"How about you and Teun stay with me?" It is so hard for me to express a need, and I need them. I do. For a lot of reasons.
"When do you want us there?"
"We'll have Christmas together in the morning."
"Early." Lucy has never stayed in bed past six on Christmas morning.
"I'll be up, and then we'll go to the house," I tell her.
December 24. Days have gotten as short as they can, and it will be a while before light savors the hours and burns off my heavy, anxious moods. It is dark by the time I reach downtown Richmond, and when I pull up to Anna's house at five minutes past six, I find Berger waiting for me in her Mercedes SUV, headlights penetrating the night. Anna's car is gone. She is not home. I don't know why this unsettles me so completely unless it is that I am suspicious she somehow knows Berger is meeting me and chose not to be here. Considering such a possibility reminds me that Anna has talked to people and may one day be forced to reveal what I have told her during my most vulnerable hours in her home. Berger climbs out as I open the track door, and if she is taken aback by my transportation, she makes no indication of it.
"Do you need anything from inside the house before we go?" she asks.
"Give me just a minute," I tell her. "Was Dr. Zenner here when you arrived?"
I feel her stiffen a little. "I got here just a few minutes before you did."
Evasion, I think as I climb the front steps. I unlock the door and turn off the burglar alarm. The foyer is dark, the great chandelier and Christmas tree lights off. I write Anna a note and thank her for her friendship and hospitality. I need to return to my own home tomorrow and know she will understand why I must. Mostly, I want her to believe I am not upset with her, that I realize she is as victimized by circumstances as I am. I say circumstances because I am no longer sure who is holding a gun to Anna's head and ordering her to divulge confidences about me. Rocky Caggiano may be next in line, unless I am indicted. If that should happen, I will be no factor in Chandonne's trial, not hardly. I leave the note on Anna's immaculately made Biedermeier bed. Then I get in Berger's car and begin to tell her about my day in James City County, about the abandoned campsite and the long, pale hairs. She listens intently, driving, knowing where she is going as if she has lived in Richmond all of her life.
"Can we prove the hairs are Chandonne's?" she finally asks. "Assuming there are no roots, as usual. And there weren't roots with the ones found at the crime scenes, right? Your crime scenes. Luong and Bray."
"No roots," I say, rankled by the reference to my crime scenes. They aren't my crime scenes, I silently protest. "He shed those hairs, so there are no roots," I tell Berger. "But we can get mitochondrial DNA from the shafts. So yes, we can definitely know if the hairs from the campground are his."
"Please explain," she says. "I'm not an expert on mitochondrial DNA. Or an expert on hair for that matter, especially the kind of hair he has."
The subject of DNA is a difficult one. Explaining human life on a molecular level tells most people far more than they can understand or care to know. Cops and prosecutors love what DNA can do. They hate to talk about it scientifically. Few of them understand it. The old joke is, most people can't even spell DNA. I explain that nuclear DNA is what we get when cells with nuclei are present, such as with blood, tissue, seminal fluid and hair roots. Nuclear DNA is inherited equally from both parents, so if we have someone's nuclear DNA we have, in a sense, all of him, and can compare his DNA profile to any other biological sample this same person has left at, say, another crime scene.
"Can we just compare the hairs from the campground to the hairs he left at the murder scenes?" Berger asks.
"Not successfully," I reply. "Examining microscopic characteristics in this instance won't tell us much because the hairs are unpigmented. The most we will be able to say is their morphologies are similar or consistent with each other."
"Not conclusive to a jury." She thinks out loud.
"Not in the least."
"If we don't do a microscopic comparison anyway, the defense will bring that up," Berger considers. "He'll say, Why didn't you?"
"Well, we can microscopically compare the hairs, if you want."
"The ones from Susan Pless's body and the ones from your cases."
"If you want," I repeat.
"Explain hair shafts. How does DNA work with those?"
I tell her that mitochondrial DNA is found in the walls of cells and not in their nuclei, meaning mitochondrial DNA is the anthropological DNA of hair, fingernail, tooth and bone. Mitochondrial DNA is the molecules that make up our mortar and stone, I say. The limited usefulness lies in that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female lineage. I use the analogy of an egg. Think of mitochondrial DNA as the egg white, while nuclear DNA is the yolk. You can't compare one to the other. But if you have DNA from blood, you have the whole egg and can compare mitochondrial to mitochondrial_ egg white to egg white. We have blood because we have Chandonne. He had to give up a blood sample while in the hospital. We have his complete DNA profile and can compare the mitochondrial DNA of unknown hairs to the mitochondrial DNA from his blood sample.
Berger listens without interruption. She has taken in what 1 am saying and seems to understand. As usual, she takes no notes. She asks, "Did he leave hair at your house?"
"I'm not sure what the police found."
"As much as he seems to shed, I would think he left hair at your house or certainly out in the snow in your yard when he was thrashing about."
"You would think so," I agree with her.
"I've been reading about werewolves." Berger leaps to the next topic. "Apparently, there have been people who really thought they were werewolves or tried all sorts of bizarre things to turn themselves into werewolves. Witchcraft, black magic. Satan worship. Biting. Drinking blood. Do you think it's possible Chandonne really believes he is a loup-garou? A werewolf? And maybe even wants to be one?"
"Thus not guilty by reason of insanity," I reply, and I have assumed all along this would be his defense.
"There was a Hungarian countess in the early sixteen hundreds, Elizabeth Bathory-Nadasdy, also known as the Blood Countess," Berger goes on. "She supposedly tortured and murdered some six hundred young women. Would bathe in their blood, believing it would keep her young and preserve her beauty. Familiar with the case?"
"Vaguely."
"As the story goes, this countess kept young women in her dungeon, fattened them up, would bleed them and bathe in their blood and then force other imprisoned women to lick all the blood off her body. Supposedly because towels were harsh on her skin. Rubbing blood in her skin, all over her body," she ponders. "Accounts of this have left out the obvious. I'd say there was a sexual component," she adds dryly. "Lust murders. Even if the perpetrator truly believed in the magical powers of blood, it's about power and sex. That's what it's about whether you're a beautiful countess or some genetic anomaly who grew up on the He Saint-Louis."
We turn on Canterbury Road, entering the wooded, wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms, where Diane Bray lived on the outer edge, her property separated by a wall from the noisy downtown expressway.
"I would give my right arm to know what's in the Chandonne library," Berger is saying. "Or better put, what sorts of things Chandonne's been reading over the years_aside from the histories and other erudite materials he says his father gave him, yada, yada, yada. For example, does he know about the Blood Countess? Was he rubbing blood all over his body in hopes it might magically heal him of his affliction?"
"We believe he was bathing in the Seine and then here in the James River" I reply. "Possibly for that reason. To be magically healed."