Bad Blood (35 page)

“She assumed it was a contaminated result,” Mattie said. “Look, that’s the problem when you aren’t exactly doing a blind test. She knew this was clothing from a female murder victim, and that the original case suspect was a male.”

“So she was surprised to have the profile come up as a woman’s?” I asked.

“Yes, surprised also when she found that it didn’t match the DNA of Rebecca Hassett, from the original samples.”

“So what did she do?” I asked.

“Figured it was her own mistake.”

Contamination was an enormous problem — an everyday issue — for forensic biologists in every lab in the country. They sneezed and coughed at their workstations, opened vials of fluids that dripped or became airborne, and, in more instances than prosecutors liked to hear, inadvertently compromised investigative results.

“You mean the tech ran the test again?”

“Of course. And compared it to her own DNA sample.”

Every person who worked in these offices had to provide his or her own genetic profile, so comparisons could be made against results obtained when contamination was suspected.

“Don’t get discouraged so easily. You know what a long shot this was,” I said.

“The last thing I expected to find was a woman’s DNA on the sweater,” Mike said.

“Mattie’s right about the blinders you let yourself wear sometimes. We knew there was no sexual assault. We should be thinking other motives, other killers — and even whether that blood was already on Bex’s sweater before the night of the murder.”

We left Genco’s office and crossed First Avenue to walk to the deli. We ate together at the counter before returning to see whether Jerry Genco had completed his careful study of Bex Hassett’s remains.

“I should know by now to expect the unexpected.”

“That DNA may have nothing to do with the case. The blood wasn’t necessarily deposited on the sweater the day the Hassett kid died.”

Mike unfolded the copy of the
Post
that he had paid for at the counter. The headline appeared over Brendan Quillian’s mug shot:
MASSIVE MANHUNT FOR MISSING MOGUL
.

“You’ve got to go back at Trish Quillian,” I said. “How did she know to show up at the cemetery this morning? Think — do we have anything with her DNA on it? Have you told Peterson to get someone to dump her phone? See who’s called in to her?”

“That’s got to be brother Brendan himself.”

“Or Lem Howell, looking for Brendan. He might have spilled the beans. Somebody certainly tipped her off to it.”

“Maybe she’s just dogging Bobby Hassett’s every step,” Mike said.

“She was already sneaking around the cemetery before he got there.”

We showed our IDs at the entrance and made our way back down to Genco.

“Pull up a couple of stools,” he said. “Get off your gimpy foot.”

“You’re not done yet?” Mike said.

“Not quite. I don’t have the luxury of many one-body days.”

Rebecca Hassett’s internal organs were laid out on separate corkboards, on a stainless steel table along the far end of the wall. A foot square and lightweight, the cork allowed the doctors to cut through the parts without dulling the blades of their knives.

“Is her hair good for information at this point?” Mike asked, looking at a glassine envelope that Genco had prepared for the lab.

“Some drugs stay in it — we’ll test for those. Nicotine, for example. Or something like Thorazine, though there was nothing in the history, I take it, to suggest that. But if it’s excessive alcohol — and only alcohol — as the first studies showed, it won’t give us anything.”

“What’s next?”

“I’ve done the spleen and the pancreas. Very decomposed, as I’d expect. I’m working on the kidney now,” Genco said, thoroughly absorbed in the samples in front of him. “Quite an experience you had in court, Alex, wasn’t it?”

“Dreadful, absolutely dreadful. There aren’t words to describe it to you.”

“You ever think they’d have you spending a day in the morgue just to keep you out of harm’s way?”

“A cemetery
and
the morgue,” I said.

“Mike knows how to show a girl a good time.”

“What do you look for when you’re doing this, Jerry?”

Genco was concentrating on the organs. “The entire point of the exhumation is to examine specimens more carefully than at the autopsy. I dissect each of these things, hopefully for the second time. See? Here’s the incision from the original dissection.”

I looked over his shoulder. He placed his scalpel an inch away from the previous cut and sliced through the liver, spreading it open on the corkboard like a small piece of fruit.

“Unremarkable,” he said. “Nothing of importance.”

I sat back down. Mike was next to me, reading the sports pages of the paper.

