I read the email from the orthopedic surgeon over and over, but each time it said the same thing.
RE: SFGH Trauma Blue 1343/SFME badge #202
Dr. Teska,
I have, as you requested, made inquiries into the identity of patient Trauma Blue 1343, which you brought to my attention by presenting me with two OstereonX plates used in a surgical procedure to repair broken bones in patient’s right arm.
I have located patient’s medical record number and chart, which I am having sent to your office. Enclosed please find, per your further request, a computer disk from our radiology department with the relevant perioperative X-ray images.
Patient’s MRN is SFGH1428087. Patient’s name is Curtis Roland Burton.
My Very Important Doe was Sparkle’s Uncle Curtis. Sparkle’s Uncle Curtis was the second DNA contributor, along with Leopold Haring, on the bloody screwdriver the police had pulled out of Samuel Urias’s pickup truck, which formed the basis of the criminal charges against him for Haring’s murder.
I popped the radiology DVD into my computer and found the images taken after surgery. I went to my own file for John Doe #15 and opened the full-body X-ray I’d done before starting the autopsy. I zoomed in to the right arm, then moved the images so they were side by side on the screen. Those surgical plates mending the bones were identical on both X-rays.
It was proof. I had an ID on John Doe #15, and I had found out what had happened to Uncle Curtis.
I called Sparkle and told her we needed to talk.
When I got to Baby Mike Bail Bonds, I found the man himself filling the office sofa. Sparkle sat behind her desk. She and Baby Mike both greeted me solemnly, and I sat, too. I told them everything I knew. They weren’t shocked to hear that their uncle’s body was in my morgue, but they were horrified to learn how he’d died—crushed in the homeless camp under the infamous King Street viaduct.
“How could we let that happen to him?” Sparkle said.
“Come on, Sparks,” said Baby Mike.
“I mean it. We should’ve—”
“Uncle Curtis was never going to die in his own bed, cool and comfortable,” Baby Mike said. “That wasn’t ever going to be the way he was going to go, and we all knew it.”
“Oh, Michael.” Sparkle sighed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “That’s terrible to say.”
“It’s true, Sparks. We all knew it, didn’t we?”
“It didn’t have to be that way.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” The huge man reached over and crushed the tissue box in his hand, trying to tease one out for himself. “I just don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
I stayed a while longer and offered practical advice about collecting the body and arranging for the funeral. I also offered to break the news to Gayle, Sparkle’s mother, myself, but Sparkle felt it would be better if it came from her. I warned them, in the gentle way I had practiced with other families, that, whatever type of memorial service they planned, it would have to be closed-casket.
Baby Mike got up off the sofa when I said that. He went to Sparkle behind her desk, lifted her up, and held her tight.
After leaving the cousins alone to make their hard phone calls, I walked down the block to Caffè Zeffiro, my go-to escape hatch when I’d worked at the Hall of Justice. I needed to sit down and process the morning’s news over a cup of coffee.
Uncle Curtis Burton’s DNA was on the bloody screwdriver, and Samuel Urias’s wasn’t. Did that mean that Uncle Curtis was the killer? He had one hell of an alibi: the medical chart said that Curtis Burton, record number 1428087, had been hospitalized under a 5150 at the General Hospital on October 25. He was still locked away on that three-day involuntary custodial hold on the morning of the twenty-eighth, when Haring’s body was found. Jeffrey Symond, Natalie Haring, and Oskar Haring didn’t agree on much, but they’d all asserted that Leopold had been alive on the late afternoon of the twenty-seventh, when he’d been in a fight with Oskar before heading to the SoMa Centre site. And if I were to ask Inspector Jones, I would bet that he could produce other evidence—phone records, texts, more eyewitnesses—that Haring was still alive and kicking when Curtis Burton went into the locked psych ward against his will.
Curtis Burton didn’t kill Leopold Haring. So how did his DNA get onto a bloody screwdriver along with Haring’s DNA, and what the hell did any of that mean, if the screwdriver didn’t even match the fatal hole in Haring’s heart—?
