"Did you know Benton?" I ask her straight up.
Nothing.
"Are you there?" I speak again.
"I'm here," she says and her tone has gotten quiet and serious. "I'm thinking how best to answer you…"
"Why not start with the truth. For once."
"I've always told you the truth," she replies.
"That's ridiculous. I've heard even the best of you lie when you're trying to manipulate someone. Suggesting lie detectors, or the big needle truth serum to get people to 'fess up, and there's also such a thing as lying by omission. The whole truth. I demand it. For God's sake, did Benton have something to do with the Susan Pless case?"
"Yes," Berger replies. "Absolutely yes, Kay."
"Talk to me, Ms. Berger. I've just spent the entire afternoon going through letters and other weird things he received before he was murdered. They were processed in the post office located in Susan's neighborhood."
A pause. "I'd met Benton numerous times and my office has certainly availed itself of the services the behavioral science unit has to offer. Back then, at least. We actually have a forensic psychiatrist we use now, someone here in New York. I'd worked with Benton on other cases over the years, that's my point. And the minute I learned about Susan's murder and went to the scene, I called him and got him up here. We went through her apartment, just as you and I went through the Richmond crime scenes."
"Did he ever indicate to you that he was getting strange
mail and phone calls and other things? And that just possibly there was a connection between whoever was doing it and whoever murdered Susan Pless?"
"I see," is all she says.
"See? What the hell do you see?"
"I see you know," she answers me. "Question is, how?"
I tell her about the Tlip file. I inform her that it appears Benton had the documents checked for fingerprints and I am wondering who did that and where and what the results might have been. She has no idea but says we should run any latent prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS. "There are postage stamps on the envelopes," I inform her. "He didn't remove them and he would have had to if he wanted them checked for DNA."
It has only been in recent years that DNA analysis has become sophisticated enough, because of PCR, to make it worthwhile to analyze saliva, and just maybe whoever affixed postage stamps to the envelopes did so by licking them. I am not sure that even Carrie would have known back then that licking a stamp might give up her identity to us. I would have known. Had Benton showed these letters to me, I would have recommended he have the stamps examined. Maybe we would have gotten results. Maybe he wouldn't be dead.
"Back then a lot of people, even those in law enforcement, just didn't think about things like that." Berger is still talking about the postage stamps. "Seems like all cops do these days is follow people for their coffee cups or sweaty towels, Kleenex, cigarette butts. Amazing."
1 have an incredible thought. What she is saying has brought to mind a case in England where a man was falsely accused of a burglary because of a cold hit on the Birmingham-based National DNA Database. The man's solicitor demanded a retest of the DNA recovered from the crime, this time using ten loci, or locations, instead of the standard six that had been used. Loci, or alleles, are simply specific locations on your genetic map. Some alleles are more common than others, so the less common they are and the more locations used, the better
your chances for a match_which isn't literally a match, but
rather a statistical probability that makes it almost impossible to believe the suspect didn't commit the crime. In the British case, the alleged burglar was excluded upon retesting with ad- ditional loci. There was a one-in-thirty-seven-million chance of a mismatch, and sure enough, it happened.
"When you tested the DNA from Susan's case, did you use STR?" I ask Berger.
STR is the newest technology in DNA profiling. All it means is we amplify the DNA with PCR and look at very discriminating repeated base pairs called Short Tandem Repeats. Typically, the requirement for DNA databases these days is that at least thirteen probes or loci be used, thus making it highly improbable that there will be any mismatches.
"I know our labs are very advanced," Berger is saying. "They've been doing PCR for years."
"It's all PCR unless the lab is still doing the old RFLP, which is very reliable but just takes forever," I reply. "In 1997, it was a matter of how many probes you used_or loci. Often in first screening of a sample, the lab may not do ten, thirteen or fifteen loci. That gets to be expensive. If only four loci were done in Susan's case, for example, you could come up with an unusual exception. I'm assuming the ME's office still has the extraction left in their freezer."
"What sort of bizarre exception?"
"If we're dealing with siblings. Brothers. And one left the seminal fluid and the other left the hair and saliva."
"But you tested Thomas's DNA, right? And it was similar to Jean-Baptiste's but not the same?" I can't believe it. Berger is getting agitated.
"We also did that just days ago with thirteen loci, not four or six," I reply. "I'm assuming the profiles had a lot of the same alleles, but also some different ones. The more probes you do, the more you come up with differences. Especially in closed populations. And when you think of the Chandonne family, theirs is probably a very closed population, people who have lived on Ile Saint-Louis for hundreds of years, probably married their own kind. In some cases, inbreeding_marrying cousins, which might also account for Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's congenital deformity. The more people inbreed, the more they up their chances for genetic glitches."
"We need to retest the seminal fluid from Susan's case," Berger decides.
"Your labs would do that anyway, since he's up on murder charges," I reply. "But you might want to encourage them to make it a priority."
"God, let's hope it doesn't turn out to be someone else," she says in frustration. "Jesus, that would be awful if the DNA doesn't match when they do the retest. Talk about really screwing up my case."
She is right. It certainly would. Even Berger might have a hard time making a jury believe that Chandonne killed Susan if his DNA doesn't match the DNA of the seminal fluid recovered from her body.
"I'll get Marino to submit the stamps and any latent prints to the Richmond labs," she then says. "And Kay, I need to ask you not to look at anything in that file unless it's witnessed; don't look any further. That's why it's best you don't submit any evidence yourself."
"I understand." Another reminder that I am under suspicion for murder.
"For your own protection," she adds.
"Ms. Berger, if you knew about the letters, about what was happening to Benton, then what did you think when he was murdered?"
"Aside from the obvious shock and grief? That he was killed by whoever was harassing him. Yes, first thing that came to mind. However, when it became clear who his killers were and then they were gunned down, there didn't seem to be anything to pursue further."
"And if Carrie Grethen wrote those harassing letters, she wrote the worst one, it seems, on the very day Susan was killed."
Silence.
"I think we must consider there could be a connection." I am firm on this point. "Susan may have been Chandonne's first victim in this country, and as Benton started poking around he might have started getting too close to other things that point to the cartel. Carrie was alive and in New York when Chandonne came there and killed Susan."
"And maybe Benton was a hit?" Berger sounds doubtful.
"More than maybe," I reply. "I knew Benton and the way he thought. For starters, why was he carrying the Tlip file in his briefcase_why did he take it with him to Philadelphia if he didn't have some reason to think that the weird stuff in it was connected to what Carrie and her accomplice were doing? Balling people and cutting their faces off. Making them ugly. And the notes Benton was getting made it clear he was going to be made ugly, and he sure as hell was…"