Virtually Harmless

by P. D. Workman

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A squad car pulled up in front of the house, lights flashing but siren off. Micah went to the door and turned the locks to open them. She shivered with the cold when she opened the door for them. It had warmed up significantly, but she’d been snuggling under a warm quilt and her body didn’t like the shock of the chilly air. The two officers took their time getting out of the car and approaching the house. Micah wished they would hurry up so she could close the door. The kitten was sleeping on the couch and didn’t look interested in getting any closer to the cold breeze.

  “You have a prowler, ma’am?” one of the cops asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’ve had two incidents, and… my parents just went home and I’m alone, and I’m worried that he might try to attack me again.”

  “Two incidents?”

  She was surprised that he hadn’t brushed up on her case on the way there. “A burglary and an assault, on two different days.”

  “And you saw him tonight, or you didn’t?”

  “I didn’t.”

  He rolled his eyes. “We’ll take a look around. Close and lock your door and we’ll knock after we’ve cleared the area.”

  They had pulled up with their lights on. If Micah had been a felon lurking about outside, she would have taken off at the first sign of trouble. But she obeyed their instruction and sat inside, waiting for them to make sure she was safe. It wasn’t long before they were knocking at the door.

  “Don’t see anyone out here, or any sign anyone has been lurking around,” the first cop said, shrugging. He had unzipped his jacket and eased his heavy duty belt up on his belly before releasing it again.

  “I didn’t know if he would be around… I’d really like to talk to Deputy Bellows, though,” Micah said, rubbing her eyes tiredly. “He’s going to want this new information.”

  “You’ll have to try to get him in the morning. If it’s not an emergency, they’re not going to wake him up. And it’s not an emergency,” he told her firmly.

  “What if this guy comes after me again? You wouldn’t know anything was wrong until it was too late.”

  He looked around. “Looks like you’ve beefed up security measures. I’d say you’re safe. Don’t open your door to anyone.”

  “He’s attacked me before.”

  “Do you have a description, ma’am?”

  “Well… actually, I do.” Micah picked up her laptop and brought up the computer composite. “Dark hair, brown eyes. I don’t know his age yet, so keep in mind he could be older than this.”

  The cop looked at her screen for a long moment. “What program is that?”

  “It’s what I do at EvPro. Composite drawings. I’m not done with this one yet; this is just the initial computer prediction.”

  “And does he look anything like that?”

  “I haven’t seen him. But yes, he looks substantially like this.”

  She tried to ignore the nagging doubts in the back of her head. She knew that a person could greatly change his appearance so that he didn’t look anything like his genotype said. Micah did not look like her genotype, even though she hadn’t deliberately changed her appearance.

  The cop eyed the picture doubtfully. “You don’t recognize him?”

  Micah analyzed the man in the picture. She manipulated pictures and studied the human face every day. She cataloged people by their features, noting their heritage, their dominant and recessive genes, unexpected surprises. Faces were one of her favorite things.

  But she didn’t know the man. Not yet. At least if she saw him on the street, she would know him and be warned.

  “Pass that on to Bellows in the morning,” the cop eventually told her. “Things look secure here for the night. You should be safe. You should call the officers who handled your assault case as well; give them that picture if they don’t already have it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. Not much else we can do.”

  “I know. Thanks for coming by.”

  ❋

  The night was a lot harder than Micah had expected. She thought she would be able to sleep through like she had when her mother had been there, but even though Marianna left her with the drugs and dosage instructions, Micah’s body pulsed with pain and her brain wouldn’t stop running on a hamster wheel. Spinning and spinning and getting nowhere.

  She awoke in the morning after a long, restless night to a loud knock on her door. She stumbled to her feet, realizing that she had slept late, and her parents were already there.

  She didn’t check the new door cam, having left her electronics in the bedroom without remembering to look at them. She unlocked the locks and yanked the door open.

  And it wasn’t Cole and Marianna.

  For a moment, Micah stood there, frozen, like the proverbial deer in the headlights. It wasn’t her parents. It was Deputy Bellows. And Micah was in her pajamas, hair mussed from sleep, eyes blurry, and covered with bruises.

  “Oh. Frank. Come in.”

  She shivered in the cold outside air and shut the door behind him. She ushered him into the living room, trying to think of what to do. “Do you want coffee? And I need just a few minutes… to wash up.”

  “Sure. I didn’t mean to get you out of bed. Should have realized with the tough time you’ve had the last few days.”

  “It’s a ridiculous time to be in bed still,” Micah criticized herself, face warming. “I don’t know what you must think.”

  “I think that you’re recovering from a pretty nasty beating, and it’s probably lucky that you’re even home, let alone out of bed.”

  “Well…” Micah tried to shake off his observation. But what was she going to say? It wasn’t that bad? She was just being lazy? He knew that wasn’t true. He’d seen assault victims before.

  “Go wash up. And if you don’t mind me in your kitchen, I can make the coffee.”

