Open Season (17 page)

“Beverly tells me you want all your information in twenty minutes or so, is that right?”

Murphy’s face brightened. “Is that all it takes?”

Kees laughed. “Not a chance. Assuming I was sitting around here dying for something to do, it might take me sixty to seventy-two hours, if I was lucky. The way things are, I could get to you in three weeks to a month.”

“A month?” Murphy burst out.

“How much did Dr. Hillstrom tell you about this?”

“She said it had something to do with reopening a case—that you might have put the wrong guy in the slammer.”

“This is going to sound a little corny, but we think an innocent man died because of what’s in this cooler.”

Kees pursed his lips and motioned us into the hallway. “Jeannie, let me know what you get from these as soon as you’re finished, okay? And hold off on the Spiegelmann stuff until I tell you.”

“Okay.”

He led us down the corridor and through a maze of overstuffed offices bulging with furniture and strange machinery. “In case you didn’t notice, we haven’t quite moved in. The university, in its wisdom, contracted for the destruction of our old quarters before the new ones were built. Then the workers went on strike.”

“What about the students?”

“You mean the lack of them? They went out on strike too—in sympathy with the workers and just in time to extend their Christmas leave. Protest isn’t what it used to be.”

We ended up in a pretty nice office, complete with rug on the floor and pictures on the walls. Half of it was piled high with junk too, but the other half looked neater and more pleasant than anything we had back home. Kees sat behind an old and unpretentious turn-of-the-century desk and locked his fingers behind his head. To his right, on a separate table, two glowing computers hummed softly to themselves.

“So, tell me your tale.”

The stereotype of the self-proclaimed “busy” man is a guy who spends half his time telling you he’s got none to spare. With one assistant and the rest out on strike, combined with what Beverly Hillstrom had told me about his popularity, Robert Kees struck me as having his life under control. He let us bumble through our story without one glance at his watch or a single sigh of impatience. When we finished, he got up, plucked the cooler from my lap, said, “Okay,” and left the room.

Frank raised his eyebrows. “What did that mean?”

“I guess he’s either doing it right now, or he just threw it out the window.”

“Were we supposed to follow him?”

“Not unless you know how to work any of that stuff.” We sat there for over an hour, staring out the window, staring at the floor, staring at each other, until he finally returned. “That’s quite the collection.”

“How do you mean?” He parked himself with his hands behind his head again. “It’s filled with goodies. A standard batch of samples, even from Beverly, has a few slides, a few swabs, maybe some tissue, and that’s about it. She threw in everything but the kitchen sink—she must have had some serious reservations when she did the autopsy.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she tell us at the time?” Murphy muttered. “It sure would have saved us a lot of wear and tear, not to mention an extra body in the morgue.”

Kees smiled. “Ah, but that’s not the game, is it? You demand, we supply. Nobody wants to ask us about our doubts—that’s for the defense. If we find something odd, the prosecution doesn’t want to know about it, not unless we can guarantee where it’ll lead them. Besides, according to the paperwork she enclosed, you’ve got the right man in jail.”

Frank passed his hand across his mouth. “Then what are we doing here?”

“I can dig deeper than she can. I think that’s why she kept as much as she did—just in case. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but you’ve got yourself a very good medical examiner up there.”

“So what happens now?” I asked.

“You wait. I work. Most of the stuff is in an incubator right now. It’ll stay there overnight. There are a couple of things I can do in the meantime but not much, except make a few phone calls and rearrange everyone else’s schedule.”

“We do appreciate this—a lot.”

“It’s okay. Why don’t you come back in about three days? We’ll see what we’ve got.”

I got up, but Frank didn’t move. “You wouldn’t have a corner we could bunk in, would you?”

Kees’s eyes widened. “You mean stay here?”

“Yup.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we don’t know for sure what’s going on. We think Ski Mask is just pushing to reopen the case. We think he’s bumped off some guy just to get our interest. We think he and us are the only people involved in this thing, and I’d lay bets he followed us here. But we don’t know any of that for sure. There’s an equally strong possibility that there’s a separate bunch just as hell-bent on keeping a lid on this, to the point that they almost killed my partner here, and that they too are hot on our tail. That cooler is the only thing so far that isn’t pure invention, and I’m not about to leave it behind in a half-demolished building and spend two days going to the movies. Is that all right with you guys?”

