Dust

22

Not far up ahead but out of sight from where we wait is a Bank of America kiosk.

“At Mass Ave and Albany. It would have been an ideal place for the killer to leave his car,” Benton describes the very intersection where I get stopped on occasion when the circus train lumbers through.

The last time wasn’t that long ago, the first of December, when the long candy-apple-red train with gold lettering on the sides took forever to clatter past, headed into the MIT campus to park at the Grand Junction branch. I sat and imagined the exotic animals inside those cars, remembering when this same Florida-based circus performed in Miami several times a year during my childhood. The Cirque d’Orleans casts a shadow over my mood every time it sets up in an arena around here, reminding me of my past, of my father who used to take me to see the elephants walking trunk to tail along Biscayne Boulevard.

“He could have left his car there in the public lot.” Benton continues talking about where the killer may have parked as I hold Quincy by his leash and pet him. “And nobody would have paid attention. Cars are in and out of that lot at all hours because of the ATM. He left his vehicle and returned on foot probably right along these tracks. It would have been raining when he did. The footprints he left when he returned to the scene would be gone for the most part, just the partials we’ve noticed. The intact ones are from when he left the final time, possibly right before dawn when the rain had stopped.”

“If they’re his, he must be a pipsqueak,” Marino says. “Size-eight feet? What would that make him, maybe five feet? I’m betting it was a kid goofing around back here.”

“We can’t say with any degree of certainty how tall,” I reply. “The correlation of foot size and height isn’t an exact science. While we can estimate based on statistical data, it’s not possible to be precise.”

Marino repositions the scale, the same six-inch yellow plastic ruler he was using earlier only with a different label. “How about for once not talking like a nerd on The Big Bang Theory and just give me a garden-variety guess,” he picks on me.

“On average a male with a size-eight shoe is around five-foot-five. But that doesn’t mean the person who left these footprints is that height. There are short people with large feet and tall people with small ones.” I ignore his rude aside, which I suspect is more for Benton’s benefit than mine.

Marino can’t stop asserting himself because for one thing he’s stung by what Benton has predicted so far. The MIT maintenance worker Enrique Sanchez routinely leaves his truck overnight at the construction site. The pipe cutter is his and he uses his own tools on the job. He has a DUI. A second offense and he could lose his license so he never drinks and drives. Benton hasn’t been proven wrong about anything so far and Marino has shown his gratitude by causing trouble with his office in Boston, unwittingly adding more grist to Granby’s treacherous mill.

“Five-foot-five for the sake of argument?” Marino says to me. “A kid, someone short, whatever. Pretty damn stupid if he did what you think,” he fires at Benton. “It would have been a lot smarter to leave the body and then get the hell out. You return to the scene you could get caught.”

“It’s not possible for him to resist watching.” Benton is back to checking e-mails on his phone. “He has to witness the spectacle he creates.”

That word again. Spectacle.

“He’s been back here before. He knew where to go and what to do. He was comfortable.” Benton continues looking through the eyes of the monster he’s after.

Through the eyes of Martin Lagos, I think.

Or someone who had access to his DNA.

Specifically, someone who had access to his profile in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System known as CODIS, and I indulge in imagining worse-case scenarios. I think it through, what I would do if I were a bad person skilled in computers or, more disturbing still, if I worked in a DNA lab and had evil intentions or did the bidding of someone corrupt who is powerful.

A DNA profile doesn’t look like a biological sample on a microscopic slide or the barcode on an autoradiograph. It’s not visual like a blood-spatter pattern or the loops and whorls of a fingerprint. In a database a profile is a series of numbers that are manually entered and assigned an identifier generated by the crime lab that conducted the analysis. It’s these numbers that are compared to an unknown profile run against a database like CODIS and when there’s a hit the numerical identifier is the link that leads to the name and personal information of who it is.

The growing reservoir of information found in DNA databanks has been controversial since the testing was first introduced in the late 1980s. People worry about privacy. They worry about genetic discrimination and a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, which protect against search and seizure without probable cause. There’s a growing concern about DNA dragnets or trolling for suspects by taking samples from people within the geographic proximity of a crime.

I’ve heard the objections and fears for years and I don’t disagree with some of them. Even the most perfect scientific procedures can be misused and abused by imperfect human beings and it’s within the realm of possibility that a DNA profile could be deliberately altered. Numbers entered into a computer by an overworked lab technician can be accidentally corrupted. They can be tampered with. While I’m not aware of this happening, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t. There’s no guarantee that such a mistake or misdeed would be publicized, certainly not voluntarily.

