CHRISTMAS CAME, AND Alden’s gift to me was a pair of driving gloves—which, I couldn’t help thinking, would keep me from leaving traces of Touch DNA on the steering wheel, a thought I was happy to push aside.
My gift to him, along with the clothes Louella had chosen, was a boxed set of eight books by an English veterinarian, published in the 1970s and popular bestsellers in their day. Alden had come across one of the books in the school library and liked it enough to read some passages aloud at the dinner table, but it hadn’t occurred to him to seek out the rest of the man’s work.
I tracked them down on line—no daunting task, as like no end of books in the internet age they were hiding in plain sight. He was delighted. “I knew he wrote more books,” he said, “but that was the only one in the library. I didn’t realize you could just, like, find them out there.”
But he knew what else you could find, and had gifted his mother and sister accordingly, having swabbed their cheeks earlier for what he told them was a school assignment. It was for biology lab, he explained, and would consist of examining epithelial cells under the microscope.
“Which we actually did,” he said, during the opening of the presents. “But I just used my own cells for that, and it was more about getting comfortable using the microscope than what was going to turn up on the slide. But with you guys, well, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”
And I suppose he didn’t want to risk having them opt out the way I had.
He’d bought himself a present as well, an ethnic analysis of his own DNA, and now he helped interpret everybody’s results. His own makeup came in at 87% British Isles, 6% German and 4% French, with the rest essentially unidentifiable.
Rottweiler, Kristin suggested.
“See, now what this does,” he said, “it tells us something about my father. Not about Dad, but Duane Allen Shipley, you know, my biological father. See, when we look at Mom’s data we see that her DNA’s still mostly British Isles, like 74%, with the rest about half and half German and French.”
“My mother’s mother,” Louella said. “There were Pennsylvania Dutch on that side of the family. That would account for the German. I don’t know where the French part would come in.”
Given the way the France and Germany abutted, and the long history of war and territorial give and take, that much genetic intermingling seemed likely enough. We batted that around some, and agreed that the Shipley contribution would have been exclusively British Isles.
“Which makes me pretty much white bread all the way,” Alden said. “Which I more or less figured, but I sort of hoped something interesting would turn up. A great-great-grandfather who was part African or Asian or, I don’t know, Arapaho? Or maybe Jewish, but something to make me a little less boring.”
Louella told him he was pretty interesting, no matter where his genes came from.
“Now with Sis here,” he said, “you can see right away that we’re half-siblings.”
“And I’m the better half,” Kristin pointed out. “And it’s not that different. I’m still mostly British Isles, same as you.”
He went over her profile with her. Her DNA was predominantly British Isles, but the figure they supplied was 65% for her as opposed to 87% for him. The French component was the same, but German was a little higher, and much of the remainder was identified as Scandinavian, with a 3% dash of Native American in the mix.
The Scandinavian didn’t surprise me. I’d almost forgotten, but remembered now, that there were cousins on my mother’s side named Olson. Boisterous and athletic, as I recalled, but I’d never really known any of them, or anything about them.
If Kristin was 3% American Indian, my own percentage would presumably be twice that. Which was enough to be real (assuming the analysis was accurate) but what did that amount to? One great-great grandparent? You’d have to go back a few generations to find a Comanche in the woodpile.
AFTERWARD, AWAY FROM the others, Alden apologized. “All I thought,” he said, “was it would be interesting to know Kristin’s genetics, and it was all in the mail before I got that it’d mean poking into your background, because, you know, half of her DNA comes from you.”
Unless, of course, it was someone else who’d fathered her. But that possibility never occurred to either of us. The physical resemblance was unmistakable, and Kristin’s mannerisms and facial expressions were an echo of mine, as was her sense of humor. She was my daughter, and half her DNA was mine.
I told him not to worry about it. What was it all anyhow besides a few numbers and countries of origin?
“And it’s not like there’s anything exotic in the print-out,” he said. “And all it is anyway is DNA, you know? I mean, you’re still my dad, right? No matter where my DNA came from.”
I was touched by that, and assured him he was my son and I was his father, and that our recognizing the fact implied no disloyalty to Duane Shipley. I told him I was proud of him, and he told me he loved me, and it was a very nice moment.
