Red Herring

by Archer Mayor

  The latter, dressed in pale green scrubs, stayed seated at the table and merely reached up to accept Joe’s quick hug, offering, “Would you like some coffee, Joe? It’s a long drive.”

  Joe poured himself a cup from the side table, speaking as he did so. “I really appreciate you both doing this on such short notice. It’s not like we don’t have enough to do without adding spontaneous field trips.”

  “From what you said on the phone,” Beverly responded, “we may be facing a series of interconnected homicides. That’s definitely worth a little collective attention.”

  Hawke had settled back down before his own mug of coffee and a couple of files. He tapped the top one with his finger. “I think I’m up to speed on Doreen Ferenc,” he said. “And I was just given Mary Fish’s electrical cord, but what’s the story on all the drops of blood? I ran the one you found on Doreen against CODIS and the state data bank. I sent those findings to your office, but other than it being from a male, I got nothing. No hits. The one from Mary is still being processed, but now there’s a third heading my way?”

  Joe joined them at the table. “Okay, we can start there. Three drops of blood found at three scenes, none of them apparently associated with the victims, all of them appearing carefully placed, and . . .” He stopped dead in midsentence.

  “What?” Beverly asked, concerned. “Are you all right?”

  Joe rubbed his forehead. “No. I mean, I’m fine. I just suddenly thought of something. All of them were wet; at least they all looked damp. They glistened.”

  “What’re you talking about?” David asked.

  “The three drops,” Joe explained. “They weren’t dry. When we found Doreen, I sat with her for a while, studying the scene, trying to rebuild what happened. The blood on her head was glistening. I remember thinking the same thing on the photo of the one I saw on the truck dashboard; it looked shiny.”

  “The sample from Mary Fish’s foot was still damp,” Beverly said softly.

  Hawke frowned and pulled his cell phone from his belt. He hit a speed dial and told the person who answered moments later, “Do me a favor, would you, Gina? Have the blood samples in the Ferenc, Fish, and Clarke cases analyzed for anticoagulant. That last one should be coming through the door shortly.”

  He paused a moment to listen, before saying, “That was fast. Great work. Thanks.”

  He snapped the phone shut and addressed the two of them. “Just got the results on the Mary Fish drop. Same as the first: male depositor, no hits on any database.”

  He paused to judge their reactions before smiling thinly and adding, “It also doesn’t match the first one.”

  Joe stared at him. “It’s a different male depositor?”

  “Right.”

  “Great,” Joe muttered. “Just what we needed; a little extra wrinkle.” He shook his head and then eyed David again. “What’s the significance of the anticoagulant?”

  Hawke gave a small shrug. “Hard to tell. In a way, it makes sense, if the blood was placed there instead of having come from a wound. You can’t just walk around with blood in a Ziploc or a bottle and pour it out at will. It’ll dry, just like it does when you cut yourself. When medics collect blood in the field, or techs at a blood bank or the hospital, they use Vacutainers with anticoagulant in them, to keep the specimens fluid.”

  “And you’re thinking that may have happened here,” Joe suggested.

  David raised his eyebrows. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “Theatrics,” Beverly murmured.

  “Yes.” Joe understood her reference. “Like you said on the phone when you called my office the other day. You suggested the rape might have been staged. I hate to tell you this, but you and Willy Kunkle are on the same wavelength. He thinks both the Doreen and Mary scenes were set up to make us reach the wrong conclusion.”

  “But why?” she challenged him. “When both of them fell apart almost as quickly? Doesn’t make much sense.”

  Instead of answering what he didn’t know, Joe switched topics. “Tell us about Bob Clarke. You were able to autopsy him, weren’t you?”

  “That’s why I’m still in scrubs,” she answered. “He’s definitely a homicide—catastrophic blow to the back of the head.” She reached forward and touched Joe high on the nape of his neck, just below the skull. “It was either carefully aimed or very lucky, but it certainly did the trick. Death must have been virtually instantaneous.”

