I’ve shocked him into silence again.
“And the other mothers’ names? What are they?”
“I don’t remember. Yet.” It pains me to say this out loud. “Just the three letters. Just SUN. But I’m working on it.” Determined. I run through names every night in bed. The U’s are the hardest. Ursula? Uni? I will not let Merry down. I will find the mother of every single Susan.
The doctor is twisting his mind around this.
I’m not such a cliché anymore.
“There were the bones of two other girls in the grave, not three,” he says finally, as if logic has anything to do with this.
Tessa, present day
The three of us barely fit in the famous Dr. Joanna Seger’s office. It isn’t at all what I expect for a rock star scientist. The large window showcases a lovely view of the Fort Worth skyline, but Jo faces the door, welcoming the living. Her desk, a modern black chunk that almost swallows the whole space, is littered with forensic journals and paper. It reminds me of Angie’s desktop in the church basement. The kind of desktop where passion is screwing organization and nobody’s making the bed.
The signature piece rising out of the chaos: a Goliath computer running $100,000 worth of software. The HD screen displays a roller coaster of lime green and black bar codes. It’s the rare spot of color except for the grinning Mexican death masks and the skeleton bride leering off a shelf like a grisly Barbie. The Mexicans, bless them, have always had a less squeamish, more realistic view of death. I’m guessing Jo can relate.
I’m afraid to peer too closely at what looks like a heart suspended in a glass box, because I’m pretty sure it is a heart suspended in a glass box. Preserved, somehow, with a putty hue. Its dull sheen reminds me of my trip to Dallas with Charlie to tour the Body Worlds exhibit, where dead humans are plasticized in polymer so we can gawk at our complex inner beauty. Charlie fought nightmares for a week after learning that this multi-million-dollar road show might be using corpses of prisoners executed in China.
I’m certain, certain, certain I do not want to know where this heart came from, either.
Lots of commendation plaques on the wall. Is that President Bush’s signature?
Bill is scrolling through the email on his phone, ignoring me. He has pushed his chair so far back to accommodate his legs that he is almost in the doorway. My own knees are crammed against the desk, probably turning pink under my cotton skirt.
This is Jo’s show, and we are waiting.
She is notched into her little cranny on the other side of the desk with her ear to the phone. She had the chance to say, “Sit, please,” before it buzzed. “Uh-huh,” she is saying now, after several minutes of listening. “Great. Let me know when you’ve finished up.”
“Very good news,” Jo announces as she replaces the receiver. “We have successfully extracted mitochondrial DNA from the bones of two of the girls. The femurs. We didn’t have luck with the skull. We’re going to have to try again, probably with a femur this time, although it was seriously degraded. We’ll keep going at it. We won’t give up. We’ll find the right bone.” She hesitates. “We’ve also decided we’re going to pull DNA from some other bones. Just to be sure there weren’t additional mistakes.”
I can’t think about this. More girls. The Susan cacophony in my head is loud enough.
I can, however, appreciate Jo’s tenacity. My iPad has been very busy since I witnessed the bone cutting. This high-tech forensic lab might be a well-kept secret in Fort Worth, but not to crime fighters around the world. The building protrudes off Camp Bowie like a silver ship hull, with a cache of grim treasure: baby teeth and skulls and hip bones and jawbones that have traveled across state lines and oceans hoping for a last shot at being identified. This lab gets results when no one else does.
“That’s great, Jo.” There is weary relief in Bill’s voice.
His tone reminds me that he is pushing a truck of bricks uphill every day with one hand and dragging me behind him with the other. This morning, I’d reluctantly agreed to ride along to meet the “expert” who is poring over my teen-age drawings. The detour to Jo’s office was a last-minute surprise, and welcome. I could breathe freely for a few more minutes before I started inspecting the swirls in a curtain for a face. That is, I could breathe if my eyes stopped wandering to that heart in a box.
“That was my boss on the phone,” Jo continues. “As we speak, the DNA of those two girls is being input into the national missing persons database. I don’t want to get your hopes up. It’s a useless hunt, obviously, if the families of the victims haven’t also placed their DNA into the system for a match. The database wasn’t even around when these girls went missing. Their families have to be ones who haven’t given up hope, who are still bugging police and on their knees praying every night. You two are most definitely not on a movie set with Angelina Jolie, and please don’t forget it.”
I wonder how many times she has repeated this. Hundreds. Thousands.
Her left hand is doodling a drawing on the edge of a magazine. A DNA strand. It has tiny shoes. I think it is jogging. Or dancing.
“Six weeks until D-Day,” Bill says. “But I’ve had less at this point with other cases and landed on top. Tell everybody thanks for persevering. Any detail about those girls’ identities could provide more reasonable doubt. I want to pile it on at the hearing.”
Jo’s hand pauses. “Tessa, do you know anything about the forensic use of mitochondrial DNA? I’d like you to understand what we do here.”
“A little,” I say. “It comes only from the maternal side. Mother. Grandmother. I… read… that you were able to use it to identify the bones of one of John Wayne Gacy’s victims thirty years later.”
“Not me specifically, but this lab, yes. William Bundy. Otherwise known as Victim No. 19, because he was the nineteenth victim pulled from the crawl space under Gacy’s house in Chicago. That was a very good day for his family. And science.”
John Wayne Gacy. Put to death by lethal injection in 1994, a month and a half before my attack.
Jo’s pen is moving again. Dancing DNA guy now has a partner. With high heels. Jo sticks the pen behind her ear. “Let me give you the twenty-five-cent science lesson I deliver to my sixth-grade tour groups. There are two kinds of DNA in our cells: nuclear and mitochondrial. Nuclear DNA was the kind used way back in the O.J. trial, and, by the way, if you have a scintilla of doubt, they had him dead to rights. But that was a fresh crime scene. For older bones, we have come to depend on mitochondrial DNA, which hangs around longer. It is tougher to extract, but we’re getting better all the time. You’re exactly right: It remains identical in ancestors for decades. Which makes it perfect for cold cases, like this one. And really cold cases, like, say, the Romanovs, where forensic work finally disproved the myth that Princess Anastasia escaped from that cellar where her family was slaughtered. Science was able to prove that anyone who claimed to be her, or descended from her, was a liar. Another great case. It rewrites history.”
I nod. I know plenty about Anastasia. Lydia had been fascinated with all of the romantic conspiracy theories-the ten women who claimed to be the only surviving daughter of Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, who were executed with their children by the Bolsheviks, like dogs. I’d also watched the convoluted, sanitized, entirely imagined, happily-ever-after Disney version of Anastasia while babysitting my six-year-old cousin, Ella. “Are you a princess, too?” Ella had asked when it was over. “Weren’t you the girl who forgot?”
Bill moves restlessly. Impatient. “What about the hair, Jo?”
“Still in process. A little more red tape than we thought before we got the police to turn it over. Separate evidence box.”