ON TUESDAY AT
1:00
P.M. EMMA LEFT THE COURTHOUSE. BABES
had yet to turn himself in, and Chief Garrisen’s twenty-four-hour deadline had expired.
A warrant was issued for his arrest.
The chief still had the office operating under a strict no-comment rule, so Emma had to duck the media on her way to her car. Her cell phone rang as she was driving out of the parking lot. She recognized the number from the Rhode Island Department of Health Forensic Laboratory. It was the head of DNA testing, Bob Entwistle.
“Got some bad news for you,” he said.
Emma stopped at the red light. “I heard last night,” she said. “You can’t construct a reliable DNA profile from the hair strands I gave you.”
“That’s not the problem anymore. The kit that arrived this morning took care of that.”
She’d been awake most of the night thinking about what Lomax vowed to do during his visit to her apartment, but it was still hard to believe that he’d gone through with it. “So Brandon Lomax actually submitted a DNA sample?”
“Not only that, but he told me to call you directly with the results.”
“And now you’re telling me that the news is bad?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Entwistle.
“Are you saying there’s a match?”
“No, not that,” he said with the distinct chuckle of a know-it-all scientist. “We can work pretty fast if we drop everything and focus on a single case, but getting results this quickly would be TV-crime-show fast.”
She was relieved but confused. “So what’s the bad news?”
“Well, as you know, in order to create the original DNA sample three years ago, we extracted saliva from the vomit that was collected at the scene of the accident.”
“Yes, and that was a fine piece of work.”
“You bet it was,” he said. “Not all departments have the equipment to extract DNA from vomit, and if I hadn’t lobbied for the purchase of that new extraction kit with paramagnetic particles to isolate extremely pure DNA for use with STR analysis, we never would have had a sample in the first place.”
Emma rolled her eyes. Whenever scientists felt challenged, they seemed to lapse into a level of detail more suitable for a rocket-science manual.
“Relax, Bob. I wasn’t being condescending. It
was
a fine piece of work.”
“Oh,” he said, backpedaling. “Thanks. But now I’m even more embarrassed to tell you the news: we never got around to constructing a DNA profile from that sample. I’m sorry about that, but this was effectively a cold case with no suspects. You know how busy the lab has been with everything from forensic files in active investigations to criminal offender files for convicted felons, and we—”
“Bob, it’s okay,” said Emma. The guy was beyond defensive. “So there’s no DNA record in the computer; is that what you’re telling me?”
“That’s correct.”
That explained the foot-dragging Emma had encountered when she’d submitted the hair sample. “So you have to go back to the original sample in the state data bank and construct a DNA profile, then compare it to Brandon’s DNA. How long is that going to take?”
“There’s the problem,” he said.
“Weeks or months?”
“We can’t locate the original sample.”
A car horn blasted behind her. Emma had watched the light turn green, but it was as if Entwistle’s words had prevented her brain from telling her foot to press the accelerator.
“It’s lost?” she asked, as she drove through the intersection.
“I won’t say lost. It’s…missing.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“But if there’s no sample and no previously constructed DNA profile in the computer, there is no way to compare Brandon Lomax’s DNA—or anyone else’s DNA—to the DNA found at the crime scene.”
“That would be correct,” he said reluctantly.
Emma had tremendous respect for the professionals in the lab, but every now and then a case would deliver a painful reminder that Rhode Island had been the last state in the union to create a DNA data bank. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’m double-checking. Since a drunk driver may have been involved in this crash, it’s possible that someone sent out the vomit sample to test for alcohol levels.”
“You can’t get a reliable blood-alcohol level from vomit.”
“I know, but I’m just theorizing here. I’m also going to check to see if somewhere along the line the department contracted with an outside lab to do DNA testing in this case or another one. Maybe there was a mix-up.”
She stopped at the next traffic light, and the car behind her nearly rear-ended her. That would have been today’s icing on the cake.
“Do me a favor and sort this out as quickly as you can,” she said.