“Now the kidney,” Genco said, moving to the next specimen. “Interesting. There’s a small nodule here.”

I got up again. “It’s only of consequence medically, Alex. Not as evidence. This will go to the lab, of course. It’s probably just a benign tumor in the bile duct. We work up microscopic slides of all of this.”

I went back to my stool.

“When are they going to get the point about the need for some good middle relievers? Mariano can’t do it all by himself,” Mike said. “My Yankees pulled out a squeaker last night.”

“Peculiar,” Genco said, bent over the corkboard.

“Wish it was. I’m afraid it’s par for the course this season.”

“Sorry. I meant this is peculiar.”

“What is?” I asked.

“There’s another little lump here.”

“Where?”

“I’ve got the uterus now. Along with the ovaries and fallopian tubes. They’re light pinkish when you’re alive. Sort of darken with the passage of time.”

I stood up again to look.

“There’s a bulge here, where I’m slicing. Do you see it?”

“Not really.”

“Right next to the point of my scalpel.” He adjusted the overhead lamp. “It’s a corpus luteum. It’s a tiny hemorrhagic cyst in the ovary — where the egg popped out during the menstrual cycle.”

“Did the first doctor find it?” I asked. “Should he have noted it?”

Genco shook his head. “Not necessarily, but then if he hadn’t cut exactly here in this same spot, he’d have missed it quite naturally. It’s very small.”

I was fixated on the deft movements of Genco’s hand as he guided his instrument back to the fallopian tubes. I winced instinctively as he made another incision.

“Almost to the All-Stars and we’re only a game and a half in front of Boston. We better liven up our bats,” Mike said.

“There it is, Alex. Do you see now?”

“What, Jerry? What am I looking for?”

“That pea-size bulge, right under my blade.”

“Yes, yes, I do.”

“It’s an embryo, Alex. I’m pretty sure of it. You see how the embryonic substance looks entirely different than the uterus? I’ll confirm it under the scope, but I’m certain what you see is fetal tissue.”

Mike looked up from the newspaper. “What the hell are you telling us?”

“That your girl Rebecca Hassett was pregnant at the time she was killed.”

“Don’t defend the guy, Jerry. How did a doc miss the kid’s pregnancy, can you explain that to me? That fact could have changed the way the entire case shook out. Maybe it gave somebody a motive, maybe it gave—”

“Don’t fly off the handle, Mike. It wouldn’t have been easy to see. I’d say the fetus wasn’t even three months yet — probably just a bit over two. The uterus is barely enlarged. Here — you can see the incision he made — will you look at this, please?” Jerry said. “The pathologist made one cut from front to back — right here — so he didn’t see all of the uterus, any more than I did when I made mine. The place where he sliced? There was nothing to show it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Since there was no trauma to the vaginal vault, no signs of a sexual assault at autopsy, a superficial visual of the reproductive organs would be all most docs would have done. Not uncommon. This was a sixteen-year-old girl — eight, maybe nine weeks pregnant. If nobody brought that piece of information in as part of her history, most pathologists doing the postmortem on an asphyxial death might have missed it.”

Mike’s argument with Jerry Genco faded to background noise. My thoughts were somewhere else.

I was trying to put together what I remembered of the time frame during which Bex Hassett’s life had spun so terribly out of control. How much earlier was it that her father had died? When had she started spending all that time away from home? Who was in the pack she was hanging with in Pelham Bay Park? What had caused her to turn against her friend Trish Quillian? Had anyone realized she’d been impregnated just a couple of months before her death?

“I wonder how religious the family was. What if Mrs. Hassett knew her daughter was pregnant and threw her out of the house?” I asked. “Parents have done that with girls who embarrassed them — more often than you think.”

“You’re a bit tardy with that thought, Coop. About six months too late to ask Mama, according to the headstone on her grave.”

“Maybe Bobby knew. Maybe the brothers had some idea. What if that’s why he didn’t want the exhumation done?”

Mike’s eyes narrowed as he considered the idea. “Guess I’ll have to talk to him again. Put him back on the list, after I’m done with Trish Quillian.”

