“A fork.” He looked at Julissa’s shock-whitened face and left out the grease-spattered frying pan, the empty ice cream container tipped over on the floor.
“Why would he leave something like that behind?” Mike asked. “He’s so careful about everything else.”
“Because he knew the police were done with the scene. He didn’t think about people like us, coming in after.”
“What’re you going to do with it?” Westfield asked.
“I’m taking it to a company in Massachusetts, for DNA sequencing. There’ll be DNA from Allison, but I’m betting there’s DNA from his saliva. I’ll get them to isolate it and then sequence it.”
Westfield shook his head.
“That—DNA profiling isn’t any good unless you have a sample from a suspect to match it to. What’s the sample? They just match up a bunch of points on different genes or whatever, and compare those to the sample to see if they’re from the same guy. If you’ve only got the one, what’s the point? We don’t have access to the evidence from the old scenes, before he started getting careful—stuff might not even exist anymore.”
Chris nodded. He’d thought the same thing for the first year or two, until he’d done more reading.
“You’re talking about DNA profiling. I’m talking about sequencing. They can do it now. The whole sequence, every base pair on every chromosome, start to finish.”
“Then what, they’ll give you a police sketch?”
“Not quite. But we’ll have a description. Hair color. Eye color. Likely height and bone structure. Shape of his nose. Race. All kinds of things. I don’t know, maybe we could take it to a good sketch artist.”
“But sequencing must cost a fortune.”
“A hundred thousand dollars. Maybe less. It gets cheaper all the time.”
“You’re just going to write a check?”
“Yeah. Or a wire transfer.”
Chapter Eleven
A warm wind blew inland from the Gulf of Mexico and flapped the curtains in the dark conference room. Julissa stood on the balcony with her elbows on the carved stone rail. Bougainvillea grew from a terracotta pot next to her and climbed a trellis to tangle in the overhead wooden beams. She watched the lights of oil tankers moving slowly towards the coast from far out in the Gulf and sipped at a glass of whiskey.
After the meeting, she’d been able to reach her parents again. She told them she was in Galveston but didn’t say what she was doing. Her mother had been hysterical in the first telephone conversation, but detached by the second. She’d either been given a tranquilizer or had tranquilized herself at a hotel bar. Her father kept asking if there was any chance it was a mistake. Had she seen the body yet? No? Then it could still be a mistake. A mix-up. He started telling her about another mix-up, a van load of girls on spring break. She told him to stop. It was real. She was meeting the district attorney in the morning; the autopsy was still underway. She didn’t tell him everything she knew. But there was no point in letting her father lose himself in hope.
She’d hung up, left her hotel room, and come into conference room. It felt better in here. She looked at the map for a while, then moved out to the balcony with a drink.
When she and Allison were little girls, they lived in the hills outside of Austin, near Lake Travis. Scrubby woods of juniper and elm lay behind their house. There were limestone stream beds with the tracks of old wagons still cut into the soft stone. In one of the deeper pools of a spring fed creek, they could dive to see the footprints of dinosaurs in the petrified mud at the bottom. The best thing, though, in those summer days of running wild in the woods, was to play with the pair of brothers who lived across the creek. They had many games, but Julissa’s favorite was hide-and-seek, with cap pistols. They played it all summer when she was eight and Allison was nine. Julissa would dream of it at night: new trees in which to hide, new boulders from which to ambush, her heart pounding in her sleep as her dreaming body raced down paths through the spear grass and around cactus patches, her feet sure and true as she leapt the old barbed wire fence and bolted across the pasture land that fell away to the limestone bluffs, Charlie or Dylan or Allison in hot pursuit, caps firing wildly.
That summer, her parents almost divorced. They locked themselves in a study, low conversations building to shouts. Whatever it was—she never learned, even after she became an adult—eventually passed. Her parents stayed married. But that summer’s game was a good enough distraction; she was only aware for a few hours each week of the mysterious fracture cutting down the middle of her family.
Now she had Chris, Aaron and Mike to play with instead of Charlie and Dylan. They could play with real guns and DNA tests and could hack into the FBI’s mainframe; they could ignore work and life and obligations and friends who didn’t matter anymore, and go on an international hunt for a killer who was more animal than man. And that sounded, to Julissa, like the perfect antidote to the stifling reality she would have to face if she did not throw herself completely and unequivocally into this new game.
Allison’s funeral.
All the rituals of collective grief played out, each stage of the wake and service and burial overseen by a fresh-faced stranger.
And then, when it was all over, she’d get up some morning to go back to work.
She heard the door open and she turned. Chris walked around the conference table and joined her on the balcony.
“Thought you’d be here.”
“I looked in my room for the minibar and didn’t notice it.”
“What’re you having?”
“Johnny Walker.”
“Any left?”
She nodded towards the bar. He went inside, poured a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s into a glass and came back. He stood at the rail next to her and took a sip from his drink.
“Allison and I used to play on the beach here when we were kids,” she said. “Labor day, I guess. Probably Fourth of July a couple times too. I was thinking, if you knew someday your happy memories would all turn dangerous and black, would you go ahead and do the things you did to make the happy memories in the first place?”