  “No, you’re a guest.”

  “I’m perfectly capable. Go freshen up and let me get the caffeine going.”

  “Oh… okay. Thanks. It’s just through there.”

  She was sure she didn’t need to direct him through the open doorway to the kitchen, but did anyway, for lack of something else to say or do.

  Bellows nodded. “Do you need anything else?”

  “No. Coffee. Lots of nice, piping hot coffee.”

  He grinned. “Good. That I can manage.”

  Micah retreated to her room and shut the door. She sat on her bed for a minute to catch her breath and gather her thoughts.

  ❋

  “You start,” Bellows said. “I want to hear what happened to you. You look just awful.”

  “I know,” Micah said. She’d looked in the mirror before joining him in the kitchen, and the bruises had set in nice and dark. She looked like someone from a zombie walk. “The thing is, I think it might be related.”

  “Related to what?”

  “Related to the case. To Sweetie.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “How could that be?” He considered. “You think that someone we interviewed attacked you? Or leaked the information to the person who did?”

  “I don’t know how he got the information. But somehow, he did. Maybe it was because of the people we interviewed or he knew that I had done the composites of Trisha. I was with you, so I guess people would know I had something to do with the case.”

  “But why would he come after you? What good would that do? You’re the artist, not an investigator. Getting you out of the way would not do much to stop the investigation. Not to be rude, but you’re not vital to the case.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what he knows or suspects, or if he’s just fighting back against me because I’m not… as able to defend myself against an attack. Going after you might… present more difficulties.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard if he had a weapon.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t have one. Or doesn’t think he can use one. I don’t know. He didn’t… I thought when h
e started hitting me at first that he had a baseball bat, but he didn’t have anything, just his hands. His fists. He hit me really hard.”

  “He may pride himself in his ability to hurt someone with his hands. He might justify himself that if he uses his hands he’s not breaking the rules. You never know what kind of twisted ideas these guys can have. They have their own morality systems, and they won’t look anything like yours or mine. They can’t. They have to make themselves righteous in their own eyes.”

  “Or they just don’t believe in anything.”

  “In my experience… everybody believes in something. Maybe it’s fate or the universe. Maybe it’s nature or genetics. But everybody believes something. And you build your morality system on top of that.”

  Micah shrugged stiffly. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “So, what makes you think that the guy who attacked you is related to the case?”

  “I’ll get to that. I want to tell you the rest first, see what you think.”

  “Okay.”

  “When he first came, when he burgled the house… he just came in and looked around. He didn’t take anything. Or move anything. Everything seemed to be completely untouched.”

  “So you interrupted him.”

  “I don’t think so. His footprints were partially snowed in. That means he had left before I got there. Before anyone got there.”

  “Someone could still have spooked him, though. A dog walker. Neighbor returning from the store. A helicopter flying overhead. For someone with a guilty conscience, any little noise could mean discovery.”

  “I think he was looking for something. And he didn’t find it here, because it isn’t here. I think it has to do with work, but he was hoping that I would have brought it home with me.”

  “That’s speculation. Anything to base it on?”

  “No… just that he didn’t touch anything. Or anything he did touch, he put back in exactly the same spot. If it were a regular burglar, someone after valuables, he would have taken it. Money, gold, electronics… my dad says the TV is garbage, but everything else is worth something. I don’t have much cash or jewelry around the house, but it was all still there. The tablet and the computer, still there. If it were just someone looking for quick cash, he wouldn’t have left all of that behind, even if he was spooked.”

  “Maybe. But jumping to it being related to work is too much. Too big a jump.”

  “Okay. When he attacked me, he didn’t try to… molest me. He didn’t threaten me, or try to take my purse or my watch. He just hit me. Over and over again. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything except hit me.”

  “Again, his fists. Not his voice. I think this guy is seriously obsessed with hurting people with his own hands. If he was trying to hurt you so badly or kill you, why not use a weapon?”

  “I don’t know. But he didn’t seem to have any other goal. It wasn’t theft. It wasn’t to take advantage of me. It was just to hurt me.”

  “Some people operate that way.”

  “For the next part, I have to teach you something about DNA.”

  “Okay.” Bellows nodded. “I think I’ve been a good student so far. What do I need to know?”

  “Well… you know that everyone is a product of the two DNA donors, the mother and the father.”

  “Yes, it seems to me we covered this in biology…” he said with a chuckle.

  “We know the full DNA profile of Sweetie’s mother because she also had her mother’s full DNA in her blood.”

  “Right.”

  “And we have Sweetie’s full DNA because we have her blood sample.”

  “Of course.”

  “So half of that DNA sample is from her mother, and half of it is from her father.”

  “And since you have her mother’s DNA, you know which half is which,” Bellows said promptly.

  “Yes. And the difference, then, is the father’s DNA.”

  “Okay. But it’s only half of his DNA, am I right? So you don’t have enough to identify him?”

