Wrath in the Blood

by Ronald Watkins

  Ruman laughed awkwardly. “I was just surprised she told me. I hardly knew the woman. But I guess she was right, wasn't she?” She took a deep drink from her large glass.

  “It's still under investigation. What can you tell me about last Sunday?”

  “Nothing new. I was home all that day. I mean, I've been home every day for ... a long time. You asked about a fight last time, didn't you? That was you who talked to me before, wasn't it? I don't believe I ever heard them fight. Sorry.”

  Spring was giving away quickly to Summer and the heat was getting to her slender body by now, perspiration forming in its little valleys. The top of the bikini was pulled up slightly revealing white skin beneath, colored like mother of pearl.

  “That's O.K. Is there anything that has happened out of the ordinary lately? Did you see any cars here that were out of place, see people, young men say, who didn't fit in?”

  Ruman smiled. “I saw a bag lady.”

  “Here?”

  “Behind the fence in back of the yard. I'm not sure when, early this week sometime. I heard a noise and peeked over the fence. We don't have an alley. Instead there's a wash there that floods when we have those freak storms. Our yards back up against it. From the top of the fence to the bottom is like 15 feet down. Sometimes kids play ball in it and once I heard they broke a window. So I looked. It was a bag lady with an old suitcase. It was very sad.”

  “I don't imagine you see many of them up here.”

  “Hardly ever. She probably thought our garbage cans would be better pickings but we don't keep them in an alley. I guess that's what she thought she'd find in back of the fancy houses. It was so very sad watching her pick her way down that hot canyon.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? I was thinking that she was me in a few years, when the money runs out. I guess it won't be so bad. It's not like I have anything now. Are you sure you don't want a drink? I'm having a refill.”

  ~

  It was nearly lunch time when Morrison rang the doorbell at the Durlacher house next door to the Swensen's. The squat, broad man with a ruddy complexion smelling of Scotch and cigarettes who opened the door introduced himself as Richard. He said he was busy but when Morrison insisted he grudgingly allowed that he might have a few minutes.

  “When I spoke to your wife Ramona earlier this week she mentioned that you have heard the Swensen's arguing in the past?”

  Durlacher's manner was not overtly hostile but it was close enough. He said he had a cold and looked it. His eyes were moist and bloodshot. He hacked every minute or so, spitting into a nasty handkerchief he kept in one hand. “She's got a big mouth. Is this confidential? I really don't want to get involved.”

  Durlacher had lost most of his hair and had a thick mustache turning grey. His body resembled a wide beer barrel and his odd brown eyes were narrow slits that burned brightly. He said he owned a general construction company and fit the type.

  “This is a criminal investigation, Mr. Durlacher. We are trying to establish if Leah Swensen was murdered and if so, who did it.”

  “Her husband killed her, right? That's what Ramona said.”

  “We are looking into that possibility.”

  “Why isn't he in custody? If he's a killer he's got no business walking around. I can't believe the way you cops drag your heels. Hell, the streets aren't even safe anymore.” Morrison suddenly realized the man was drunk as well as sick.

  “Perhaps you could tell me about the fights I understand you overheard.”

  “Like I said. Ramona's got a big mouth. I tell her that all the time. So all right, so you already know. Last weekend, when all this happened, they had a big fight. We both heard it.” Hack. Spit.

  “By 'they', you mean the Swensens?”

  “Sure, who else? That's who we're talking about, isn't it? That's why you're here, right?”

  “Yes. How many fights of theirs have you heard?”

  “I can recall three, counting Sunday night. There was another one about 10 days ago, a bad one a couple of months before that. Up until then they were quiet neighbors, like the Ruman woman. The only time you see her is when she wheels the dumpster out to the street full of wine bottles. Clink, clink, clink, all the way to the street. Have you talked to her yet? Was she sober? What a lush! No wonder her husband dumped her.” Hack. Spit.