And everything was going to be fine, I told him, even as I told myself.
AND WHY WOULDN’T it be?
Because my individual DNA profile was still nowhere to be found. Kristin’s was on file at the firm charged with duly analyzing the swabs Alden had mailed in, but Kristin hadn’t left her DNA all over a dead woman in California. A CSI-style computer, flashing its lights to show off for the television audience, wouldn’t suddenly flash Match Match Match while its screen showed us her picture.
My secret and I were as safe as we’d ever been.
DID I REALLY believe that?
I told myself I did, and perhaps it was so, because in certain respects belief is largely a matter of what you tell yourself. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in life after death? In reincarnation? In life on other planets? If you believe in any of these, isn’t it because you’ve elected to believe?
Oh, evidence may play a part, but it’s like evidence in a judicial proceeding, with each side citing it as proof. Perhaps you remember the cartoon, two goldfish in a bowl. “If there’s no God, then who changes our water?”
You believe what you want to believe.
MY FAITH IN the matter, let’s be clear, was no Rock of Ages, firm and unyielding. I couldn’t help knowing that forensic technology was continuing to evolve at the speed of one of those flashing CSI computers, that what they could do yesterday was less than they can do today, and barely a shadow of what they’d be able to accomplish tomorrow.
To keep everything in perspective, you ought to understand that the subject did not occupy my mind every moment of every day. Indeed, I had a life to live, and I spent my time living it. I had a business to run and I ran it. I had my clubs, Lions and Kiwanis and Rotary, and rarely missed a meeting. I bowled on Tuesday nights, and from my chair in front of the TV I followed the Bengals and Buckeyes, the Cincinnati Reds, the Indy Pacers, all in their respective seasons, and without ever really caring how the games turned out.
If there was nothing compelling on television, I might be in my home office, possibly seated in this chair in front of this computer, keeping up with email or walking the unmarked trails of the internet. But more often than not instead of booting up the computer I’d be in my recliner with my feet up, reading one book or another. I’d had a good run with Civil War history, but something had pointed me toward Rome, and I was having a go at Gibbon.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m sure an abridged edition would have told me as much as I needed to know, but I’d come upon a set of six boxed volumes online at a very good price, and before I knew it I’d signed on for the long haul. It proved to be absorbing for all that it was slow going, and I was in no hurry to get to the end. I mean, I already knew how it turned out.
And didn’t I have all the time in the world?
PERHAPS NOT.
TV fare: Dateline, 48 Hours, Forensic Files. Sometimes those shows were what I wanted to watch. Other times they found their way unbidden to our large high-definition screen, and more often than not they drew me in.
When they didn’t, the nightly news was obliging enough to come up with the occasional item. A man who’d served twenty years for rape and murder was released when DNA exonerated him—although the prosecutor still swore he was guilty.
And, while the lucky man’s enterprising attorneys were suing the state for some optimistic sum, surely no more than a drop in the bucket for all those years the system had stolen from their client, his prison cell didn’t stay empty for long. Cold cases, capital crimes long forgotten by all concerned, were being solved and resolved left and right.
All over America, rape kits and crime scene evidence lay in storage. While everyone had known for years that the cases would never be solved and the evidence would never prove useful, it was apparently easier to kick the evidentiary can down the road than to clear the shelves and make room for the next batch of rape kits.
So it had been for years and years. And now specialists of a new sort, cold case investigators, were going through old files and processing old rape kits.
And making new arrests.
Sometimes scientific advances enabled them at last to build cases against men they’d suspected all along. In other instances, men who’d never raised the slightest blip on the radar screen, men who’d never been linked in any way to the case or the victim, were suddenly caught in the investigators’ crosshairs, under arrest and charged with having committed a crime they and the world barely remembered.
