“I was spot-checking to see if the evidence was what they said it was.”
Journey and I share measured smiles across the table. It sounds like this issue with his shoes is settled.
35
Intentionally withholding or destroying evidence in a legal proceeding can result in dire consequences.
—VICTOR FLEMMING
After we finish eating, Victor cleans up the kitchen while I walk Journey out to his van to say good-bye.
“Your uncle’s cool,” Journey says, leaning back against his van. He rests his arms on my shoulders and pulls me to him. I lay my head against his chest. I listen to the faint thrum of his heartbeat and wish I could sync mine with his. Mine is racing. I’ve never been close to another person this way, except maybe Rachel.
“Yeah, he is.” I drift into Journey’s circle of warmth, loving how his fingers twist the very tips of my hair.
“Maybe he’ll solve this thing and we can stop worrying about psycho killers.”
“Mmm. That would be nice,” I whisper.
Journey moves me away from his body so he can look at my face. “Have you told him about the—you know—connection?”
“Not yet.” I step back. “But I think I should. What do you think?”
Journey pulls me back against his chest. “I think we’re safer if you don’t tell.”
“Why?” I pop my head back again, studying his face.
“Because that connection between the two murders is the one thing no one else knows. Even the killer doesn’t know we know it,” Journey says. “And, since we’re not sure who we can trust, I think we should keep it that way.”
“Except we know we can trust Victor.”
“Probably. Yeah.” Journey rakes a hand through his hair, sweeping it off his forehead. “But can we trust who Victor would tell?”
I haven’t discussed my suspicions about Chief Culson with Journey, but I see what he’s saying. If I give the tie to Victor, he’ll tell Rachel and she’ll tell the chief. Even though Victor thinks he’s safe, I’m still not so sure.
“That makes sense.” I de-stress by forcing the air out of my lungs and then taking in a long deep breath. Thoughts of possible motives for murder used to be a silent dark knot that lived quietly inside me. It was not something I ever talked about openly. I don’t have to hide any of this from Journey, which is a relief. But our lives would be better if we didn’t have to worry about it at all.
Journey pulls me to his chest again and rests his cheek on top of my head. “I have to get back to work.” He whispers this into my hair. In one swift move he pecks me on the cheek and climbs into the van. “I’ll call you later.”
The van finally rattles to a start on the third try and he backs down the driveway toward the street.
“How?” I wrap my sweatshirt a little tighter around me, my voice buried by the rumble of the van. “You lost your phone.” I watch him back into the street and pull away.
Returning to the kitchen, I find Victor in full-fledged field DNA test mode. The table is littered with all kinds of stuff and he’s slumped in his chair, going through my notebook. I take a seat.
Victor sets the notebook aside. “So we know your bio teacher collected samples from you and from Journey. And, I can maybe buy that she would put herself in the mix, too. Can you see her doing that?”
“Definitely. Miss Peters used to say we are our own best test subjects.”
Victor gnaws on a hangnail. “So, if she had a degree in forensic chemistry, she probably knew what her own DNA string looked like.”
“We all knew what it looked like,” I say with a laugh. “She had it blown up, framed, and hung on the wall.”
“She included her own DNA in order to validate the test. That’s logical,” he says.
“She was a stickler for things like that. I can hear her voice in my head. ‘Always include a control sample.’”
“She’s her own control sample. I’ll buy that.” Victor stabs the notebook with his pen. “I don’t expect to match the last sample because we don’t have enough information. But let’s say CC indicates it was Chuck. Why would she include him?”
“Because … she wanted to impress him, show him she could do it.”
Victor points at me. “You really are my star pupil.” He thinks for a minute. “It’s too bad we can’t get a sample of Chuck’s DNA, because then we could settle your theory once and for all.”
Victor stops and gives me a wide-eyed look.
Which is funny, because I’m giving him the very same look.
Two great minds …
Both of our heads swivel to the counter next to the sink and land on one plain, gleaming, half-full glass of water.
