The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “And the thigh line?”

  She frowned. “That was a sample of semen, found on the thigh swab. Here, two locations I tested yielded inconclusive results.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There wasn’t enough DNA present to profile all eight loci,” Frankie said. “In the remaining six, Mr. St. Bride could not be eliminated. It is seven hundred forty thousand times more likely that Mr. St. Bride is a cocontributor to the semen sample than another person chosen randomly from the population.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Martine,” the prosecutor said.

  And the jury foreman winked.

  First, the cat died.

  Now, it wasn’t such a big thing, taken by itself. Magnolia had been suffering with diabetes for three years, and twelve was pretty old for a cat. It had happened, her mother said, while Chelsea was at court, testifying on behalf of poor Gillian.

  That afternoon, her little brother had fallen off a jungle gym and broken his arm in three places.

  “When it rains,” her father said, “it pours.”

  But they didn’t know about the Law of Three; they didn’t understand that all it took was one pebble to start an avalanche of dynamic proportion. What you did came back to you triplefold—both the good . . . and the bad. Chelsea wasn’t sure how much of that shit she believed, but she did know some things: She’d sworn an oath in a court of law and had gotten on the stand, and this was what had come of it. Her pet, her brother—by karmic proportions, she had one more devastation coming her way, to make up for what she’d done.

  At dinner that night, she stared at her parents intently. Her mother had a mammogram scheduled the next day. Would it turn out to be cancer? Her father was planning on driving back to work that night . . . would he crash unexpectedly? Would she stop breathing, just like that, in her sleep? Would she wake up and find the Devil sitting beside her?

  “Chelsea,” her mother said, “you haven’t touched your food.”

  She couldn’t stand not knowing what tragedy was coming. Pushing away from the table, she ran upstairs and locked her bedroom door behind her and rummaged through her drawers, finally finding what she’d so carefully buried.

  Could you wipe out your misdeeds with good intentions, like an abacus working in reverse? Chelsea didn’t know. But she tied the small bundle tight, with three knots. She stuffed it into a padded envelope that had come from an online CD store. She scrawled a new address across the front, added stamps, and ran out of her house with her parents’ concerned questions trailing her like the string of a kite.

  She ran until she reached the end of the block, where the big blue mailbox sat. Collection times, it said, were at 10 A.M. and 2 P.M. With shaking hands, Chelsea dropped the packet into the moaning mouth of the box. She did not think of Gillian. She did not think of anything that might change her mind. Instead, she focused on climbing the slippery slope of hope, which promised her that by noon tomorrow, her life might turn itself around.

  “You analyzed the pubic hair combings in the rape kit, didn’t you, Ms. Martine?” Jordan said, getting up from his seat.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you find?”

  “No hairs with DNA foreign to the victim.”

  Jordan raised his brows. “Isn’t it extremely difficult to violently rape someone without leaving behind a single pubic hair?”

  “I see it all the time. We don’t normally even test pubic hair when we have DNA, since hairs can be transferred in the most innocent of ways. For example, when you went into the bathroom during the last recess, Mr. McAfee, you probably came away with other people’s pubic hair on your shoes, yet I’ll assume that you weren’t committing rape.”

  She looked lovely, Jordan thought, even when she was reaming him. Abandoning that line of defense, he said, “You testified that the blood found on the victim’s shirt is a match for the defendant’s, isn’t that correct?”

  “No. I testified that the locations I tested matched.”

  “Whatever.” Jordan waved away the distinction. “Can you tell whether the blood you tested came from a scratch on the defendant’s cheek . . . or from a cut above his eye?”

  “No.”

  “Is it possible to tell from the blood on the shirt whether he was scratched by a human, or by a branch?”

  “No,” Frankie said, then shrugged. “However, DNA was found beneath the victim’s fingernails, a mixture from which the defendant couldn’t be excluded as a cocontributor.”

  “Was the victim wearing nail polish?”

  She smiled a little. “As a matter of fact, she was. Candy-apple red. The nails were fairly long, too, which made for a very good sample of skin cells beneath.”

  “Do you have to scratch someone to get his skin under your fingernails?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You can get his skin beneath your fingernails if you massage his scalp, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Or if you gently rake your hand down his arm while you’re flirting?”

  The forensic scientist made a face that let him know what she thought of his alternative scenario. “It’s possible.”

  “Let’s examine some of the evidence,” Jordan said. “The semen and the nail residue . . . those are both mixtures of DNA?”

  “Yes.”

  “Presumably, they’re mixtures of the two known samples you have here—Ms. Duncan’s and Mr. St. Bride’s?”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  “Then how come the two lines aren’t identical?”

  “You’re noticing the discrepancies in intensities—the numbers that are parenthesized versus the numbers that aren’t. And those can come from a variety of sources,” Frankie explained. “If we did the mixture of the DNA in the lab, it would be very precise—two drops of each cocontributor’s blood. But a mixture that was handed to us to analyze may not be equally divided between the two contributors. Obviously, in the fingernail residue mixture I wasn’t detecting as much DNA from the cocontributor as I was from the victim.”

  “But if we’re talking about semen, shouldn’t there be a pretty good amount of DNA from the male?”

  “Depends on how much sperm he has in it,” Frankie said. “If he’s a frequent ejaculator, he won’t have much sperm. If he’s a crack addict, he won’t have much sperm. If he’s an alcoholic or a diabetic, he won’t have much sperm. Many factors are involved.”

  “To your knowledge, Ms. Martine, is the defendant a frequent ejaculator?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you know if he’s a crack addict?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if he’s alcoholic or a diabetic?”

  “Again, no.”

  Jordan rocked back on his heels. “So when you looked at those two different mixture profiles . . . it didn’t bother you to see so many incongruities between them?”

  She hesitated. “An intensity difference isn’t really an incongruity. Sometimes we’ll see a number come up in parentheses that we didn’t expect . . . but that can be due to many things—from the percentage of each contributor’s DNA in the mixture, to whether or not the contributors are related. We don’t exclude a suspect based on such an infinitesimal differentiation.”

  “There’s a big difference between being two hundred forty million times more likely than anyone else to be a cocontributor—such as in the fingernail sample—or being seven hundred forty thousand times more likely to be a cocontributor—like in the semen sample.”

  “That’s true.”

  “What if you’d had results at the two locations that dropped out?”

  “That’s a big if, Mr. McAfee,” Frankie said. “It’s possible that your client might have been excluded. It’s also possible that he might have been further included.”

  “Isn’t it true that certain labs test more than eight locations?” Jordan asked.

  “Yes. The FBI lab does thirteen.”

  “Isn’t it possible that if you typed more systems