Alter Ego

by David Archer

  Indie’s eyes lit up. While she hadn’t considered the thought on her own, she grasped at it like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver.

  “Wendy, that’s definitely a possibility. As everyone knows, my husband has put a lot of people in prison, including some extremely powerful people. It’s definitely possible that somebody would do something like this just to try to destroy him.”

  Wendy had to stifle a grin, because that was exactly what she wanted to hear.

  “And how are you holding up? This is probably going to be very hard on you and your children; do you plan to stay here while it’s happening, or have you thought about leaving town?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Indie said. “They said this happened up in Fort Collins, so I’m sure I’ll be going up there to visit my husband at times, but I’m staying right here in my home.” She looked directly into the camera. “The one thing I’m absolutely certain of, all the way to the very bottom of my soul, is that Sam Prichard did not do this. How could I run away and hide and expect him the face it all alone?”

  Wendy, off-camera, winked at her and smiled. She tapped Harvey’s arm and he turned the camera back to her.

  “As you can see, Mrs. Prichard is absolutely convinced of her husband’s innocence. I think everyone knows that I have worked closely with Mr. Prichard in the past, and I can admit that I personally find it very difficult to believe he could be guilty of this crime. We’ll continue to bring you more information as it becomes available. This is Wendy Dawson, Channel 5 news.”

  Harvey shut down the camera and pointed it at the floor, then turned to Indie.

  “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I don’t believe Sam did this either. I’ve gotten to know him over the last few months, and it just doesn’t sit right with me.”

  “I wish everyone who knew him felt that way,” Indie said. “Even his friends on the police force are looking at him with suspicion.”

  “Indie, hang in there,” Wendy said. “He’s Sam Prichard. I don’t know how, but he’ll figure this out and bring the real killer to justice.”

  “Of course he will,” Grace said. “And thank you. If we can get people thinking he was framed, then that could make the police look at other possibilities.”

  Wendy and Harvey left the house, the other reporters crowding around them to try to get anything they might share, but they went straight to their van and drove away. Grace watched them leave, then turned back to her daughter-in-law.

  “What else can we do?” she asked.

  “We can make dinner,” Kim replied. “I’m sure everybody is hungry. Kenzie, are you hungry?”

  The little girl shook her head. “I’m not hungry,” she said. “I just want my Daddy back.”

  * * * * *

  Sam was sitting on his bunk, trying to think of anything that could definitely confirm that he was not in Fort Collins, or Wellington, at the time the murder had occurred. Unfortunately, he had left Denver late that morning and hadn’t met up with anyone in Idaho until late the next day. As much as he hated to admit it, there were a few hours when he could have stopped somewhere along the way. Without some way to prove that he was elsewhere at the time, he wasn’t sure how strong a defense he could mount.

  He heard footsteps in the hall outside his cell, and then the same jailer appeared.

  “You got a visitor,” he said. “Lawyer here to see you.”

  “About time,” Sam muttered as he got to his feet. He put his hands through the meal slot and the jailer applied handcuffs before opening the door. When he stepped back, the jailer opened the cell and motioned for Sam to step outside, then took hold of his arm as they walked down the hall toward the visiting area.

  Carol Spencer, the attorney, was waiting when Sam was led into the room. The jailer removed the cuffs and Sam took a seat across the table from her.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Have you found out anything about what’s going on?”

  Carol tapped a file that was laying on the table. “From the look of this, these people have one hell of a case, Sam. I’m hoping you can give me some reason to believe that what they’re saying is not true.”

  “Other than the claim that they have my DNA, I don’t know what it is that they’re saying. Something about how I’m supposed to have raped and murdered some young girl. What’s the actual file say?”

  Carol opened it, looking at the contents as she spoke. “The victim was Brenda Starling, fourteen, from Fort Collins. Her body was found almost three weeks ago in Wellington, but it was determined that she was actually murdered on Route 14 near Fort Collins a couple of days before that. They claim that you abducted her at some point on the evening of the sixth, raped her more than once and then stabbed her to death inside a van. A large pool of blood was found at the scene, and they believe the floor of the van had been perforated to allow the blood to leak out. A security video from the highway maintenance garage, where the blood was found, seems to show a van parked in that very spot, and when it drove away, the blood was already there. There was no blood before the van appeared. Specific evidence against you was the recovery of hairs, including whiskers and pubic hairs, and traces of semen and other bodily fluids. All of those were tested for DNA, and the results match your DNA profile to the point of almost certainty.”

  “But that is impossible,” Sam said. “I never did this, so it couldn’t possibly be my DNA.”

  “Sam, there are three separate samples that were tested. All three of them came back with the same DNA profile, which happens to be yours. I have trouble imagining that all three, even if they were contaminated, would come back with the same errors.” She looked at him. “Sam, did you know this girl? Did you at any time ever have sex with her?”

  “Oh, come on, Carol,” Sam said. “You can’t seriously believe I would do this. No, I did not know her, nor did I ever engage in any kind of sexual activity with her, or anybody else other than my wife. I don’t know how in the world they could claim to have my DNA, but there’s something crazy going on.”

