THIRTY-EIGHT
When I got to the Cold Case Unit office, the light was off. I let myself in with the key and switched on the overheads. The flourescents snapped and hummed ominously. I locked the door behind me, then went over to Lt. Gooch’s desk. I tried the bottom drawer, but as I’d expected, it was locked. From out of my purse I pulled a small pry bar.
My pulse was racing. Whatever that stuff was in those pills, it was stronger than I’d expected. When you take stimulants, there’s always a point where the initial euphoria brought on by the chemicals in your bloodstream starts to tip over into another, not-so-comfortable feeling. When I was in the residential treatment program up in Minnesota, I had had a lot of time on my hands. I’d spent a good deal of that time reading up on the pharmacology of addiction. Basically, stimulants mimic the natural fight-or-flight responses of the body. Point being, there’s a close relationship between euphoria and terror. When the euphoria side of the fight-or-flight mechanism starts wearing off, that’s when tremors, paranoia, terror, night sweats, and all the other pretty stuff starts kicking in.
As I inserted the pry bar into the lip of the drawer, my pulse was racing, and I could hear the keening whine of the flourescents and the groan of the boilers in the room next door with unusual clarity. The sounds seemed malignant to me then, like auditory masks behind which something terrible was hiding.
I leaned on the pry bar. Nothing much happened other than a squawk from the metal. I slid the pry bar over until it hit something that might or might not have been the lock mechanism. I leaned on it again. The metal folded, but still the drawer didn’t move. Paint was coming off in small, dandruff-like flakes. I moved the pry bar again, jerked on it a couple of times, and finally the drawer came free.
I slid it open. My heart was pounding as I pulled out the Dixie cup full of disgusting brown liquid. It smelled so strongly of tobacco that I almost gagged as I poured off a quarter inch of Lt. Gooch’s foul spit into a plastic urine-sample container I’d lifted from the Narcotics unit upstairs.
When I was done, I screwed the lid back on the sample container, put it in my purse. Then I looked down at the drawer, and my heart sank. I’d smashed the lip of the drawer terribly, flaked off all kind of paint, bent the entire front of the drawer. Gooch would see it immediately. I tried to bang it back into some semblance of its former self, but it was no use.
What would I do? Then something struck me. There was a guy in maintenance who I used to flirt with all the time back when I worked in Narcotics. Maybe he could help.
I called his extension from the phone at my desk. “Rodney! Hey, child,” I said, “it’s Mechelle. No, baby, question is, how you feeling today? Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Oooooo, don’t make me have to spank you.” We played a while, and I laid it on thick, doing my little low-down-and-nasty-girl thing. Then I told him I needed his help fixing something. “Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “And some gray paint, too?”
Rodney said he’d be right down, it’d be taken care of before I got back from where I was going.
Mark Terry, the civilian tech over at the GBI crime lab, saw me coming through the door and came out to greet me.
“Mechelle, Mechelle!” he said. “Always busy, always working.”
I grinned. “You know how it is.”
“I told you about getting too skinny,” he said. “All that hard work’ll wear you down.” He looked me up and down, slowly. “No, that’s just fine. Right there. Uh-huh. Stay like that and don’t ever change.”
I gave him a pouty look over the shoulder, cocked my hip, tried out a couple of poses on him.
“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Work it, Mechelle.”
We both laughed. I kept laughing a hair too long. Suddenly he was looking at me a little funny. “You okay?” he said.
“Hey, it’s nothing. I’ve been up all night, starting to get giddy.”
“So what you got for me?” Mark said, leading me back to his cubicle.
“Well, here’s the thing . . .” I put my purse on his desk, took out the plastic sample container full of Lt. Gooch’s spit, set it next to his computer screen.
Mark frowned slightly. “I don’t mean to be getting persnickety about procedure and all,” he said, “but you know that vial should have a seal and a label on it.”
“That’s what I’m getting to, Mark.”
The lab tech looked at me dubiously.
“What I got here is a sample. Saliva. For which I need you to run DNA.”
“Without a seal. Without a label. Without a case number.”
I picked up a paperweight off his desk, turned it around and around in my hand. I could see my fingers trembling from the energy pills. “I’ll be honest with you. This sample has been illegally obtained. It has no legal status. Never will. It’s not going to be used in court. What I need is to determine whether I’m on to the right person. Or not. You see what I’m saying?”
“You’re saying you have a suspect, but you’re just not sure he’s the right man.”
I nodded.
“And you’re saying that we’ve already run a sample from a crime scene, and you want to see if there’s a match so that you know whether to proceed with investigating that suspect, or whether you can eliminate him. Him? It is a him, I assume?”
“What it is,” I said, “is we have a real confusing case. We have guy who, if he knew I suspected him, he’d be liable to do something terrible. So I need your help here.”
