Secrets from the Deep

by Linda Fairstein

  Natasha was a journalism student in graduate school at Columbia University. She was a huge help with my homework—not to mention being there for me whenever I had problems to solve.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, taking an English muffin from the refrigerator and popping it in the toaster. “Booker and I are going to sit down with her to talk about what we can do in the doubloon investigation. We can take the train down to the Puzzle Palace and do it with her there.”

  Natasha put down the paper. “Sam came to pick Blaine up at five this morning,” she said. She had been a teenager when she met my mother in the courthouse, and still called her by her first name. “There’s a hostage situation on Staten Island. She won’t be able to do that with you today.”

  “What kind of hostage situation?” I asked.

  Getting the news that my mother was in the middle of a real-life police crisis was always frightening. I was as wide awake now as if someone had put a bunch of ice cubes down the back of my pajamas.

  “Don’t worry, Dev,” Natasha said, placing her hand over mine. “She’s just gone to the scene for moral support of her cops. She’s not in danger.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Some guy went into an all-night parking garage and had a fight with the workers, so he’s keeping them locked up inside,” Natasha said. “That means they are his hostages.”

  One minute my mother could be joking around with me and holding me close to her, and the next she was doing the most serious work in the city. She was Lady Blue to the entire police department, and the most important person in the world to me.

  “Is Sam texting you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Every fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll get dressed and call Booker,” I said. “Would you ask Sam to text me, too?”

  “Sure,” Natasha said. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Maybe we’ll go to Headquarters to wait for Mom,” I said.

  “You can hang out with me, Dev,” Natasha said. “She’ll be safe, I promise you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, finishing my juice and going inside to get dressed. “I’d sort of like to be where I can see Mom when she gets back to work.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  I called Booker and told him what was going on, and we met at ten fifteen to take the subway downtown.

  Before we’d even gone one stop, Sam texted good news.

  “Situation over! Everybody safe.”

  The photograph he sent showed my mother in the middle of the NYPD’s hostage negotiators—the men and women who worked to get the victims released. Like the rest of the team, she had an NYPD jacket over her light gray suit. On the back were the words TALK TO ME, the motto of the squad.

  I smiled and texted back. “Always good advice. Tell her how proud of her I am.”

  I wanted to tell Sam to give her a big kiss for me, but I knew he wouldn’t cross the line and do that.

  “Lady Blue going to hospital to greet victims being treated for minor bruises. Then to press conference with the mayor. You and Booker should play tennis or chill. Later.”

  I was tempted to write back a message for my mother: “We’ll see.”

  But I didn’t need to make her day any worse, even if it was just a joke. So instead I texted: “Later,” with a whole bunch of smiley faces.

  “Change in plans,” I said to Booker.

  “For a good reason,” he said. “You want to turn around and go home? We can pick up our rackets and go to the park to play tennis.”

  “I think we just got very lucky,” I said. “Too lucky for me to let you trounce me in a game of tennis.”

  Booker played for the Hunter High team. He was too good for my game.

  “There’s one more lead the two of us can track down,” I said. “If my mom and Sergeant Wright don’t get this all together until Monday, which is the way it looks now, we may have some more evidence to help them. We’ll get off at Twenty-Eighth Street,” I said.

  “Twenty-Eighth? What’s there?”

  “This whole thing started as an experiment about DNA,” I said.

  “Yeah. I know that.”

  “The NYPD does all its DNA work at the city’s lab on Twenty-Sixth Street,” I said. “Not the kind of stuff Officer Hadley did yesterday, in Queens. It’s only DNA at this place.”

  “How can we get in without your mother?” Booker asked.

  “I’ve been there with her a dozen times,” I said, “and my mom invited three of the biologists to come to Ditchley to lecture to us for our STEM program. Getting in will be a piece of cake.”

  “Is this where your buckets of sand and fish scales are being analyzed?” Booker asked.

  “No way,” I said. “They’ll be sent over to Cape Cod, to the institute that does work with ocean creatures. Our science teacher got the school to give us each an allowance to get lab results tested and sent to school.”

  I stood up and held on to the railing over my head, anxious to get off the train when it stopped at Twenty-Eighth Street.

  “So DNA on what, Dev?” Booker asked.

  “Start with the emery board,” I said. “It’s a nail file. It’s bound to have DNA on it from being rubbed against someone’s skin or nails.”

  “Jenny Thaw,” Booker said. “What good is that?”

  “At least we’d have her DNA profile,” I said. “What if she’s the one who broke into Becca’s house? What if she has something to do with the coin, if it ever belonged to her relative Gertie?”

  Booker stammered. “I—uh—I just never thought of anything like that.”

  “Then there’s the coin,” I said.

  “C’mon, Dev. Don’t be silly,” he said. The train doors opened and I scooted out onto the platform, with Booker at my heels. “The coin was submerged in water for days, maybe months or years.”

