“It’s not a great signal in here,” I say to him right off. “Let me call you back on a landline.” I get up and go to a phone on the wall next to the coffee cart.
I dial his number. “How are you, Henri?”
“Fighting over grant money, short half my staff it seems because of the flu and the holidays, and they sent us the wrong HEPA filters in this big order that just came in. I’m fine. What can I do for you, Kay?”
I start by telling him there is a sensitive situation with the DNA in the three D.C. cases and that we have what appears to be a related homicide in Cambridge. The Capital Murderer may now be in Massachusetts.
“This is extremely confidential on multiple fronts. And there may be a problem at the federal level,” I add in a way that conveys my meaning.
“I saw on the news there was a body at MIT,” Dr. Venter says. “No details other than that. A bag from that spa shop was over her head, I presume? And fancy duct tape?”
“No bag or duct tape but she was wrapped in an unusual white cloth and asphyxia is in my differential.”
“That’s interesting,” he replies. “Because in the case here, Julianne Goulet, I believe she was suffocated but not necessarily with the plastic bag that was taped around her neck. Her postmortem artifacts were perplexing and I found bluish fibers in her airway, her lungs. What I’m wondering is if he had some sort of cloth over her.”
“Lycra.”
“Yes.”
“And while she violently struggled to breathe, she inhaled fibers and clawed and these same fibers ended up under her nails,” I suggest.
“Precisely. I believe the bag and fancy tape were added as some sort of creepy adornment after the fact. Just like the white cloth and the way the body was posed. That’s just my opinion of course.”
“Henri, when our DNA analysis is done I’d like to compare it with your initial results in the Goulet case and not with what’s in CODIS.” I get to the most important point. “Or maybe a better way to put it is I don’t want to compare any DNA profile we get with what’s in CODIS now.”
“In it now?”
“I’m not questioning the integrity of CODIS overall, just this one sample in the case your office handled, Julianne Goulet and the DNA profile your labs recovered from panties she had on. I’m wondering if there was some sort of entry error when the profile was uploaded into CODIS,” I explain, and Lucy’s eyes are riveted to me.
“My Lord.” He understands what I’m implying. “This is quite disturbing.”
The bay door is annoyingly loud, and in the widening space I see the hearse rumbling on the other side, a Cadillac with a Christmas wreath attached to the front grille.
“As I understand it this DNA profile from the panties on Goulet’s body has been matched with a suspect, someone who’s been missing for seventeen years and is believed at least by some to have been dead that long.” I continue to give him enough to illustrate the ugly picture of tampering.
“I know nothing about a suspect,” Dr. Venter says.
“The FBI has one.”
“No one has told me that or attempted verification with our records. And that would be mandatory when there’s a match in CODIS. The lab that did the original analysis has to confirm and what you’re suggesting is outrageous.”
“I understand the stain in question was blood?” I inquire.
“That’s not exactly right. We analyzed a mixture of fluids comprising a stain on the panties Julianne Goulet had on,” he recalls. “These panties are believed to have come from the previous victim, a woman whose body was found in Virginia a week earlier. I’m trying to think of the name.”
“Sally Carson.”
“Yes.”
“But the profile on the panties didn’t turn out to be hers,” I inform him, “which is odd since they were identified as having been worn by her when she left the house before she vanished. Apparently her DNA wasn’t recovered at all.”
“I don’t know anything about the Carson case. It was Virginia’s and nobody’s talking.”
“For a reason that’s not a good one, I fear.”
“I’m pulling up the actual report from the Goulet case but I’m quite sure the DNA wasn’t hers either because of course we have her blood card, her profile. So we’d know if it was her DNA on the panties she was dressed in, probably postmortem. As you’re aware, we routinely use certain biospectroscopic methods for different body fluids, mainly looking for ribonucleic acid markers, the same techniques you use. So I can tell you exactly what those fluids were and if there was more than one profile mixed in but I’m fairly sure there wasn’t. What I remember is it all came from a single source, the same person.”
I wait as he finds what he needs in his database and the motor of the bay door completely stops. In the big square opening I see feathering clouds and farther-off ones that are building. The long black hearse noses forward slowly, propelled by its quiet engine, new and sleek, what funeral workers proudly call a landau coach.
“I have the report in front of me.” Dr. Venter is back. “Vaginal fluid, urine, and menstrual blood all from the same individual. We have only the identifier we assigned when we uploaded the profile into CODIS. As you would expect, we don’t know who it is.”
I’m surprised by the information and unfortunately I’m not. I inform him that Sally Carson’s autopsy report indicates that she was having her period when she was abducted and murdered. It’s possible if not probable that the stain on the panties Julianne Goulet’s body had on should have matched Carson’s DNA. But it didn’t, most likely because somebody tampered with a profile in the FBI’s database CODIS. I suspect but don’t say it openly that Carson’s profile was substituted for Martin Lagos’s, which would explain why it appears he left “blood,” as Benton referred to it, on the panties Julianne Goulet’s dead body had on.
“I’m looking at what we have and we definitely weren’t notified about a DNA match,” Dr. Venter says darkly. “We should have been sent the suspect’s profile to compare with our records and we weren’t.”
“A suspect’s profile from DNA analysis that I have reason to suspect was originally done in Virginia seventeen years ago,” I say. “A male who hasn’t been seen since, I’m told.”
“A male?” he exclaims. “A male certainly didn’t leave vaginal fluid and menstrual blood.”
“Exactly. Now you see the problem.”
“Virginia also should have been notified for a verification,” Dr. Venter says.
“I’m not checking with Virginia. Last summer their former lab director was hired as the new director of the FBI’s national labs. She got quite a promotion. I don’t know her personally.”
“This is extraordinarily disturbing,” Dr. Venter says. “I did the Goulet autopsy myself and frankly have had some concerns about the way it’s being handled even before knowing any of this. The one who used to be with the D.C. division back in your Virginia days and now is in Boston…Well, you might not have encountered him back then.”
“Ed Granby.”
Lucy hasn’t taken her eyes off me.
“In not so uncertain terms he threatened me,” Dr. Venter replies. “He said I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the DOJ and I would be if I leaked a word about the Goulet case, that he was taking extreme measures to prevent copycat crimes.”
“So he continues to say.” Then I bring up the fluorescing residue in Gail Shipton’s case that doesn’t seem to have been found in the others. “I’m just making certain you didn’t see anything like that,” I add.
“A grayish viscous material I found in her mouth and nose.” He opens that report next. “A mineral fingerprint on SEM, halite, calcite, and argonite that lit up a rather spectacular vivid red, a deep bluish purple, and emerald green when exposed to ultraviolet light.”