She told Penny Orr they wanted to get a positive identification through a DNA confirmation and explained they could do so through Orr.
To her surprise, Orr expressed reluctance. “What would I have to do?”
“It’s completely noninvasive,” Tracy said, thinking perhaps Orr was under the impression she’d have to give bone marrow, or blood. “I’ll overnight you a DNA kit. The instructions are self-explanatory. I’ll also provide you with a return shipping label so you can send it straight back to me.” That label would have the personal PO box to which Tracy had all of her mail sent.
Orr sighed, still sounding uncertain, and Tracy couldn’t completely understand her reticence. “It’s just that, if it isn’t her, then it raises doubt again about what happened to her. I’m not sure I can go through that again,” Orr said.
“I understand this has been difficult,” Tracy said. “But if it isn’t Andrea, there’s another family out there possibly wondering the same thing—what happened to their daughter. They deserve closure too.”
Orr seemed to give that argument some thought. After several long moments she said, “Okay. Go ahead and send it.”
Devin Chambers’s sister, Alison McCabe, had also been resistant, but she too ultimately relented. Tracy suspected that whatever bad feelings had developed between the two sisters, blood remained blood.
The following week, both women shipped back the tests and, with the DNA samples secured, Tracy drove to the squat concrete building on Airport Way South that housed the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. The facility, located in an industrial area south of downtown, looked more like a food-processing warehouse than home to the state’s high-tech crime lab responsible for analyzing the evidence to convict murderers, rapists, and other miscreants.
Mike Melton sat in his office. Today he was not strumming on his guitar or singing. When Tracy knocked, Melton was taking a bite out of a homemade sandwich that reminded Tracy of the cheese sandwiches her mother used to make her and Sarah—two slices of white bread, mayo, and a slice of Velveeta. An apple, an uncapped bottle of water, and an open brown bag sat on Melton’s desk.
“Looks like I caught you at a bad time,” Tracy said from the doorway.
Melton waved her in as he chewed and swallowed, washing the sandwich down with a sip from the bottle. “Just eating a late lunch,” he said. “I was over at the courthouse working on some last-minute prep work for the Lipinsky trial.”
“Kins said it could go out next week,” she said.
“That’s what they tell us.” Melton used a napkin to wipe at the corners of his mouth visible beneath his thick reddish-brown beard. Over the years it had become streaked with gray. Tracy had heard the term “bear of a man” used to describe big men, but in Melton’s case the analogy fit, and not just because of his size. In addition to the beard, which seemed to get longer and fuller each time Tracy visited, Melton wore his hair combed back off his forehead, the curls touching the collar of his shirt. He also had the build of a lumberjack, with meaty forearms and hands that looked like they could tear a phonebook in half, yet his fingers were nimble enough to pluck the strings of a guitar. Detectives referred to Melton as Grizzly Adams, because of the uncanny resemblance to that TV show’s star, Dan Haggerty.
“Come in and sit.” Melton walked to Tracy’s side of his desk and moved a leather satchel from one of two chairs. The other was stacked with technical books.
“A little light reading?” Tracy asked.
“Just trying to stay on top of everything.”
Tracy settled in. Rather than returning to behind his desk, Melton leaned against the edge. “Heard Pierce County pulled the crab pot case.”
Melton was no dummy, nor had he just fallen off the turnip truck. As the crime lab’s lead scientist, he possessed multiple degrees, none of which hung on the wall of his office. Instead of diplomas, he kept mementos from prior interesting cases—a hammer, a saw, a baseball bat. He also knew that when detectives showed up unexpectedly at his office door they usually wanted something.
“They did,” she said. “And left me with a couple loose ends I’m trying to nail down.”
“Such as?” Melton said, moving back to his seat and picking up his cheese sandwich.
“DNA. Given the condition of the body, it’s the only means for a positive identification.”
“Heard the parents were deceased and no siblings,” Melton said, taking another bite.
“Found an aunt in San Bernardino. The mother’s sister.”
“Ah.” Melton put down the sandwich and sipped his water.
Tracy had no way to soften the question. “I was hoping you’d provide me with the victim’s profile so I can send it to an outside lab for comparison.”
Melton leaned back in his chair. “You don’t like the work we do here?”
“It would be better at this point to let an outside lab handle it.”
“How are Nolasco and Martinez going to like that?” he said, the corners of his mouth inching into a slight grin.
“You heard about that?”
“I hear everything. You know that.”
She smiled softly. “They’ll like it probably less than they liked me going to talk to the aunt in the first place.”
Melton gave her comment a moment of thought. “Well, we send out the profiles all the time when we get backed up and overwhelmed here. In fact, with the Lipinsky matter taking up so much time, I was just thinking we needed to send that profile out so we could speed things up.”
Tracy smiled. “Thanks, Mike.”
“Don’t thank me. Just doing my job. Would it also be better if I didn’t ask why you’re using an outside lab?”
“Probably.”
Melton nodded. “You don’t think it’s her, do you? You don’t think it’s the woman everyone said walked off Rainier.”
“Like I said, she has an aunt in Southern California who’d like some closure,” Tracy said.
“So . . . easy enough to find out.”
