Full Tilt

52

Albany, New York

All right, here we go again.

Constance Baylick set out on another day of searching the regional, state and national data banks holding DNA profiles to determine if any new ones added to the system matched hers.

Maybe this time.

She’d been assigned to lead on DNA analysis of profiles collected thus far from the Rampart investigation to help with identification or links to other crimes.

Constance was a new hire of the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center, part of the state police crime lab in Albany. She’d graduated among the top in her class at University of California, Davis, where she’d studied molecular cell biology. She was still working on her PhD. She knew her stuff.

Constance slipped on her headphones to listen to “Born This Way.” Mother Monster helped her concentrate as she set out to work.

She had full authority to access CODIS, all affiliated databases and networks. She received all the newsletters, alerts and bulletins and was well aware of the backlogs.

Sometimes you pray and sometimes you get lucky.

She started by running her routine checks, locally, then with the New York State DNA Databank, then the regional systems.

Then she went into the National DNA Index System, known as NDIS, which held profiles of convicted criminals, people arrested or detained, unidentified human remains, missing persons and the relatives of missing persons. It was common for police agencies across the country to regularly search their profiles against new ones added to the system.

As expected, nothing new so far.

Constance continued clicking through the system. The song had nearly ended when Constance froze.

Ping. Ping. Two hits. Holy cow!

Constance yanked off her headphones, the music ticking at her neck as she checked the identifier number of the submitting agency: Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. She entered her security code and downloaded the profiles.

These were two distinct forensic hits that the system had identified as possible matches with profiles she’d submitted from the Rampart case.

Constance immediately began working to verify that the two Minnesota profiles matched two from Rampart. She scrutinized and tested the genetic markers-alleles-comparing them to the first one until she had it.

Okay. Looks like a definite match here.

She went to the second.

It was trickier. It drifted into pedigree and familial searches that required all alleles to match. But Constance knew that the target and candidate profiles could contain a different number of alleles, as was the case here.

What we have here is a partial DNA match. But it’s strong enough to confirm identity. One person in the Minnesota case and a person in the Rampart case are in the same family.

Constance would swear on it under oath in court if she had to.

She began writing her preliminary report for her supervisor to send to the investigators in Rampart and Minnesota.