eating cookies with Officer Martin. They were dunking Keebler chocolate chip cookies into milk, and Mikey was talking a mile a minute.
I looked around the kitchen, teeth still chattering, and was handed a glass of Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda in a highball glass with ice cubes. The officers asked me questions that I no longer remember. All I do remember is the look on my father’s face when he got home that night.
She would never have left them alone, he screamed. He shouted what I already knew. In the instant I saw the red lights reflecting on my bedroom walls, in the moments of sipping Dr. Brown’s, the bubbles tingling my nose, I knew. Whereas Mikey always had about him the belief that the world was a safe place, I knew differently.
Like Ripper on the prowl, even as a little kid I knew that sometimes bad things escaped from their hiding places.
Chapter 4
I spent that Monday at work testing a shipment of heroin to determine its purity level. Lewis called me into his office at around four.
“Here’s the file on the suicide king case. We’re supposed to look for something, anything, missed, in terms of DNA evidence.”
“You looked at the file?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“And there was a tiny bit of what could be sperm on the panties. Too small to have been tested that many years ago.”
“Anything else?”
“Well,” he drawled. “I’m no lawyer.”
I howled with laughter. Lewis’s IQ hovered near 170, which I only found out one night over many shots of tequila and a poker game with my father, brother, uncle and Lewis. As I recall, I lost a bundle—and Lewis lost more. When Lewis lost even his watch that night, he bemoaned a man of his IQ being at the mercy of Lady Luck—and the Quinns. And he accidentally cited his IQ score. Like most geniuses, he could be prickly. And like most geniuses, he knew better than anyone else. And that included attorneys.
“And?”
“And the man had completely incompetent counsel, Billie. Guess who his court-appointed lawyer was?”
“Don’t tell me….”
Lewis nodded. “Cop-a-plea.”
Lewis and I may have been scientists residing in a world of DNA. However, we got to know the different cops and attorneys and prosecutors on the basis of their reputations. Cop-a-plea Fred? He had the worst rep of all. He had a serious comb-over, wore sweat-stained polyester suits, and bottles rattled around inside his briefcase.
“If Cop-a-plea was his court-appointed attorney, he didn’t stand a chance in hell. Fred doesn’t care about guilt or innocence, just avoiding actually showing up for a trial.”
Lewis nodded. “This case is a textbook example of how to send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life.”
“So now what?”
“Now we test the tiniest of specks, evidence that was unable to be tested before. With the newer tests, I’m pretty sure if it’s not too degraded, we can get results. Most of this guy’s chances are pinned on that…we have to hope it’s not so degraded as to be useless.”
“Lewis?”
“Hmm?”
“You read the file, do you think he’s innocent? Or are you still just doing this because you have a crush on the ultimate unattainable woman?”
Lewis didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he swept a hand at his “wall art.” His office also had crime-scene pictures, as well as some scientific prints of cells and blood under microscopes. “You know, it would be real easy, as a man of science, to remain forever detached from what it is we’re actually doing. Over here—” his hand gestured to a crime scene with a body lying under a sheet “—we have the worst of what man can do. And over here—” he swept his hand to a cell photo that had been taken with an infrared camera “—we have cells, DNA and what they tell us. And never the twain shall meet. I mean, that’s how it can be. We just remain in this world—the lab. We can be lab rats. But sometimes, maybe, we have to emerge and go into the other world…. Yes, it’s very possible he’s innocent, Billie. And maybe it bothers me. And if I can do something about that, then I suppose I should.”
“Dear God, does this mean you’re getting a conscience?”
“Don’t let it get out.”
I knew, of course, that when the bayous of Louisiana released a floater who was once his childhood love he had had a determination to do right, using science. But I also knew he and I were both guilty of keeping our universe microscopic and not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe life was easier that way.
“Billie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think, if we do this, we’ll be doing God’s work?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t, but I thought…I don’t know. Do you think we’d be doing God’s work?”
“God and I are distant friends, Lewis. But yeah, maybe.” I took the case file and turned to leave his office, and over my shoulder, I said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”
He didn’t say anything, but Lewis LeBarge, the most rascally man I knew, definitely was doing some thinking.
My desk was piled three inches high with papers and files, and I sighed and looked at my watch. I’d be leaving after dark. The end of daylight saving time the previous weekend guaranteed that. I opened the Justice Foundation’s case file and began poring over every detail. Police reports, evidence analysis, witness interviews. My heart raced a bit. I had to admit, like Lewis, that there was definitely something about piecing together a puzzle that was exciting.
Cammie Whitaker was the suicide king’s victim—his only victim.
I took out a pad and pen and started writing questions as they came to me.
Why the suicide king playing card?
Suicide?
King = Power?
Cammie Whitaker was a beautiful redhead, a former college cheerleader for St. John’s with blue eyes and pale, freckled skin. In her college yearbook photo there was an aloofness, something unknowable to her as she stared at the camera. In the crime-scene photos, her blue eyes stared upward, and a knife was plunged into her temple. Her body was perfectly arranged, and there were thumb-prints and finger marks in mottled red-purple around her neck. She had been strangled, as well. Everything else about her, though, was serene. Her nightgown was beautifully splayed out just so, as if, when the detectives walked in, she had simply been sleeping.
Her apartment was in Ft. Lee, a town that faced Manhattan and was an easy commute from Jersey. Rents weren’t cheap—and her apartment reflected that. The place was stunning. The furniture was all French country, tasteful. If they weren’t actual antiques,