“Will do. Like I said, I’m sure it’s just a mix-up.”
“I’m sure,” she said, wondering if for a certain former attorney general, the mix-up was a highly convenient one.
Ryan finished his morning radio show and went straight to Cambridge. If Babes’s friend Tom wouldn’t answer his cell, Ryan would go find him.
Ryan took the same subway that had taken him to MIT last week, but this time he walked away from campus, toward Tom’s apartment. He should have been planning his conversation with Tom, but he was still preoccupied with this morning’s radio show and one of the biggest jerks ever to call in to
Jocks in the Morning.
The conversation replayed in his head as he walked down Kensington Avenue.
“Hey, sport. How are you?”
Sport? Who does this guy think he is
,
Robert Redford in
The Great Gatsby?
“Doug Wells, here,
Action News
in Providence. We have a mutual friend in Conradt Garrisen.”
Nobody called him Conradt, especially not his friends.
You don’t know Connie any more than I know the Prince of Wales.
Ryan said, “You realize we’re on the air, right?”
“Absolutely,” said Doug. “I hear you’re returning to baseball, so I wanted to call and let your listeners know that we here at
Action News
in Providence will be following your comeback every step of the way.”
Ryan hated it when people called to promote other networks. This one was particularly bothersome since he had not yet made his comeback a topic of discussion on the show.
“That’s kind of you, Doug. Thanks for calling.”
“Oh, one other thing.”
“Running out of time here, Doug.”
“I’ll be quick. My heart goes out to you and your brother-in-law.”
“Thank you.”
“And, Babes, if you’re listening, I know it can be hard to talk to family about things you have bottled up inside. Sometimes you just want to talk to someone who isn’t going to judge you. So, Babes, if you can hear me, call me at the
Action News
station or at home, and we can even talk off the record—”
Ryan cut him off.
Asshole.
Tom Bales lived in a two-bedroom apartment just a few blocks from MIT. Ryan went up the elevator and knocked on the door. A young good-looking guy answered. He was wearing torn blue jeans, no shoes, and a T-shirt that read
AND YOUR POINT
IS
?
Not since his own college days had Ryan seen eyes like these, and it was a safe bet that the kid had been smoking some kind of herb since breakfast.
Some of Ryan’s friends had told him to try that, too, for his insomnia.
“Is Tom here?”
“Tom who?”
“Tom Bales.”
“Oh, my roommate,” he said, laughing. For some reason, he thought that was really funny. So did the giggly girlfriend on the couch in the living room.
“Is he here?”
“Uh, no. Hey, you’re Ryan James, right? The sports dude on the radio.”
“That’s me. You a listener?”
The guy fluttered his lips like an overworked horse. “Nah. Tom linked me up with your brother-in-law to do computer support for my paper on thermal plasma outflow and circulation within the Earth’s inner magnetosphere. Babes has been great. This could be one of the most detailed surveys of ion-pitch angle distributions ever done by—”
“I hate to be rude,” said Ryan, “but I really need to find Tom.”
“Honestly, I haven’t seen him in about two days.”
“What?”
“Well, that’s not unusual. When Tom gets into his projects, he could be working nonstop at the lab and sleeping two hours a night on the floor. If he sleeps at all.”
I can relate to that.
“What about his girlfriend? Could he be at her place?”
Now the kid was really laughing.
“What’s so funny?” said Ryan.
“Virgin Tom—a girlfriend?” he said, snickering. “Tom talks a good game, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him with a woman.”
The image of Tom’s chase after the Tommy Bahama girl on campus flashed in Ryan’s mind.
“I’d like to leave him a message,” said Ryan. He didn’t trust Tom’s roomie to deliver it. “You mind if I put a note in his room, where he’ll get it?”
“Be my guest.”
He directed Ryan to the first bedroom off the hallway, and then went back to whatever he had been doing in the living room with Giggles.