“Yes.”
She sipped her whiskey and pointed down the beach towards the old Flagship Hotel on its pier out over the water.
“We stayed there, mostly. Dad said it was the nicest hotel in Galveston when he was a kid, but by the time we stayed, it was run down. I guess you have nicer beaches in Hawaii.”
“That’s why we went.”
“Straight out of school?”
“Cheryl was. I graduated three years before her, so I took the bar in California, worked in San Francisco and waited for her to graduate. She did her residency in Honolulu, and we stayed.”
They didn’t speak for a few moments. She sipped from her drink and wondered how far she could hurl the heavy glass tumbler from the balcony. If she hit the windshield of a parked car, what would happen?
“I’ve got to meet that Spaulding guy, the district attorney, tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to.”
She sat on one of the deck chairs. The lights from the oil tankers were reeling on a moving horizon. She steadied herself against the armrest.
“How many of those’ve you had?”
“This?” She held up the glass. “My fifth. I was down at the bar earlier.”
She hadn’t felt drunk at all until that moment, and then she felt it all at once. She finished her whiskey and set the empty glass on the balcony next to her.
“It’s not my drink. Scotch, I mean. It’s Allison’s—she did a post-doc year in Edinburgh and came back a Scotch convert.”
Chris sat on the balcony next to her chair. He leaned against the glass wall and put his feet out towards the stone railing. He didn’t say anything, and she liked him for that. They sat listening to the wind blow off the Gulf. A dark band of clouds lay on the horizon. She could smell the rain in the wind.
“I wish you’d come with me to this th
ing tomorrow, the meeting with Spaulding.”
“I don’t know what I could do.”
“Just be there. As a friend.”
“All right.”
They sat awhile. The clouds on the horizon were blotting out higher stars as they mounted up and moved closer. Julissa saw the first flashes of lightning, veiled in the thickness of the approaching front.
“I might go to bed soon,” Chris said. He had finished his drink and held both of their empty glasses cupped in the palm of one hand resting on his lap.
“You think he’s still in Galveston, this man?”
Chris thought about it for a moment.
“No. I doubt it.”
“I hope not. I want to find him but I don’t want him in this city right now.”
“It’s hard,” Chris said. “Not knowing, I mean.”
The wind was picking up. A few seagulls perched on the roof above them flew off and flared briefly in the white lights that edged the eaves before disappearing over Seawall Boulevard.
“Will you stay a bit and watch the storm come in with me?” she asked.
“Okay.”
“We can go in when the rain starts.”
He nodded.
Later, Julissa was in her room listening to the rain beat on the window and sweep against the walls of the old hotel as the wind rushed past. The lightning lit the room and then left her in a greater darkness waiting for the next flash. She imagined a swimmer, deep in the heart of the storm and far out in the Gulf, plowing headlong into the rain and breaking seas, fast as a runner, the waves showing green and steep in the flashes, great schools of hammerhead sharks parting like curtains to let the swimmer pass untouched. She pulled the blankets closer and eventually slept with the lights on and her gun on the bedspread next to her.
Chapter Twelve
Chris waited his turn to disembark from the 767 that had just landed in Boston. He walked up the jetway with his briefcase and followed the signs to the baggage claim. The fork from Allison’s apartment was so valuable he hadn’t risked its confiscation by trying to bring it through security in his carry-on. When his suitcase came along the conveyor belt, he pulled it to a quiet place beside a broken vending machine, knelt, and checked that the fork was still in its evidence bag. Then he zipped the suitcase and went to the rental car kiosks.
Though he’d hesitate admitting it outright to his new friends, Chris was rich.
He and Cheryl made a lot of money while she was alive and they were both working. But the heavy money came after she was murdered. As a surgeon at the beginning of a long and promising career, Cheryl had been very well insured. It was enough that Chris didn’t need to worry, but more money came ten months later. Their house had been in a new gated development on the edge of Kaneohe Bay. The developer’s brochures advertised it as a safe place to raise a family. A wrought iron fence surrounded the neighborhood, with guard booths at the entrance drive and guards at the walkway gates leading to the beach. Security cameras watched the common areas; each house was equipped with an alarm wired to the front guard booth. On the day Cheryl was murdered, the guard at the beach gates called in sick and the private security company never bothered to find a replacement. The guard at the entrance drive booth was asleep. To make sure no one saw him sleeping, he raised the gate to let all traffic pass, and he turned off the camera recorders so there would be no DVD from the guard booth camera showing him asleep. It may not have made a difference. The police later discovered the alarm in Chris’s house was improperly installed and couldn’t send a signal anywhere.
Chris had not been a tort lawyer. He never thought a lawsuit would fix anything. But when he learned how thoroughly Cheryl had been failed, he sued the security company, the developer, and for good measure, his homeowners’ association. The developer had an eight million dollar insurance policy; the security company had three; and the homeowners’ association had two and a half. The developer brought in its electrical subcontractor as a third party defendant; the sub was insured to the hilt. Chris negotiated a global settlement for ten million dollars, made the four defendants pay to raze his house, and got the homeowners’ association to buy the vacant lot. His only concession was to sign a confidentiality agreement. He could live easily enough on what they’d saved before Cheryl was killed, and on the money from her life insurance. The rest was for revenge.