  “What was the fight like this previous Sunday?”

  Durlacher shrugged and sipped his amber drink. “A replay of the others, only louder. Lots of yelling. I think I heard some furniture being knocked over. Like that.”

  “Do you know either of the Swensens?”

  “I never talked to the wife. She was pretty, a little chunky for my taste, but nice looking anyway when she wasn't wearing those glasses. Kind of distant I'd say. Her husband's an arrogant bastard, always hitting me up in the driveway to sponsor him for membership in the country club. He owns some dinky steel company I'd never do business with.”

  “When was he asking about the country club?”

  “For the last year, ever since I got elected to the board. I think he used to lay in wait so he could act like he had just run into me on his way to the office. Always acted like he was better than everyone else.”

  “Did you sponsor him?”

  Durlacher coughed again then spit into his handkerchief. He took the time to light a cigarette before answering. He drew the smoke into his lungs, hacked and spit again. “Just what do you know about Jack Swensen?”

  “He's a contractor, makes a good living, no children. The usual things.”

  “You ever hear of Big Swede's Used Cars?”

  Anyone who had lived here long had seen the television commercials. Big Swede Swensen, with his thick, Scandinavian accent, huckstered his cars in the cheap slots, late at night. What his commercials lacked in quality they made up for in ubiquitous proliferation and shear corniness.

  The Big Swede, as he called himself, wore a checkered shirt, wool cap and lumberjack boots no matter what the temperature. In the commercials filmed during the summer you could see the sweat pouring down his sunburned cheeks. He carried a giant ax and ended every 20 second spot by chopping the price of the car with his ax, revealing behind it his new low price. “When the Big Swede chops prices,” he'd shout into the camera, “he really chops prices!”

  The commercials had become something of a local joke especially as they became increasingly politically incorrect. Big Swede's Used Cars had been located on the west side of town not far from the old interstate on Camelback Road. She hadn't seen a Big Swede car commercial for several years.

  “Sure, I remember him.”

  “Well, that's Jack Swensen's old man.”

  TEN

  When Maria Peña abandoned her plan to become a police officer she arranged to be trained as a forensic fiber and hair analyst, the crucial first step for any criminalist wanting to make the profession a career. Then, just this previous fall, she had completed the extensive course in DNA analysis and was now one of only two criminalists on staff cross trained in both specialties.

  When she finished typing and analyzing the blood samples she had taken from the Swensen bedroom she prepared a report of her findings and forwarded it to Morrison and Kosack. She had discovered nothing different from what the field tests she had conducted at the scene produced but the report made her findings official.

  By now Peña had the sample of Leah Swensen's blood which Morrison had obtained by subpoena from her doctor's laboratory. Three months before he had drawn the blood to check her complaint of chronic fatigue and the laboratory had preserved a sample on a slide.

  Peña now turned to the far more complex and time consuming task of DNA analysis of the blood samples. Whereas DNA results had in recent years been viewed in court as exotic, just since she had become a criminalist major police department laboratories nationwide now had qualified staff able to routinely perform them. In 1995 Great Britain had passed a law requiring that every charged criminal give a s
ample of tissue and blood for DNA typing. The information gathered from testing these samples was then placed in a central police computer.

  Peña had no doubt that in years to come the incidence of sex crimes and murders where the killer had been injured and left blood at the crime scene which could be solved by DNA tests would rise dramatically there. But she doubted if anything like that was going to happen in her state or in the United States in her lifetime, though to her it seemed a perfectly justified and prudent measure.

  Through a process consisting of a number of intricate procedures Peña would reduce human biological material to its most essential component. What had once been a mystery as unfathomable as the origin of the universe was now a routine forensic procedure.

  In the center of every cell in the human body is a nucleus which contains 23 pairs of matching chromosomes. The DNA is organized as two pieces of string that are wound around each other in a double strand much like a twisted ladder. Each side of the ladder is precisely, and unerringly, matched to the other.