Ryan opened the bedroom door and almost gasped. He wasn’t that many years removed from quirky college living conditions, but this was over the top. A two-hundred-inch LCD screen covered nearly the entire wall. Ryan had seen projection screens that large, but never an LCD. He’d heard of them in sports bars in Japan, and he checked the brand. There was no label. He inspected the workmanship more closely. This was no factory model. Tom had built the thing himself.
It was getting easier all the time to understand Babes’s friendship with Tom.
Ryan’s gaze drifted across the room to the mirror above the bureau. It was large and had an oak frame, but most of the mirror itself was covered with photographs that Tom had taped onto the glass. Ryan was too curious not to walk over to take a closer look.
They were typical college photographs—Tom with his friends having a good time. True to the remarks of Tom’s roommate, however, Ryan didn’t notice any photographs of Tom alone with a woman. Then his eye caught a photograph of Babes, and the image struck him.
It was a typical picture of Babes. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t even looking at the camera. But Tom was beaming. So was the other person in the photograph. It was a woman, and Ryan couldn’t take his eyes off her.
It was Chelsea.
Ryan took a step back and breathed in and out, not sure what mix of emotions was coursing through his body. But he suddenly wanted out of Tom’s room.
He scribbled a note with his phone number—“Tom, call me IMMEDIATELY”—left it on Tom’s pillow, and stole one more glance at Chelsea on his way out the door.
BABES SLEPT UNTIL NOON. NO SURPRISE THERE. HE HAD LAIN
awake till dawn, afraid to make a move, too frightened to close his eyes.
His unexpected visitor had chewed him out royally for eating his box of vanilla wafers. How was Babes to know that the guy had been living in the Dawes family crypt—
Babes’s
crypt—for the past six months? Throughout the chilly night, Babes had hoped that the man would be gone in the morning. When he woke, however, Babes saw him seated cross-legged on the floor, studying Babes’s collection of baseball cards. They were still neatly displayed, each team forming its own column, just as Babes had arranged them.
“These yours?” the man asked.
Babes rose up on one elbow, still on the cold floor. It was Babes’s first look at the man in daylight, and while he avoided making eye contact, he couldn’t help staring. The stranger wore torn blue jeans, an old army coat that was too big on him, and tattered sneakers that didn’t match, one black and one white. His hair was an oily dark mess, shoulder length on one side and down to the middle of his ear on the other, clearly a self-inflicted cut. A thick, snarly beard covered most of his face, leaving only his narrowed eyes and a deeply furrowed brow to convey expression.He was obviously homeless, which gave Babes a funny feeling; school kids used to tease Babes and say that he would end up that way someday.
“Hey, I asked you a question,” the man said. “Are these cards yours?”
Babes nodded.
“Lots of Red Sox cards. You a Sox fan?”
“Yes,” Babes said quietly.
“Too bad. I like the Yankees. Guess I’m gonna have to kill you.”
Babes screamed at the top of his lungs and scurried deep into the corner.
“Hey!” the man shouted.
“Don’t kill me!” shouted Babes.
“I was kidding, you idiot!”
Babes cowered and continued to wail like a mortally wounded animal.
“Stop it! I’m not going to kill you!”
Babes kept on screaming, barely taking a breath. The echo off the granite walls made the noise inside the crypt almost unbearable, and the man had no idea how to stop it. In desperation, he scooped up the columns of baseball cards into stacks and hurled one stack after another at Babes.
Babes shielded himself with his hands and screamed louder. But as cards began to fall around him, the image of snow falling at Fenway flashed in his mind, and his screams became a whimper. His attention was suddenly refocused. The whimper turned into a sniffle.
The man looked on in amazement as Babes, in the span of minutes, went from utter hysteria to pensive silence. Soon he began to reorganize his cards, as if the outburst had never happened. The speed and concentration with which he worked was remarkable and strangely fascinating.
The man drew closer for a better look, but Babes didn’t notice.
“What order are you putting them in now?” the man asked.
“Teams, ranked according to their won-loss percentage.”
“For what year?”