But not all of them were there to be found. One 48 Hours episode brought an earlier show up to date, documenting the solution of a thirty-three-year-old rape and murder in Kearney, Nebraska. The victim was a recent high school graduate, engaged to a classmate who’d been the prime suspect until alibi witnesses cleared him. Now DNA indicated she’d been killed by a man who’d evidently never met her until the day he raped and strangled her. He was a unemployed day laborer, forty-four years old, passing through Kearney on his way home to Grand Island, and how they met and what passed between them we’ll never know, because by the time his DNA pointed to him he was as dead as she was, spirited away by liver cancer before the law took the slightest interest in him.
48 Hours couldn’t show Kearney cops making an arrest, or even knocking on a door in Grand Island. By the time cancer got him, the perpetrator had moved several times, winding up in Alpine, Texas. The best feature of the updated show was an interview with the officer, now retired, who’d been on the case at the very beginning.
“You have to wonder what good it does after all these years,” he told the camera. “I promised Vicki’s parents I’d find the person who’d done this, who took her away from them, and I guess I thought I would, but then I came to know I wouldn’t. And then the father passed, and once a year I’d call on the mother, just to let her know somebody still cared. And then she died, and just two years ago Ken Silbergaard, and that was the worst part for me.”
Silbergaard was the victim’s fiancé, cleared thirty years ago.
“We knew he didn’t do it, but we couldn’t say who did, and I know there were people who were never entirely sure about Ken. Maybe he was genuinely innocent and maybe he managed to get away with it, and as long as the case was unsolved there was a shadow falling on him. Who knows how different his life might have been otherwise? I wish he’d lasted long enough for me to apologize to him. I don’t know what I did that I could have done any different, but still, you know?”
THAT SENT ME to Google. I’d never even considered the possibility of collateral damage in the death of Cindy Raschmann. Grieving parents? A boyfriend under suspicion?
I couldn’t find anything, and I was reluctant to look too hard. Anything I did online would leave evidence, on my computer if nowhere else.
Early on the cyberworld had appeared to be one in which anything could vanish forever with a single keystroke. You hit DELETE and the slate was clean.
Except I’d come to realize the opposite was true, and that anything done on a computer had a half-life that was essentially eternal. You could delete it all you pleased, and a teenager who knew what he was doing could find it somewhere on your hard drive.
If you removed the hard drive and pulverized it, if you consigned the whole computer to a river bottom, that might be enough. But if you backed up your data automatically to another drive, that was one more thing you had to deal with. And if you backed up everything automatically to the Cloud—whatever that is, exactly—well, you were screwed, weren’t you?
But why should I worry about records of my Google searches? There’s this unending document I’m working on at this very moment, utterly incriminating from its opening sentence onward. “A man walks into a bar.” And so he does, and it’s all here, where anyone could read it.
It’s password-protected, so at least I don’t have to worry about one of the kids borrowing Dad’s computer for a quick check of Instagram and stumbling onto evidence that the old man is a monster.
If I should come to the attention of the authorities, if the long arm of the law should manage to reach all the way to Lima, the password would prove about as impenetrable as the lock on a motel room door, and at least as easy to kick in. Any geek assigned the task of cracking my computer would manage the trick without breaking a cybersweat.
Really, none of it mattered. If they had reason to look at me, they had me cold.
All the more reason to avoid anything that might supply such a reason. For years I’d done fine leaving well enough alone. I was no longer certain that “well enough” was still an apt description of the Cindy Raschmann case, but if not I was still best advised to keep my hands off it.
Which was easier said than done.
You know how it is when you nick yourself? A slip while shaving, a scrape on the back of one’s hand, anything sufficient to break the skin. A little bleeding—enough to spread your DNA around, I suppose—and then it scabs over and that’s the end of it.
Except the healing process sometimes includes itching, and one responds automatically, even unconsciously, by scratching. One’s fingers want nothing so much as to pick at the scab.
I kept holding myself back from reaching for a telephone, punching in a number.
Oh, I made that phone call over and over in the silent privacy of my own mind. Hi, this is George Haycock, I’m researching techniques in cold case investigation. I wondered if there’d been any recent development in an old case of yours. This one’s all the way back in 1968. The victim’s name is—give me a minute here—Raschmann? First initial’s C as in Charlie?