  Carol looked at him, then steepled her fingers in front of her face. “Okay, let’s say I believe you. What can you give me to help me counter this kind of evidence?”

  Sam slumped in his chair, his arms and elbows resting on the table. “Unfortunately, not much. I did have an old, gray van at that time, one that I bought for a specific job I was working on. The actual case itself is classified, but I can tell you that I needed a nondescript vehicle to transport someone from one location to another. It’s a national security matter, so I can’t go into more details than that.”

  “Where’s the van? If we can prove the girl was never in it…”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. When I got back, the thing was literally running on its last legs. I took it straight out to Buckley Salvage and scrapped it. They picked it up with a claw machine and dropped it into the shredder before I even drove away.”

  Carol stared at him for a couple of seconds. “Do you have any idea how bad that’s going to look in trial?”

  “Of course I do,” Sam said. “Unfortunately, it’s also the truth. I can tell you with absolute certainty, however, that there was no blood of any kind in it. I could probably even find a way to get the person I transported in it to issue a statement that he never saw any blood inside it.”

  “They’ll say you could have washed it out. I’m afraid a statement like that won’t have much impact.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just the only thing I could think of.”

  “You said you were transporting someone. When did you pick them up?”

  Sam let out a sigh. “Late on the seventh,” he said. “And before you ask, I left home early in the afternoon of the sixth. Fort Collins isn’t that far, so yes, I could have stopped there for a while, but I didn’t.”

  “Where did you go to pick them up?”

  “Pocatello, Idaho. It’s only about a nine hour drive, but a headlight went out on the van. When it got dark, I pulled over in
to a rest area and slept in the van till the sun came up again. I was only a couple of hours from Pocatello by then, so I stopped off in Ogden, Utah, and got the headlight fixed. That took a couple of hours, and then I had to wait at an old farmhouse outside Pocatello all day for my passenger to catch up with me. After that, we split the driving and drove straight through to Washington, D.C.”

  Carol scratched her nose. “Can anyone verify you were at the rest area?”

  Sam shook his head. “I saw a couple of people when I got out to use the restroom. I didn’t speak to anyone, so I doubt anybody would really remember me. I certainly wouldn’t know how to get hold of anyone I met there.”

  “Oh, Sam, you aren’t making this easy. If you were anybody else, I would suggest trying to get the best possible plea bargain, but I know you won’t go for that.” She grunted. “On the other hand, if I were the prosecutor, I wouldn’t even think about making a deal. This case is too solid. With evidence like this, there’s not a jury in the world that’s going to believe you aren’t guilty.”

  “Even though I’m not,” Sam said. “I know, I know, I know exactly how bad it looks, but I didn’t do this! The only thing I can even imagine could lead to this sort of problem is a deliberate frame-up, but even I don’t believe that’s what’s happening. Nobody could have gotten access to so many potential DNA samples.”

  “Why not? They could get whiskers out of your razor, and pubic hairs out of your dirty underwear. Possibly even bodily fluids, now that I think of it.”

  “But that means someone would have had to have gotten into my home. Indie is meticulous about laundry, so my dirty shorts don’t lay around waiting for someone to pick them up. The razor thing might be possible, because I use disposables and throw them away, but pubic hairs? Bodily fluids? There’s just no way.”

  “There has to be,” Carol said, exasperated. “The only other possibility is that you’re guilty. Now, think, Sam.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing all evening? I’m a professional investigator, do you think I haven’t been racking my brains, trying to figure out how a frame-up like this could be pulled off? The only way anybody could have gotten those kind of DNA sources to put on that body would be if they were in the house right after I made love to my wife. They would’ve had to have taken my shorts the next morning, before she got a chance to carry the hamper to the laundry room. I can just about guarantee that there was no such person in my house anywhere close to that time, and bodily fluid samples degrade over time. They would’ve had to have been relatively fresh, or somebody would have noticed a problem.”

  Carol leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m trying to find a way to help you, Sam,” she said, “but you’re making it pretty difficult.” She stared at him for a moment, then leaned forward. “Again, assuming I believe you, those traces had to have come from somewhere. Sam, did you pick up a hooker or something on your way out of town that day? Knock off a quickie or something?”

  “No!” Sam said emphatically, slapping his hand on the table. “Carol, I can’t believe you would even ask me that question.”

  “I have to, Sam,” she said. “The crime lab says they recovered those traces from the body. They got there somehow. If they didn’t come directly off of you, then somebody else managed to collect them and knew enough about forensic measures to apply them convincingly. The only way I can imagine that happening is if you had a little afternoon delight with some floozy on the road. If you did, that gives us the very slim possibility of establishing reasonable doubt.”

  “I did not,” Sam said deliberately. “Good grief, Carol, you’ve seen my wife. Can you imagine any man looking elsewhere when he had her to go home to?”

  “It happens,” Carol said bitterly. “How do you think I ended up divorced? And while it may not be obvious now, there was a time when I looked every bit as good as Indie.”

