“Mr. Behr,” Kerry Gibbons said as she exited her house and saw him. “Didn’t expect to see you for a while.”
“Frank, please,” he said,
It was a cold morning, and the ground he’d walked across was as hard underfoot as the grim mission he was on.
“Frank. Do you have some information?”
“No, ma’am. Like I said, it’ll be quite some time, most likely, before I do. That’s if I do,” Behr said.
“Then what do you need? Think I told you everything already and I got to get Katie to her program,” she said. The young girl appeared next to her grandmother, all bundled up in a coat and scarf.
“Something I should have asked for the first time I was here: I could use a DNA sample on your daughter, and permission to check it against unidentified bodies.”
“Oh, dear,” Kerry Gibbons said.
“Or barring that, one on you and the little girl to crossmatch. It could be an old toothbrush, a pillowcase that we could recover some hairs off of, a sports mouthpiece, a razor, a whistle—anything with saliva on it. I don’t suppose her doctor might have an old blood sample?” Behr wondered.
“Okay,” she said, “wait here for a minute.” Kerry Gibbons disappeared back inside the house for a moment, leaving Behr alone with the little girl. She ran over to her jungle gym and stood at the base of the slide.
“Lift up,” Katie said, looking at Behr. He took it to mean she wanted to go down the slide, and he picked her up and set her at the top for a quick trip down.
“Whee,” the girl said, as if by rote, without much joy in her voice. “Again.”
Behr obliged. He looked at the girl’s pale white skin, her raisin eyes, her runny nose. Losing her mother was a tough deal, but having her grandmother was a break in her favor. She was starting out somewhere close to even, and Behr wondered where she’d end up.
It was the fourth or fifth time down the slide when Kerry Gibbons emerged from the house. “Here you go,” she said, extending a Ziploc bag that held a blue plastic Goody hairbrush pretty well covered with blond strands. “That’s my daughter’s. Probably some of mine and Katie’s in there too. But like you said …”
“It should work,” Behr said. Then he had her sign the standard release he’d printed out.
“Any way I can get that back after the test?” Kerry Gibbons asked. “It was hers after all.”
“Sure,” Behr said.
“Did you end up finding that Jonesy?” the woman wondered.
“Yes, Jonesy’s been found,” Behr said. Her eyebrows rose in interest at this, but his tone discouraged further questions, and she didn’t ask any.
“Well …” she said.
“Oh, one other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m getting some pretty good courtesy extended from the police, so it’d be good if you ran any further inquiries into the case through me,” Behr said.
Kerry Gibbons took his measure with eyes that seemed to know all the angles, and when she was done she must’ve arrived at an acceptable sum. “Okay, Frank,” she said. “Will do. You’re my investigator.”