Endless variations. I tried on different identities and different motives for my quest. I was a freelance journalist, following up a piece I’d done on the California Highway Killer. I was a deputy sheriff in Oregon running down a lead in one of my own cases. But every silent rehearsal was essentially the same: I was some voice in the shadows, wanting to be reassured the Cindy Raschmann case was stalled and unlikely to be reopened. No developments, no progress, no reason to open that file and sift old evidence or run down old leads that went nowhere.
That’s what I wanted, of course, but to pick up the phone and dial the number was to risk its very opposite. Some dude asking about Cindy Raschmann, and that reminds me. Shouldn’t somebody be taking a new look at that? Maybe a fresh pair of eyes’ll see something we missed. With all the advances, all the new crap the scientists keep coming up with . . .
And I knew this, and reminded myself of it over and over again, and on each occasion squelched the impulse. But God, how the scab itched! I laid a tentative fingertip on it time and time again, and each time I managed to keep myself from picking at it. I would hold off, and the itch would subside.
For the time being.
“I HAD THIS email,” Alden said.
A few hours ago I was sitting where I am now, at this desk in what had been his room until we fitted out his aerie in the attic. I had finished the most recent entry, and after reading “For the time being” several times over, I’d decided that was as good a place as any to stop. I saved what I’d written, closed the file, and moved on to my own email. There was nothing of great interest, and certainly nothing that had anything to do with DNA or crime scene investigation or a woman who’d died decades ago and two thousand miles away.
But I found something to click on, and it led to something else, and I was miles away myself, learning about the breeding habits of a freshwater aquarium fish named Copeina arnoldi, more commonly known as the splash tetra. I don’t keep aquarium fish, or have any interest in them. Kristin had kept a small goldfish in a glass bowl (and changed the water, like God in the cartoon), but it had died, and so had its replacement, and she’d since decided that Chester the putative Rottweiler was all the companion animal she needed. The empty goldfish bowl had long since been retired to a basement storage shelf.
So I had no reason to read about the splash tetra, but the internet doesn’t ask of you all that much in the way of motivation, and what I learned about the fish was interesting enough to keep me reading. And that’s what I was doing when Alden came into the room and said he’d had an email.
I looked up.
“It was actually addressed to Kristin,” he said, “but as far as they’re concerned we’ve both got the same email address. Some people call it an eDress, with a small E and a capital D, because otherwise it looks like you were trying to write address and made a typo. But when you say it out loud it sounds dumb.”
I might have urged him, gently, to get to the point. But I knew what the point was, and I was in no hurry for him to get there.
“What they do,” he said, “and I didn’t know this when I sent in the samples, or if I did know it I wasn’t thinking of it, you know? Like it slipped my mind, and that’s if it was ever there in the first place.”
I waited. Why hurry him?
“They take your DNA and compare it to the samples they have on file. It’s not like on TV—bing-bing-bing-bing MATCH! MATCH! MATCH!—because there’s never a complete match, because your DNA is like, unique.”
“Right.”
“But they come up with relatives you didn’t know you had. Or ones you did, because they found what they said was a very probable first cousin of Kristy’s right here in Ohio, and guess who it turned out to be? Me, because I guess they don’t have an algorithm for half-brother, so in their books I’m her, quote, very probable first cousin.”
Was that it? It was unsettling all by itself, in its implications and what it boded for the future, but I could tell there was more.
“So actually that was last week. And then they told me about a second or third cousin of mine in downstate Illinois. I mean, down around Cairo, except they pronounce it Kay-ro.”
“Shows what they know.”
“And people call that part of the state Little Egypt, and from what you hear, everybody down there’s an inbred retard in the Ku Klux Klan, and they only find out about DNA when they get arrested for incest, if that’s even considered a crime down there. I mean, that’s the sort of thing you hear. I’m sure it’s like an exaggeration.”
“I suspect you’re right.”
“Anyway, some woman knew enough about DNA to send them hers, and her profile matches enough of my markers for us to be cousins. She’s not a match for anybody else, so that puts her on the Shipley side of the family.”
“Are you going to get in touch with her?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe she’ll reach out to get in touch with me, and then I can decide.” He grinned. “I had this thought, like I’d write and she’d write and we’d get together, and she’d be hot and gorgeous and there’d be this strong attraction between us, and there we are and we can’t do a thing about it because we’re cousins and we both know it.”