“Dr. Teska,” someone said behind me. It was Eva Yung, Samuel Urias’s public defender, in the café’s snaking counter-service line. I waved her over to join me. She was having some latte sort of thing and we chitchatted about the pros and cons of soy milk versus almond milk versus oat milk until I told her about Curtis Burton, the second DNA contributor on the screwdriver, who could not possibly have killed Leopold Haring.
Eva saw a silver lining—for her side, at least. “I guess it inserts still more reasonable doubt into that weak piece of physical evidence they’re trying to use against my client. Still, though...that’s a deeply weird finding.”
“You’re telling me,” I said—and didn’t tell her that the dead man with the new ID was also the uncle of a good friend of mine. With lawyers, even ones I like personally, I try to maintain a need-to-know protocol.
I asked Eva if the man who had phoned me claiming to be a friend of Samuel Urias had contacted her, as I had urged him to do.
“He called me. We set up a meeting, but he never showed.”
“Damn. But, over the phone—did he tell you the same thing he told me, that he could provide an alibi?”
“Yes. Sort of. He was oblique about it.”
“If you can get him on the stand, he won’t be.”
“Doesn’t seem likely. He called from a blocked number and wouldn’t give me his name. If he won’t testify, he’s not much good to Samuel.”
“Did you ask Samuel about it?”
She smiled ruefully. “Did I ask my client, a married, churchgoing man with children and a reputation in his community both here and back in Mexico, if he had, in fact, spent the night in question involved in a sexual liaison with a man? Yes. I asked him something like that.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and nodded. “He got offended and denied it.”
“The very idea that some man would offer a lover’s alibi made him sick to his stomach. Those were his exact words—‘sick to my stomach.’”
We drank our coffees in silence. Then Eva said, “What if the blood isn’t even Haring’s?”
“What do you mean?”
“We have isolated two sets of DNA alleles on a screwdriver shaft that is covered in blood. We have confirmed that the blood is human—but we can’t say for sure which of those two DNA contributors it belongs to, right?”
I thought about it. “The blood could belong to both of them—each of them, that is. Some from Curtis, some from Leo. Yes...but that’s not necessarily the case. The blood on that shaft is human blood, which means human DNA, which means it definitely belongs to at least one of them. We’ve been assuming that, if that were the case, the blood must belong to Leopold Haring—because this is supposedly a weapon that was used to stab him to death. You’re asking if the blood could instead be only Curtis Burton’s blood, with some of Leopold Haring’s DNA that somehow got on there. Could that blood on the bloody screwdriver belong to Curtis Burton and only Curtis Burton...? That’s an excellent and puzzling question, Eva.”
“Thank you. I try.”
“If the blood doesn’t even belong to Haring, then it isn’t possible that the screwdriver was the murder weapon.”
“I would certainly like to establish that.”
“Interesting. Outside my realm of expertise. But you know what? I owe that DNA scientist a call, to tell her about the positive ID. I’ll ask her.”
“That’d be great.” Eva Yung looked worn out, even with half a latte in her system. “You know what would make my job a lot easier? A goddamn alibi. Sometimes your clients make it hard to help them out, you know what I mean?”
“No,” I said. “Mine are generally pretty compliant.”
Eva headed back to the Public Defender’s office to work another case, and I took advantage of the relatively good cell signal and mellow noise level inside Caffè Zeffiro to call Shirley Shimamoto at the criminalistics lab. I told her that we had secured an ID for my John Doe, and I wanted her to help me explore the possible ways his DNA could have ended up on that screwdriver.
“For starters, does the DNA have to have come from his blood? Is there, like, a marker for that?”
“No. It could have come from blood, or it could have come from lots of other sources.”
“Like what?”
“Any nucleated cells—could be semen, skin, epithelium carried in mucus secretions, or even in stool. It could also be touch DNA, meaning he just handled the screwdriver and left the alleles behind.”
“Really?”
“Could be.”
“Is that...likely?”
“Could be. DNA is specific to an individual, but it can’t tell me how it got on there or when. Though there is one peculiar thing about this sample.”
“What’s that?”
“There are two DNA profiles, as you know. They seem to be present in roughly equal amounts—but one of them is more degraded than the other.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never seen this before, in mixed samples. Typically each set of alleles is equally degraded if there’s been decomposition. Here, the data suggests that the DNA came from two people, but one of them was decomposing faster than the other. Well...not faster, exactly. For longer.”
