OK, so definitely Jo’s car. I say it out loud, “DNA 4N6.”
4N6? I try again. DNA Foreign Sex. Um, probably not, but it’s taking my mind off the gun riding at my hip and what things a bone doc might store in the trunk of her car.
On the horizon, a straight black line. The predicted cold front and 30-degree temperature drop by nightfall. A sixtyish woman in pink fast-walks past me, pumping her arms, hurrying away from it. I stop at a homeless man curled into a fetal position, asleep on a concrete picnic table near a shopping cart crammed with useful trash. I stick a $10 bill deep into the empty coffee cup he’s clutching. He doesn’t move.
I do that whenever I can. For Roosevelt. I made Lydia go visit Roosevelt on his street corner after they found me, because I knew he’d be worried. I never got to say goodbye myself. He was found dead leaning against a tree, like he fell asleep there, a week before the trial.
DNA 4N6. Four-en-six. Forensics! I’m an idiot.
I pick up the pace once I see Jo, who is right where she said she’d be-under a landmark live oak rumored to have once been a hanging tree. She’s cross-legged on a bench, sipping out of a green neoprene water bottle with a red biohazard sticker. Her black North Face windbreaker bears a CSI Texas logo. I’m figuring the bottle and the jacket are high-end graft from a forensic science conference.
“Thanks for meeting me here.” She unfolds her lean legs and pats the bench for me to sit beside her. “I worked in the lab all weekend and needed some air. I heard about what happened at your house. Have the police caught him?”
“No. I didn’t get a good look. There’s an anti-death-penalty newsletter that mentions me on a regular basis, so the cops are checking that email list. The editor posted my street address in her last blog that ranted about Terrell’s case. I’m not hopeful, though. I’ve been through this before.”
“It’s odd and scary… that these people would target you.” She doesn’t say it, but I know what she’s thinking. The victim.
I shrug, used to it. “The trial was a trigger for a lot of anger. And the jury foreman was very public in saying the case turned on my testimony.” Even though I was just painting in the scenery.
She nods sympathetically. I don’t really want to talk about what happened Saturday night. It’s bad enough that it’s rolling on an endless loop in my head: Charlie crouching in the shed under a compulsive array of garden diggers. The police, at my insistence, breaking down Effie’s back door. She had drifted off in her La-Z-Boy wearing noise-canceling headphones that she’d ordered off eBay. “You know, to maybe quiet the voices,” she had told me conspiratorially while a policeman searched her house. For a brief second, I thought she was also hinting at the ones in my own head, but her eyes had been darting around like a feral cat. It seems most likely that Miss Effie’s digger snatcher lives under her own roof. So I didn’t tell the cops, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to bring it up to Effie.
“I thought maybe you could use some good news,” Jo says. “The red hair on the jacket found near the field? The mitochondrial DNA analysis proves there is a 99.75 percent chance it didn’t come off your head. And there is no evidence of Terrell’s DNA on the jacket itself.”
“Is it enough to get Terrell a new trial?” I wonder if she’s told Bill.
“Maybe. Maybe not. There’s a relatively new law in Texas that allows prisoners to successfully appeal a case when scientific technology can shed light on old evidence. But I talked to Bill this morning. He’s been through this wringer before with Death Row clients and he’s pretty adamant that a single red hair and a sloppy expert who used junk science aren’t going to be enough to convince an appeals court to overturn anything. He wants to throw more than that at the judge. Unfortunately, Terrell only has his mom and sister as alibis for the time Hannah Stein disappeared. And the cops have been unable to draw a line between Merry Sullivan and Hannah. Of course, the cops aren’t exactly on Terrell’s side-they are mostly focused on getting the girls identified for the families and getting the media off their backs every time the anniversary rolls around. Working at the behest of the district attorney who wants a little TV time. Did you happen to catch his press conference on Hannah?” I can tell she’s not expecting an answer. “Ferreting out the real killer… well, that would just be a bonus for us.”
The bitterness from her surprises me. “Sorry.” She grimaces. “I’m usually the one assuming everyone’s doing the best they can. I wish Bill and Angie had pulled me in much sooner.” Her face turns more pensive. “I’m trying something else in an effort to identify the other two girls. I just don’t know if there’s time to do it.”
Despite my resolve to pull back from the case, I feel that relentless tug in my gut. I’m the one with the answers, a Susan had insisted that day in the lab. Was it the Susan who belonged to the chattering skull? Or the new girl, lost and found in the pile of bones?
“A forensic geologist I know in Galveston is examining the bone evidence,” Jo continues. “He might-a big might-be able to narrow down the area or areas where they lived. Then we could check out the cases of missing girls in those places.”
“I’ve seen websites where you can send in a sample of your DNA and they will decipher your ancestry. Is this anything like that?”
“It is nothing, nothing like that. My geologist will use isotope analysis to examine the elements in her bone and try to match it to a region. It’s a tool kind of in its infancy stages when it comes to forensic identification. It was first used on a boy whose torso was found floating in the Thames over a decade ago. Scientists were able to trace his origin to Nigeria.”
“And it helped them identify the boy? Catch his killer?”
“No. Not yet. It’s a process. When you’re trying out new technology, each case is a single step on a million-mile road.” Her voice is softening. “We are so much a part of the earth, Tessa. Of the ancient past. We store strontium isotopes in our bones, in the same ratio as in the rocks and soil and water and plants and animals where we live. Animals eat the plants and drink the water. Humans eat the animals and plants. The strontium is passed along, all stored in our bones in the same ratio unique to the region.” The simplicity of her explanations always astounds me, and I think what a good professor she must be. “The problem is, it’s a big world. And there is a relatively small database at this point when it comes to identifying geological regions. It’s another long shot.”
Jo has fallen silent. It still isn’t clear exactly why she’s asked me to the park.
“Tell me again how you deal with all of the dead ends,” I finally say. “There’s just so much futility. Don’t you ever think you can’t take it anymore?”
“I could ask you the same.”
“But you choose this.”
“I’d say it chose me. I’ve known since I was fourteen this is what I was supposed to do. That’s why, when a kid tells me he’s going to be a third baseman for the Yankees, I don’t doubt him. Did you ever hear about the Girl Scout Murders in Oklahoma?”
“No,” I say, although it stirs a vague memory. Lydia would know.
“Every scientist has a cold case that pulls at them for years. This Girl Scout case is mine. I was in high school when three Girl Scouts were pulled out of their tent in the middle of the night on a campout near Tulsa. They were raped and murdered and left out for show. A local man-who’d been a popular high school football player-was accused, tried, and declared not guilty. DNA evidence was collected at the time, but there was zero technology to examine it. And before you ask, the evidence is now too degraded to be useful. I’ve used my connections to see every single crime scene photo and read every single word on the police reports and forensic testing. The point is, if I could beam myself back to 1977, I could give those parents some answers. And it’s all because scientists in labs keep trying to do futile things. My work is as much in the future as the present.”