Kees shrugged. “We’ve got the room and the furniture… God knows we’re not too crowded. Be my guests. Just don’t get underfoot, okay?”

Murphy stood up and nodded. “You got it.”

I followed him out the door, closing it behind me. “You really going to do this?”

“You bet your butt. You get a star witness that can bust a case wide open, what do you do with him? You sit on him until they need him. That cooler’s our witness.”

“It may not be, Frank.”

He turned and poked me in the chest with his finger. “Maybe not. That was my tune until last night. Now I’m singing yours. So humor me.”

I held up both palms in surrender. “Consider yourself humored.”

We found a room with a few pieces of machinery, all of it unplugged, and a pile of tables, desks, filing cabinets, and armchairs. Several pillows on the floor made for serviceable if lumpy beds. Murphy borrowed my car keys, disappeared for a couple of hours, and returned with some magazines, a couple of pulp novels, enough junk food to hold us for a week, and a rented TV.

The next two-and-a-half days passed slowly. Frank and I watched, as the hours crawled by, morning news shows, midmorning talk shows, midday news shows, hours of soap opera, more hours of pre-dinner sitcom reruns, evening news shows, prime-time whiz-bangers, late night action shows, more now-stale news, and finally the twilight zone of Leno, Letterman, old movies and more reruns.

We stood around, we sat, we lay on our pillows, we read a little, we washed at the basin in the half-finished bathroom. We waited.

Every once in a while, we caught a glimpse of Kees or his cowgirl in the hallway. They politely bade us good night on their way out every evening and gave us a cheery good morning hours later, but we kept out of their hair and they didn’t seek us out. On the morning of the third day, the sound of heavy equipment starting up outside told us the strike had been settled.

But it wasn’t until the fourth day that Kees appeared in our doorway and asked us to follow him to his office.

After that amount of time, and the bored tension that went with it, my druthers were to come face-to-face with tangible results—like a reconstructed body or at least a steamer trunk filled with evidence. But aside from a few sheets of paper lying in the middle of his desk, Kees’s office looked unchanged from before.

We sat down like two rumpled old men awaiting counseling and watched Kees assume his by now traditional pose. “What do you know about blood typing?”

Murphy opened his mouth, but I beat him to it. “Hillstrom told me something about Hs and secretors and PG-something-or-other sub-typing that gets the blood more and more specific to a single person.”

“Okay. That gives me an idea of how to approach this. Let’s back up, though, and look at what we’ve got. From what you told me and from Beverly’s samples, I figure we’ve got two categories: the physical evidence—things like the underwear, the rope, the broken lamp, the general signs of a struggle, stuff like that. And the tissue samples, taken from a variety of sources—the fetus, the semen, the stains on the sheet, etc.

“Now on the first, you guys are the experts. Your living is going around matching evidence with unwitnessed action. What I do isn’t that different. What I’m going to tell you is part scientific fact, and part educated conjecture. When you leave here, in other words, you’ll have more than you had, but you’re still going to have to put the pieces together on your own. Okay?”

We both nodded.

“All right. Now you nailed the suspect… What’s his name?”

“Davis.”

“You nailed Davis as a group O secretor—the same as both semen samples. We tested both as separate entities because as far as we know, they might have been placed by different men.”

Murphy shook his head. “Lovely thought.”

“But unfortunately realistic, although not necessarily in the way you think. She may have been attacked simultaneously by two men, but she might also have had intercourse with one man, come home, and been attacked by a second. Here’s an instance where conjecture takes over, in fact. I seriously doubt that a woman would receive semen in either one of these two areas, and then put her clothes back on and walk home. It is only reasonable to assume it all happened at once. Had one of the deposits been inside her vagina, I wouldn’t necessarily take that position.