“Hang on. The DNA that’s more decomposed—”
“More degraded—”
“—the DNA that’s more degraded...belongs to which sample set?”
“John Doe’s.”
“Curtis Burton’s.”
“Okay.”
“So Curtis Burton’s...blood, snot, whatever, got onto this screwdriver before Leopold Haring’s blood, snot, whatever did?”
“That’s what it looks like. Both of them were collected at the same time, when the screwdriver was taken for evidence—but that doesn’t mean they had been laid down on the screwdriver at the same time.”
Shirley Shimamoto was overlooking another possibility. It was one that I, who have spent many hours around decomposition and degradation, am steeped in.
“What if Burton’s DNA sample is more decomposed than Haring’s because Burton was already a couple of days dead when his sample was laid down on the screwdriver?”
Shimamoto thought about it. “Well, I guess that would look exactly the same, wouldn’t it. Yup. Could be. Kind of gross, but could well be...”
I called Eva Yung, got her voice mail, and left a message with the rough outlines of what Shirley Shimamoto had just told me. Then I called Jason Bevner at the district attorney’s office, and told him I wanted to talk to him, with Jones and Ramirez, if possible.
“When?”
“I’m at Zeffiro’s and can come right over.”
“Now...?”
“If that’s convenient.”
He pushed aside his surprise and said, sure, why not.
I like face-to-face meetings. I spend too much time with the cold, stiff dead, after all. Why talk on the phone, or videoconference, or whatever, when you can meet in the flesh? We should all enjoy the flesh while it’s still warm. Take it from me.
“What’s up?” Bevner asked from behind his desk. Inspector Ramirez sat opposite him. He said Jones couldn’t make it. He didn’t rise to shake my hand, and neither man offered to find me a chair. They didn’t want me to linger.
I told them all about Natalie Haring’s attempt to get me to change or at least soften my opinion on the screwdriver, ending with Oskar Haring’s outburst, and the melee that ended the meeting. Then I told them about Curtis Burton, the impossibility of his having anything to do with Haring’s death, and Shimamoto’s weird lab finding that Burton’s DNA was more degraded than Haring’s. I didn’t tell them about the possibility of an alibi for Samuel Urias; I figured the ethical thing to do was to let Eva Yung try to track Redbeard down, and let her present him as a witness if she could, rather than to offer him as a target to the prosecutor before it was even established whether or not he was credible.
“Okay,” said Bevner, when the dust had settled on my spiel. “So what?”
“So now you have a whole bunch of new suspects in this homicide, that’s what. Plus it looks even more strongly to me that your prime suspect had nothing to do with it.”
“What new suspects?”
“Natalie Haring stands to collect a life insurance windfall, including a double-indemnity rider from her husband dying on the job site.”
“Everybody always blames the wife.”
“Then there’s Jeffrey Symond. He’ll collect enough separate insurance money to keep his firm in the black for years to come. That’s why there were so many lawyers in that room—there are multiple, overlapping stakeholders, corporate and kin. Jeffrey Symond is now the sole partner in Haring & Symond, and he doesn’t have to put up with Leopold Haring’s troublesome antics anymore.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ramirez said. “Symond said himself that he can’t run the business without Haring. Haring was the creative genius.”
“Maybe,” I said. “For sure he was an asshole, everyone agrees on that. And there are other creative geniuses out there. Symond can hire one, or a couple, even—and he doesn’t have to split things fifty-fifty with those new hires, the way he had to with his bosom buddy. From what I can see, Symond will be much better off now, as long as Samuel Urias goes to prison for killing poor old Leo.”
“Crocodile tears from Jeff Symond, huh?”
“I’m just saying.”
Ramirez turned to Jason Bevner, warming to the idea. “Natalie is tied up in the business, too. What if she and Symond conspired to off Leopold? What Oskar said to the doc, about how hard it would be for somebody to sneak up on Leopold if he was armed—? That’s a good point. If one of them was distracting him, the other one could’ve stabbed him.”
The look Jason Bevner was giving Inspector Ramirez told both of us that I wasn’t getting through to him. So I pushed some more.
