THIRTY-SIX
So I had a problem. Within forty-eight hours or so, I was going to have DNA results from the semen sample found on the body of Gooch's murdered daughter. But without anything to compare it to, it didn't do me any good. I wasn't in any position to get a court order for a sample of his blood just yet. And even if I didâand Gooch was in fact the killerâthen the first thing he was liable to do was to run out and kill Jenny Dial and dispose of her body.
I drove back from Columbus trying to reason my way out of this box, but my mind was so muddled from lack of sleep that I could hardly think straight. In Macon I stopped at a Quik Trip and gassed up. At the counter they had a display of all kinds of snake-oil herbal supplements: echinacea, gingko biloba, kava kava. Cold pills, think pills, energy pills. I picked up a tiny plastic bag, looked at the ingredients. Caffeine and a bunch of herbs. Well, it was better than nothing.
“Throw this in, too,” I said, dropping the pills on the counter. “And a Diet Coke.”
The instructions on the little bag recommended taking two pills. I washed all four down with the Diet Coke, started driving.
When the pills hit me, I started feeling a slight tingling in my fingers. It wasn't quite like snorting a line of crank, but the herbs were more potent than I'd expected. I tried to concentrate on the DNA question. There are quite a few ways to get DNA samples. Blood is the best source of DNA, but you can get it from semen, from hair follicles, from saliva, even from sweat. None of which helped me out, really. The problem wasn't just the source, but the means of getting it. To get the sample, I'd need a warrant. To get a warrant, I'd have to go to the DA. If I went to the DA asking for a sample of any bodily fluid from a cop, the word was liable to get around, which was liable to tip Lt. Gooch off, which was liable to lead us right back to the one place I couldn't allow us to goâthe place where Jenny Dial ended up lying in some ditch.
My mind started flitting around as I was driving. The caffeine had given me enough energy to stay awake, but not enough to really concentrate. A thought would enter my mind, then it would flit off, then it would come back and recirculate, unaltered, unimproved. I must have been doing eighty-five as I tore through Atlanta. I shot past I-20 without even thinking. Next thing I knew I was on the north side of town, barrelling onto GA 400, the big toll road leading up toward Alpharetta. The same thoughts kept rolling around and around, and eventually I realized I wasn't thinking about DNA at all.
I had been seized by panic, and it had nothing to do with the case. I don't know whyâwell, okay, I know
why
âit was paranoia brought on by too many stimulants and not enough sleep, but why I fixated on that little boy, I can't say, exactly. All I know is that I felt like something terrible was about to happen to the boy who had almost been my son, but who wasn't anymore.
I took the Alpharetta exit, headed west, until I had driven past the grandiose sign that said
ROSEMONT ORCHARDS II, A TENNIS COMMUNITY.
As I pulled up in front of the big house where David and Nancy Drobysch and their son Kevin lived, a shiny gold Acura was backing out. In the front seat was a pleasant-looking woman, blond, blue eyed. The top of a child's car seat poked up in the back.
I drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, turned, and followed the Acura down the road. I hung back a couple of hundred yards as Nancy Drobysch merged into the traffic on Old Milton Highway, a large artery with two lanes on each side of a wide turn lane. We drove a mile or so, turned into the parking lot of a bright new strip mall. As Nancy Drobysch slid into a space in front of a Kroger supermarket, I crept around the lot, finally parking in front of a nail salon.
From where I was parked, I could see Nancy Drobysch's blond hair disappear into the Kroger. She was pushing a grocery cart with a baby's car seat in it, but I couldn't see the baby. I waited a minute, telling myself it was time to fire up the car and get my ass out of there. But I didn't. I kept thinking
something bad's going to happen, something bad's going to happen.
After a minute, I got out of the car walked into the Kroger, picked up a green basket with the store logo on it, and began wandering through the fruits and vegetables. I couldn't see Nancy Drobysch anywhere. I strolled around trying to find the weirdest fruits and vegetables. Soon I had a nice little pile in my basket: tomatillos, guava, something called conyaku, a shriveled cassava root. I looked around the store, wondering, how many of these corn-fed suburbanites ate cassava.