“In any case, the whole thing is a little ephemeral because the mouth sample pretty much stops there—at O secretor. It’s far too contaminated by the victim’s saliva to be analyzed any further. That, luckily, is not the case with the pubic sample.

“The typing and subtyping Beverly told you about is called Phospho-Gluco-Mutations typing, or PGM for short. Basically, it’s an enzyme that is polymorphic, meaning different people have different types. At this point, we’ve determined ten subtypes in the population. With time, we’ll probably get more, but in your case, this was enough.”

“So you did get something,” Murphy asked.

“Oh yes. Here, look at this.” Kees took the top sheet of paper off his little pile and slid it across the desk. In neat, penciled handwriting, there was a single column of figures:

Suspect
Group O secretor
PGM type 2 - 1
subtype 2 + 1 +
ESD 1
GLO 2-1
ACP BA

“That’s Mr. Davis. Here’s the semen.” He slid the second sheet over:

Semen
Group O secretor
PGM type 1
subtype 1 + 1 +
ESD 1
GLO 1
ACP BA

I couldn’t resist a smile. “So they don’t match.”

“Nope.”

“How about the fetus?”

“Okay, now on the fetus… Well, to back up a little, you know that a fetus is a product of its parents.”

Murphy sighed.

“Meaning that if you have one parent and the fetus, you can get a vague notion of the missing parent’s makeup. You can also therefore exclude people who do not fit that vague makeup. Which leads me to this.” And he slid the third sheet toward us:

Mother
Group A
PGM 2
subtype 2 + 2 +
ESD 1
GLO 1
ACP B

Fetus
Group B
PGM 2 - 1
subtype 2 + 1 -
ESD 1
GLO 2 - 1
ACP B

Father
Group B or AB
PGM 1 — 1, 1 + 1 -, 2 + 1 -, or 2 - 1 -
-----
ESD 1 or 2 - 1
GLO 2 or 2 - 1
ACP B, BA or CB

We both stared at it; Kees saved us from asking any idiotic questions. “To summarize that in English, Davis is neither the semen depositor nor the father of the fetus. But neither is the real semen depositor the father, so now you’ve got three men.”

“Davis, the man who attacked her, and the father.”

Kees made a steeple of his fingers. “No. Davis, the depositor, and the father. If Beverly’s guess is right—that the semen was brought to the site and deposited artificially—then Davis could have been the one who attacked her. After all, you still have all that physical evidence against him.”

“Oh, come on,” Murphy said. “I don’t buy that crap about the semen being poured all over her like salad dressing. People don’t do that.”

“Perhaps not, but other possibilities exist. There might have been two attackers—Davis and the depositor—and you only got Davis.”

Murphy rubbed his forehead.

“Or even, to humor Beverly once again, the father and Davis might have been in cahoots and the semen secured from some innocent third party and, once again, artificially placed.”

“Come on.”

Kees laughed, enjoying his devil’s advocacy. “If push came to shove and I were placed on the witness stand and a very sharp lawyer asked me, ‘Dr. Kees, since all you could get from the sample in the mouth was Group O secretor, doesn’t that mean it could have been Davis’s semen, even though the other sample was not?’ I would have to answer yes. I would also have to concede that in cases of gang assault such evidence is not rare.”

“Meaning that Davis might have deposited one of the semen samples?”

“It’s possible. I told you I couldn’t give you answers—just information. Now I have to admit I tend to agree with Captain Murphy. People usually do the simplest thing in these situations. They are rarely operating at their highest mental capacity. Chances are Davis was framed by a man who sexually assaulted the young woman and then killed her, or the other way around. But I’m afraid what I’ve given you doesn’t prove that—it merely suggests it.”

There was a long silence in the room. I have to admit, the joy I’d felt at hearing the semen wasn’t Davis’s had vanished. I’d seen enough lawyers at work to know that the information we’d just received didn’t even warrant a reopening of the case, much less a retrial. My only consolation was that Frank looked as down as I was. Several days ago, he would have been grinning from ear to ear.

Kees, on the other hand, was still smiling. “I feel I ought to add at this point that
that
,” and he pointed at the three sheets of paper, “is not the only thing I found.”