  I stopped in my tracks and turned to face Booker, my hands planted on my hips.

  “Did you see what Officer Hadley did yesterday?”

  “Of course I did,” Booker said. “I was standing right next to you.”

  “He pricked the red spot with some little metal tool to analyze it for us.”

  “Right,” Booker said.

  “And he explained that the ingredients in nail polish form a film or a coating, which keeps water from getting through or into the polish.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  “So if we get someone at the DNA lab to scrape off some of the red stuff, even though the coin was in the water,” I said, “there’s a good chance that there could be a trace of human DNA on the surface of the coin, covered over by the polish.”

  “Whoa!” Booker said. “That would be amazing.”

  “Imagine if that DNA profile could prove to the police who owned the coin,” I said, “or maybe the person who stole it. Someone who had a legal right to it would have claimed it by now. They wouldn’t be breaking into houses to try to get it back.”

  “This experiment has turned you around,” Booker said. “You were always all about books and literature and writing short stories. You were happy to live in the school library.”

  “I still am happiest in a library,” I said, “but science is so interesting and so much fun.”

  “Now you’re shooting to be the Marie Curie of the Ditchley School,” Booker said, running up the steps to the street ahead of me. “Two Nobel Prizes in Science.”

  “I’m not looking for any prizes,” I said, trying to think the way Sam Cody would. “I just want to break this case.”

  25

  “Devlin Quick,” I said, presenting my school ID card to the security guard.

  “Booker Dibble,” he said. “Hunter High School.”

  The sign over the guard’s head said OFFICE OF FORENSIC BIOLOGY.

  I learned from my mom, back when I was just a you
ng kid, that the word “forensics” meant the use of science in the law—especially in regard to evidence in criminal cases. This building was the brand-new city laboratory where all the DNA from police investigations was analyzed.

  “Who are you here to see?” the guard asked.

  “Kerry O’Donnell,” I said.

  “She’s expecting you?” the guard asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said, trying to think of some excuse for being there.

  The guard looked at my ID again. “You related to our commissioner?”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m her daughter.”

  “Should have said so to begin with,” he said, writing our names in his logbook and directing us to the elevator. “O’Donnell’s on six.”

  “Smooth as silk,” Booker said.

  The sixth floor labs looked like some kind of futuristic movie set. All the biologists were dressed in white lab coats. The workbenches had protective hoods covering them—if one scientist sneezed at her desk, without the hood it could contaminate the sample on the desk next door—and the workers each wore clear plastic goggles and white gloves.

  Kerry’s office was down the hall past the first bank of workbenches. When I got to the door with her nameplate on it, I knocked.

  “C’mon in,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” I said, opening the door.

  “Dev! What a treat,” she said, getting to her feet to greet us.

  She was one of the youngest forensic biologists on the staff—super-smart, with a great sense of humor. Even when she came to school and talked about the most complicated science issues, Kerry made it easy to understand them.

  “Give me the goods, Detective Quick,” Kerry said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  I opened the latch on my crossbody bag. I had tried my best to tell her that my mother hadn’t sent us here, but that didn’t seem to matter to Kerry, which is part of the reason I like her so much.

  “I know you don’t go to Ditchley, young man,” Kerry said to Booker. “Are you helping with a school project here?”

  “It started as a school experiment,” he said, “but now we’re trying to restore something valuable to its rightful owner.”

  “A good deed,” Kerry said. “That’s my favorite kind of work to do, not that it happens very often in a DNA lab.”

  I handed her the emery board.

  “That’s a relief,” she said, taking it from me and holding it by the ends. “It doesn’t look like much of a weapon.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am,” Booker said. “Nothing like that. Nobody’s injured here.”

  “See all that red stuff?” I asked, pointing my gloved finger to the top and side of the thin board. “We were at the evidence lab in Queens yesterday. Officer Hadley took a sample of it. He’ll know for sure by Monday, but he thinks it’s nail polish.”

  “And you think I might find some scrapings under the polish, or somewhere else on this?” Kerry asked.

  “I was hoping so,” I said.

  “I can give it a try,” Kerry said.

  “So, I know a bit about DNA,” Booker said.

  Kerry smiled. “From TV shows or your science teacher?”

  Booker laughed. “A mix of both, and I have some questions for you.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Suppose Dev is right,” Booker said. “Suppose the woman who used the nail file—we think it’s a woman, and Dev found it in her bathroom—just suppose you find her DNA on the file.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Will that tell you anything?” Booker asked.

  “Good question. I like it when one of the partners is practical.”

  Booker winked at me.

  “I can usually develop a DNA profile from a small amount of trace evidence—in this case, from skin cells that probably rubbed off on the rough material of the emery board,” Kerry said. “Now, the profile won’t tell me the person’s name or identify her to me. It’s just a DNA profile that no one else on the entire planet has, except for that person.”

  “So what good does it do us?” Booker asked.