  “Did it cause bleeding?” Hawke asked.

  She shook her head. “Closed injury, in case you were hoping for a source for that blood. And I checked the mouth and nose, too. No open wounds.”

  “He had to have been struck while he was outside,” Joe offered. “You can’t deliver a blow like that inside the cab of a truck. And if he died immediately, that would explain why his body looked placed behind the wheel.”

  Beverly had more to tell. “There was something else,” she continued. “When I examined his stomach contents, there was a significant quantity of Scotch. Knowing you were coming, I ordered a quick blood alcohol reading. He was clean.”

  “As in clean, clean?” Joe asked.

  “As a whistle. No discernible amount of alcohol reached his bloodstream.”

  “So he downed a bottle of Scotch seconds before being murdered?” Hawke asked.

  “Apparently.”

  Joe leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. “Jesus. That’s how his grandfather died.”

  “Murdered?”

  “No, no. He was a DUI fatal—the real McCoy. Years ago.”

  Joe got up and refreshed his cup at the side table, still talking. “Along the same lines, Doreen was raped by her father when she was a kid. He ended up in jail, the family moved, and Doreen never married; never even had a romantic relationship, as far as we can tell.”

  “What about Mary Fish?” Beverly asked.

  “We don’t know,” Joe confessed. “We haven’t interviewed her partner yet, and she has no apparent next of kin. The partner was sedated and in the hospital yesterday. Interesting notion, though, if each of these folks was posed to reflect something traumatic from their past.”

  He sat back down with a full mug. “Okay, let’s step back a bit and see what we’re facing; I mean the evidence, not the theories.”

  “You were talking about the three drops,” Hawke reminded him.

  “Right,” Joe agreed ruefully. “God—getting old. Okay, so now we know we have at least two out of three belonging to separate John Does. Dave, what can you tell from an anonymous drop of blood?”

  “Just what I told you,” David said, spreading his hands apart. “They’re males. That’s it.”

  “What about if one of them’s sick with something?”

  Hawke was already shaking his head. “Times have changed. We don’t have the budget for that kind of digging anymore.”

  Joe studied him for a few seconds, scowling with frustration.

  David pulled a brochure from his pocket and placed it flat on the table, adding, “One of these fellows might be able to help.”

  It was from the University of Vermont, whose campus was across the street from where they were sitting.

  “That’s been on my desk for a while,” David explained. “It’s part of an annual series of seminars UVM’s been hosting for years. They have them on engineering, architecture, mathematics, you name it. Scientists and scholars from all over the world come here to kick around ideas. It’s low-key, low-profile, and very worthwhile. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology is one of the groups using it, and they’re the ones in town this week, as luck would have it. I only thought of it because I knew you’d be asking me for things I couldn’t do or couldn’t afford.”

  He leaned forward and flipped the mailer open. “Right there—a talk entitled ‘Novel Uses of Synchrotron Light Sources.’ ”

  Beverly couldn’t restrain herself. She reached out and twisted the document around so she could read it, s
ince Joe was merely staring at Hawke.

  “What does that tell me?” he asked.

  “The theme of the session is forensics,” Beverly tried explaining. “This is terrific. What an opportunity.”

  David Hawke took pity. “Joe, these are mostly high-level DNA researchers, cutting-edge people who gave us DNA profiling in the first place. Very smart. And they’re having a little brain session all this week a few hundred yards away. It occurred to me that we could do worse than to approach one or two of them and ask for help.”

  “They would do what you can’t?” Joe asked.

  “Maybe. Wouldn’t hurt to ask. They have a lot more money than I do.”

  “These are big names,” Beverly commented, nodding. She looked up at him. “Joe, it’s an academic standard for types like this to pitch in on interesting cases now and then; it keeps them fresh, makes them feel useful, and gives them a glimpse of the real world. It’s a little like lawyers working pro bono—it helps them sleep at night. And the tools some of them have at their disposal are incredible. A synchrotron alone is capable of analyzing things down to the atomic level—a huge help in exactly what you’re looking for.”