“Franchise history.”
The man did a double take. “You know the won-loss record of every major-league team from the day they joined the league?”
“Yes, well, as of two days ago. I didn’t get the newspaper yesterday.”
The man’s mouth fell open. “You recalculate every day?”
“Yes.”
“Cool. I think. Who’s in first?”
“The Yankeees. Winning percentage of .567, if you go back to the New York Highlanders in 1901.”
“Ah, my boys from the Bronx,” the man said with a smile. “Hey, you’re doing this for me, aren’t you? Cuz I’m a Yankee fan.”
Babes stopped arranging his cards and looked off to the middle distance, his face expressing only confusion. It had never occurred to him that he was doing this for anyone but himself. “I suppose it could be seen that way,” he said, turning his attention back to the cards.
“Who’s in second place?”
“Giants, if you count both their time in New York and San Francisco: .539.”
“Then who?”
“Dodgers. Winning percentage of .524, Brooklyn and Los Angeles combined. St. Louis Cardinals are in fourth at .517. My Red Sox are in fifth place at .515, if you count their time as the Boston Americans. Chicago Cubs are right behind at .513, followed by the Cleveland—”
“Okay, okay.”
Babes didn’t hear him. He was in his zone, his mind processing won-loss percentages to the third decimal as he laid out the cards in perfect order. It took him about fifteen minutes, and it didn’t bother him in the least that a homeless man was his audience. In fact, he was perfectly fine being watched. Even as a small child, his play dates had gone just fine—until the other boy got tired of watching Babes do what Babes wanted to do, and then it was a disaster.
“And in last place,” Babes announced, “the Tampa Bay Rays, if you count the old days as the Devil Rays.”
The homeless man applauded. “That’s amazing.”
Babes shrugged. “Not really.”
“No, I mean it. You are one cool dude.”
“You think…you actually think I’m cool.”
“Yeah. No lie, dude.”
Babes smiled, but he still didn’t look the man in the eye. “Do you want to see me do it again?”
“Sure. I could watch this forever.”
“You could? Forever?”
“Well, not forever. But I mean, a really long time.”
“Okay,” said Babes, it never occurring to him that the man might just be making conversation or saying something to be nice. “How about this time I do it by team home runs, most to least?”
“That would be awesome.”
Babes scrambled the cards on the floor and eagerly started all over again.
“Hey, what’s your name?” the man asked.
Babes answered without looking up. “People call me Babes.”
The homeless man waited, as if expecting the question to come back at him. But Babes was too into his project to care about another person’s name.
The man glanced at a stray baseball card beside him, which happened to be one of the most famous Red Sox of all time. “My name’s Carl Yastrzemski.”
Babes froze. “Really?”
“No, you moron. But you can call me Yaz anyway.”
“Okay, Yaz.”
Babes finished his first column, taking extra care to make sure the cards were lined up just so.
“Hey, tell me something, Babes.”
“What?”
“I meet some weird dudes under bridges and stuff. But you…you’re a little hard to figure out.”
“I have a pervasive development disorder.”
“A what?” the man said, chuckling.
Depravement provides evildoers
—the letters were tumbling in Babes’s mind, rearranging themselves. “A pervasive development disorder,” he said, his tone punctilious.
“Okay. If you say so. What are you hiding out here in the crypt for?”
“I killed my sister.”
Babes said it without emotion and with no hesitation, as if now that he’d confessed over the radio it was simply an established fact.
Yaz said, “Well, I’m sure she deserved it.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“I was kidding again, okay? You need to work on your sense of humor, you know that?” Babes didn’t answer. He was busy building the second column of cards, his face pure concentration. “So, how did you do it?” the man asked.
“Do what?”
“Kill your sister.”
Babes looked up, but his gaze was cast downward at the man’s feet, not at his face. “You really want to know?”
“Yeah. I really want to know.”
Babes put down his baseball cards and started plucking at his eyebrow. “Okay. Then I’ll tell you.”