  In the Swensen case wanted to establish beyond any doubt that the blood found in the bedroom had been that of Leah Swensen. She understood that Morrison and Kosack had still failed to discover a body so her tests would be essential in helping the prosecution establish that Leah Swensen had been savagely attacked in her own home.

  Her tests could not prove that the young wife was dead but that conclusion would be the logical extension of the evidence the detectives were still in the process of gathering. had narrowed the probability that the blood was Leah Swensen's down to one in one thousand with the various, more traditional, blood tests she had performed both at the house and at her laboratory. Depending on the outcome of the DNA tests such a conclusion would become virtually absolute.

  took the blood from the single largest sample she had collected, the pooled blood near the closet in the bedroom, and began her tests which would take five 12 hour days to complete. First, she isolated the DNA from the blood by breaking the white blood cells open and extracted the nucleus. Then she purified the DNA by eliminating any protein, excess lipids, fats and other superfluous material. Once this painstaking process was completed the isolated DNA appeared as long strands.

  Next she cut the strands with an enzyme, slicing the chromosome ladder into several thousand pieces, each with the matching chromosome still in place. She placed the isolated DNA on a gel and administered a low electrical currant. DNA has a slightly negative charge so the slices tend to move towards the positive electrode. carefully measured the distance of the movement to determine the size of each slice and arranged them accordingly.

  Now she sorted the slices and separated them into single strands of chromosomes. These were then transferred to a nylon membrane which was easier for her to handle than the gel. At this point she added to the membrane a probe which consisted of a known piece of DNA in order to visualize the results. The single chromosomes from the specimen of blood she was testing now connected to the probe according to their genetic predisposition and formed an absolute pattern which was virtually unique to this particular blood.

  washed the probe away then placed X-ray film on top of the membrane and exposed the film. The visual marker contained in the probe produced a band wherever the probe stuck to a chromosome. The film came out as a chart with the size and look of a medical X-ray negative and the results appeared very much like an abacus.

  She repeated this procedure on a dozen samples of blood she had taken from the Swensen house including a very small one extracted from the kitchen butcher knife as well as the smear she had discovered in the trunk of the Jaguar. The final charts produced were identical in every case, meaning all of the blood came from the same person.

  Finally, four days into the work she ran the same test on the blood obtained from the doctor's laboratory. When she was finished she compared the resulting chart to the others. There was no distinction.

  With all this done still could not say that the blood in the Swensen bedroom came from Leah Swensen. The doctor would testify at the trial that he had drawn the sample of blood from his patient and sent it to the laboratory. The lab director would testify he had given the slide to Peña by subpoena. Peña would testify that her tests indicated that blood matched every other sample she had taken from the Swensen house.

  At the trial Peña would then testify that the likelihood that it was anyone's blood other than Leah Swensen's was one chance in 770 million.

  ~

  As waited for the DNA tests to run she spent a portion of her time on the tuft of hair she had discovered in the bedroom. Matching hair was nowhere near as precise as DNA blood analysis. The strands of hair had removed from the woman's brush she had found at the dressing table were presumed to be from the head of Leah Swensen. At the laboratory she removed a single strand of hair from the tuft and began her analysis.

  With a microscope she examined the two strands simultaneously, enlarging them ten times, noting at once the superficial similarity of the two. There were altogether 30 characteristics of the human hair and she began systematically comparing each of them.

  First was the pigmentation. Both strands were darkish brown at their base, proceeding in color to auburn, then to a reddish hue at mid-shaft and ending a blondish-light brown toward the tip. This was a natural progression of pigmentation and indicated that Leah Swensen had not altered the color of her hair.

  Both strands of hair had a cortex with a ruddy texture as well and the scales on both cuticles were uplifted in a pattern consistent with someone who brushed their hair routinely several times a day.