“You think it throws Reuben DeSoto — the original suspect — back in the mix? What if she’d been sleeping with him and told him he was the father of the baby? He’d have no reason to rape her then — but they might have argued about it. Maybe he did kill her.”

“That whole gang she was running with in the park? I guess we’ll have to see if we can scare up any of those guys.”

Jerry Genco was ready to get us out of his hair. “Odds are this had nothing to do with the girl’s death. You know the numbers on teen pregnancy in this country? It’s a staggering figure. She had a high-risk lifestyle, this Hassett kid. We see it all too frequently here. Quite sad, really.”

The arguments I had made to Judge Gertz about my motion to use an expert on interpersonal violence in Brendan Quillian’s trial were triggered now by Genco’s dismissal of the relevance of this murder victim’s pregnancy.

“The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide,” I said.

Genco was labeling his specimens for storage. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“Pregnancy — like separation — is one of the two most dangerous times for women in a bad relationship,” I went on. “Most of them are killed by the men they’d been intimate with — I hesitate to use the word
lover
. You know that, too.”

“And one of the most common causes of death in those circumstances is strangulation,” Mike said, looking at me a bit less skeptically.

“So if somebody knew Rebecca Hassett was pregnant, and that somebody wasn’t happy about it, maybe it gives us a new suspect.”

“Well, I’ll be the first to tell you if I was wrong about the insignificance of this — this pregnancy. I’ll call you tomorrow to see if I can give you two any direction,” Jerry Genco said. “Maybe we can help figure the paternity. We’ll have a preliminary on the DNA of the fetal tissue in twenty-four hours.”

Ignacia Bliss took over the task of guarding me for the twelve-hour shift starting at 8 p.m. She met me inside the funeral home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, where Elsie Evers’s grieving relatives and an honor guard of court officers surrounded the closed coffin. The most skilled technicians in the funeral business couldn’t have reconstructed her face well enough to allow anyone to view the slain woman.

My closest friends from the office — Nan, Catherine, and Marisa — had come to the wake as well, arranging with Ignacia to follow us to my apartment. They were determined to distract me and get a read on my emotional well-being. Fortunately for me, Paul Battaglia had become mired in another matter that required his attention in Manhattan, where the people who vote for him live.

“We’re in charge of dinner,” Catherine said. “Go get into your robe.”

While I changed and Ignacia went into the guest room to make some calls, the three of them poured drinks and opened a bottle of wine.

Marisa called into the bedroom, “Does Swifty’s deliver? Delicious thought, isn’t it?”

“When they get a break in the action, ask them to send a waiter in a cab with the order. Get something for the two cops in the lobby, too.”

I padded out in a short silk robe and my ballet slippers. They were listening to television news in the den, and Nan muted it when she saw me.

“I need to hear it. It’s fine.”

“Mike and Mercer said we shouldn’t let you—”

I rolled my eyes. “I need my pals around me, just like this. I don’t need a censor.”

A seasoned crime reporter was leading off the nine o’clock hour. The chiron below him was running a strip that said
BREAKING NEWS
across the bottom of the screen.

“We begin with a story about the many possible sightings of the armed fugitive Brendan Quillian, who broke out of a Manhattan courtroom yesterday in a deadly blaze of gunfire.”

In the top right corner, over his head, the news producer had gathered an array of photographs of Quillian that were displayed for several seconds each. Most had been cropped from the social columns, although it was unlikely that the tuxedo-and-bow-
tie outfit he was often seen in would translate to someone readily recognizable in casual street clothes.

“The damn eye,” I said, sinking into my most comfortable wing chair. “Why don’t they use that in their description?”

“Frankly, it never seemed as obvious to me,” Marisa said, “the times I’ve seen him in court.”

“He hasn’t glared at you the way he fixes on Alex,” Nan said.

“…and tips have continued to come in to police, as well as to our newsroom, from all over the Northeast. Earlier today, Brendan Quillian was reportedly sighted on an Amtrak train to Washington, as well as in a diner in Poughkeepsie, New York,” the reporter said. “So as you can imagine, it’s quite a task for the NYPD to follow up on all these calls to determine which ones have any credibility.”