“No. We did not,” Lucas said. “We got a good profile from the hair in his bathroom sink that is nothing like the profile from the semen recovered from Grandfelt.”
“Damnit! I was more and more sure that Carlson was our guy,” Virgil said. “We’re back to square one.”
“Not quite. We still have some photo guys who haven’t been located. You’re coming up tomorrow? We do need to see what everybody has done while we were out.”
“Yeah, why don’t I meet you at ten o’clock at the BCA?” Virgil said.“We’ll get with Jon, see what’s what. I’m wondering why he didn’t call me with this.”
“Because he doesn’t know about it yet,” Lucas said. “Henderson arranged for the private lab. He made a call at the end of the workday in Chicago and talked to the lab director. They’ll be calling Duncan tomorrow morning.”
“All right. Damnit, I was so sure.”
“See you at ten,” Lucas said.
—
They met inDuncan’s office, and after talking for ten minutes about the burning of Virgil’s stable, and the cleanup over the weekend, Duncan said that the fire was a sensation on the true crime sites. “How’d that happen?”
“I mentioned it to a couple of people,” Virgil said. “If somebody is deliberately fucking with me, I’m hoping they think I’m out of the case.”
“All right.” Duncan admitted he was unhappy that Henderson had called Lucas, without notifying anybody at the BCA about the DNA test. “But I’ll tell you what—I’m not so sure about the whole DNA thing anyway. I think Amanda Fisk may have been pulling somebody’s weenie. That would be Virgil’s.”
“What?”
Duncan held up a finger. “Let me get Linda, she’s right upstairs.”
He made a call and Linda Esselton, the DNA tech who’d done the scrubs of Timothy Carlson’s jewelry, appeared two minutes later, carrying a file folder. She took a chair and Duncan said, “Tell them.”
“The Chicago lab sent us the results and I printed them out.” Shetook several pieces of printed paper out of the file, fanned them on her lap, and said, “If you look at the results from the seven separate scrubs…”
“Linda, just talk to us in English, we’re not real big on the science stuff,” Lucas said.
She hesitated, then nodded: “Okay. I scrubbed seven pieces of jewelry. I got nothing. Zip. That’s not right. That jewelry had been sterilized. I didn’t notice anything unusual when I was scrubbing it, except with the gold Rolex bands, you wouldn’t be surprised to see an arm hair caught in the links. There wasn’t any. Okay, sometimes there isn’t—but there’s always something, even if it’s not visible. Skin cells. Tiny specks of blood. Something. But there wasn’t.”
“Are you sure your swabs were good?” Lucas asked.
“You mean my technique, or the instruments?” She was prepared to be offended.
“The instruments, we know your technique is good,” Lucas said.
Mollified, she said, “I had swabs from two different batches. I believe all of them were good.”
Virgil: “So what are you telling us?”
“Just what I said. The jewelry, all of it, was sterilized, and in a way that deliberately removed any traces of DNA. Why would anyone do that? I mean, innocently?”
They all shifted in their chairs, looking at each other and then back at Esselton. Virgil asked, “Are you telling us that somebody deliberately defeated the scrubs?”
“I’m not a detective. I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything like it. Before we sent the package off to Chicago, we split the hair sample that Carl recovered from Carlson’s sink, and after we got the results,Carl and I looked at our sample again this morning. The hair appeared to have been chopped. It’s not hair that would have naturally fallen into the sink, you know, because somebody was going bald and they brushed their hair in the morning and it went down the drain…it was chopped. Like haircut hair. The other thing is, we also recovered hair from the shower, but it was all Fisk’s hair. There was no other DNA in the shower drain.”
“You know for sure it was Fisk’s?” Duncan asked.
Esselton nodded: “We got the scrub from her, for comparison’s sake.”
“I saw that,” Virgil said. “She did tell us that they’d been cleaning the house, scouring it, really, getting ready for a sale. You think that would have included cleaning out the drains?”
“Possibly, but…that thoroughly? I mean, I’ve sold a couple of houses and made sure the drains all drained, so we wouldn’t get dinged by an inspector, but these were, I mean, there were only a few hairs in the shower, when there should have been quite a lot. And all the hair was from Fisk.”
“Interesting. And odd,” Lucas said. He smiled. “I like odd things. They’re trying to tell you something.”
