by Jodi Picoult
Ross pulled the card closer, staring at the whirlpool of parallel lines. He was familiar with crime-scene linkage, which said that any person who came into contact with an object or another person left a piece of himself behind. Detectives, like Eli, would use this to document that a suspect was in a certain place at a certain time, to find the cause that led to this particular effect. But the same theory could be used to prove the existence of a ghost. Or to make a man rethink suicide. Or to explain why love felt like a phantom limb, long after it was over.
Forensic detectives already knew what most people spent a lifetime learning: you couldn’t pass through this world without affecting someone else.
Ross’s chest suddenly felt so tight he thought he might pass out. “You okay?” Eli asked, staring at him curiously. Even the dog cocked its head. Ross grabbed the first thing he could on the table—another set of prints that had been tucked underneath some crime-scene photos. He bent down, pretending to be absorbed by the lines and dips that made up the fingerprints.
“This is what I’m thinking,” Eli mused. “Pike’s an influential guy. He told the investigating officers a story, and they believed it because it was far easier to blame an Indian than to stand up to a guy who was so well-respected in the town. The question, of course, is why Pike killed his wife, if that’s the way it went down.” He snapped on latex gloves and began to pack the glass for transport to his DNA scientist. “Money, maybe. He did inherit the land.”
Frowning, Ross glanced from one of the index cards to the print that had come off the pipe. “Uh, I’m not sure about this . . . but don’t these two match?”
Eli took the cards out of his hands and began to bob his head back and forth. “Hmmph.” Settling down on a stool, he picked up his magnifying glass and began to scrutinize them. After about five minutes, he rubbed his jaw. “I’ll be damned. I’m going to have to have the experts at the lab take a second glance, but yeah, I’d say this is a match.”
“So whose prints are they?”
Eli looked at him. “Cecelia Pike’s. They were rolled postmortem. Standard procedure.”
“If Gray Wolf wasn’t even there, what was she doing with his pipe?”
“Holding onto it, apparently,” Eli said. “Among other things.”
“Like?”
“Maybe Gray Wolf himself. Say the wife was having an affair . . . getting rid of her and framing her lover would kill two birds with one stone.”
“Shut up,” Ross said, his voice rising. “Just shut up, all right? There was no lover. There was no one. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Easy . . .” Eli held up his palms, placating. “I’m not the bad guy here.”
Ross forced himself to relax, realizing how crazy he must have sounded. “It’s just . . . she was not having an affair. You didn’t know her.”
Eli stared at him. “Neither did you.”
WITNESS STATEMENT
Date: September 22, 1932
Time: 8:15 AM
INTERVIEW OF: Lemuel Tollande
INTERVIEW BY: Officer Duley Wiggs and Detective F. Olivette of the Comtosook Police Department
LOCATION: Comtosook PD
SUBJECT:
1. Q. State your name and address for the record, please.
A. Lemuel Tollande, 45A Chestnut Street, Burlington.
2. Q. Where do you work, Mr. Tollande?
A. The Rat Hole in Winooski. I tend bar.
3. Q. Do you know John Delacour, aka Gray Wolf?
A. Sure. He’s a friend, a regular.
4. Q. Did you see this man on the night of September 18th?
A. Yeah. He came in about eight, eight-thirty, and left near one.
5. Q. At any point did he leave the bar during that time?
A. I think he went out to get some smokes . . .
6. Q. How long was he gone?
A. I can’t say. The bar was awful busy that night.
7. Q. Well, are we talking five minutes? An hour?
A. I . . . I really can’t tell you. All’s I know is he was gone and then he was back.
8. Q. Did he tell you he’d been fired from his job?
A. No . . . but Gray Wolf’s a pretty private fellA. He keeps his business to himself. [Pause] He ain’t no murderer, though. Wasn’t the first time around, and not this time neither.
