as the lock on a motel room door, and at least as easy to kick in. Any geek assigned the task of cracking my computer would manage the trick without breaking a cybersweat.

  Really, none of it mattered. If they had reason to look at me, they had me cold.

  All the more reason to avoid anything that might supply such a reason. For years I’d done fine leaving well enough alone. I was no longer certain that “well enough” was still an apt description of the Cindy Raschmann case, but if not I was still best advised to keep my hands off it.

  Which was easier said than done.

  You know how it is when you nick yourself? A slip while shaving, a scrape on the back of one’s hand, anything sufficient to break the skin. A little bleeding—enough to spread your DNA around, I suppose—and then it scabs over and that’s the end of it.

  Except the healing process sometimes includes itching, and one responds automatically, even unconsciously, by scratching. One’s fingers want nothing so much as to pick at the scab.

  I kept holding myself back from reaching for a telephone, punching in a number.

  Oh, I made that phone call over and over in the silent privacy of my own mind. Hi, this is George Haycock, I’m researching techniques in cold case investigation. I wondered if there’d been any recent development in an old case of yours. This one’s all the way back in 1968. The victim’s name is—give me a minute here—Raschmann? First initial’s C as in Charlie?

  Endless variations. I tried on different identities and different motives for my quest. I was a freelance journalist, following up a piece I’d done on the California Highway Killer. I was a deputy sheriff in Oregon running down a lead in one of my own cases. But every silent rehearsal was essentially the same: I was some voice in the shadows, wanting to be reassured the Cindy Raschmann case was stalled and unlikely to be reopened. No developments, no progress, no reason to open that file and sift old evidence or run down old leads that went nowhere.

  That’s what I wanted, of course, but to pick up the phone and dial the number was to risk its very opposite. Some dude asking about Cindy Raschmann, and that reminds me. Shouldn’t somebody be taking a new look at that? Maybe a fresh pair of eyes’ll see something we missed. With all the advances, all the new crap the scientists keep coming up with . . .

  And I knew this, and reminded myself of it over and over again, and on each occasion squelched the impulse. But God, how the scab itched! I laid a tentative fingertip on it time and time again, and each time I managed to keep myself from picking at it. I would hold off, and the itch would subside.

  For the time being.

  “I HAD THIS email,” Alden said.

  A few hours ago I was sitting where I am now, at this desk in what had been his room until we fitted out his aerie in the attic. I had finished the most recent entry, and after reading “For the time being” several times over, I’d decided that was as good a place as any to stop. I saved what I’d written, closed the file, and moved on to my own email. There was nothing of great interest, and certainly nothing that had anything to do with DNA or crime scene investigation or a woman who’d died decades ago and two thousand miles away.

  But I found something to click on, and it led to something else, and I was miles away myself, learning about the breeding habits of a freshwater aquarium fish named Copeina arnoldi, more commonly known as the splash tetra. I don’t keep aquarium fish, or have any interest in them. Kristin had kept a small goldfish in a glass bowl (and changed the water, like God in the cartoon), but it had died, and so had its replacement, and she’d since decided that Chester the putative Rottweiler was all the companion animal she needed. The empty goldfish bowl had long since been retired to a basement storage shelf.

  So I had no reason to read about the splash tetra, but the internet doesn’t ask of you all that much in the way of motivation, and what I learned about the fish was interesting enough to keep me reading. And that’s what I was doing when Alden came into the room and said he’d had an email.

  I looked up.

  “It was actually addressed to Kristin,” he said, “but as far as they’re concerned we’ve both got the same email address. Some people call it an eDress, with a small E and a capital D, because otherwise it looks like you were trying to write address and made a typo. But when you say it out loud it sounds dumb.”

  I might have urged him, gently, to get to the point. But I knew what the point was, and I was in no hurry for him to get there.

  “What they do,” he said, “and I didn’t know this when I sent in the samples, or if I did know it I wasn’t thinking of it, you know? Like it slipped my mind, and that’s if it was ever there in the first place.”

  I waited. Why hurry him?

  “They take your DNA and compare it to the samples they have on file. It’s not like on TV—bing-bing-bing-bing MATCH! MATCH! MATCH!—because there’s never a complete match, because your DNA is like, unique.”

  “Right.”

  “But they come up with relatives you didn’t know you had. Or ones you did, because they found what they said was a very probable first cousin of Kristy’s right here in Ohio, and guess who it turned out to be? Me, because I guess they don’t have an algorithm for half-brother, so in their books I’m her, quote, very probable first cousin.”

  Was that it? It was unsettling all by itself, in its implications and what it boded for the future, but I could tell there was more.

  “So actually that was last week. And then they told me about a second or third cousin of mine in downstate Illinois. I mean, down around Cairo, except they pronounce it Kay-ro.”

  “Shows what they know.”

  “And people call that part of the state Little Egypt, and from what you hear, everybody down there’s an inbred retard in the Ku Klux Klan, and they only find out about DNA when they get arrested for incest, if that’s even considered a crime down there. I mean, that’s the sort of thing you hear. I’m sure it’s like an exaggeration.”

  “I suspect you’re right.”

  “Anyway, some woman knew enough about DNA to send them hers, and her profile matches enough of my markers for us to be cousins. She’s not a match for anybody else, so that puts her on the Shipley side of the family.”

  “Are you going to get in touch with her?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she’ll reach out to get in touch with me, and then I can decide.” He grinned. “I had this thought, like I’d write and she’d write and we’d get together, and she’d be hot and gorgeous and there’d be this strong attraction between us, and there we are and we can’t do a thing about it because we’re cousins and we both know it.”

  “A twenty-first century problem,” I said.

  “I mean it’s just me daydreaming, because for all I know she weigh
s three hundred pounds, with one blue eye and one brown eye and they’re only half an inch apart after a couple of centuries of Little Egypt inbreeding. But yeah, a twenty-first century problem is right, because suppose your biological father was a sperm donor? And nobody who donated sperm just did it once. There was this thing on TV, or maybe it was online, I don’t remember which, but all over America clusters of people are finding out they’ve got the same sperm donor for a daddy, and they never met him but they’re walking around full of his DNA.”

  We talked about that a little, because it was an interesting subject all by itself. For thirty or forty years, a college student could go once or twice a week to a clinic, sit in a room with a copy of Playboy, jerk off into a cup, and walk away with a few dollars for his trouble. And that was all there was to it, and why would he ever give it a second thought? If his efforts resulted in a pregnancy, he wouldn’t know about it, and neither would anyone ever know of his role in the proceedings.

  All changed now.

  “So I don’t know,” he said. “Whether I’ll do anything about my retarded third cousin. I think I’ll let it go, at least for now.”

  We agreed it was probably best to put off the decision for the time being. But he wouldn’t have interrupted me to report a possible Shipley cousin two states away. There was another shoe, and I waited for it to drop.

  “The thing is,” he said, “it turns out there’s a couple of third or fourth cousins out west.”

  “Cousins of yours?”

  He shook his head.

  “Kristin’s, then.”

  A nod. A forty-four-year-old woman in Washington State and man in his early twenties in Salt Lake City.

  “So they’d be, you know, relatives of yours. You’d be the connection between them and Kristy.” We both let that sentence hang in the air, and then he said, “I’m not saying anything to Kristy.”

  “No.”

  “Dad, I’m just so sorry I went ahead and started all of this. I was stupid, I didn’t stop to think that swabbing Kristy’s cheek was like swabbing yours from a distance.”