Janet Burlingame is an eleven-year veteran of the FBI’s DNA Casework Unit, based in Quantico, Virginia. In my five years with the Special Tracking Unit I’ve met her in person twice: once right after the unit was formed, and then again three years later while we were working on a case west of Quantico.
In her mid to late thirties with striking red hair, stylish glasses, and a trim, athletic build, she’s naturally attractive, yet wickedly dangerous. As Jimmy tells it, she has black belts in three different forms of martial arts. I never found out which ones because, honestly, when someone can kill you seven hundred different ways, does it really matter?
Needless to say, my conversations with Janet are always cordial.
When the call comes early in the afternoon, Diane transfers it to the conference room and then joins us as we greet Janet over the speakerphone. After some friendly banter, she says, “So, some good news and some bad.”
“Give us the bad first,” Jimmy says, ever the pragmatist.
“Well, they kind of go hand in hand,” Janet replies. “We came up with seven distinct female profiles from the clothes, as you suspected, but only one of them was in CODIS, a woman by the name of Erin Clare Yarborough. Her DNA is associated with the sixth mannequin. We got a match on both the mask mold and the clothing.”
“The one in the bedroom with the paperback copy of Misery,” I say to Jimmy, and then realize that it doesn’t really matter where she was found, leastwise not to Janet. Still, for some reason it’s important to me. I suppose it makes them more real, and right now I need them to be real.
Murphy did something far more insidious than simply destroying the women’s bodies, he supplanted them with mannequins dressed in their clothes and wearing their faces.
“What do we know about Miss Yarborough?” Jimmy asks.
“She was entered into NCIC two years ago after she went missing in Seattle,” Janet replies. “The only reason we have her DNA is thanks to her sister. Apparently Erin made a number of suicidal threats, which escalated to an actual attempt when she took a fistful of pills and washed them down with whiskey. Paramedics got to her just in time. Anyway, it was after this last incident that her sister picked a bloody bandage out of the trash after Erin tossed it away. You know—just in case.”
“Yeah, just in case,” Jimmy echoes in a somber tone.
“Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire,” Janet continues, “so I imagine there’s more to the story, but with HIPAA rules being what they are, we don’t have ready access to her medical records.”
“Do you know which hospital she was taken to for the overdose?”
We hear papers shuffling, and then Janet says, “Harborview Medical Center.”
As we speak, Diane is already logging into LInX, the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, to run more in-depth analysis of Erin Yarborough.
Created by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), LInX allows jurisdictions to share access to their databases. In this case, it’ll give us access to the records of almost all the police departments and county sheriff’s offices that Erin may have come in contact with.
“Can you make sure the unidentified DNA gets linked to our case number?” Jimmy says as the conversation winds down. Janet assures him it’s already done and then calls out a cheerful goodbye before ending the call.
Pushing his chair to the right with his feet, Jimmy scoots up next to Diane and peers at the laptop screen over her shoulder.
“Contacts begin about four years ago,” Diane says without looking up, “mostly with her as a victim or contact. There are a few local arrests where she was cited and released, plus those Janet mentioned, the ones where she was booked.” She does a quick count in her head: “Seventeen incidents in all.”
“Any others that might be suicide attempts, overdoses—”
“Prostitution,” I suggest.
Jimmy points his index finger at me, as if to underscore the word.
“There’s a suspicious circumstance where she was contacted in the car of a known pimp. She claimed not to know his real name, only that he went by Stain, and Stain was nice enough to give her a ride so she could meet her uncle.”
“That’s nice,” I say in a singsong voice. Then, elbowing Jimmy, I say, “That’s nice, right? Stain sounds like a great guy, giving her a ride to meet her uncle like that. And they say there are no more nice guys.”
Jimmy just snorts, and Diane ignores me outright.
“The officer noted that she was dressed the part—of the hooker, that is, not the adoring niece—and that they were idling in a casino parking lot.” She says the last words slowly and with more emphasis, as if Jimmy and I don’t know that casinos are havens for prostitution, even in the Pacific Northwest.
Diane continues to open the seventeen reports linked to Erin Yarborough, finding additional incidents of possible overdose, suicidal actions, and drugs. The casino incident was the only one that hinted at prostitution, though it wasn’t the streetwalking variety, the type most vulnerable to predators.
When Diane finally gets tired of us peering over her shoulders, she shoos us from the conference room like farmyard chickens, and then locks the door behind us. She’ll spend the better part of the next hour crafting a comprehensive report on the young woman once known as Erin Yarborough. Her life story will be told not in pictures of vacations and baby showers and family gatherings, but in police case numbers and mug shots. Her relatives will be presented not as a concerned sister or worried parents, but as next of kin. Their phone numbers and addresses will be attached for notification purposes.
As Diane reclaims her seat in the conference room, I watch her through the glass wall and wonder about Erin Yarborough, about the person she was before she started down the road of bad decisions.
Will she be missed?
In the end, I suppose that depends on how much damage she did before she went missing, how many lives she disrupted and overturned. Exactly how many bridges do you have to burn before no one cares?
I don’t think anyone has the answer.