9. Q. Mr. Tollande, have you seen Gray Wolf lately?
A. Not since that night in the bar.
10. Q. Do you know where we might find him?
A. He moves around a lot.
11. Q. Your people always do. And you lie, too, don’t you?
What Eli first thought, stepping into the musty, stuffed room that made up the Comtosook Public Library, was that someone with all the bright bloom of Shelby Wakeman didn’t belong in a such a closeted place. He imagined her sitting, instead, among a kaleidoscope of tulips in the Netherlands, or swimming with a rainbow of Caribbean fish, and then drew himself up short at being caught in such a flight of fancy.
Watson, unused to being on a leash, yanked so hard all of a sudden that Eli went flying, nearly jackknifing himself on the front desk. The resulting noise caused Shelby to look up from the computer terminal where she sat. “Well, hello,” she said, getting up and coming around the counter. She looked at Watson, who was wagging his ridiculous tail so hard it made his face shake. “You aren’t allowed in here,” she scolded, but she was patting him all the same. “Then again, who am I to tell a cop what to do.”
When she smiled at him, Eli’s heart raced like a Roman candle. “Hey,” he managed.
Brilliant, Rochert. She works in a library, she knows the whole dictionary, and that’s the only word you can scrape out?
“Were you looking for something in particular?” Shelby asked, and Eli opened his mouth only to realize that she was speaking to Watson. “Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe, with your namesake? Or Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers?”
“Actually, he just came to keep me company,” Eli said. “I was looking for town records from the thirties.”
He was not particularly looking for town records from the thirties. In fact, he’d come expressly to see if Shelby was working today. But the murder case was on his mind, and that excuse was the first to pop into his head. It occurred to Eli that, between his investigation of a seventy-year-old murder case and his itch to see this woman, he was clocking precious little time for police work.
She was staring at him curiously, wondering, no doubt, why a policeman wouldn’t know that all municipal records were stored next door to the department in the town clerk’s office. “I know exactly where they are . . . but it’s not here.”
“Any chance you can show me?”
Before Shelby could even pose the question, the other librarian on duty—one who’d been so still and wrinkled Eli hadn’t realized she was animate—waved her along. They walked down the steps with Watson between them, Shelby squinting in the sun.
“Beautiful out, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I forget how bright it gets, sometimes.”
“You mean working in the library all day?”
“That, and staying up all night with Ethan. It’s the only time he can go out to play.” They began to walk down Main Street, Watson sniffing at cracks in the sidewalk and patches of gum stuck to the ground.
“When do you sleep? You must be exhausted.”
She smiled tightly. “You do what you have to do.”
A kid on a scooter passed them on the left, pushing Shelby toward Eli. He felt the charge that came from being so close. He could trip, blame it on Watson, and brush up against her. He could even push Watson into her, and then catch her when she fell.
What would she feel like in his arms?
Then they were at the municipal offices, and Eli felt a slow roll of frustration. Had the buildings in this town always been so close together? He followed Shelby up the stone steps and into the first room on the right. “Lottie,” she said to the colossal town clerk, “h
ave you lost weight?”
If she’d lost an ounce, Eli would eat Watson’s grain for a week. But the woman beamed. “I think that diet’s working,” she tittered, waving them into the bowels of the building without question.
The basement was dark and moldy, with spiderwebs festooning the ceiling. Watson immediately tugged free of his leash to chase a rodent behind a stack of boxes. Unerringly, Shelby crawled over a small bunker of crates into a narrow aisle of filing cabinets that had not seen the better half of this century. She opened a drawer and pulled out a yellowed stack of cards. “These are from 1932.”
Stupefied, Eli could only stare at her. “Are you psychic too?”
“Ross isn’t psychic,” Shelby corrected. “And no, I’m not either. I found them the hard way the last time I was here—by going through every other drawer before I hit this one.”
He moved into the narrow aisle to stand beside her, only to realize there wasn’t really space for two. They were pressed up against each other from chest to hip; Eli could feel her breath against his shoulder. In this basement, with the air thick as blood around them, Eli thought time might have stopped. After all, lately, stranger things had happened.