“Let’s not forget Oskar. He went into a psychotic state in that conference room as soon as some schmuck attorney laid a hand on his shoulder. We know that Oskar and Leo exchanged punches the day Leo died. He’s not denying that. Oskar could’ve followed Leo to the construction site, right? Leo was a violent man. Don’t you think he might have struck his son again, and set off exactly the sort of frenzied attack I just witnessed out of Oskar, an attack that ended with a fatal stabbing—?”
“With what?” said Bevner. “Oskar’s DNA isn’t on the screwdriver.”
“That’s exactly my point. You already know my scientific opinion about that piece of evidence. It doesn’t fit the wound, the trace evidence doesn’t match, and the new DNA findings only make things worse for your case. Dr. Shimamoto’s report is going to inject a shit ton of reasonable doubt.”
Bevner shrugged. “Maybe. Let’s say you’re right about this new—very confusing—DNA data. Maybe you’ve done your job too well, Doctor. If the screwdriver gets thrown out, then we won’t be able to proceed with a case against Mr. Urias. That’s true. I’m sure that Ms. Yung will insist that we release him from our custody. I’m telling you, though—going to trial might be the best thing for that man.”
“Why?”
“Because he’ll have the chance to get acquitted, that’s why.”
“He’s only just been charged!”
“Yeah. And sometimes that’s as good as done. You know what I mean?”
“No,” I said honestly. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Bevner shrugged again and eyed Ramirez. The detective looked away from both of us and grunted, in what sounded like disapproval.
“Well, Doctor,” said Jason Bevner with an air of finality, “we disagree. I say we had enough for the prelim with that screwdriver, and it’ll hold up at trial, too. The way it was brought into evidence—the warrants, the search of Urias’s truck—is unimpeachable. That’s a good piece of evidence. It’s a great piece of evidence! I’ve won cases with way less. I can see no reason to reopen the investigation so we can bat around a bunch of your theories about the dead man’s family and business partner. Leave them be.”
Them, and their well-heeled lawyers, he meant. Assistant District Attorney Bevner wasn’t about to go bugging a bunch of rich, connected people when he had an easy patsy in his pocket.
I heard Bevner crack wise behind my back after I rounded the bend out of his office. Detective Ramirez didn’t join in.
I left work on time for a change, and managed to make it home and get the leash on Bea for a good solid beach run while we still had some daylight. It was shaping up to be an award-winning sunset, with no fog and some high clouds, so Bea and I climbed the sand ladder to Sutro Heights Park. Working her stubby legs up that cliff face tuckered the dog out. She lay down in front of me on one of the benches on the parapet of the park’s ruined mansion, and we gazed out over Ocean Beach and the wide Pacific as the sky turned gold, then red, and deepened toward violet.
Curtis Burton had been in custody, in the General’s psych ward on a 5150, when Leopold Haring was killed on October 27. He was released on the twenty-eighth and died in the collapse of the King Street viaduct on the twenty-ninth. So how did their DNA get commingled on the bloody screwdriver the police had recovered out of Samuel Urias’s truck—a screwdriver that didn’t have Urias’s own DNA on it?
I was thinking about it the wrong way. The screwdriver wasn’t the murder weapon. It didn’t match the wound, and no amount of finessing by ADA Bevner was going to change that. Its dimensions were wrong, and it had fibers on it that didn’t match the decedent’s clothing. And I believed Redbeard, the alibi lover, even if he refused to meet with Eva Yung. Nobody had killed Leopold Haring with that screwdriver, but somebody had bloodied it and dropped it into Urias’s pickup bed to frame him for the murder. So maybe the screwdriver had nothing to do with the killer at all. It could be someone else trying to set up Urias, right...? I mean, if I were the killer, and I stabbed the guy with a screwdriver, and I wanted to pin it on someone else, then I’d just dump the actual goddamn murder weapon in his truck!
“Somebody is screwing with us, Bea,” I said. She snuffled in the patchy grass. The bluish band on the Pacific horizon was mellowing, and shrinking. The day was at its end.
“Who gains?”
Sutro Heights was clearing out of dog-walkers and sunset enthusiasts. I took Bea down the granite stairway off the parapet, across the wide lawn, and onto the gravel path toward Anza Street, toward 41st Avenue.
Toward home. Such as it was.