  “We would have enough to identify him if he was in the system. He wasn’t.”

  “Right.”

  “I thought that maybe it would be enough to do a composite of the father. Not a very good one, because we would have to guess a lot. But… it would at least be a starting point.”

  Bellows agreed. “I guess something is better than nothing. You would know that he was white because the baby doesn’t appear to be mixed race. And maybe you would know a few things like eye color.”

  Micah nodded. “Some traits are dominant, so if Sweetie had that trait, and she didn’t get it from her mother, then she got it from her father. And because it is dominant, he has to show it too. And some traits are recessive and for her to show that trait, she would have to inherit the recessive gene from both her mother and her father. There are some things that we can figure out, but it wouldn’t be as good a picture as what I could produce with full genome and epigenome.”

  “So what did you come up with? Do you have a picture for me?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  “When the officers rescued me from the attack, I didn’t realize that I had evidence on me that could help solve the case. I didn’t realize until a day or two later that… my fingernails were torn from scratching him. I didn’t know whether I had gotten any of his skin or just his clothing, so I… took it in to EvPro.”

  Bellows frowned. “You should have had the police come back to process the evidence.”

  “I know,” Micah admitted. She was glad to be coming clean to him. She hated the dishonesty of having EvPro process the evidence and then telling the police that she had remembered the unsub’s face or gotten the information from somewhere else. “But I knew that even if the police did come out to collect it, it would still take months for you to process.”

  “This isn’t a good idea.”

  “Stay with me. I’m not done.”

  He eyed her, took a sip of his cooling coffee, and nodded for her to go on. “Okay. Continue.”

  “Our processing is much faster than yours. My team prioritized it. The DNA profiles were separated and the unsub’s was sequenced and run through our databases. Then through the initial computer-generated phenotyping.”

  “Already? That is quick.”

  “Very. Top of the line equipment and proprietary technology. We process thousands of samples a year from all over the country. All over the world.”

  “So you have a picture for me of the man who attacked you, and you think that he might be related to the Sweetie Doe case. That’s why you wanted to talk to me.”

  “One more step.”

  “Okay,” Bellows was getting impatient, his tone taking on an edge. “Take me through the last step, then.”

  “When the computer sequences the genome, it automatically runs the genome against our database to see if we already have a match. I was worried that it could be someone who I had drawn a composite of, that they were out of prison and wanted revenge.”

  “Uh-huh. And you came up with a match, I gather?”

  “It came up with a match. The Lazarus.”

  Bellows looked at her blankly. “Is that some code name or serial killer name I’m unfamiliar with?”

  Micah realized she had not given him all of the information he needed. “When we create a DNA profile for someone using information from relatives, we call that a Lazarus. In this case, Sweetie Doe’s father.”

  “Sweetie Doe’s father,” Bellows repeated slowly, trying to chain it all together. “His DNA profile was—” Bellows sat bolt upright, splashing his coffee. “Sweetie Doe’s father is the man who attacked you?”

  Micah nodded, pleased with his reaction in spite of the mess. “Yes. Exactly.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Bellows’s mouth was a round O. He stared at Micah. “So now you have the full DNA profile for Sweetie’s father, and that means you can do a picture. And we have something to match if
we can track him down. And…” his words slowed and became reflective, “it means that he’s still around town and that he knows he is the baby’s father.”

  Micah thought about it. Why else would he be attacking her? If he didn’t know he was Sweetie’s father, then they wouldn’t have triggered his attacks by working on the file. He would have been as oblivious as anyone else. Particularly since they had not released Trisha Madro’s name. There was no one saying, ‘Hey, weren’t you Trisha’s boyfriend?’ There was no one accusing him of being the baby’s father. The only ones who knew that were probably Trisha and the father himself.

  “Did you have any leads on Trisha? Someone she was seeing a few months ago? Friends and acquaintances that might have some insights?”

  Bellows sat back in his chair and sighed. “Things have not gotten any easier. If anything, they are even more difficult.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Trisha was likely a sex worker. So identifying a boyfriend or the father of the baby becomes very difficult.”

  “But she knew. She told him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have known the baby was his.”

  Bellows made a helpless gesture, palms up. “I wish I could say I was close to finding out who that was.”

  “You must have found out if she worked with a pimp. And whether any of the other girls were friends with her. That could help.”

  “These girls are virtual prisoners. Some of them are literally prisoners. But even the ones who are not physically restrained, they’re still held prisoner by the men further up the food chain. It’s not necessarily like you’re thinking, with one pimp running a handful of girls, taking care of them and making sure no one interferes for a large cut of the money. Instead, we’re talking about… organized crime. Sex trafficking. The girls are assets. They’re sold and traded, trafficked across the country sometimes.”

  “But Trisha wasn’t trafficked across the country; she was kept here.”

  Bellows nodded. “Yes. She was. This is where she was in foster care, and this is where she died. For some period of time in between, the last year or more, she was in the grips of these… lowlifes.”