  Peña repeated her comparison through more than a dozen strands of hair lifted from the brush as well as a similar number taken from the tuft. Finally she was satisfied the hair in the tuft came from the same person as the hair on the brush. There was no such thing as an identical match in human hair analysis, but of the 30 characteristics she examined, all 30 were a match to one degree or another with many of them being exact, and the odds of that occurring between two different persons was extremely remote. It would be for a jury to decide what significance this evidence had, along with the DNA results and whatever else the detectives developed, in determining what occurred in the Swensen bedroom Sunday night.

  ~

  Early Monday, one week since the pair had responded to the Swensen home, Morrison and Kosack sat at their desks to compare notes. The newspaper had run a third article on the murder that morning speculating if the investigation was stalled and the detectives were feeling the heat. The choir of an evangelical church at practice had been discovered murdered the previous night and a task force had been hurriedly assembled. It was much like trying to hold a conversation at a busy airport.

  “What's the story with Jodi Iverson?” Morrison asked. Before her was a clean sheet of paper.

  Kosack shrugged. “She has no alibi for Sunday night or until 10 o'clock Monday morning when she arrived at work. She says she was home, alone. She denies seeing Swensen over the weekend.”

  “Does she usually start work so late?”

  “She says she overslept. I think she keeps pretty loose hours at the office, a sign of her special position with the boss.”

  Morrison wrote down Iverson's name then beside it recorded, “No alibi.”

  “What do we know about her?”

  Kosack suddenly beamed. “This is good. First, get this, she's 31 years old, not 26. Next, her last name isn't Iverson, it's Swartz.” Kosack grinned at his partner.

  “Jewish?”

  “You betcha. She started using Iverson when she moved out West from Long Island. Four arrests, two in New York state, two more in New Jersey. The first for shoplifting when she was 18 years old. She paid a $35 fine. The second when she was 23 for bad checks. She paid restitution to her employer and they had the charge dropped. The following year she was arrested for assault.” Morrison's eyebrows rose. “Apparently it was a cat fight outside a bar in Hoboken with the ex-girlfriend of the guy she was wit
h. No charges filed. Get this last one in Atlantic City – for solicitation.”

  “Prostitution?”

  “She was part of a call girl ring, apparently one with connections. The charge was dropped. It was shortly after that she moved here. No history of marriage that I can find or anything else that helps us.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think she came out West and reinvented herself. She decided to find safer and easier ways to make real money. Like marriage. She could have helped her boyfriend out, but I think the murder was spontaneous so maybe he called her to hold his hand afterward or to help cart off the body.”

  “Phone records?”

  “No calls to Iverson from the Swensen house that weekend, but I checked the telephones at the closest convenience market and there is a call to her number at,” he looked at his notes, “10:13 Sunday night. It lasted three minutes and 21 seconds.”

  “What did Iverson say about the call?”

  “She said Jacky called to say hi.”

  “So did she help out or not?”

  “Swensen's story is that everything was normal when he went to work Monday morning and the girlfriend didn't make it into the office until ten. Let's say she went over there, had it out with Leah Swensen, sliced her up, popped the body into her car, took a shower, washed her clothes, dropped the body off, went home, and ...”

  “In less than two hours?” Morrison asked.

  Kosack grunted. “You see? It's pretty farfetched.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the analysis of hair in the bedroom at the Swensen place indicates no other woman was there. You can't fight with someone like that, not like this, without leaving something of you behind. What difference does it make, Ruth? We haven't got one iota of evidence anywhere involving her. Unless we get a break I don't see implicating the girlfriend, though for my money she is one ambitious woman. There's more to this name change than we know, but what the hell.”

  Morrison wrote down “No evidence.” She thought for a moment then said, “I've got a neighbor down the street who was out walking his dog Sunday night. He says he waved to Swensen about 10 o'clock. He remembers because he always wanted a Jaguar himself. That matches with the telephone call to Iverson. He denied to us he went anywhere Sunday night, right?”