“And?” Win begins to trot.
“She sent the case to the DA’s office about two months ago, said some guy, sounded young, kind of rude, called her, gave her instructions. She didn’t mention it to me because I didn’t ask, says a lot of people call about stuff. I’m sorry.”
“Gotta go,” Win says, running fast.
He grabs the truck’s door as it is shutting, and the fat little bully looks at him, shocked, then furious.
“Get your damn hands off my truck!”
He’s mean, stupid, stinks like beer and cigarettes, his breath so bad Win can smell it as he opens the door wide, stands between it and the front seat. He looks into the small, cruel eyes of Suzy’s worthless husband, who’s probably been hanging around here, waiting for her to show up or, if nothing else, waiting for her to drive past and see him and speed off in terror.
“Who are you and what do you want!” Matt yells.
Win just stares at him, a trick he learned a long time ago on the school playground, after he got bigger, got tired of being picked on. The longer you stare at somebody and don’t say anything, the more freaked out the person gets, and Matt’s eyes seem to be retreating like little clams digging into the sand, hiding. He’s not so tough now. Win stands there, blocking the door, staring at him.
“Man, you’re crazy,” Matt says, beginning to panic.
Silence.
“Now just go on, I’m not doing nothing to nobody.” He’s spitting as he talks, so scared he just might soil himself.
Silence.
Then Win says, “I hear you’re into kicking dogs and abusing your wife.”
“That’s a lie!”
Silence.
“Whoever said that’s lying!”
Silence.
Then, “I just want you to remember my face,” Win says very quietly, staring, not a trace of emotion. “You bother Suzy one more time, ever hurt an animal one more time, and this face is going to be the last one you ever see.”
12
Win gets the frustrating news that the DNA analysis isn’t completed yet. He explains that the situation is urgent, asks how quickly the analysis can be finished. Maybe in another day or so. He asks exactly what the results might mean.
“A genealogical history,” Dr. Reid explains over the phone. “Based on four major biogeographical ancestry groups, sub-Saharan African, Indo-European, East Asian, or Native American, or an admixture.”
Win sits in Nana’s favorite rocking chair by the open window, and wind chimes quietly chime, light, sweetly.
“… Technology based on SNPs,” Dr. Reid is explaining. “Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms. Different from normal DNA screening that requires the analysis of millions of base pairs of genes when looking for patterns, many of them irrelevant. Basically, what we’re interested in are the some two thousand ancestry information markers….”
Win listens to a typical scientist typically overexplaining, going on and on about some beta version of some machine that is 99.99 percent accurate, about some test that can predict human eye color from DNA with 95 percent accuracy, about Harvard Medical School and a license the lab has with it to develop some anemia drug…
“Whoa.” Win stops rocking. “What do drugs have to do with this?”
“Pharmacogenetics. When we started doing ancestral profiling, it wasn’t to work criminal cases. The original objective was to assist pharmaceutical companies with determining how genetics can be applied to developing drugs.”
“You’ve got something going on with Harvard Medical School?” Win gets a feeling, a strong one.
“Maybe you’ve heard of PROHEMOGEN? For the treatment of anemia associated with renal failure, cancer chemotherapy, Zidovudine-treated HIV. Can help reduce the need for blood transfusion.”
A breeze stirs the trees beyond Nana’s window and the chimes seem to chime louder.
“Dr. Reid,” Win says, “you mind telling me how long ago the sample was submitted in the Finlay case.”
“I believe about two months or so ago.”
“It takes that long?”
“Theoretically, five days, a week, but it’s a question of priorities. We’re currently analyzing DNA in a hundred or so other active criminal cases, several of them serial rapists, serial murderers. I was told there was no rush.”
“I understand. Twenty years ago. The guy we’re talking about probably isn’t killing people anymore.”
“It’s not a guy. The first thing we always do is run a standard STR panel, which happens to give us gender from one of those markers. Both DNA sources are from females.”
“Both? What?”
“Samples from areas of clothing around the neck, under the arms, the crotch, where you might find cells from sweat, skin shedding, gave us a profile of a female who has a different DNA profile from the bloodstains, which have always been assumed to be the victim’s and are,” he says. “That much they got right back then.”
The storage facility where the country club keeps decades of records is a massive complex of cinder-block units connected like train cars over a two-acre lot.
Although the units are temperature-controlled, they have no lighting, and Sykes runs the narrow beam of her small flashlight over white cartons while Missy checks her inventory list so she can tell what’s inside.
“E-three,” Sykes reads.
“November 1985,” Missy says. “Getting close.”
They move on. It is stuffy in here, dusty, and Sykes is getting tired of digging through old boxes in dark, claustrophobic spaces while Win runs around New England doing who knows what.
“E-eight,” she reads.
“June 1985. Looks like they’re a bit out of order.”
“You know what?” Sykes decides, lifting another heavy box off metal shelving. “Let’s just get them for the whole year.”
The doorman of the historic brick building in Beacon Hill isn’t inclined to let Win do what he wants, which is to appear at Lamont’s door unannounced.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says the older man in his gray uniform, a bored doorman who spends most of his time behind a desk, obviously reading newspapers. There’s a stack of them under his chair. “I have to ring her first. What’s your name?”
Numb-nut. You just told me she’s home.
“All right. I guess you leave me no choice.” Win sighs, reaching inside his jacket pocket, slipping out his wallet, flipping it open, showing his creds. “But I really need you to keep quiet about this. I’m in the middle of an extremely sensitive investigation.”
The doorman takes a long time looking at Win’s shield, his ID card, then looks closely at his face, something odd and uncertain in his own, maybe a glint of excitement, then, “You’re that…? The one I’ve been reading about. I recognize you now.”
“I can’t talk about it,” Win says.
“You want my opinion, you did what you had to do. Damn right. Kids these days, worthless hoodlums.”
“I can’t talk about it,” Win says as a woman in her fifties enters the lobby, yellow designer suit, a Chanelian, as Win calls rich women who have to flaunt those huge Chanel double C’s.
“Good afternoon.” The doorman politely nods at her, almost bows.
She dismisses Win’s existence, then does a sharp double take, stares openly at him, smiles at him, a little flirtation going. He smiles back, watches her head to the elevator.
“I’ll just ride up with her,” Win says to the doorman, doesn’t give him a chance to protest.
He strides across the lobby as polished brass elevator doors part and steps aboard a mahogany vessel that is about to carry him on a mission Monique Lamont isn’t likely to appreciate or forget.