  Joe retrieved the flyer and glanced over it. He couldn’t pretend to understand much, but the words “forensics,” “DNA,” and “analysis” surfaced periodically.

  “We know anyone here?” He waved a hand across the pages.

  “I know of Eric Marine,” David said. “He’s requested a couple of my articles, with favorable comments, which never hurts. I recognize over half the participants of this seminar, of course, and several are even friendly acquaintances, but Marine looks like our best shot for a couple of reasons.” He suddenly smiled broadly. “The first being, I’d like to meet the man; the second is that he works out of Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, which is exactly the kind of place that could help us out.”

  “Never heard of it,” Joe admitted.

  “Huge campus,” Beverly explained. “Particle colliders, the synchrotron mentioned here, a brand-new nanolab. Physicists at Columbia University pushed to get it built after losing a bunch of their top people to western schools after World War II and the Manhattan Project and other projects. They were afraid that if they didn’t have something really nifty to offer locally, the resulting brain drain would leave them a second-rate school. So they took over an army camp and created this incredible facility. They study everything from how the universe was created to what happens to an astronaut’s blood after six months in space.”

  “They’re not going to let us in there,” Joe said flatly.

  “It’s not military,” Hawke insisted. “It’s almost totally open. That was the point from the get-go. People from all over the world, including places that make our government shudder, come there to do research—thousands of them, every year. There’re ten labs just like it across the U.S. It’s actually pretty neat—pure science, no national flags hitting anyone across the face. All you need to do is apply. If your experiment is judged to be interesting, it’ll be done at no cost to you. The only provision is that you must publish your results. If you want your findings to be kept confidential, then you have to pay full cost. It’s what the scientific community envisioned from the start before politicians and wars messed everything up—a global community of scholars brainstorming ideas.”

  Joe slid the brochure back across the table to him. “Okay, okay. I’m welling up. What’re you proposing?”

  “Well, I know this is rushing things a little, but this bunch’ll only be in town for a few more days, and I would think an approach on our home turf has got to play in our favor. Of course, we also have to analyze the drop of blood from Bob’s pickup, but I can speed that up.”

  David scratched his head, organizing his thoughts. “You’re going to have to consider two things first.” He held up his hand and lifted one finger. “Number one, we’ll have to make the bait tempting enough for Marine and company to find it appealing. For that, we have to show that we’ve done our job the best we can, and that our needs are crucial and can’t be met without them. This’ll be helped by my budget being already in the red.”

  He raised the second finger. “Number two, keep in mind that, while someone like Marine has all sorts of wild ways to coax information from blood, it’s not truly proven stuff. Some of it’s even controversial, so no court will allow it to be presented. Still, as with psychological profiling and the use of ESP, it can come in handy in making a case, on a purely investigative level.”

  “Oh,” Hawke added, “and there’s another thing I almost forgot: If you opt to do this, we’re going to have to manage how we handle the evidence, to maintain case integrity. Some of my testing destroys whatever sample it analyzes. That’s why we always try to hold a little back. In choosing who gets first crack at what, we’ll have to keep that in mind.”

  Joe pointed at the brochure. “Okay. Let’s say using Brookhaven’s a possibility, or any other outsider, for that matter. What can we expect to get, case by case?”

  “With Doreen,” Beverly volunteered, “it’s mostly negatives. No semen and no knife tip broken off in the bone. In fact, it doesn’t appear as if the knife even nicked a bone. It did go through her nightgown, though.”

  Joe hesitated before asking, “Which gives us what? The dimensions of the blade?”

  She smiled. “Well, yes, to a certain extent, although the hole usually widens on the way out, as the knife’s withdrawn. I actually meant whatever residue might be on the blade, microscopic traces of which could have been wiped onto the fabric of the nightgown.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “Okay. A long shot.”

  “Admittedly,” she conceded.

