Virtually Harmless

by P. D. Workman

  “And the range of Mama Doe’s is…?”

  “Definitely under twenty. Lower range fifteen or sixteen. You probably won’t see a lot of full-term pregnancies much younger than that anyway. And the person who abandoned her needed to have access to a car. So, let’s say fifteen as the minimum.”

  “Fifteen to twenty.” Kwong gave a low whistle. “I hadn’t thought of her being so young.” He looked down at the composite pictures once more. “Tell me what else you have adjusted for.”

  Despite wanting to get the work done so she could get pictures out to Deputy Bellows and anyone else involved in the investigation, Micah enjoyed discussing her work and the unraveling of the DNA puzzle.

  “Her epigenome suggests that she is a smoker, so I have deepened the lines of her face more than I normally would for a teenager. I aged a photo of Sweetie, with reference to their unique and shared heritages, and made a few adjustments to Mama’s facial structure to match. Other traits included unattached earlobes, no dimples or freckles, probably straight hair.” Micah paused, considering the details she had been poring through. “The data suggests some level of malnutrition. So I have gone with a slightly lower than expected height and thinned her face.”

  “Malnutrition,” Kwong repeated. “Really? Was she an immigrant? She’s white.”

  “Even in America, there are still children who don’t get enough to eat. Not just immigrants from poorer countries.”

  Kwong looked like he would argue the point, then shook his head. “Well, I guess that helps to narrow the pool. Someone who may be living below the poverty line, making use of county services.”

  “I’ve been digging down deeper into dietary and environmental factors and their effect on the epigenome. I might get Mr. Hawkins to do a bit more research for me if he’s not too busy.”

  Kwong raised an eyebrow. “Which would tell us what?”

  “I may be able to get an idea of what her diet and environment were like. What she was eating, where she was living. Whether she’s from this area or somewhere else.”

  “How accurate would that be? It would narrow it down to what kind of area?”

  Micah blew out her breath slowly, considering. She’d gone off down a rabbit trail, chasing what other information they could extract from Mama’s epigenome, but how useful would that information be? How would it help them to identify her?

  “Hard to say… no one has done it before, as far as I am aware. But it would be good for us to at least start a database, start tracking this internally so that we can make better predictions in the future…”

  “What would it tell us?” Kwong persisted. “That she grew up in this county? This area? Montana?”

  “Uh… probably not that narrow. Maybe… western states, or Rocky Mountain or prairie states…”

  “That doesn’t really help us to identify Mama Doe. It’s too broad. We already know that she lives in this region, and if she is just a teenager and indigent, chances are she grew up here.”

  “I suppose,” Micah agreed.

  “Don’t waste any more time on that. Yes, it’s something you can suggest to R&D that they work on for the future, to stay ahead of the competition, but don’t get bogged down with it now. There isn’t enough data to make it worth our while on this file.”

  “Okay. I’ll send them a memo.”

  He nodded, satisfied, and put down the pictures. He tapped one with the pads of a couple of fingers. “I like these. It’s good work. If you can get the first couple to the Sheriff’s Department tonight, then you can work on whatever variations you wanted to try over the next couple of days, send them over as you complete them.”

  Micah looked at the time on her phone and realized that it was time to close up for the day. She stretched her shoulders and back. “I’ll touch a couple of these up and send them over,” she agreed. She opened her drawer and removed a tray of colored pencils. “Won’t take long.”

  “Great. I’ll let them know they’re on the way.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Micah sat on the couch, petting the kitten and staring at the dark window, visualizing Mama Doe’s face and thinking about everything she had learned and the pictures she had produced over the previous few days. Despite the fact that the streetlights were on, she did not notice the figures moving up the sidewalk and was startled when the doorbell rang, followed by a sharp rap.

  The cat immediately sat up, staring at the door in alarm. Micah didn’t encourage visitors, so the kitten was unused to anyone else coming to the door, and certainly not to anyone knocking or ringing the doorbell. When Micah rose to go to the door, the kitten streaked away, claws skittering over the slippery wood floor, and hid.

  Micah peered out the peephole, but she knew who was at the door without looking. Not many people would come to her house unannounced, and it was too late and too dark out for door-to-door salesmen or missionaries. Besides, she knew that knock. She’d heard it many times before, and it was always exactly the same. She confirmed the identity of the visitors and opened her door.

  “Hi, Mom, Dad. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “No,” Marianna agreed, stepping forward to give Micah a brief hug and brush her cheek with a kiss. “You never do ask, do you? I’ve been telling you that I wanted to come over and see your new little one, but you’re always too busy.”

  Micah made sure that the door was shut before looking around for the kitten. Her parents began to take off their jackets and gloves. Micah called the kitten, checking her usual hiding spots. She had wedged herself between a counter and the fridge and was backed right up against the wall, eyes wide with worry.

  “It’s okay,” Micah soothed. “There’s nothing to be scared of. Just some new people to meet. It’s okay.”

  She could hear her parents getting settled in the living room, talking in low voices, commenting on her decorating or the reception they had received or speculating about the kitten.

