The Body Box (30 page)

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Authors: Lynn Abercrombie

Tags: #Fiction, #Thriller

BOOK: The Body Box
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“Okay, so go straight to the Chief. I hear he's got an open-door policy.” He paused. “Besides, you know, the Chief was head of the crime scene unit back when he was a lieutenant. He knows all about this forensic stuff. If anybody would understand what you're talking about, he would.”
I stared at him.
“What?” Mark Terry said.
“Head of Crime Scene?”
“Oh, yeah. Back in the eighties. Yeah, his college degree is in chemistry. Or bio, I forget. But, yeah, he wrote a big paper back in the early eighties about how DNA was going to be this big forensic tool and all that. Everybody laughed at him back then.”
“So he's known all about DNA for years? Knew about it even before it had come into common use by law enforcement?”
“Yeah. So?” He kept looking at me, then his eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Wait a
minute
! The
Chief ?
The Chief is your suspect?”
I nodded. “Right now? Yeah.”
“Holy mackerel!” He cocked his head, eyes wide. “You aren't serious, are you? You're yanking my chain.”
“Nope.”
He stroked his chin, eyes narrowed, looking up at the ceiling. I could tell he was thinking something, but it was obvious he wasn't sure he wanted to tell me. “Hm.”
“Hm,
what
?”
“I got to think about this for a minute.”
“What's there to think about? A little girl is dying somewhere. We don't get off the dime, she's dead.”
He pulled the files over in front of him again. “Let me take another look at this.” He laid out several of the files, looked through them carefully.
I paced around his cubicle for a while, picking things up and looking at them. A human skull, a vial of some milky substance I wasn't sure I wanted to identify, a broken ashtray, a beer can cut in half.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Here's what I notice. You've got a lot of hair samples that you didn't run DNA on. How come you didn't run these?”
“I think it was a budgetary thing. Lt. Gooch didn't want to run every single hair. He said there were too many of them. I mean, there's like a hundred hair samples between these seventeen case. Plus, hair, you can pick that up anywhere. Rubbing up against somebody in the line at the grocery store. Semen's definitive.”
“Screw it, let's run them. Maybe we'll learn something new.”
“We don't have time. It'll take days. And we don't have that long.”
Mark smiled. “The state passed a law last year saying we had to run DNA on every felon. They decided it would be cheaper to run them in-house, instead of sending them to a commercial lab. We've just started getting the equipment in the past couple of weeks. The process is fully automated. If I can figure out how to work it, I can run this stuff tonight. Maybe there's something you've missed.”
“Seems like a long shot.”
Mark Terry drummed his fingers on the table for a minute. “Here's the thing. The semen evidence doesn't add up to anything here. Same with the blood. But for an organized criminal, semen and blood are the easiest things to plant, and the easiest to avoid leaving on a body. But hair? Forget it. Everybody on earth sheds hundreds of hairs a day. Even a criminal mastermind can't avoid that.”
“Okay, okay, suppose that's true. What good does that do me right this minute?”
“What's your goal right now? You suspect the Chief. But you really don't know, do you?”
I nodded.
“We run the hair, we'll know.”
“But we don't have a sample of his DNA.”
Mark gave me his mysterious smile.
“What, Mark?”
“Last year Captain Goodwin came to me, said that one of his friends had somebody threaten a paternity suit. He asked if I could run some DNA. Off the books, so to speak. Didn't want to go through the APD forensic guys for the same reason you and Lt. Gooch didn't: because the word might get around the department.”
“And?”
“The Chief is a ladies' man, you know.”
I stared at him. He turned around and rummaged around in a file, came out with a printout, little black bars on a white field. “Right here. The Chief's DNA.”
“Wait. Are you
sure
this is the Chief's? Maybe it's Goodwin's. Maybe it's somebody else's.”
“Look, he didn't say it outright. But he implied it so strongly that there's no doubt in my mind what he was saying.”
“I don't have the samples,” I said.
“The evidence lockup is open all night, correct?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I'll make a list, you go get the stuff and come back, and we'll spend all night with the new equipment. By morning you'll know if it's the Chief or not.”
“You sure this'll work?”
“A hundred hairs? If the Chief really did this, his DNA's in there somewhere. I feel highly confident about that.” He paused. “I mean, look, all you need is one hair. Put him at one single solitary crime scene among these seventeen, and you know he was there at all the others.”
“Wait here,” I said. I felt something rising inside me, like a shaft of light coming out of a cloud. I sprinted for the door. There wasn't much time, there couldn't be.
 