“Easy enough,” Tracy agreed.
Melton again paused. The man was nothing if not deliberate. “Well,” he said again, “that is our job, isn’t it? To find out with certainty so the victims’ families can find closure?”
“I always thought so.”
“So my running a DNA profile would just be a means to ensure certainty.”
“It would be, if it was still our case.”
“Might not still be yours, but it’s still mine. I do run this division,” Melton said, meaning he was head of all the crime labs throughout the state, including the one in Tacoma that serviced Pierce County.
“I got into a bit of a pissing contest with Pierce County,” Tracy said.
“So I hear,” Melton said.
“They’re not going to be too happy about me doing anything to help solve their case for them. Probably best if you stay out of the line of fire.”
Melton scoffed. “What are they going to do, fire me?” The detectives knew that with his expertise, Melton could get a job in minutes at a much higher salary with one of the private laboratories. He stayed at the crime lab out of a sense of duty to find justice for victims’ families.
“I don’t want you to have to make that choice for me, Mike.”
“Which lab did you choose?”
“ALS,” she said.
Melton nodded. “They’re a good outfit. I know Tim Lane. He’s been recruiting me for years. I’ll give him a call and tell him to treat you right, put the pedal to the metal.”
Tracy pushed up out of her chair and offered her hand. “Like I said, I appreciate it, Mike.”
“I know you do,” he said, taking her hand. “That’s why I’m willing to do it.”
For the remainder of the week, each time Tracy entered the bull pen, Kins, Faz, and Del, or some combination of the three, would give her a look like she was an obstetrician and they were expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room. Tracy would shake her head to let them know the lab had not
called. That Friday, as she worked a homeless-man stabbing case, her cell phone rang. The screen indicated no caller ID but the prefix was for a Seattle number.
“Detective Crosswhite?” the caller asked, causing a flicker of anticipation in her stomach.
“Speaking.”
“Mike Melton says I’m supposed to treat you right, and given the size of him, I don’t want him angry at me.”
ALS had an office in Burien not far from the Seattle Police Academy, about a half-hour drive from Police Headquarters. Tim Lane said he could e-mail Tracy the results so she could avoid the drive, but Tracy didn’t want to leave a paper trail on her computer. She told him she needed to talk to a witness down his way and would pick up the results. Strange as it seemed, she also didn’t want to hear the news over the phone, and Lane didn’t question her further. He might have already sensed something was up when he realized he wasn’t calling Police Headquarters but a private cell phone.
Tracy and Kins took his BMW rather than a car out of the pool. They did have a witness they needed to speak with in Des Moines, which was just next door to Burien, just in case anyone accused them of using taxpayer time to run down evidence in a case that was no longer theirs.
ALS was located in a business park that included a brewery, a fitness gym, and, apparently, a basketball club. The number of private laboratory services had exploded with the recent advancements in DNA analysis and the concomitant desire of private citizens to find out their ancestry, genetic makeup, and proclivity to get future life-threatening illnesses.
“You done it, yet?” Kins asked Tracy as he pulled into a parking space labeled in white block lettering as reserved for ALS visitors.
“What? Get my DNA profile? No. You?”
“Nah. What do I want to know that for?” Kins pushed out of the car and Tracy exited the passenger side. “My dad’s father had Alzheimer’s. I worry enough about that stuff without someone telling me I should be worrying. When they tell me they know how to cure it, that’s when I’ll want to know.”
She met him at the hood and they walked toward the entrance. “What about your ancestry or heritage? Aren’t you curious?”
“All my life I’ve grown up thinking I’m English and believed I had to tolerate tea, bland food, and cold and foggy weather. What am I going to do if I find out I’m Italian and could have been eating like Fazio all these years? Besides, you keep going back far enough and we all came from the same place anyway. Had to start with just two, right?”
“God, that means we’re related to Nolasco?” Tracy said, pulling open the glass door.
“I’m pretty sure Nolasco’s a reptile.”
Tracy told the receptionist they had an appointment to see Tim Lane, and they stepped toward chairs in a waiting room with low ceiling tiles, fluorescent lights, and rich-blue walls lined with posters spelling out the lab’s various available services.
“This place looks like the preschool we used to take the boys to,” Kins said.
Two couples sat waiting. Tracy had also read that parents were getting their genetic makeup analyzed before having children to determine if their offspring were at risk for genetic disorders such as sickle-cell anemia and Down syndrome. At forty-three, Tracy’s odds were greater than younger mothers of passing something on to her child.
A door in the corner of the room pulled open and a blond-haired man, partially balding, stepped out wearing a white lab coat over a pink dress shirt and red tie. “Detectives,” he said, giving them a 100-watt smile. “I’m Tim Lane.” They shook hands. “Come on back.”
Tracy and Kins followed Lane down a carpeted hallway. He led them into a nondescript conference room with a window that looked out over a small area of once-green lawn showing patches of brown. Lane stepped to the far side of the table, on which he’d set two manila folders.
“Mike says you’re to get the VIP treatment,” Lane said, his voice deep and rich.
“Heard you’ve been trying to recruit him. The detectives would revolt,” Tracy said.