  “Come on out,” Micah invited. She shook the kitten’s kibble bowl. “Come on. Come here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

  It took some minutes of encouraging but, eventually, the kitten crept out, still jumpy and looking around anxiously. Micah fed her a few pieces of food by hand, then picked her up gently. The cat made one protest, then was quiet, and Micah carried her out to the living room.

  “Here she is. This is Marianna and Cole, my mom and dad,” she told the kitten, getting closer. The kitten’s nose moved as she sniffed the air to get the scent of the new arrivals. Micah wondered what she could smell and whether she thought they smelled safe. They would smell different from Micah, not living in the same household and eating the same food. She wouldn’t be able to discern the relationship between them.

  “Oh, isn’t she precious!” Marianna crooned. “Give her here. Let me hold her.”

  Micah shook her head, sitting down with the kitten. The cat burrowed her head into Micah’s elbow, hiding from the intruders. “No, she doesn’t know you yet. Give her a chance to get used to you first.”

  They both looked at Micah, saying nothing at first, waiting awkwardly.

  “How has work been?” Cole asked eventually, looking around the living room and finding nothing to comment on.

  “Good.” Micah stroked the cat, enjoying the feel of her silky soft fur. “We got the file for the Sweetgrass Doe case. I’ve been working on composites of her mother.”

  “Her mother? How did you do that?” Marianna asked. “I didn’t think there was any blood at the scene. Was there… blood or something else?”

  “No. We weren’t able to get trace from anything else. Or at least not yet—another department is trying to find anything useful from the clothing. But we analyzed Sweetie’s blood.” Micah gave a short explanation of the technology.

  Neither parent said anything. They looked at each other, communicating without speech. That always weirded Micah out. She couldn’t imagine knowing someone so well that she could communicate with them by facial expression and body langua
ge alone.

  “How long does the mother’s DNA stay in the baby’s blood?” Cole asked eventually.

  “We don’t know. The studies that have been done have mostly focused on the fetal DNA in the mother’s body. So that they can test for genetic anomalies like Down Syndrome before the baby is born without putting him or her at risk with amniocentesis, identify the baby’s gender in the first few weeks, things like that. They have done studies that show that the baby’s DNA remains in the mother’s body, in places like the brain, for decades after the baby’s birth. At this point, we don’t know. It hasn’t been studied widely enough. Until recently, we didn’t have the technology to separate multiple profiles from the same blood sample, especially at such low concentrations.”

  “The world is changing,” Marianna observed, looking frightened. She turned to look at Cole again. He made a calming motion with his hands. Micah knew what they were worried about. But she didn’t have an answer for them. She was still trying to figure it all out herself.

  “No one would ever have guessed twenty years ago that we would have this kind of technology someday,” she said. “And thirty or forty years ago… no one was even talking about DNA.”

  Marianna shook her head, distressed. “All of the adoptions back then were sealed. They were always supposed to stay sealed and confidential. And now even if the governments don’t open the records up, adoptees can still track their biological families down!”

  “With technology like this,” Cole said, “if children carry their mother’s full DNA and mothers carry their children’s… then there’s no privacy at all. Upload it to one of those genealogy matching sites, and suddenly you know everything there is to know about your family.”

  “Well, it’s not quite that easy. Sometimes the links to other people in the database are quite distant, but you can find some connections to your biological family, even if they’re not immediate.”

  Another department at EvPro would, Micah knew, search for genetic connections to Mama Doe and Sweetie in the genealogical databases. But there were more and more rules about what information law enforcement could access even in public databases. People were still trying to hold on to their ability to keep their genetic information private, but technology was outstripping the laws. Did a murderer or rapist—or someone who had kidnapped or abandoned an infant—deserve to have their identity protected? Did their relatives’ privacy rights outweigh the social good of getting a violent offender off the streets?

  Micah didn’t meet her mother’s eyes. She looked down at the kitten. The cat was getting braver, poking her head up and watching the strangers. Curious as a cat. Micah had never known how apt the expression was before.

  “What did you name her?” Marianna asked.

  Micah squirmed. “Uh… Meow.”

  Cole laughed loudly, making the kitten burrow her head back down into Micah’s arm and side. “Meow? You know, they have sites on the internet where you can look up good names for cats.”

  Micah rolled her eyes. “I know. I looked at some of them. But they’re just… too cutesy. I don’t want a silly pun on some actor’s name, or something based on her color or something ironic like a dog’s name. I wanted… something suited to a cat.”

  “Well, I guess I can’t argue with the suitability of a cat being named Meow, but really! It’s not very inventive, is it?”

  “It’s how she communicates. Why wouldn’t you… pick a name that your pet can actually say?”

  “But if everyone went by that principle, then all cats would be named Meow and all dogs would be named Bark.”

  “But not everyone does.”

  “No.” Cole chuckled again. “You are… you have always had your own way of thinking about things.”

  Micah tried to shrug it off. She knew that her brain worked differently from either of theirs. She had always felt like an alien observing another culture. She looked like the people around her, but another kind of brain had been dropped into her human body. Something that was only a near approximation of the rest of the human race.