“Why are you doing this?” Shelby asked quietly. “It isn’t going to solve anything.”
It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the murder case. Eli shrugged. “People do all sorts of crazy things every day.” A shaft of sunlight fell onto her cheek from the one window in this cellar, as if it had sought and found the only object of beauty worth illuminating. Eli leaned forward, toward that halo. Would it be warm, there?
Shelby reared back so suddenly that a short wall of boxes tumbled to the ground, spilling their contents. She thrust the stack of cards into Eli’s hand. From across the room, Watson sneezed. “The one, um, that you want should be in front,” she murmured.
Eli took her lead, forcing himself to concentrate on the brittle pile of death certificates he now held. He glanced down at Cecelia Pike’s, signed by the same ME who had done the autopsy. He had responded to a call placed to the Comtosook Police department at 10:58, concerning an alleged homicide. The time of death had been certified at 11:32 A.M. Stuck to this card with what could only be blood was one for the newborn, also certified at 11:32. His mind scrambled back to his talk with Wesley Sneap, who’d said Cecelia Pike had been hanged near midnight, and cut down to a horizontal position about 6 or 7 A.M. But the police hadn’t been called in until eleven . . . which gave Pike plenty of time to stage the scene.
He glanced up at the sound of footsteps. “Hello? Hello down there?”
There was a clatter, and the whump of Watson finding someone new to greet. “Whoa, Pilgrim. Down! News flash—you’re not a Pomeranian,” said Frankie Martine. She wore jogging pants with a white stripe, and a formfitting T-shirt that read HOTBOD. Her blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and in spite of her lack of makeup, she could have given any model a run for her money. That was Frankie’s cross to bear—she was Marie Curie trapped in Marilyn Monroe’s body. “Eli Rochert. What’s a girl gotta do to find you in this town!”
A smile split his face. “Jeez, Frankie, I never expected door-to-door service. What are you doing here?”
“No way was I gonna get into this on the phone.” She peered over his shoulder, and he belatedly remembered Shelby.
“Frankie Martine, this is Shelby Wakeman. Shelby’s—”
“Leaving,” Shelby murmured. “I, uh, have to go.” And without even looking at him, she backed out of the pile of cartons and fled up the stairs.
“Your girlfriend’s gonna be ma-a-ad,” Frankie sang as Eli escorted her into his makeshift lab. She took a seat and propped her feet up on Watson.
“She’s not my girlfriend. Yet.”
“Yeah, well, you just blew that one back about three months.”
Eli scowled. “Is it my fault you’re beautiful?”
“Gee, was that a compliment?” Frankie leaned forward, plucking a particular page from the sheaf. “C’mon. Admit. You love me.”
He did. Because all the sharpest detective work that Eli did amounted to nothing at all if Frankie couldn’t take the traces of evidence a perp had left behind, and make heads and tails of it. She was leafing through his evidence—the clothing and articles that hadn’t been sent to her. “Nice print.”
“I took it off the pipe before giving it to you,” Eli said.
“Yeah? Whose is it?”
“The victim’s, strangely enough.”
“Hmm,” Frankie said, but did not elaborate. “How come I didn’t get this?” She was holding up the victim’s nightgown, with a small brown splotch on one side.
“How much blood did you need? You had the rest of her clothing.”
“It’s the wrong color.” Frankie pursed her lips. “I mean, I don’t get to see seventy-year-old blood very often, but still.” She rolled it into a ball and tucked it into her black bag. “Just in case I get bored when I go to visit my friends at the lab in Montpelier.” Then she tossed him a file. “Look at this.”
Table 1—Amelogenin Typing Results
KEY: Types in parentheses ( ) are lesser in intensity than types not in parentheses.
— No conclusive results
** Drop-out may have occurred due to limited amount of DNA
She took one look at Eli’s face and rolled her eyes. “Crash course?”
“Please.”