We leap up and make it to the sink in a matter of steps. Neither of us touches the glass, but we both know it contains the chief’s DNA.
“Looks like we’ll get to test your theory after all.” Victor returns to the table and slides my notebook over to me. “Clean page, write this down: today’s date … gel test. Samples one through four. We’ll label them the same as Peters’s. That glass on the counter will be CC.”
Victor shoves all the crap to one side of the table and grabs an unread newspaper from our recycling stack. He unfolds it, covering half of the table. “My lab table has a stainless steel top, easy to clean and sanitize,” he explains, “but out in the field we use newspapers. Here’s a lesson for you: An unread newspaper is sterile. Want to know why?” He doesn’t wait for my answer but keeps talking. “Because printing presses get up to about one hundred and thirty degrees. That’s enough to kill most bacteria.”
“Wow, that’s news to me.” I giggle.
Victor groans.
I peer into his open briefcase. “You carry around the stuff to run DNA in your briefcase?”
“I do for certain things, like the agarose gel and buccal swabs. But the rest of this stuff I picked up at the superstore on the way home. They sell everything there.”
“So, it’s just normal stuff?”
“Pretty much.” Victor reaches into the bag and pulls out a brick-sized chunk of green foam, which he sets in the middle of the table. “Like floral foam, for example.”
“You’re going to use that?”
“It makes a perfect test tube rack.”
I peer over the edge of his shopping bag. “You found test tubes at the superstore?”
He smiles. “The buccal swabs come with their own tubes.”
“Oh. Good to know.”
He ticks a list off on his fingers. “But I will also need rubbing alcohol, tape, a sharp craft knife, some aluminum foil, and, oh yeah, baking soda and a pitcher.”
While I gather the requested items from various places in the kitchen, Victor twists open an unused swab kit. He then retrieves the glass we saw Chief Culson drink from. He hoists it to me and we nod to each other—a silent confirmation that we agree this was the chief’s glass.
Victor vigorously runs the swab along the rim of the glass, first along the inside and then the outside. When he’s finished, he drops the swab into the test tube. He lines up each of the samples by sticking them into the block of floral foam.
“Okay, these samples are in the same order of Miss Peters’s test.”
I give him a raised-eyebrow look. “There has to be more to it than that.”
“There is. I’m just going to power through. Stop me if you have questions, or you can just sit back and watch.”
I prop one leg up on the chair to rest my notebook against. “Best show in town.”
He shakes some baking soda into the pitcher and then sloshes in some distilled water from a bottle in his shopping bag.
“How much did you put in? That didn’t look very precise,” I say.
“It doesn’t have to be. I’m just making an alkaline buffering solution.” He rummages to the bottom of his shopping bag and retrieves a small testing kit for home aquariums. He scoops a bit of the buffering solution into the kit, adds a few drops of s
omething red, and shakes it. Then he holds it up to the light and analyzes the results. “Close enough,” he mutters. He puts the lid on the pitcher and hands it to me. “Stick this in the fridge and put the alcohol in the freezer.”
Victor upends his shopping bag over the table, dumping out the rest of his purchases. It’s a bizarre assortment. A small plastic container about the size of half of a sandwich, and a smaller plastic soap dish, with a flimsy, hinged lid. Two small spools of electrical wire: one red, one black. Two packages of alligator clips, some wire strippers, six 9-volt batteries, and a bottle of meat tenderizer.
“Guess what this is?”
“Junk on sale that you couldn’t resist?”
Victor chuckles. “I like the sense of humor. It’s cute. This, my star pupil, is our electrophoresis chamber. Or it will be once we build it. Now pay attention. You don’t want to miss anything.”
36
Fifty percent of human DNA is identical to the DNA of a banana.
—VICTOR FLEMMING
Victor’s right. I don’t want to miss any of this.
“I don’t know how much you know about running gel,” he says. “So I’ll just skim the basics.”