“A twenty-first century problem,” I said.
“I mean it’s just me daydreaming, because for all I know she weighs three hundred pounds, with one blue eye and one brown eye and they’re only half an inch apart after a couple of centuries of Little Egypt inbreeding. But yeah, a twenty-first century problem is right, because suppose your biological father was a sperm donor? And nobody who donated sperm just did it once. There was this thing on TV, or maybe it was online, I don’t remember which, but all over America clusters of people are finding out they’ve got the same sperm donor for a daddy, and they never met him but they’re walking around full of his DNA.”
We talked about that a little, because it was an interesting subject all by itself. For thirty or forty years, a college student could go once or twice a week to a clinic, sit in a room with a copy of Playboy, jerk off into a cup, and walk away with a few dollars for his trouble. And that was all there was to it, and why would he ever give it a second thought? If his efforts resulted in a pregnancy, he wouldn’t know about it, and neither would anyone ever know of his role in the proceedings.
All changed now.
“So I don’t know,” he said. “Whether I’ll do anything about my retarded third cousin. I think I’ll let it go, at least for now.”
We agreed it was probably best to put off the decision for the time being. But he wouldn’t have interrupted me to report a possible Shipley cousin two states away. There was another shoe, and I waited for it to drop.
“The thing is,” he said, “it turns out there’s a couple of third or fourth cousins out west.”
“Cousins of yours?”
He shook his head.
“Kristin’s, then.”
A nod. A forty-four-year-old woman in Washington State and man in his early twenties in Salt Lake City.
“So they’d be, you know, relatives of yours. You’d be the connection between them and Kristy.” We both let that sentence hang in the air, and then he said, “I’m not saying anything to Kristy.”
“No.”
“Dad, I’m just so sorry I went ahead and started all of this. I was stupid, I didn’t stop to think that swabbing Kristy’s cheek was like swabbing yours from a distance.”
“With a really long Q-tip,” I said.
‘Yeah, right. The thing is, I never meant for this to happen. Not that anything’s happened, not really, and nothing will, because the only way anyone can try to get in touch with Kristin Lynne Thompson is through my email address, and anything that gets to my mailbox I’ll just delete.”
As if it could be that simple. As if anything in our age would ever again be truly delible.
WE MUST HAVE scattered, we Bordens. That was our last name, Borden, like Elsie the Cow and her husband Elmer, famous for his glue. Or like Lizzie, as you prefer.
Borden. I let Word perform a Global Search of this document to confirm that I had just now written my original surname for the first time in all the years since I signed over my car’s title to a dealer in Fort Wayne.
The ten little Bordens and how they grew. I’ve had some time to remember the names, and it’s interesting what comes back to you if you give it a chance. Judy and Rhea, Arnie and Hank and Roger and Charlotte—and Tom and Lucas, Carole and Joyce. With the youngest four, two boys and two girls, I can’t remember their birth order, can’t attach faces or any other specifics to their names. And I’m not a hundred percent certain of some of those names. Was it Luke or Lucas, Joyce or Joy? Was it just-plain-Carol or Carole-with-an-E?
I may not have known then. I don’t think the younger ones were ever all that clear in my mind. I’m afraid I never paid them much attention.
And now, for the first time in a while, I found myself wondering what had become of them. My parents would certainly be long gone by now, and my father surely would have died well-insured. And my brothers and sisters? It seemed a good bet that some of them would be alive, even as one or two of them would probably not.
Judy and Rhea might be grandparents. Even great-grandparents, if their own early training in motherhood had got them off to an early start. Arnie, Hank, Charlotte, Luke, Carole, Joyce, Tom—where had you all gone off to, and how many marriages and divorces could you claim? And how many offspring?
I had never cared enough to pose the question. I still didn’t care, not really, but the questions came regardless.
ROGER. THAT WAS my name, Roger Edward Borden. I never liked it. Much better to walk around in a castoff shirt with Buddy on the pocket, better to answer to Buddy than to Roger.