He was in Boston to spend some of that.
He drove his rental car into the city and left it with the valet at the Marriott Hotel near the waterfront. The sun was going down. He’d left from Houston shortly after returning to the Galvez with Julissa after her meeting with the prosecutor. She’d come out quietly, carrying Allison’s autopsy report in a folder. She hadn’t said much on the drive back to the hotel.
Now, standing in the room at the Marriott and looking out over Boston’s harbor, he thought about calling her. To say what, precisely? He wasn’t sure. He told himself it was because he’d gone so long with no friends. Now that he had some, he wanted them. But he knew a lie when he told it to himself. It was Julissa he wanted to call, not Aaron Westfield. He put the idea out of his mind and watched the sun go down. Then he showered, changed into slacks and a white shirt, and went downstairs.
The scientist’s name was Dr. Gerard Chevalier. They met at the bar off the lobby. Chris had spoken to Dr. Chevalier on the telephone twice and had corresponded with him by email. He recognized the scientist from his picture on the company’s web page. He was short and square-looking, in his mid-fifties with salt-and-pepper hair just above his shoulders. He wore golden spectacles and a dark suit. According to the web page, verified by Mike Nakamura, Chevalier held an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He started Intelligene in 2004 after patenting a process for sequencing DNA.
Chris had been completely frank with him on the phone. Chevalier was willing to do business.
“Dr. Chevalier?”
“Yes.”
“Chris Wilcox.”
They shook hands and took a booth away from the other groups of people. A waitress followed them, and Chris waited until they’d ordered drinks and she’d left.
“How’s Intelligene?”
“Good. We were profiled in the New York Times two months ago, business has been up since then.”
“You own the company?”
“Technically, no. I started it. But we went public last year, so the investors are the owners.”
“You’re still the CEO?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got some freedom of action?”
Dr. Chevalier nodded. “I haven’t forgotten our talk.”
“Good.”
“You found something? Evidence?”
Chris nodded. He opened his briefcase. Inside was a cardboard tube, the kind used for mailing photographs. Inside of that, in a wax paper evidence bag, was the fork he’d taken from Allison’s kitchen counter.
Chris handed it across the table to Chevalier.
“Don’t open it here.”
“Understood. It’s good you used the wax paper and not plastic.”
“Like you told me,” Chris said. He pointed at the bag. “You’ll probably see two DNA sources. One’s a woman, and you’ll find more of her than the other. I’m looking for a man. The source for the man will be saliva, if there’s any trace of him on this at all. The blood and other matter is from the victim.”
Dr. Chevalier put the tube in the lapel pocket of his suit coat.
“You got this how?”
“You know my situation.”
Dr. Chevalier nodded.
“You’re uncomfortable, I can take it somewhere else.”
Dr. Chevalier shook his head. “I just want to know where I stand.”
“The fee?”
“Standard full sequence rate.” Chevalier opened his own briefcase and slid a sheet of paper across the table.
“This is the escrow information. They disburse half right away, as a deposit. We’ll give you the initial data as it comes in. When
we give the full report to escrow, they disburse the other half.”
“If you can’t find any usable DNA from the male source?”
“Then I’ll refund the deposit.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress came back with their drinks. Chris had a light beer and Dr. Chevalier had ordered a glass of pinot noir.
When she left, Chevalier took another set of documents from his briefcase.
“It’s a violation of federal law to sequence a person’s full genome without his consent. If you sign this waiver for me to sequence your own DNA on the sample you just gave me, then I won’t have a problem.”
Chris looked at the waiver and looked back at Chevalier. He hadn’t considered signing anything that would link him to the evidence from Allison’s apartment.
“It’s all right,” Chevalier said. “The simplest test would show you aren’t the source of any DNA in the sample you gave me. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“This way, I do the work after hours, but handle the fee through the books like a straight-up transaction. You get privacy, I stay clear with my shareholders.”
Chris signed the waiver and pushed it back. Chevalier was right: if the waiver wound up with the Galveston police, it might help convict him of breaking and entering, or tampering with a crime scene. But not murder.
“How long for the full report?”
“A week and a half, assuming I find the right DNA.” Dr. Chevalier raised his glass. “To a step forward, Mr. Wilcox.”
They toasted and sipped their drinks. Dr. Chevalier held his wineglass up, between the dim overhead light and his eye. He swirled the wine in his glass and took another sip.
“I had some time to think about this after our last call.”
“Yeah?”
“There are other tests I could do. Or contract out. If we can isolate a saliva sample, we can try running it through a mass spectrometer.”
“What’ll that do?”
“I read a paper a few months ago on stable isotope hydrology. Heard of it?”
“No.”
“Basically, all ground water has a unique signature of stable isotopes. A person who lives in a place long enough builds these up in his body just by drinking the local water. Researchers put together stable isotope hydrology maps of the world.”
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