FORTY-FIVE
“So, look,” I was on the cell phone, driving, “you mentioned the other day maybe getting a drink together.”
There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. It was Mark Terry, the GBI crime lab tech. “Yeah,” he said guardedly.
“So, you know, here it is, Friday night, I'm just hanging.”
“Hm. Gosh, yeah, um.”
“You're with somebody.”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Then come
on!
Live a little. Broaden your horizons.”
Another brief pause. “Hey, why not? What you got in mind?”
“Tell me where you are. We'll figure something out.”
He gave me directions to his house, which was located near Emory University, only about ten minutes away. I was feeling a peculiar tingle. I hadn't been on a date in a year. Dates used to be all about speed and tequila with me, so I'd sort of tried to steer clear of the man/woman thing for a while. Not that this was really a date. But still, I was coming here under that pretense. I pulled up in front of the small Craftsman bungalow. Mark Terry opened the door wearing a four-button jacket in an unusual dusty blue, pleated pants of a subtle plum shade, beautiful loafers, a spread-collared shirt with French cuffs and turquoise cuff links. It was the first time I'd seen him in anything besides a white lab coat.
“You clean up pretty good for a white man,” I said.
“You like?” he said, pinching the lapel of his jacket. “Gigli. Bought it in Milan last year.”
“You bopping over to Italy on a frequent basis?”
He smiled mysteriously, but then said, “Nah. Must have saved for three years to scrape together the money. Always wanted to get over to Europe, finally got around to it.” He closed the door, locked it. “So where you want to go, Mechelle?”
“Uh. . . .” I said. I was thinking about playing him a little, but decided it was the wrong thing to do. He was silly, yes, but a nice guy. There was no point leading him on.
He looked at me for a minute, then a look of disappointment and irritation showed in his eyes. “Man,” he said, “you want me to do something. Am I right? At the lab?”
I sighed. “Look. There's been a development.”
He put his hands in his pockets, stared out at the street. “A development.”
“Yeah it'sâ”
“Wait, wait, hold up. You and me, we got a thing, a little . . .” He made a backward-and-forward motion in the air between us with his hand. “You know what I'm saying? And that's all good. But it seems to me, like, you know, like you're taking advantage of that. You call me up, you act like you want to go out for a drink, I throw on my best frock, and, shit . . . All it is, you want me to do something for you. Mechelle, come on. That's not right.”
“I know, I know. But I swear I wouldn't have done it if it weren't important.”
He jingled the keys in his pockets. “Tell you what. We'll go get a drink. Someplace nice. Have a little conversation. You'll explain what's going on. Then we'll go over to the lab, I'll do whatever you want.” He winked. “You can have your way with me.”
I thought about it for a minute. Not a
real
drink. Just a coke or something. What could be the harm?
“Fair enough,” I said.
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We went to Holyfield's, a bar owned by the boxer Evander Holyfield down in Buckhead, Atlanta's party neighborhood, and sat at the bar.
As we walked in, I realized I hadn't been in a bar for nearly a year. It was a weird feeling. When you've been as intensely involved with bars as I have over the years, the whole vibe comes on like a freight train. The loin-twisting beat of the hip-hop coming over the stereo, the smell of cigarettes, the vapid laughter of drunks. Holyfield's caters mostly to upscale blacks, everybody dressed to the hilt, gold flashing, a row of Mercedes Benzes parked outside. A see-and-be-seen kind of place. I spotted one of the mayor's deputies joking with an outfielder from the Braves. If blond-haired Mark felt conspicuous, he didn't act like it.
We sat down at the bar. I felt the smooth surface with my fingers. A familiar tactile reminder of a certain kind of life that I'd left behind. Theoretically.
Mark held up a finger to the bartender. “Couple of vodka martinis. Stoli with a twist, lime.” He turned to me. “You don't mind my ordering for you, do you?”
“Actually, I better get a Sprite.”
He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“I don't drink anymore.”
“Oh. Oh! Shoot, I'm sorry, gosh!” Mark tried to wave at the bartender, but he already had his back turned, shaking the martini mixer.
“So.”
“So. You been fidgeting all the way over here,” Mark said.
“This thing with Lt. Gooch. I don't even know what to say.”
“No,” I said. “It's not just that.”
“What then?”
“I don't even know where to start.”
The bartender turned around, and the two martinis were sitting there in front of us in a couple of huge, extravagant blue glasses. I'd picked mine up and taken a long pull on it before my mind had even had taken a solid bite on the notion that I was supposed to not be drinking this shit.
“Aw, man,” I said.
My fingers rested on the rim of the glass. I sat there for a minute then finally reached across the bar, poured the martini into the little sink hidden under the bar, and then turned the glass upside down. I could feel the booze burning in my throat.
“You okay?” Mark said.
“Not really.”
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It took three Sprites to explain the whole thing. The only thing I left out was that I finally had what I believed to be a firm suspect. When I had wrapped up the story, Mark was staring at me. “You can't be serious,” he said finally. “Seventeen kids?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you're sure Gooch didn't do it.”
“Ninety-nine percent.”
“So what is it you need from me?”
“I want some help on the forensic side. The DNA, the blood evidenceâthat whole side of this case has been so screwy we never were able to make sense of it. We think he must have been planting evidence. But we're not sure. I'd like to just sit down with you, go over every single case, see if there's something we missed.”