 
It took an hour and half to get all the evidence from the slow-moving loser who worked the night shift at the evidence lockup. I nearly came across the desk at him once or twice, but I knew it wouldn't help.
Finally, loaded with little bags of hair, I jumped in my car and headed back over to the GBI lab. It was 12:15
AM
.
“How long's this going to take?” I said.
“We're still getting things calibrated. My guess, it'll be morning before we start getting results.”
“Can I help?”
Mark frowned. “You know what? I'd like to say yes, but I'm afraid it'll take longer for me to show you what to do than it will just to do it myself.”
“I guess I'll just hang around then.”
“You sure? Why don't you go home, get some rest?”
“I hate to do that while you're here busting your ass all night.” I was so wired there wasn't a chance I'd sleep.
Mark shrugged. “Hey, under the circumstances, it's a pleasure to do this job. Even in the middle of the night.”
“There is one thing, though . . .”
“What?”
“I'll tell you later.”
I headed for the door again.
FORTY-SIX
I entered City Hall East at about 12:45, wearing dark glasses, a Braves cap, and carrying a duffel bag.
Captain Goodwin had said that the Chief was spending the weekend at his lake house. What I needed to do was figure out where that was. Obviously Captain Goodwin would be no help. That meant drastic measures would be required.
At the time that he had demanded them, I hadn't let Goodwin confiscate the symbols of my authority because I was pissed off. But now I was glad I hadn't. Badges you can buy at the dime store, guns you can pick up on the corner. But the ID card with the electronic swipe key built into it, the one that that would let me into the innermost recesses of City Hall East—that was irreplaceable.
Once again, the lackadaisical nature of the City of Atlanta's IT department paid off for me. Like everything else electronic, the swipe key worked not just for places where I needed to go for the Cold Case Unit, it also was still activated to let me in to places I had needed to go back when I was doing temporary duty in Admin.
The Admin people don't work nights, so there was nobody to ask why I was wandering into the Admin area, a long row of offices where I very much didn't belong. I skulked through the dark, echoing hallways, trying not to make any noise. Finally I reached the office where I'd worked before. It appeared that nobody had replaced me. Just as well—I hadn't done much work there anyway.
But I wasn't heading for my own office. I was heading for the Chief's office. And that was one place I knew for sure my badge wouldn't get me into. Which was where my trusty pry bar would have to come in.
The outer door to the Chief's office was large and made out of some sort of fancy wood—mahogany, maybe. Solid mahogany, I quickly learned, was not a favorite wood of cabinetmakers just because it was pretty. That stuff was
strong
. I heaved and yanked and made a lot of unladylike noises before the frame finally gave way.
I figured I had about thirty seconds before the security detail showed up. There was no camera over the door or anything, but the electronic lock next to the door was hooked up to the building security system.
My heart was pounding as I raced into the outer office and over to the large desk where the Chief's secretary sat. My main target was the huge, two-ring Rolodex sitting on the edge of the desk. I dumped it into my duffel bag, glanced at my watch. Fifteen seconds. I rummaged around in the desk, found a message log and some sort of phone log. These went in the duffel bag, too.
Then I was done. As soon as I got out the door, I realized I was too late. I could hear footsteps pounding on the hallway floor. I headed for the stairs, but somebody was racing up that way, too. For a moment I felt like a cornered rat. Then I thought of something. I opened the door to the ladies' room, tossed the duffel bag in, and let the door shut.
A couple of uniformed cops with guns drawn—both of them young black fellows—burst out of the door from the stairwell.
“Did you get him?” I shouted.
“Get down! Get down!” they yelled back.
I held up my badge. “Detective Deakes,” I yelled. “Cold Case Unit.”
“Oh!” the younger of the two cops drew to a halt, breathing hard. “I seen you on the TV today!” He looked mildly starstruck as he examined my cleavage.
“Don't be worrying about
me!
Get the perp! He just went down the stairs. He just came out of the Chief's office.” Just as the two cops turned and headed back into the stairwell, another pair of uniforms appeared. Both of them were older, beefier, in worse shape.
“He went that way,” I yelled, pointing at the young cops as they headed into the stairwell.
“
Who
did?” the beefier of the two uniforms said suspiciously. He was a middle-aged black guy, with graying hair and a lieutenant's bars on his collar.
“They're chasing him. The guy who broke into the Chief's office.”
The other cop, a white fellow, got on his walkie-talkie and calmly sent out a call to seal off every exit to the building. They seemed to be in no hurry to leave.
“You better go!” I said.
The lieutenant ignored me as he took out a notebook. “Who are you?”
“Detective Deakes.”
“And you were doing what up here?”
“Look, the guy's getting away.”
The Lieutenant gave me a long look. “No, he ain't. My job, I'm sealing off this room, find out what happened here.”
“I was up here looking for the Chief. He's taken a personal interest in the case I'm working right now.”
The long look again. “You talking about the Gooch case?”
I nodded.
“Man.” He shook his head. “I always knew Gooch was crazy. But I didn't know he was
that
crazy.”
I nodded impatiently. “Look, I'm in kind of a hurry, but here's what happened. The Chief had told me he was going to be up here until fairly late, then he was heading down to his lake house, spend some time with his wife. I just got back from the lab with some results, figured I'd check and see if he was here. I got off the elevator, and there was this guy coming out of the Chief's office.”
“Description?”
“Male black, light complected, medium build. Had a very nice suit. He was carrying a briefcase. He walked down to the stairwell. I didn't think anything of it until I saw the door had been kicked in or something.”
“Anything else?”
“You know something?” I said. “It looked an awful lot like that guy Captain Goodwin. You know who I'm talking about?” I laughed. “But I'm sure it wouldn't have been him. Why would
he
knock down the Chief's door?”
“Okay, but what about—”
“Lieutenant, no offense, I know you're trying to be thorough. But I got nothing else to tell you. And I'm very much pressed for time.”
“Detective until I get this—”
I cut him off again. “No offense, I'm working a murder, you're fooling around with a little break-in. Chief's office, sure. But it's just a break-in.”
I walked away as he sputtered, slipped into the bathroom, grabbed my duffel bag. There were a couple of uniformed officers guarding the door downstairs, but I waved my badge and they didn't give me a second look.
As soon as I reached the parking garage, I started running again.

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