“Pretend I don’t know anything. Tell me everything.” I scoot my chair in close.
“The test is called electrophoresis. It’s a process that uses electrical current to move particles through a fluid or, in our case, a gel.”
Victor snaps the lid off of the plastic soap dish then uses the knife to carve away each end, creating a U-shaped shell. He holds it up and rotates it. “This is the gel casting tray. The gel goes in here.” He picks up a slightly larger plastic container. “This is the buffering chamber.” He demonstrates how the smaller tray fits inside the larger one. “That alkaline solution I put in the fridge goes in here.”
I make a quick sketch of these items in my notebook and label them.
Victor rips into the packages of wire, cuts off an eight-inch piece of red and one of black, and then proceeds to strip off the coating at each end and attach the shiny copper tips to the alligator clips.
“It’s starting to look electrical.” I remember the new equipment in Miss P’s lab. There was a clear acrylic tray that had similar red and black wires attached to it.
Victor sets the wires aside and creates two strips of aluminum foil, which he folds over each end of the buffering chamber. “The aluminum foil makes the contact point on the buffering chamber,” he says.
He clips a black wire over the foil at one end of the chamber and the red wire over the foil at the other end. “Black is negative and red is positive.” He sets the contraption in the middle of the table. “That is pretty much all there is to an electrophoresis chamber.”
I turn it over and inspect it from all angles. It looks exactly like a plastic soap dish inside of a sandwich keeper, wrapped in aluminum foil and wired up. But even though it’s primitive, it closely resembles the one I saw shoved aside in Miss Peters’s lab. “Why does it need a current?” I ask.
“The current mobilizes the individual DNA strands, moving them through the gel. The smaller the strand the farther it will travel.”
“But you don’t plug it in, right?” I ask.
“Nope. Six nine-volt batteries will run this baby in about forty-five minutes.” Victor unwraps the economy pack of 9-volt batteries and builds a little battery pyramid—three batteries on the bottom (tops up) and two batteries on top (tops down) all plugged in to one another. This arrangement leaves one terminal open on each end. “In the field test you can’t always rely on having available power,” he explains. “So, you need an alternative.”
I sketch his battery arrangement in my notebook. “I didn’t know you could plug one battery into another.”
“It’s called connecting them in series.” Victor touches the alligator clips. “I won’t do it now, but all I have to do is clip the red side to the positive terminal on your stack of batteries and the black side to the negative terminal and voilà, electrical current.”
I check the time on my phone. It’s still early; Rachel and the chief are probably just arriving at the opera. We have plenty of time.
“Now we make the agarose gel.” Victor is standing near the microwave and mimes a slight mad-scientist expression as he tears open a small envelope of powder he retrieved from his briefcase. He taps the contents into a glass measuring cup that already contained distilled water. He stirs the two ingredients together for a minute then holds up the cup for my inspection.
“It’s cloudy,” I say, wrinkling my nose.
He pops the measuring cup into the microwave and heats it for a few seconds.
“We actually have to melt it to be sure all the particles are removed,” Victor says.
While the cup containing the gel is heating, I notice Victor applying tape to the open ends of the soap dish. “Wait. You just cut that off. Was that a mistake?”
“Hey. You’re paying atttention,” Victor says. “I like that.” He holds the plastic tray up, gesturing to how it is formed. “Remember, I said this is the gel casting tray. When we run the test the ends need to be open so the current can pass through the gel. But we need to tape the end until the gel forms into a solid.”
The microwave dings and he removes the measuring cup and pours the melted mixture into the tray. “This’ll take thirty minutes to set up,” he says. “Now we prep the samples.”
While Victor messes around with the buccal swabs and test tubes, I page back in my notebook, reviewing the notes I’ve made. “I had no idea there were so many steps.”
“Fortunately, I don’t have to run DNA every day. But in my lab I have a lot of high-tech stuff that streamlines this process,” he says.