  Sam shook his head. “Sorry, but no. I have not been with anyone else, and I cannot imagine any scenario in which someone could have recovered those traces from me. There has to be an error in the DNA testing, or somebody is fudging the results on purpose.”

  It was Carol’s turn to shake her head in the negative. “Crime lab sent it out to one of the most prestigious labs in the country,” she said. “Those people don’t make mistakes, and the possibility that someone could get them to falsify the results to implicate you—well, I don’t know anybody who would believe that.”

  “And yet, something like that has to be the truth. Either there was some kind of error made during the testing that allowed it to point to me, or somebody is deliberately trying to destroy me. It’s not like I don’t have my share of enemies, you know?”

  “But how do I prove that? How do I convince a jury of your peers that someone hated you badly enough to manipulate a lab with an impeccable reputation into producing the result they wanted? Can you imagine how many expert witnesses the prosecution could bring on to shoot that theory down? How many do you think I could get to help me try to make it believable?”

  Sam scowled. “Probably none,” he said. “I know what you’re saying, because I wouldn’t believe it either, if it wasn’t happening to me.”

  The two of them sat across the table for almost a minute without speaking. Finally, Carol broke the silence.

  “Okay. We have an absolutely impossible situation that we have to deal with. The prosecution has evidence that would be considered absolutely incontrovertible in almost any case, and we can’t produce a single witness who can put you somewhere else at the time the crime took place. The fact that you had a van that matches the description of the one they saw in the security video looks pretty bad, but it looks absolutely disastrous when you take into account the fact that you had it utterly destroyed not long after this happened. Sam, no matter how I look at this, you’re almost certainly going to be convicted. Tell me how I can help you.”

  Sam put his elbows on the table and leaned his face into his clenched fists. “There’s only one way I can imagine,” he said after a moment. “Find a way to get me out on bail. If you can, I’ll find whoever’s doing this. I’ll find who actually killed that girl, and I will drag them personally to that detective, O’Rourke. That’s the only thing I can think of that might help, if I can produce the real killer.”

  Carol’s eyes were wide as they bored into his own. “That might work,” she said, “if you could find some way to explain the DNA results. Otherwise, I’m not sure even a confession would save you, Sam. The real problem, however, is going to be getting you bail. Considering who you are, I’m sure they’re going to label you as a flight risk.”

  “You’ve got to try. Carol, I don’t know how, but you get me out of jail and I will find the truth. That’s what I do, remember?”

  She sat and looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “They’ll be taking you to Fort Collins early tomorrow morning,” she said. “When you get there, you’re going straight into arraignment. I’ll be there. I’ll do what I can about bail, but it’s not going to be easy.”

  “You think anything I’ve done lately has been easy? You get me out on bail, and I will find a way to prove my innocence. That’s the only hope I’ve got, Carol, and you know it.”

  “Okay. I’ll do my best, but you’d better be thinking of a backup plan.” She got to her feet and tapped on the door, and the jailer came to escort her out a moment later. A second jailer put the handcuffs on Sam and led the way back to his cell.

  “Just got the word,” the jailer said as they walked. “You’re leaving us at seven a.m. Try to get a good night’s sleep, because you’re going to need it.”

  THREE

  Indie went straight to her bedroom with her computer after the reporters left and immediately hacked her way into the Laramie County Sheriff’s office computer network. It took her a couple of minutes to find the case file on Sam and she began going through it, looking for any inconsistency that could throw doubt on the evidence against him.
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br />   Kim and Grace were taking care of the children, so Indie was able to concentrate on what she was doing. Unfortunately, the lack of distractions didn’t help; between the grainy, black and white images of the van they suspected of being the murder vehicle—which matched the old van Sam had recently bought and then scrapped almost perfectly—and the supposedly ironclad DNA evidence, it certainly looked like Sam had to be guilty.

  Despite herself, as tears streamed down her cheeks, Indie wondered for just a moment if it could be true. Could the man she loved, the man she knew so well, truly be capable of this kind of horrific act? No matter how she wanted to deny it, the evidence certainly looked conclusive.

  Stop it, she said to herself. He couldn’t, the man I know simply could not do this! Sam protects people, Sam saves people, he would never rape or murder anyone!

  She opened another window and put Herman, her search program, to work. She entered the parameters she wanted him to look for, consisting of cases in which DNA evidence was proven to be false even when it seemed conclusive, and cases when DNA was contaminated or somehow compromised so that it gave a false result. She hit the enter key to set him on his search, then leaned back in her chair.

  Herman was quick, and the first results came back within seconds. Unfortunately, they were mostly academic papers on using DNA evidence forensically, and the only instances when DNA seemed to be in error involved a perpetrator who was closely related to the suspect. Even then, however, the best they managed to get was around an eighty-five percent match. That would be too low to use as genuine evidence of guilt, though it could be used to reinforce the impact of other evidence.

  In Sam’s case, the lab came up with a ninety-nine percent match to Sam on three different types of DNA samples. According to the file, they had found whiskers inside the girl’s bra, along with pubic hairs and some kind of bodily fluids on and near her genitals. Desperately, she clicked back to the file to look at the photographic evidence once again.