“We worked at the crime lab together, many, many years ago,” Lane said. “I only lasted five years.”
“How’d you get into the private sector?” Tracy asked.
“I majored in chemistry and went back for my MBA. I’ve always been entrepreneurial and wanted to run my own business. With the advances in DNA and the backlog of cases at most major metropolitan crime labs, I saw an opportunity I thought I could fill. We were one of the first private labs. Now you Google ‘private DNA testing’ and you get a couple hundred thousand hits.”
“How much of your work is for the general public?” Kins asked.
“It’s about sixty percent now. When we first opened we were basically an annex for the crime labs. We did a lot of paternity testing. Over the years, with advances in DNA testing and technology to perform that analysis, the crime labs can get through their cases a lot faster than they could when I was there, and don’t have as much of a need for outside labs. Eventually, you won’t need us at all. You’ll get the bad guy’s DNA profile, put it up on a cloud, and it will run through all the major databases and spit out results in minutes.”
Lane sat. Tracy and Kins took two chairs across the table from him. “Mike also said you guys don’t need any hand-holding, so I’m going to get right to it, if that’s okay?”
“That’s fine,” Tracy said.
Lane opened the first folder. “We used the profile Mike sent us as our baseline for comparison with the two DNA profiles you provided. The first profile, we were asked to determine if the person could be the victim’s aunt.”
“Correct,” Tracy said.
“We can determine with a much higher degree of certainty whether two people are related,” Lane said, slipping into his comfort zone. Tracy and Kins had both received educations about DNA testing and analysis through their work on several trials, but Tracy let Lane continue. Her father had once taken her to buy her first six-shooter, and although he had been shooting six-shooters since he could walk, he had patiently listened as the seller went through every aspect of the gun, then thanked him for his thoroughness. When they left the store, Tracy asked her father why he had endured the lecture.
“Interrupting a man when he’s discussing his profession is like telling him what he has to say isn’t important. Besides, you never learn anything when you’re talking.”
Lane continued. “But without the DNA from at least one parent, we can’t be certain.”
“The parents are deceased,” Tracy said.
Kins said, “So what did you find in this instance?”
“In this instance we performed a statistical analysis based on the match type typically expected for a known aunt-niece relationship. This provides us with what’s called a ‘kinship index.’ A biologically related aunt and niece typically have a kinship index value greater than 1.0. Conversely, if they are not biologically related, the kinship index value is less than 1.0. The closer to or more distant the kinship index value is to 1.0, the more or less likely the two individuals are related.”
“And in this case?” Tracy said.
“In this case the kinship index value was significantly less than 1.”
Her adrenaline spiked but Tracy did her best to temper her reaction. “So they’re not related.”
Lane shook his head. “The statistical probability is they are not.”
“You said ‘statistical probability,’” Kins said. “What are we talking about here? What are the percentages?”
“Negligible. If you want percentages, I’d say it’s 99.95 percent they are not related.”
Kins glanced at Tracy but also didn’t say anything. She knew him well enough to know the wheels were spinning in his head too.
“And the test to determine siblings?” Tracy asked.
Lane closed the one manila file, slid it across the table to Tracy, and opened the second file. “Again, the recommended method to determine whether individuals are true biological siblings is to test their p
arents. DNA paternity and maternity testing will always provide conclusive results. That not being an option here, we are again left with probabilities. In this case, based on the type of genetic material inherited by each sibling, we determine what’s called a ‘sibship index.’”
“What did you find?” Tracy asked.
“The sibship index was well over 1. The statistical probability is that the two women in the genetic profiles you provided are full siblings.”
Tracy and Kins stepped outside the lab with Tracy holding the results of the two tests. Kins slid on sunglasses against the bright glare. “I’m not going to lie; a part of me was hoping we’d get the opposite result.”
“It would have made things a lot easier,” Tracy agreed.
“But not nearly as much fun,” Kins said. “And ‘easier’ is never a word I’ve associated with you.”
Tracy stopped at the car passenger door, raising a hand to deflect the sun’s glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kins used the remote, and the doors unlocked with a chirp. “Don’t get defensive; I’m just saying it seems like lately if something can go wrong in one of our cases it usually does. It would be nice to get a grounder every once in a while.”
They pulled open the car doors and slid inside the BMW. Kins started the engine to get the air-conditioning going, but didn’t look to be in a hurry to get moving. “What do you think happened?”
“I think we’ll make a mistake if we speculate. I think the question at this point is what does the evidence tell us?”
“At this point I’d settle for just about anything that made sense,” Kins said.
“Well, we now know for certain that Andrea Strickland is not the woman in the crab pot,” she said. “It’s Devin Chambers.”
“No doubt about that,” Kins said.
“We know Andrea and Graham Strickland were having marital problems and financial problems. The business was a massive failure, and the bank, the landlord, and other creditors were banging on their door with personal guarantees that Strickland couldn’t begin to pay off. We also know Andrea was sitting on a pile of money she wouldn’t let him touch and that she was afraid he’d somehow put at risk with the creditors.”
The Trapped Girl (The Tracy Crosswhite Series Book 4) Page 24