Roger Wilco. Roger the Dodger.
I don’t suppose there’s anything genuinely wrong with the name. It’s neither dirt common nor weirdly unusual.
But I’d never liked being Roger.
LAST NIGHT, AFTER the others were asleep, I looked at the gun.
It was in the lowest of the three drawers on the right-hand side of my desk. That was the drawer that you could lock, and so that’s where I’d put the thing back when I acquired the desk. Years and years ago, that would have been, and I don’t remember where I’d kept it before.
Or when I’d last looked at it, and consequently I had to search the desk’s other drawers, the unlocked ones, until I found the key. If nothing else, it put paid to the argument that I kept the gun for protection. Any intruder could kill all of us several times over before I could get my hands on the thing.
But I did in fact find the key, eventually, and I was able to turn the lock, and the gun that time forgot was waiting where I’d left it.
The sight of it in the otherwise empty drawer, the feel of it when I took it in my hand, brought back flashes of memory. One of them reminded me how I’d sniffed the barrel all those years ago, trying to determine if it had been recently fired. The results, I recalled, were inconclusive.
I repeated the action, but this time what I smelled was the steel of which the gun had been made and the gun oil with which I’d cleaned it before placing it in the drawer. That came back to me, coming across the gun-cleaning kit on a basement shelf at Thompson Dawes, bringing it home, and cleaning the thing in the manner explained in the kit’s instruction sheet.
Where was the kit? Wouldn’t I have put it in the drawer as well?
I don’t believe I’ve described the instrument itself. It’s a five-shot Colt revolver with a two-inch barrel, and there’s a .38-Special cartridge in each of its five chambers. This was not the case when it came into my hands. At first it had in fact appeared to be fully loaded, but there were spent cartridges in three of its chambers and live rounds in only two.
And so it had remained until the day I cleaned it. The details had slipped my mind, but sitting there with gun in hand brought them back. When I cleaned the gun with the kit I’d found, I had cleared all five chambers, and the following day I’d disposed of everything, the kit included, in the store’s trash.
Thompson Dawes didn’t stock guns, which had made the discovery of the kit a surprise, but I’d never paid much attention to the basement, and now I had a look around to see what other wonders it might hold. Porter Dawes had evidently sold firearms at one point, phasing them out before I went to work for him; I didn’t find any, but I did uncover some supplies—another cleaning kit, the same as the one I’d used, and two boxes of shotgun shells, and a variety of handgun and rifle bullets.
It all went in the dumpster, but not before I’d transferred five .38-Special rounds from their box to my jacket pockets, where they weighed more than I would have guessed. I didn’t know if they’d fit, but as far as I could tell they were identical to the live rounds I’d discarded, and when I got home that evening I eased the burden on my pockets and filled the Colt’s empty chambers.
The bullets seemed to fit well enough. I knew, as must be obvious, next to nothing about guns, and had no way of knowing whether a pull on the trigger would result in a gunshot or a mere click. I could have found out readily enough through the simplest of experiments, but why? With the revolver locked forever in its drawer, what difference did it make whether or not it was capable of firing a bullet?
Then why load it in the first place?
A fair question. I’m not sure I raised the question at the time. I doubt I’d have bothered to load the gun, not if I’d had to go out and buy ammunition for it. But those five rounds were in a box of shells I was in the process of discarding, they weren’t costing me anything, not even the effort of a trip to a gun store, and if one were going to keep a gun in a locked desk drawer, shouldn’t it be a loaded gun? Shouldn’t it be ready for use, even if one were never likely to use it?
Never mind. I didn’t give it much thought then, if any. No need to overthink it now.
So. Last night I found the key, unlocked the drawer, drew it open. I took the gun in hand, felt its weight, breathed in its smell of steel and gun oil.
I did not hold the gun to my temple, or put the barrel in my mouth. I did not tighten my finger on the trigger and squeeze off a shot.
I did not do any of those things. But I did imagine myself doing them.
For what it’s worth.
THAT THIRTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD case in a city in Nebraska I can’t be bothered to look up. It’ll come to me.