I ambledâas much as it's possible to amble while flying on caffeineâover to the drink aisle, put a bottle of the most expensive wine I could find into the basket, turned the corner, and banged slap into a cart. Looking up at me from the cart was a tiny brown-skinned boy. He stared at me in surprise; then the corners of his mouth turned down, and he began to wail.
“Hey, hey, sweetness,” I said. “It's okay. It's all right.”
Then I looked up, and there was Nancy Drobysch, eyes narrow, jaw set. She unbuckled the boy quickly and efficiently from the car seat, picked him up, and cradled him tightly in her arms.
“What are you doing here, Mechelle?” she said. Her voice was quiet, but her tone was sharp.
I picked up a handful of the vegetables and fruits from my cart. “Tomatillos,” I said, shrugging. “Cassava root. You know. The selection of cassava in my neighborhood is miserable.”
She kept looking at me with her cool gray eyes. “David told me,” she said. “He told me you used the Web site to figure out who we are. You promised in the adoption agreement that we wouldn't have contact. You said that's what
you
wanted.”
I smiled at her, at the boy. “Really,” I said, “I'm just here. I didn't even knowâ”
“Bull
shit
,” she said.
I felt a strange sense of dislocation then, a sort of swirling in my chest. I reached toward the boy, to stroke him, maybe, or pat him on the head. My boy.
Her
boy. He was still sniffling, looking at me like I was some bird of prey ready to come out of the sky at him, swoop him off to be eaten. Nancy Drobysch angled her body away from me.
“
You
agreed, Mechelle.
You
said. No contact.”
I'm not usually tongue-tied, but I just stood there, this ache in my chest so strong I could hardly breathe.
“I mean, come on,” Nancy Drobysch pursued. “I don't know what you're doing, but you and I both know it's not healthy. Do you need some kind of help? Counseling? Something? Maybe David and I could help.”
“I just . . . I just wanted to see him.”
Nancy Drobysch sighed irritably. “That's not in the cards. You know this.”
“I know, I know, I justâ”
“Look, Mechelle, I don't know how to say this. But after David found out you'd used the Web site to track us down, somebody in the neighborhood said they'd seen somebody that looked like you driving by our house.”
“Like me? Black, you mean?”
“It was you, wasn't it?”
“No! Of course not!”
Nancy didn't believe me, I could see it in her eyes. And there was no reason she should, either. I knew this was bad, but I was just being carried along, unable to stop myself. I reached out my hand again toward the boy.
“David went to a lawyer,” Nancy said. “I don't know how to say this, but . . . Look, he's going to file a restraining order on you. If you come around again . . .” She didn't finish the sentence, but I knew where it went from there.
I smiled brightly. “Oh! I see. Okay, I see how this is going. You got the child, it's all nice and legal, now the gloves come off.”
“Please! Mechelle. Think! Look at this from our perspective. No, no, actually that's not right. Look at this from
his
perspective. Take five minutes and just think. If you just do that, you'll see what's right. Okay? Now we're going.”
I didn't move. She tried to back up. I put my hand on her cart, closed my fingers around the steel mesh. There was a brief tugging match, then suddenly a cell phone had materialized in her hand. “Police?” she said. “Hello? Yes, look I need some assistance.”
“All right, all right, all right, you made your point, girlfriend.” I set the basket of weird fruits and roots and vegetables on the floor, picked up the wine bottle, sprinted for the door.
THIRTY-EIGHT
When I got to the Cold Case Unit office, the light was off. I let myself in with the key and switched on the overheads. The flourescents snapped and hummed ominously. I locked the door behind me, then went over to Lt. Gooch's desk. I tried the bottom drawer, but as I'd expected, it was locked. From out of my purse I pulled a small pry bar.
My pulse was racing. Whatever that stuff was in those pills, it was stronger than I'd expected. When you take stimulants, there's always a point where the initial euphoria brought on by the chemicals in your bloodstream starts to tip over into another, not-so-comfortable feeling. When I was in the residential treatment program up in Minnesota, I had had a lot of time on my hands. I'd spent a good deal of that time reading up on the pharmacology of addiction. Basically, stimulants mimic the natural fight-or-flight responses of the body. Point being, there's a close relationship between euphoria and terror. When the euphoria side of the fight-or-flight mechanism starts wearing off, that's when tremors, paranoia, terror, night sweats, and all the other pretty stuff starts kicking in.