  “With Mary,” David picked up, “we’ve got the footstool, which gave us nothing, the note, which had only Mary’s and presumably her roommate’s fingerprints on it—we’ll collect the roommate’s prints after she calms down—and not much else. The most promising item is the electrical cord used to hang her, from which I’m hoping we can collect some sweatprints or touch-DNA, although we’ll have to farm that out to another lab—or to Brookhaven, if they’re willing and able.”

  Joe had read about sweatprints and touch-DNA, where a person’s fingerprints might be too smeared to lift, but the skin cells and oils and residues within the print were still available for testing. “That’s looking good?” he asked.

  Hawke gave him an equivocal, “It’s looking possible. The cord was new; its surface is smooth and nonabsorbent; the killer may not have been wearing gloves. Who knows? There, even without Brookhaven, I’d be willing to take a shot, budget be damned.”

  “Don’t we also have the ink analysis route with the suicide note?” Joe asked.

  “Sure,” David conceded. “But without a standard, it won’t do us much good. It’s like a fingerprint without an AFIS match or a blood drop with no hit in the data bank.”

  Joe shook his head. “Hold it. Isn’t that precisely what we’re talking about? We already have blood with no hits. That’s not stopping us from trying to see what else we can get out of it.”

  David held up both hands in surrender. “Granted. We’ll put the ink on the table, too.”

  “What do you think you have with the third case?” Hillstrom asked Joe, hoping to be helpful in light of his frustrated expression.

  “Well,” he said, “given what you discovered in the poor guy’s stomach, I have a bottle that might have somebody else’s fingerprints on it. I also have the truck.”

  “It wasn’t Clarke’s?” David asked, surprised.

  “No, no. It was Bobby’s, all right. But it occurred to me driving up here that if he didn’t go off the road himself—and that’s looking likely with the head injury Beverly found—then the truck had to have been pushed, possibly by another vehicle.”

  “Leaving a mark on the bumper,” Beverly suggested.

  “Could be.”

  “Well,” David stated. “That, we could check out pretty easily.”


  “What about clothing?” Joe asked him. “Does touch-DNA work there? We’re assuming the killer pulled down Doreen’s underwear and lifted Bob into his truck. He couldn’t have done either without touching them and leaving DNA—assuming he wasn’t wearing gloves.”

  “Big assumption,” Beverly couldn’t resist saying. “This is clearly a careful man.”

  Hawke was also looking skeptical, if for different reasons. “I don’t know. The underwear’s as big a reach as finding residue from the knife on the nightgown. And with Bob, even if the bad guy didn’t have latex gloves, he probably was wearing something. It was in the middle of the night in the late fall, for crying out loud—frigging freezing. Still, the underwear, the nightgown, the ink analysis, and even the bumper might all be good for Eric Marine’s curiosity. Actually, come to think of it, if we did gather enough evidence through cutting-edge science, maybe we could get it into court, after all, and establish legal precedent. That is how it happens sometimes; DNA didn’t have an easy time at first.”

  Joe reached out and patted his arm. “Slow down, Einstein. There could be a Nobel in this for you, too, but I doubt it. For all we know, Eric Marine’s never heard of you, had some student read your articles, and has a policy against helping outsiders.”

  Hawke pulled a face. “Damn, Gunther, you sure can rain on a parade.”

  “Just being cautious,” Joe said. “Right now, we have a whole lot of nothing, much less anything to bring to a jury. I’ll have the sheriff’s department transport the pickup truck to you in a closed carrier, so you can give it your full attention without putting a team out in the field. I’ll also interview Mary Fish’s partner for any relevant background information. How much longer will Eric Marine be in town?”

  Hawke didn’t bother consulting the brochure. “Three days, assuming he doesn’t skip out early.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Beverly volunteered, making both men stare at her. She smiled in response. “I’ve heard about him, too, and read his papers. Plus, I don’t think it will hurt if a colleague of the opposite gender makes the appeal. Maybe I can meet him for lunch or something.”