“OK. Basic DNA—everything you’ve got came from either your mom or your dad. She gives you one allele, and he gives you another. The result—a baby with big feet or dimples or curly hair. All those physical traits are on your DNA strand, but they don’t do a lot of good in criminal investigations. So we test the DNA for different traits—like vWA or TH01. At those spots, every person’s gonna have a type: one number from Mom and one from Dad. The DNA we extract from evidence—even really old, difficult evidence like the stuff you sent me—narrows the pool for who might have left that DNA behind.” She smoothed out the corners of the chart she’d handed Eli. “Each of these columns here with the weird number on top is one of those traits. At each trait, there are two numbers—the alleles—which came from the mom and dad of whoever left that DNA behind. Capisce?”
“So far.”
“OK. Before we can analyze evidence, we need control samples—that is, DNA profiles we can compare to the ones we’re about to find on the rope or medicine pouch. The first control sample came from the victim’s blood, which was all over the evidence thanks to her recent labor and delivery. The results I got I labeled as CeceliA. As for your missing perp—well, you got lucky. Making the assumption that the saliva on the pipe was his, I concentrated the DNA yield and was able to get all eight loci . . . which I titled Gray Wolf. Finally came the glass you just sent—that saliva was the basis for the eight numbers that make up the profile of someone different than Gray Wolf’s profile . . . they’re listed as Spencer Pike.”
“Hang on. So that means that we definitely have the DNA of these three people?”
“Two out of three are a lock. The third is a little less of a sure thing. I can’t tell you that this particular DNA belonged to Gray Wolf, because I never had a control sample.”
“So all you really know is that you’ve got DNA on the pipe that’s male, and different from Spencer Pike’s.”
“Actually, I’ve got a little more than that.” Frankie trailed her finger down the page. “One of the byproducts of DNA testing is that we’ve got charts, now, of subpopulations, which show how alleles tend to crop up with frequency in various ethnic and racial groups.”
“You lost me,” Eli said.
“We can generate statistics collected by typing people of a certain background—white, black, Native American. Say you’ve got a white Rolls-Royce. Rolls are only two percent of the entire car population.”
“And you know this . . . why?”
Frankie shook her head. “Shut up, Eli. Two percent. White cars are fifteen percent of th
e total car population. To approximate how many white Rolls-Royces there are, we say fifteen percent of two percent of the car population . . . which means that .3 percent, or three out of every thousand cars, is a white Rolls. That’s the same thing we do when we look at the way types tend to crop up with frequency in various subpopulations. For example, the rope end—the profile I got there is found in one in 1.7 million Caucasians, but only one in 450 million Native Americans. That means if I filled a football stadium with 450 million Indians and another stadium with 450 million whites, I’d expect 264 Caucasians in that stadium to have a matching profile . . . but only one Native American to have it.”
“So whoever handled the rope end was more likely white than Native American?”
“Right. But now, look at the numbers from the pipe. The chances of finding a D5S818 combo of 11,11 is fourteen percent in the Caucasian population, seven percent in the African American population, and twelve percent in the Hispanic population. But the chance of finding an 11,11 combination there in the Native American population is thirty-five percent—that’s more than twice as common as the Caucasian population. If you look at the whole profile on the pipe, the chance of it coming from a Caucasian is one in 320 million; from an African American it’s one in 520 million; from a Hispanic it’s one in 41 million. From a Native American, though, it’s only one in 330,000.”
“So whoever smoked the pipe was an Indian.”
“That would be my unofficial assumption.”
Eli nodded. “What else?”
“There was no surprise when I tested the rope loop, with the epidermal cells that came from the victim’s neck—if you compare the row to Cecelia’s control sample, they’re identical. I only got seven of the eight systems when I tested the noose, but I’d still call it a success. Then I tested the end of the rope, as a different sample. I wasn’t expecting much, and even after scraping for E-cells I had no luck. So I used a PCR procedure to replicate billions of copies of discrete areas of the DNA, and managed to get six loci, which was pretty much a miracle. And of those six systems, every single one is a match to the DNA taken from Spencer Pike’s drinking glass.”