Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  A smile split his face. "Jeez, Frankie, I never expected door-to-door service. What are you doing here?"

  "No way was I gonna get into this on the phone." She peered over his shoulder, and he belatedly remembered Shelby.

  "Frankie Martine, this is Shelby Wakeman. Shelby's--"

  "Leaving," Shelby murmured. "I, uh, have to go." And without even looking at him, she backed out of the pile of cartons and fled up the stairs.

  "Your girlfriend's gonna be ma-a-ad," Frankie sang as Eli escorted her into his makeshift lab. She took a seat and propped her feet up on Watson.

  "She's not my girlfriend. Yet."

  "Yeah, well, you just blew that one back about three months."

  Eli scowled. "Is it my fault you're beautiful?"

  "Gee, was that a compliment?" Frankie leaned forward, plucking a particular page from the sheaf. "C'mon. Admit. You love me."

  He did. Because all the sharpest detective work that Eli did amounted to nothing at all if Frankie couldn't take the traces of evidence a perp had left behind, and make heads and tails of it. She was leafing through his evidence--the clothing and articles that hadn't been sent to her. "Nice print."

  "I took it off the pipe before giving it to you," Eli said.

  "Yeah? Whose is it?"

  "The victim's, strangely enough."

  "Hmm," Frankie said, but did not elaborate. "How come I didn't get this?" She was holding up the victim's nightgown, with a small brown splotch on one side.

  "How much blood did you need? You had the rest of her clothing."

  "It's the wrong color." Frankie pursed her lips. "I mean, I don't get to see seventy-year-old blood very often, but still." She rolled it into a ball and tucked it into her black bag. "Just in case I get bored when I go to visit my friends at the lab in Montpelier." Then she tossed him a file. "Look at this."

  Table 1--Amelogenin Typing Results

  KEY: Types in parentheses ( ) are lesser in intensity than types not in parentheses.

  -- No conclusive results

  ** Drop-out may have occurred due to limited amount of DNA

  She took one look at Eli's face and rolled her eyes. "Crash course?"

  "Please."

  "OK. Basic DNA--everything you've got came from either your mom or your dad. She gives you one allele, and he gives you another. The result--a baby with big feet or dimples or curly hair. All those physical traits are on your DNA strand, but they don't do a lot of good in criminal investigations. So we test the DNA for different traits--like vWA or TH01. At those spots, every person's gonna have a type: one number from Mom and one from Dad. The DNA we extract from evidence--even really old, difficult evidence like the stuff you sent me--narrows the pool for who might have left that DNA behind." She smoothed out the corners of the chart she'd handed Eli. "Each of these columns here with the weird number on top is one of those traits. At each trait, there are two numbers--the alleles--which came from the mom and dad of whoever left that DNA behind. Capisce?"

  "So far."

  "OK. Before we can analyze evidence, we need control samples--that is, DNA profiles we can compare to the ones we're about to find on the rope or medicine pouch. The first control sample came from the victim's blood, which was all over the evidence thanks to her recent labor and delivery. The results I got I labeled as Cecelia. As for your missing perp-- well, you got lucky. Making the assumption that the saliva on the pipe was his, I concentrated the DNA yield and was able to get all eight loci . . . which I titled Gray Wolf. Finally came the glass you just sent--that saliva was the basis for the eight numbers that make up the profile of someone different than Gray Wolf's profile . . . they're listed as Spencer Pike."

  "Hang on. So that means that we definitely have the DNA of these three people?"

  "Two out of three are a lock. The third is a little less of a sure thing. I can't tell you that this particular DNA belonged to Gray Wolf, because I never had a control sample."

  "So all you really know is that you've got DNA on the pipe that's male, and different from Spencer Pike's."

  "Actually, I've got a little more than that." Frankie trailed her finger down the page. "One of the byproducts of DNA testing is that we've got charts, now, of subpopulations, which show how alleles tend to crop up with frequency in various ethnic and racial groups."

  "You lost me," Eli said.

  "We can generate statistics collected by typing people of a certain background--white, black, Native American. Say you've got a white Rolls-Royce. Rolls are only two percent of the entire car population."

  "And you know this . . . why?"

  Frankie shook her head. "Shut up, Eli. Two percent. White cars are fifteen percent of the total car population. To approximate how many white Rolls-Royces there are, we say fifteen percent of two percent of the car population . . . which means that .3 percent, or three out of every thousand cars, is a white Rolls. That's the same thing we do when we look at the way types tend to crop up with frequency in various subpopulations. For example, the rope end--the profile I got there is found in one in 1.7 million Caucasians, but only one in 450 million Native Americans. That means if I filled a football stadium with 450 million Indians and another stadium with 450 million whites, I'd expect 264 Caucasians in that stadium to have a matching profile . . . but only one Native American to have it."

  "So whoever handled the rope end was more likely white than Native American?"

  "Right. But now, look at the numbers from the pipe. The chances of finding a D5S818 combo of 11,11 is fourteen percent in the Caucasian population, seven percent in the African American population, and twelve percent in the Hispanic population. But the chance of finding an 11,11 combination there in the Native American population is thirty-five percent--that's more than twice as common as the Caucasian population. If you look at the whole profile on the pipe, the chance of it coming from a Caucasian is one in 320 million; from an African American it's one in 520 million; from a Hispanic it's one in 41 million. From a Native American, though, it's only one in 330,000."

  "So whoever smoked the pipe was an Indian."

  "That would be my unofficial assumption."

  Eli nodded. "What else?"

  "There was no surprise when I tested the rope loop, with the epidermal cells that came from the victim's neck--if you compare the row to Cecelia's control sample, they're identical. I only got seven of the eight systems when I tested the noose, but I'd still call it a success. Then I tested the end of the rope, as a different sample. I wasn't expecting much, and even after scraping for E-cells I had no luck. So I used a PCR procedure to replicate billions of copies of discrete areas of the DNA, and managed to get six loci, which was pretty much a miracle. And of those six systems, every single one is a match to the DNA taken from Spencer Pike's drinking glass."

  It didn't necessarily mean that Pike had hanged his wife, but it at least meant that he'd handled that rope. Eli looked at the empty row on the chart. "What happened with the medicine pouch?"

  Frankie narrowed her eyes. "What happened is that your favorite DNA scientist nearly came here and committed a felony against the detective that begged for her help. You have no idea what a bitch this was, Eli. I would have scrapped it, if you didn't have such a dearth of evidence to begin with."

  "I'll take you out to dinner."

  "No, you'll buy me a yacht," Frankie said. "The first time I tested it I came up dry. I wound up taking a second cutting off the string that came in contact with the neck. I got two profiles--both similar, both consistent with a mixture."

  "Meaning?"

  "That there was more than one or two types in most of the systems. Look at that line on the chart . . . see the spots where there are three numbers, instead of two?"

  "Yeah." Eli frowned. "What's up with that?"

  "You know how you get one allele from Mom and one from Dad? If you wind up with three or four, either you're a freak, or there's a mixture of DNA from at least two people. And given their genetic makeup, neither Cecelia Pi