As I inserted the pry bar into the lip of the drawer, my pulse was racing, and I could hear the keening whine of the flourescents and the groan of the boilers in the room next door with unusual clarity. The sounds seemed malignant to me then, like auditory masks behind which something terrible was hiding.
I leaned on the pry bar. Nothing much happened other than a squawk from the metal. I slid the pry bar over until it hit something that might or might not have been the lock mechanism. I leaned on it again. The metal folded, but still the drawer didn't move. Paint was coming off in small, dandruff-like flakes. I moved the pry bar again, jerked on it a couple of times, and finally the drawer came free.
I slid it open. My heart was pounding as I pulled out the Dixie cup full of disgusting brown liquid. It smelled so strongly of tobacco that I almost gagged as I poured off a quarter inch of Lt. Gooch's foul spit into a plastic urine-sample container I'd lifted from the Narcotics unit upstairs.
When I was done, I screwed the lid back on the sample container, put it in my purse. Then I looked down at the drawer, and my heart sank. I'd smashed the lip of the drawer terribly, flaked off all kind of paint, bent the entire front of the drawer. Gooch would see it immediately. I tried to bang it back into some semblance of its former self, but it was no use.
What would I do? Then something struck me. There was a guy in maintenance who I used to flirt with all the time back when I worked in Narcotics. Maybe he could help.
I called his extension from the phone at my desk. “Rodney! Hey, child,” I said, “it's Mechelle. No, baby, question is, how
you
feeling today? Uh-huh? Uh-huh? Oooooo, don't make me have to spank you.” We played a while, and I laid it on thick, doing my little low-down-and-nasty-girl thing. Then I told him I needed his help fixing something. “Yeah, that's right,” I said. “And some gray paint, too?”
Rodney said he'd be right down, it'd be taken care of before I got back from where I was going.
Â
Â
Mark Terry, the civilian tech over at the GBI crime lab, saw me coming through the door and came out to greet me.
“Mechelle, Mechelle!” he said. “Always busy, always working.”
I grinned. “You know how it is.”
“I told you about getting too skinny,” he said. “All that hard work'll wear you down.” He looked me up and down, slowly. “No, that's just fine. Right there. Uh-huh. Stay like that and don't ever change.”
I gave him a pouty look over the shoulder, cocked my hip, tried out a couple of poses on him.
“
Oh,
yeah.
Oh,
yeah. Work it, Mechelle.”
We both laughed. I kept laughing a hair too long. Suddenly he was looking at me a little funny. “You okay?” he said.
“Hey, it's nothing. I've been up all night, starting to get giddy.”
“So what you got for me?” Mark said, leading me back to his cubicle.
“Well, here's the thing . . .” I put my purse on his desk, took out the plastic sample container full of Lt. Gooch's spit, set it next to his computer screen.
Mark frowned slightly. “I don't mean to be getting persnickety about procedure and all,” he said, “but you know that vial should have a seal and a label on it.”
“That's what I'm getting to, Mark.”
The lab tech looked at me dubiously.
“What I got here is a sample. Saliva. For which I need you to run DNA.”
“Without a seal. Without a label. Without a case number.”
I picked up a paperweight off his desk, turned it around and around in my hand. I could see my fingers trembling from the energy pills. “I'll be honest with you. This sample has been illegally obtained. It has no legal status. Never will. It's not going to be used in court. What I need is to determine whether I'm on to the right person. Or not. You see what I'm saying?”
“You're saying you have a suspect, but you're just not sure he's the right man.”
I nodded.
“And you're saying that we've already run a sample from a crime scene, and you want to see if there's a match so that you know whether to proceed with investigating that suspect, or whether you can eliminate him. Him? It is a him, I assume?”
“What it is,” I said, “is we have a real confusing case. We have guy who, if he knew I suspected him, he'd be liable to do something terrible. So I need your help here.”
Mark Terry cleared his throat, looked uncomfortably at the wall. “Yeah. I see. Only this lab runs on procedure. Big time. I mean, if we start goofing around with procedure, all kind of bad things can happen. Look what happened with the FBI lab a couple years back. One guy started getting slipshod, it came to light, and suddenly every defense attorney on the planet gets to call into question every federal conviction from the last ten years.”
“I know, I know.”
