Ignacia arrived with soup and salad, and we had a quiet dinner together in front of the television. Fatigue and anxiety from the week’s events had overtaken me, and I excused myself to go to my bedroom and read a few magazine articles.
I couldn’t even concentrate on those, so I closed my eyes. I thought of Luc again-the chiseled features, the sexy accent, the kisses that had aroused me as we walked along the cove a short week ago. I wondered if I would ever have the chance to re-create the electricity of those first hours. And I wondered what it would be like if he were beside me now.
I slept late, and after Ignacia left at 8 a.m., soaked in my bathtub and dressed casually in jeans and a sweater. I wasn’t going to court or meeting with any witnesses today, and I didn’t expect to be in the office for long. I carried a small bag with my ballet shoes and clothes in it, optimistic that I could sneak away early for a few hours of exercise at the barre.
The patrol car was waiting for me in the driveway when I got downstairs at nine thirty on a cool June morning. I was grateful for the week’s end after days scarred by such tragic events.
My cell phone rang just as we pulled onto the southbound FDR Drive at Seventy-third Street.
“Where are you?” Mike asked.
“On my way to the office. And you?”
“Spent half the night again in a warren of subway tunnels filled with homeless men and the other half in something that vaguely resembles a sewer. What does Mattie Prinzer drink?”
“Scotch,” I said. “Some kind of fancy single malt. One of those two-hundred-dollar-a-bottle jobs, if I remember correctly. Why?”
“Well, buy her a six-pack of ’em. She stayed up till dawn with my Q-tip.”
“And the good news is?”
“She’s matched the saliva on the cotton to the blood on Bex Hassett’s zipper.”
I sat bolt upright. “The same DNA? Trish Quillian’s blood is on the sweater her best friend was wearing the night she was killed?”
“Don’t get too excited, Coop. It may not be what you think.”
I was usually the one curbing Mike’s enthusiasm. I’d urge him not to jump the gun, so I thought immediately of the contrary arguments that had to be considered. “I know, I know. The girls were best friends. Trish’s blood could have been left on that sweater some other day or time.”
“It’s not just that-”
“But after more than a decade?” I said. “Don’t you think it’s fantastic just to get the match? Whatever the issue is about when and how the blood got there, the fact is that Trish Quillian is the only person in the universe with that genetic profile.”
“Tell the boys in blue to get you over here to Mattie’s office as soon as possible. There were actually two people in the universe with Trish Quillian’s DNA. That’s the first problem we’ve got to deal with. I’ll tell you the other one when you get here.”
40
Mattie’s small office was tucked away at the end of the hall, past the lab in which forensic biologists sat elbow to elbow at their tables, interpreting data that cooked overnight in the robots-the giant machines capable of running dozens of DNA samples at a time.
“I wanted you to see this for yourself, Alex,” Mattie said.
Mike was pacing behind her; three steps in each direction was all that the space allowed. He looked up as I entered, but didn’t bother to greet me. “The bastard would never have had the chance to escape.”
“What have you got now? I hear you did a brilliant job on Trish Quillian’s gob of spit,” I said to Mattie. Mike was talking to her about Brendan Quillian, and I didn’t understand why.
“That’s old news already, Coop. Get with it.”
“Last week, the night of the blast in the water tunnel,” Mattie said, “we were so proud of ourselves for showing off the mobile lab. Getting the crew up there and having results in less than ten hours.”
“The guys did a great job.”
“I think so, too. From bits and pieces of flesh, they matched the two sandhogs from Tobago to items they found in their lockers and their home.”
“Sorry. I never even focused on those men,” I said. “We’ve all been assuming they were caught in the wrong place at a very wrong time, not that they were the targets of the killer.”
“That’s quite possible. Yes, one had tissues in a jacket pocket in the shed. Cut himself on a piece of metal a day or two before the explosion. The other one was identified from his toothbrush.”
“And then there was Duke Quillian,” Mike said, locking his thumbs in the rear pockets of his jeans.
I frowned and looked at Mike for an explanation. “Don’t tell me he wasn’t down there in the tunnel? He was certainly identified, too. Wasn’t he?”
It was Mattie who spoke. “Yes. Duke Quillian is dead. But the day he was identified, it wasn’t actually done by a DNA analysis of his blood.”
“Why not? I thought…”
Mattie spread the reports in front of her. “For one thing, we had the severed digit,” she said, pointing to an eight-by-ten blowup of the large finger with its ragged edge.
“They just scraped skin cells off the surface of it, and of course, they also had a perfect print to match.”
“Duke Quillian had no record. No fingerprints on file with the NYPD. Mike checked that the first day.”
“Yes, but the union required all the sandhogs to be fingerprinted after 9/11. It was mandated as a security issue, for some of the jobs they had to work on near Ground Zero-rebuilding subway stations and such,” Mattie said. “The prints were delivered to the ME’s office within hours of the blast, so that confirmed his death.”
“All that confirmed,” Mike said, correcting Mattie, “is that it would be a struggle for him to use a rotary phone. It was only one finger.”
Mattie shook her head at Mike. “And the dental records. A piece of Quillian’s skull was picked up at the scene. That fragment was also matched to his dentist’s files.”
“So Duke’s dead, right?” I asked.
“Very dead, Alex,” Mattie said. “And I know we never do things fast enough for Mike, but you’ve got to remember the backlog we have. No one else was reported missing, so we knew we had the deceased-our three victims-identified.”
With the expansion of the capability of DNA to solve crimes-well beyond murders and sexual assaults-the lab was inundated with dozens of investigative requests a day, some of them presenting dozens of samples per case.
“Thousands of pieces of skin and tissue were collected in the debris from the tunnel,” Mattie went on. “The techs have been doing extractions on them as fast as they can, in between all the new work that’s brought in every day. They’ve been running samples in the robots. One of my guys got a result yesterday that had him stymied. It didn’t make sense to him, so he brought it to me to discuss last night, after Mercer left.”
“What didn’t make sense?” I asked.
“This-this anomaly.”
“Anomaly?”
Mike leaned over Mattie’s shoulder. “Yeah, Coop. Anomaly. That’s a scientific expression that usually translates as ‘Detective Chapman, you’re screwed.’ Show her.”
There were pages of reports from the various biologists who had worked on the tunnel samples. With the tip of her pen, Mattie pointed to the profiles that repeated themselves on different test results.
“Here’s Tobagan Number One, as we’ve called him.” His tissue fragments had been identified again and again from remains within the blast site.
She lifted her pen and moved to Tobagan #2, making the same point.
“This,” Mattie went on, “is the genetic profile of Duke Quillian. We obtained it, of course, from the skin cells of the finger that Mike recovered on the first day. It matches skin cells from microscopic pieces of flesh that were in the debris. There’s no question that Duke was blown to bits.”