I watch as he uses a drinking straw to pipe the buffering solution into the first two tubes. Then he hands me the straw and I add it to the last two tubes. “So what do you do every day?” I ask.
Victor shrugs. “Solve mysteries any way I can … and go to meetings.” He rolls his eyes. “You have no idea how many meetings. By the way, here’s one for you: Did you know human DNA is 50 percent identical to the DNA of a banana?”
“Is that why bananas are so a-peeling?”
Victor groans and chuckles. “Enough with the puns. That one stunk up the room.”
I laugh along with him, all the while contemplating how this kind of casual, silly, hanging-out fun is what normal families do. But it’s not something that comes naturally to Rachel and me. She’s loving and concerned and protective, but there’s always a barrier. We just never seem to get real with each other. Clearly, Victor’s just being Victor and I’m just being Erin and we’re just here hanging out together, running DNA and making up bad puns. But this feels completely real.
He puts a few drops of dishwashing detergent into one of the test tubes and then plunges the swab up and down, scraping and scrubbing it along the sides of the test tube.
“You’re getting kind of aggressive there.”
“This isn’t a gentle process. In the lab I’d put it in a blender,” he says.
After he’s soaped, scraped, and ravaged all four swabs, he sprinkles a few grains of meat tenderizer into each tube. I pick up the bottle so I can add it to my notes. I can’t resist giving him a strange look. “Meat tenderizer?”
Victor grins. “What is meat?”
I shrug. “Food?”
“It’s protein. In order to run it, we need to free the strands of DNA from the protein. Meat tenderizer destroys protein.” Victor makes an explosive gesture with his hands. “Boom. The DNA is left behind.”
“Wow. You should have been rapping on this stuff in biology today. People might have paid attention.”
“I have analyzed my performance in the classroom at least a hundred times. If I were to do it again I would approach the whole thing differently.” He puts out a hand. “Alcohol, please.”
I retrieve the alcohol from the freezer and set it on the table.
“You’re going to do
this part,” he says. “Use the straw and float a small amount of alcohol on top of each of these tubes. By floating, I mean very slowly drizzle the alcohol down the side, so that it doesn’t sink, but floats on top of the buffer.”
I push the bottle of alcohol back to him. “You better do it. I might screw it up.”
“You got this. Just go slow,” he insists.
I wonder where his confidence in me is coming from. Nonetheless, I take a deep breath and add the alcohol to the first tube. It’s nerve-wracking, but I do it. By the last tube, I’m handling it like a total pro.
Victor’s final purchase from the superstore is a package of long, thin wooden skewers. He uses the skewers to show me how the DNA floats up in the tube right to the point where the buffering solution and the alcohol meet. With a skewer, he pulls up a small ball of milky white goo that almost looks like snot.
“And there you go,” he says. “You just successfully extracted DNA.”
Blink. Blink. I’m amazed, yes. And a little grossed out, too. Because the essence of life looks like it came out of someone’s nose.
37
Fingerprints and eyewitness testimony will connect a suspect to a crime scene, but if you want to really make it stick, find their DNA.
—VICTOR FLEMMING
The gel is set. The DNA extracted. The chamber’s wired up, loaded, and ready to go. I should be on-the-edge-of-my-seat excited about this—and I am. But I’m also obsessing about Journey. It’s weird not to be able to text him or send him a Snapchat and get an answer back.
This isn’t normal. I’m extracting DNA and still can’t stop thinking about him.
“You seem quiet,” Victor says. “Are you okay with all of this?”
“Yes. All of this is amazing. I was just thinking about Journey, that’s all.”
“He seems like a pretty nice guy.” Victor rummages in his briefcase, retrieving his notebook. “What is it that you like about him?”
My face turns pink. I didn’t expect that question. This boyfriend stuff is still pretty new to me. “Um, I guess I like that he’s not afraid of me.”
To Catch a Killer Page 22