“I mean, I do this kind of thing, and it comes to light? Hey, not only will I lose my job, I'll lose my entire career. Being a lab tech is out the window forever and ever, amen.”
I spread my hands. “I'm not joking when I tell you lives are at stake. As we speak, a human life is in jeopardy.”
Mark shook his head. “Look, Mechelle, me and you, we go back a ways. We got a fun little thing going and all that. But seriously, you saying this is life and death or whatever? That's not hacking it. I need you to give me something more, say . . . tangible.”
The way he said it, it was obvious he wasn't saying no. He was saying something else, saying it but not saying it, hoping to force me into speaking the actual words. I let my mind float across the possibilities. What would satisfy him? I'd been playing this flirty game, showing him some leg for a long time. Was I willing to take this one step further to make this case? Or was that even what he was aiming for?
“So, what,” I said. “Maybe me and you could grab a drink later? Something like that?”
Mark Terry looked at me impassively. “A
drink
?”
“Well, shucks, baby.” I gave him a randy little smile, the rotten jittery feeling banging around in my chest. “One step at a time, huh? Start with a drink, see where it goes from there.”
His eyes widened. “Wait, wait, wait. You thought . . .”
It was obvious from the look in his eyes that I'd misconstrued what he was angling at. I slumped back in the seat. “Then I . . . I'm sorry . . . I misunderstood what you were implying.”
Mark Terry kept looking at me, then finally a big grin spread across his face. “Not that I'm not interested. But all I was saying is, you want me to route an under-the-table DNA job for you, you got to be square with me what you're talking about. You got to tell me what you're working, whose life is at stake, that kind of thing.”
I felt a flush run across my skin. “Oh, man. I thought . . .”
We both laughed.
I slid the sample vial across the desk. “You have got to swear to me. I mean on a stack of Bibles, on your mother's grave, the whole nine. Because this
absolutely
can't get out.”
Mark Terry raised his hand solemnly. “Scout's honor.”
I waited for a moment, let a little drama build in the room. Drama is good. Finally I said, “We're working a serial killer. A child murderer.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. He's been out there for over a decade. About twenty victims.”
Mark Terry stared at me. “No wonder. I was racking my brains, trying to figure out why y'all been running all that old DNA. Figured maybe you were just using the shotgun approach on some old cases or something.”
“I can't tell you all the details. But the bottom line is that he's snatched another little girl. He holds them for a long time, that's part of the MO. So we've got to get him before he kills her.”
Mark Terry's face grew slightly pale. “You know this for a fact?”
“We're pretty sure.”
“My God. So I guess y'all must have a whole task force going and everything.”
I shook my head.
The lab tech frowned in puzzlement. “But . . . then who
is
working it? Just you and Gooch?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
“Our suspect is law enforcement. We don't want this getting out.”
Terry ran his hand over his face nervously. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know, Mechelle. I don't want to get in over my head.”
“Please.”
“Maybe I should call Gooch.”
I shook my head, very slowly.
Mark Terry stared at me. He must have seen something in my eyes. He blinked. “Wait a minute. Wait a goddamn minute! Are you saying . . . Whose saliva
is
this?”
“Oh, no, no
nah
, hey, no. I mean, come
on
!” I laughed brightly. “It's not the lieutenant. It's just . . . I'm kind of freelancing a particular aspect of the case. Okay? Just running a hunch about another suspect in the case. You know what a control freak he is: I don't want him giving me a bunch of grief if I pursue this particular angle and I'm wrong.”
Mark Terry scratched his chin, eyes narrowed slightly. I could tell he was trying to decide whether he believed me or not. “I don't know . . .”
“Plus, look, suppose I'm wrong. I'd rather not get the lieutenant's butt in a crack over my mistake.”
Mark Terry picked up the vial, held it up to the light. “What the hell is this anyway?”
“Tobacco juice. The guy chews a plug.”
Terry made face of distaste, then slapped a small white label on the vial. “That's it, then. John Doe, blind DNA screen.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing. “I won't forget this.”
“A drink, huh?” Mark Terry smiled craftily at me. “Hey, maybe a drink wouldn't be the worst thing in the world either.”
“Call me.” I reached across the desk, touched him lightly on the arm. “And, baby? Not a word to anybody.”