Mark Terry cleared his throat, looked uncomfortably at the wall. “Yeah. I see. Only this lab runs on procedure. Big time. I mean, if we start goofing around with procedure, all kind of bad things can happen. Look what happened with the FBI lab a couple years back. One guy started getting slipshod, it came to light, and suddenly every defense attorney on the planet gets to call into question every federal conviction from the last ten years.”
“I know, I know.”
“I mean, I do this kind of thing, and it comes to light? Hey, not only will I lose my job, I’ll lose my entire career. Being a lab tech is out the window forever and ever, amen.”
I spread my hands. “I’m not joking when I tell you lives are at stake. As we speak, a human life is in jeopardy.”
Mark shook his head. “Look, Mechelle, me and you, we go back a ways. We got a fun little thing going and all that. But seriously, you saying this is life and death or whatever? That’s not hacking it. I need you to give me something more, say . . . tangible.”
The way he said it, it was obvious he wasn’t saying no. He was saying something else, saying it but not saying it, hoping to force me into speaking the actual words. I let my mind float across the possibilities. What would satisfy him? I’d been playing this flirty game, showing him some leg for a long time. Was I willing to take this one step further to make this case? Or was that even what he was aiming for?
“So, what,” I said. “Maybe me and you could grab a drink later? Something like that?”
Mark Terry looked at me impassively. “A drink?”
“Well, shucks, baby.” I gave him a randy little smile, the rotten jittery feeling banging around in my chest. “One step at a time, huh? Start with a drink, see where it goes from there.”
His eyes widened. “Wait, wait, wait. You thought . . .”
It was obvious from the look in his eyes that I’d misconstrued what he was angling at. I slumped back in the seat. “Then I . . . I’m sorry . . . I misunderstood what you were implying.”
Mark Terry kept looking at me, then finally a big grin spread across his face. “Not that I’m not interested. But all I was saying is, you want me to route an under-the-table DNA job for you, you got to be square with me what you’re talking about. You got to tell me what you’re working, whose life is at stake, that kind of thing.”
I felt a flush run across my skin. “Oh, man. I thought . . .”
We both laughed.
I slid the sample vial across the desk. “You have got to swear to me. I mean on a stack of Bibles, on your mother’s grave, the whole nine. Because this absolutely can’t get out.”
Mark Terry raised his hand solemnly. “Scout’s honor.”
I waited for a moment, let a little drama build in the room. Drama is good. Finally I said, “We’re working a serial killer. A child murderer.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. He’s been out there for over a decade. About twenty victims.”
Mark Terry stared at me. “No wonder. I was racking my brains, trying to figure out why y’all been running all that old DNA. Figured maybe you were just using the shotgun approach on some old cases or something.”
“I can’t tell you all the details. But the bottom line is that he’s snatched another little girl. He holds them for a long time, that’s part of the MO. So we’ve got to get him before he kills her.”
Mark Terry’s face grew slightly pale. “You know this for a fact?”
“We’re pretty sure.”
“My God. So I guess y’all must have a whole task force going and everything.”
I shook my head.
The lab tech frowned in puzzlement. “But . . . then who is working it? Just you and Gooch?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“Our suspect is law enforcement. We don’t want this getting out.”
Terry ran his hand over his face nervously. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t know, Mechelle. I don’t want to get in over my head.”
“Please.”
“Maybe I should call Gooch.”
I shook my head, very slowly.
Mark Terry stared at me. He must have seen something in my eyes. He blinked. “Wait a minute. Wait a goddamn minute! Are you saying . . . Whose saliva is this?”
“Oh, no, no nah, hey, no. I mean, come on!” I laughed brightly. “It’s not the lieutenant. It’s just . . . I’m kind of freelancing a particular aspect of the case. Okay? Just running a hunch about another suspect in the case. You know what a control freak he is: I don’t want him giving me a bunch of grief if I pursue this particular angle and I’m wrong.”
Mark Terry scratched his chin, eyes narrowed slightly. I could tell he was trying to decide whether he believed me or not. “I don’t know . . .”
“Plus, look, suppose I’m wrong. I’d rather not get the lieutenant’s butt in a crack over my mistake.”
Mark Terry picked up the vial, held it up to the light. “What the hell is this anyway?”
“Tobacco juice. The guy chews a plug.”
Terry made face of distaste, then slapped a small white label on the vial. “That’s it, then. John Doe, blind DNA screen.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing. “I won’t forget this.”
“A drink, huh?” Mark Terry smiled craftily at me. “Hey, maybe a drink wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.”
“Call me.” I reached across the desk, touched him lightly on the arm. “And, baby? Not a word to anybody.”