The killer, the man who got away with it for all those years, who went to his grave without ever being suspected of anything, had left his semen in the girl he’d raped and strangled. And years later the cold case investigators worked up his DNA profile and checked it against the state and federal databases.
And came up empty, because the man they were looking for wasn’t there to be found. Aside from a handful of traffic violations and a couple of DUI arrests, one of which got his driver’s license suspended for six months, he’d gone through the rest of his life without making a mark on a police blotter. I can’t say that his was an exemplary life, and for all I know he’d killed again, but if he’d done so he’d left no evidence behind.
So they ran the DNA he’d left in Kearney—that was the city, I knew it would come to me, and he wasn’t from Kearney, he was from some nearby town, and it’ll come to me, too. And indeed it has. Grand Island. He killed her in Kearney, he went home to Grand Island.
But that’s not the point. The point is that they ran his DNA and came up empty, and that was the end of that, except of course it wasn’t. Another year and another technical development, and while the possibility that he might be a direct descendant of Charlemagne hadn’t prompted him to swab his cheek and mail if off to Ancestors R Us, some relatives were not so discreet.
And, just as a fortyish woman in Washington State and a younger man in Utah had pinged when my daughter’s DNA showed up, so did the Kearney Killer’s relatives light up the screen when someone took a good look.
On some of the cold case shows they tell you how, after a fresh look at forensic evidence points to a suspect, the cops have to shadow him for weeks waiting for him to spit on the sidewalk or discard a paper cup, thus giving them lawful access to his DNA. In this case, there was nobody around to cast a shadow. A court order allowed them to exhume a grave in West Texas, and they didn’t need the consent of the deceased to take a sample of his DNA.
Bingo! A perfect match.
Case closed.
MAYBE SOMEONE IN Bakersfield, or more likely somebody with California’s state equivalent of the FBI, had already begun submitting the DNA from Cindy Raschmann to the various who’s-your-daddy sites. Maybe the outfit Alden had selected had already received California’s query, and maybe the results had already popped up on their screen.
Any or all of these things might already have happened. And if they hadn’t, they would. And someone in California would put in a request, and someone in Sacramento would approve a trip to Ohio, and the next thing you knew there’d be two men on our front porch, ringing our doorbell.
They show up in pairs, don’t they? But it wouldn’t necessarily be two men, not nowadays. It could be a man and a woman. It could even be two women, theoretically, but that seemed less likely.
They could be out there right now, while I sit here imagining them. They could be driving past the house, figuring out their approach. The process, in fact, could be anywhere at all along the timeline, and the question of how far they’d come showed itself as immaterial.
Because it was all just a matter of time, and the amount of time didn’t matter. They were coming. And I wasn’t going anywhere.
THAT LAST ENTRY was three days ago. The day before yesterday I booted up the computer and read the last thing I’d written. I closed the file and went on gazing at the blank screen.
Shut it down, went to the kitchen, got a beer out of the refrigerator. Looked at it, put it back, chose a ginger ale instead. Sat on the porch with it, watched the passing traffic. There’s not much of it, not on our little street, but cars do pass by now and then.
I found myself noticing the license plates, realized I was looking for an out-of-state tag. But they wouldn’t have driven here from California. They’d have flown and rented a car. Or some cooperative local officer would be driving them around.
The ginger ale was sweet. Artificially sweetened, in fact. It’s a brand Louella likes. I don’t know that she has to worry about calories, but she would rather enjoy the sweetness without taking in the sugar.
“Although it seems like cheating,” she said once.
What am I going to do about her? About all of them?
YESTERDAY, A DAY after the ginger ale on the porch, was the day for my usual visit to Penderville. I called my manager, invented a reason to cancel our lunch, said I’d try to get down there sometime in mid-afternoon.
“But just in case,” I said, and we had as much of a conversation as we needed to have.
Around four I got on I-75, headed for Penderville. I stayed on past the exit I usually took, and pulled into the parking lot for a restaurant called Crazy Jane’s. The red neon sign, which had caught my eye over the years, showed a woman in profile. Jane, I suppose, though there was nothing obviously crazy about her.
I parked, and after a few minutes I got out of the car.
A man walks into a bar.