  “He didn’t mean that,” Marianna said, touching Cole’s arm. “Cole, tell her you didn’t mean anything negative. You’re brilliant, Micah, we’ve always known that. There’s nothing wrong with your brain or the way you think.”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” Cole muttered, shaking his head.

  “You laughed at her. You’re making fun of her difference.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I know he didn’t mean it that way.”

  Even while she was talking to them, trying to smooth things over before it became a real argument, the gears were turning in Micah’s head. Adoption. The baby. The mother. The traits she had seen in Mama Doe’s epigenome analysis. Malnourished. Early smoker. Early pregnancy. No one calling in to report a mother whose baby had suddenly disappeared.

  “Micah? Micah! You see, Cole, it did bother her. Micah, you can call your cat whatever you like. Nobody cares.”

  The way the kitten had shown up on her doorstep. No mother. No owner. No one missing her. The mother cat had to have been feral, maybe killed by a predator and never returning to the nest where her babies sheltered. Because she didn’t have a place in the community, in its social structure.

  “No, it’s okay, Mom,” she told Marianna absently. “I’ll be back in a minute; I have to…” She stood up, handed the kitten to Marianna, and hurried to the desk in her home office. She had a whiteboard, various scratch pads, notebooks, and sketch pads, so she always had a place to jot down her thoughts and start mapping her ideas out. She had her computer too, with several outlining or mind-mapping programs on them, but she never achieved the same flow as she did if she drew things out with a pencil or marker. She sat down and started to connect words and ideas, stood up and went to the whiteboard, and sat down again with another notepad to develop her thoughts further. It fit. It made sense, like nothing else in the case had.

  ❋

  She wasn’t sure what time it was when Marianna ventured into the doorway of Micah’s home office to say goodbye. She carried the kitten, who was blinking sleepily and had probably been asleep in Marianna’s lap for however long Micah had been lost in thought in the office.

  “We really should be heading home now, and you’ll be wanting to get to bed too, I guess. Will you come over Sunday for dinner?”

  “I’m not sure.” Micah didn’t look at her calendar. “I’ll have to see.”

  “Don’t let what Dad says get to you. You know he loves you.”

  “I know,” Micah agreed. And she preferred his gruff, blunt manner to Marianna’s fussing and political and social correctness, but she would never tell Marianna that. “It’s fine. It’s forgotten.”

  And it was; she could barely remember what they had been talking about. She was too wrapped up in her thoughts about the Sweetgrass Doe case.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Micah called Deputy Bellows as soon as she got to her desk, hoping that he would be on duty and not have been on night shift.

  The phone rang a few times, and she suspected he wasn’t going to answer. She swore under her breath, something she almost never did. She waited for his voicemail, preparing to hang up. She didn’t want to leave a message. She wanted to talk to him directly. This was a message that required voice-to-voice communication.

  “Sheriff’s.”

  “Deputy Bellows?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” He apparently looked at his caller ID “Miss Miller. I’m afraid we’re not getting very far with your pictures. I’m sure they’re fine, but we haven’t had any calls. I have men checking wants and warrants and missing persons reports. They’ve looked at everything in the region and are working their way out. Some possibilities, but nothing that is looking too promising.”

  “I know where you need to look.”

  He sputtered. Micah worried she had caught him in the middle of taking a drink of coffee. “Are you okay, Deputy?”

  He cleared his thro
at. “I’m fine. What do you mean, you know where to look?”

  “Foster care. You need to get CFS checking their files.”

  “Foster care.” Bellows didn’t sound enthused. “If she was a foster kid, there would be a missing report on her. They would already have been looking for her. A teen mom disappears with her baby? Or loses the baby? They would be having kittens.”

  “Not if she had already aged out. If she was eighteen…”

  He considered that. “She wouldn’t be in a foster family anymore, unless they decided to foot the bills themselves, and most parents can’t afford to do that. She might still have a social worker.”

  “Maybe. But not for sure. And if she lost touch, they wouldn’t be that worried about it. Once she’s an adult and on her own, she can decide for herself not to have contact.”

  She could hear him turning pages. “I still think there would be a report if a new mom went missing, or if her baby disappeared.”

  “There are lots of ways around that. Some women hide their pregnancies. Or she could tell anyone who knew that she’d given the baby up for adoption. Or that it was stillborn. As long as she doesn’t say anything to make them suspicious…”

  “I’ll look into it. What made you think of it?”

  Micah thought back to the previous evening. “Just a discussion I had with someone… I got to thinking about the epigenome. Malnourished at some point, she could have been a neglected child. Mother a junkie, or on the streets, or just didn’t want to have to take care of a child. So CFS apprehends her. Puts her into foster care. Tries to get the parent back on track or maybe Mom is in jail. The child takes up smoking early in life, barely a teen or maybe even younger. Gets pregnant. All very common for a displaced or neglected child. Probably drinks, too. And then the lack of social connections. No family to report her or the baby missing. No one who suspects that anything was wrong. She’s invisible.”