  “Maybe Dev can ask the owner of the emery board to give you a sample, like a Q-tip swab of her mouth.”

  “Oh no,” I said. “We can’t do that. I’m not ready to alert her that we’re looking at her. I mean, I don’t want her claiming something valuable if it isn’t hers.”

  “Are there any other ways to match her profile?” Booker asked.

  “Have you learned about the databank yet?” Kerry said.

  “I’ve heard of it,” Booker said, “but I don’t exactly know what it is.”

  My mother had explained it to me so many times that I probably could have helped Booker out here, but that would have been kind of obnoxious to do, considering Kerry was an expert in this work. I zipped my mouth.

  “So there’s a computer system that law enforcement all over the country uses,” Kerry said, “and we call it a DNA databank.

  “Suppose a person, any person, committed a crime,” Kerry said. “Nothing violent, but just something that might leave evidence behind at the crime scene.”

  “Like if somebody broke into your grandmother’s house, took a sip of her lemonade from a drinking glass, and left it in the sink,” I added.

  “Exactly, Dev,” Kerry said. “The police might take that drinking glass as evidence, and find the person’s DNA from the spot where the burglar put the glass to his or her mouth.”

  “Yeah,” Booker said. “There’s DNA in our saliva.”

  “So drinking glasses are good evidence,” Kerry continued. “Often when we touch things, our skin cells—every one of which has DNA in it—come off on the surface that we touch.”

  “Then what happens to the drinking glass, for example?” Booker asked.

  “The police take that glass to the local lab, and someone like me develops a DNA profile. If they have no idea who stole the sip of lemonade,” Kerry said with a smile, “then they would put that profile—without knowing who it belongs to—in the national databank.”

  “Where there are already thousands and thousands of DNA profiles,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Kerry said. “And then the computer takes over from detectives and from biologists like me.”

  “Oh, I see. The computer tries to match the DNA profile to another person already in the databank,” Booker said.

  “You bet,” Kerry said, “and that computer search just takes hours, instead of weeks of detective work. It might find that serial lemonade sipper anywhere.”

  “So there are profiles in the databank,” Booker said, “that don’t have any names attached to them when they are entered?”

  “That’s right,” Kerry said. “They’re just evidence found at a crime scene that may, or may not, turn out to be an important clue, and that may, or may not, be linked to a real person at some point in time.”

  “But there is also DNA from criminals in your system,” I said. “Isn’t that true?”

  “From bad guys all over America,” Kerry said. “If they’ve been arrested for crimes in some states, or found guilty in others, you can bet their profiles are in the law enforcement databank.”

  “Okay,” Booker said. “This is coming together for me.”

  My phone buzzed. It was another text from Sam Cody. “All good at hospital. Going to City Hall. You and Booker cool?”

  “Totally,” I texted back. “Totally cool.”

  “Is that all you’ve got?” Kerry asked, waving the emery board at me.

  “Actually,” I said, opening my bag again, “the real deal is in here.”

  I fumbled with the bag’s catch because of the vinyl gloves Kerry had given me, but came out with the torn paper bag and our coin.

  “Way to go, Dev!” Kerry said. “Is that Olympic gold, for your swimming?”

&
nbsp; Booker laughed. “Doesn’t she just wish? This is a real doubloon. Actual pirate treasure.”

  Kerry got serious really quickly. She was turning the coin over and over in her hand.

  “Looks like Isabella is wearing the same red nail polish that’s on the emery board,” Kerry said. “Where did you find this?”

  “On Martha’s Vineyard,” Booker said. “It came up in a bucket of sand we scooped from the ocean.”

  Kerry lowered the coin and looked me in the eye. “Your mother knows all about this, right?”

  “About the rare coin and the emery board?” I asked. “She sure does.”

  About our visit to the DNA lab, I thought to myself, not so much.

  “I mean, you can call her,” I said. “She’s been pretty tied up with that hostage situation this morning, but I bet she’d have time for you.”

  “I almost forgot about that case,” Kerry said. “We’re fine without her. Just making sure she didn’t want the FBI involved in this, since you found the coin in another state.”

  “There’s a really smart sergeant on the Vineyard who’s working on that, and she’s going to be talking to my aunt Blaine today,” Booker said. “The FBI isn’t involved at all.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Kerry said, staring at the coin again. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and you can follow me out to my workbench.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Well, first I’m going to photograph the coin and take a close-up of Isabella’s face,” Kerry said. “Then I’m going to remove a slice of the polish from the surface of the coin to expose what might be underneath it. And then I’m going to swab the coin for possible DNA.”

  “Swab it?” Booker asked.

  “Yes. I’ll take a cotton swab and run it over the surface of the coin, and then process it to see if I come up with anyone’s DNA.”

  “That’s awesome,” Booker said. “Are you going to do it right now?”

  “You two are worse than the chief of detectives,” Kerry said. “Why? Because you needed the answer yesterday?”

  “That would have been very useful,” I said.