“You got a suspect?”
I looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe.”
“Who?”
I didn't say anything.
“You are too much. I don't know why I put up with you.” Mark crooked his finger at the bartender. “Lemme get the check, dawg.”
I dropped a twenty on the bar. “You mind if I run to the girls' room?”
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I went into the bathroom, sat down on the toilet. I didn't really need to go, I just needed a second to think. Problem is, I wasn't thinking too straight.
I'd been up early, and it was getting late. I was feeling tired, depressed, pissed off at myself. Back in the day, this was the point when I'd usually gone for the crank. Brought me right back to happy. Happy and full of enthusiasm and energy, feeling sexy and full of myself.
Next thing I knew, I was dumping the entire contents of my purse onto the nice marble counter next to the sink. Lipstick, eyebrow pencil, Dentyne, brush, wallet, mirror scattered all across the counter. I pawed through it, as though if I kept looking, maybe I'd find an ancient bindle of crank that I'd somehow overlooked for the past year. I mean, I knew there wouldn't be. But still, a part of me was hoping that maybe there was something from back in the day, just a taste of something that would get me back on my feet. But there was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
“You okay, baby?” A tall, dark-complected woman in a beautiful gold dress stood behind me, looking at me with concern.
“I was just looking for something,” I said, wiping my face. I realized a couple of tears were running down my nose.
“Something like . . .” She was looking at me with a funny look on her face, like she was halfway suggesting something. I had a hunch I knew that look.
“I need a little something to pick me up,” I said.
The woman studied me for a while. I'd been an undercover narc long enough to understand what was happening here. She was scoping me out, trying to see if she could trust me. Then her face changed, like
I know this person.
Like she knew what made me tick. And maybe she did.
“What's your poison, baby?” she said, giving me a cool little smirk.
“How's it work?” I said.
“You tell me what you like, then you go out, fold your Benjamin lengthwise, set it down on the bar. When the valet delivers your car, you'll find what you need inside. Me, I don't touch nothing. You and me, we just having a conversation.”
I looked at her for a minute, took about three long deep breaths, then flipped open my badge holder.
She saw the badge, and her face went tight with fear and anguish and self-loathing. All that beauty just drained away, and all I saw left on her face was something dead and ugly and halfway destroyed. She grabbed my hand. “Please. Please don't. Please. Please! I can't go back inside.”
“Don't let me see you here again, sister,” I said.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“It ain't about that,” I said.
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We drove over to the crime lab in Decatur. I paced up and down next to Mark's cubicle for about an hour while he sat there with the stack of seventeen folders in front of him.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “You're a hundred percent right. Somebody left a false trail. Somebody monkeyed with the blood, the semen, the whole bit.”
“But how?” I said. “Take for instance the first murder, Gooch's daughter. It was Gooch's DNA.”
“I don't know what attracts people to this kind of work. But you sit around thinking about crime and evidence all day, ideas start popping into your head. Like, if I wanted to kill myâI don't knowâmy best friend's wife or something and get away with it, how would I do it?” Mark Terry smiled a thin, ironic smile. “This one? This one's easy.”
“Tell me, then.”
“My guess, Lt. Gooch used condoms for birth control. Your perp goes through Gooch's garbage, finds a used rubber, throws it in the freezer. When the time comes, he's got everything he needs. Just thaw it out, stick it in a trocar or a syringe or a turkey baster, squirt it into the little girl's vagina. Boom, Daddy is suddenly a cold-blooded child-raping sicko.”
“And the rest of them?”â
“It's
all
stuff like that! A human being is nothing but a big bag full of DNA. DNA, man, it's just seeping out of you all the time. You lick a stamp, hey, you just mailed off enough DNA to clone yourself five thousand times. You spit on the ground, there's DNA in the dirt. You comb your hair, there's DNA in the comb. You cut yourself on the job, there's DNA on your shirt, on your Band-Aid, on a paper towel in the men's room. It's everywhere! Any fool could do this.” He looked at me curiously. “The only thing that amazes me is that criminals don't do it more often.” He shrugged. “Hey, maybe they do. But we'd never know, would we? Because DNA testing is . . .” He gave me his ironic smile again. “ . . . foolproof!”
“Okay, but there were five cases that all had the exact same DNA. Why?”
“Maybe I'm overstating the case when I say an idiot could do this. Sometimes maybe it's easy to get DNA, sometimes not. He probably kept some of these samples in the freezer for years. It doesn't take much. Maybe that first one, Hank's condom? He swizzles some saline solution in the condom, pours it out into five or six vials, pops them in the freezer out in the garage. Then if he ever needs it, Good Ol' Hank Gooch is right there, next to last year's venison and a big stack of TV dinners, waiting to be a pervert child murderer all over again.”
“Damn!”
Mark Terry closed the files. “Okay, here's what I don't understand. I get the impression you haven't told anybody in the chain of command about this.”
“My chain of command had his head shot off by the SWAT guys at eight this morning.”
“Okay, but beyond that. Go to the chief of detectives.”
“I think the perp is a cop,” I said.
Mark studied me for a while. “Like, a
particular
cop?”
I nodded.