If Martin Lagos’s identification number were substituted for another person’s in every database, we’d have no way of knowing the DNA profile wasn’t really his. It would be the ultimate identity theft and I can’t mention this now in front of Marino.

I watch him return the camera and scale to his scene case. Quincy is sitting on my foot and licking my hand.

“Let’s go,” Marino commands his dog who isn’t interested in going anywhere. “I’ll catch you at your office in a while,” he says to me, ignoring Benton. “Machado and I’ve got a few things to finish up such as finding Haley Swanson who’s ducking us now. Later I plan to drop by Gail Shipton’s condo, if you want to come.”

“You know what to do” is my response. “Make sure you get everything out of her medicine cabinet. I want to know what meds she might have been on. Let me know what’s inside her refrigerator and in her trash.”

“Jesus Christ,” he complains. “Am I wearing a T-shirt that says Stupid?”

I wait until he and Quincy are through the tunnel, headed back to Briggs Field. Then I suggest to Benton that he should consider possibilities that might explain the DNA recovered from the panties Julianne Goulet had on when her body was found.

“If one wanted to be one hundred percent certain the DNA is Martin Lagos’s,” I elaborate as we begin walking again, “the FBI should have checked it against the original analysis done by the Virginia labs in 1996. The profile also should have been compared to his mother’s. Her blood card from the autopsy my former northern district office did should still be in her file.”

“As I understand it, all of the appropriate steps have been taken,” Benton says with no inflection in his voice as if he’s parroting what he’s been told. “The DNA’s been verified as Martin Lagos’s. Nothing in the CODIS database has been entered in error or altered, I’m assured.”

“You actually asked the question?”

“I presented the possibility to Granby. It would have to be someone at his level to discreetly question the lab director in Quantico.”

“If you didn’t have people gunning for you before, now you certainly will.”

“Nothing is out of line. The DNA recovered from the panties shows a direct maternal relationship to Gabriela Lagos.”

“New analysis of her blood card was done?” I push him on this.

“I’m telling you what I was told,” he says in a way that continues to concern me.

“If it really is Martin Lagos’s DNA, that argues against him being dead,” I say to him. “The test results seem to support that he murdered Julianne Goulet unless his DNA got on the panties in some way other than his depositing it on them.”

“I’m thinking that’s the only other explanation.”

“What you’re suggesting would be rare if not impossible. Laboratory contamination after seventeen years wouldn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t think it would.”

“Semen, skin cells?” I suppose one or the other was what was recovered and tested.

“Blood,” Benton says.

“Visible blood. You’re right. That seems too obvious. Why would the killer leave his blood on a pair of panties? How could that happen and he didn’t notice and realize what it would mean when the panties were analyzed?”

“What if someone kept a sample of Martin’s blood all these years?” Benton asks.

“It would have had to be preserved properly. Frozen, in other words,” I say dubiously. “You’re talking about something planned well in advance by someone who knew what he was doing. And you have to ask why a blood sample of his would be stored to begin with. By whom and for what purpose?”

“What about people who exchange blood-vial jewelry? They wear it around their necks.” Benton is looking for any possible explanation because he has misgivings, sinister ones that he’s not going to verbalize.

He doesn’t want to openly accuse. He wants me to figure it out.

“What if he’d exchanged something like that with someone?” he asks.

“And seventeen years later this person uses it to frame him in multiple homicides?”

“I just know DNA from a blood sample was identified as Martin Lagos’s and I’m coming up with anything I can think of to explain how that could have happened, Kay. Besides the obvious.”

“The obvious being a problem with CODIS and your fear that people like Granby are lying to you.”

“I wish I’d never mentioned it to him.”

“Who else could you mention it to?”

“To you, to someone I trust with my life.” He doesn’t mention Lucy because he won’t. “I’m going around him every chance I get.”

Ahead of us a dark brick warehouse looms, its hundreds of windows blanked out by the sun.

“Saying someone was wearing Martin Lagos’s blood in a vial on a necklace and then decided to use it to frame him?” I play it out. “Days, not to mention years, without being air-dried or properly stored and you can forget it. The blood would have decomposed, the DNA destroyed by bacteria or UV light if it was exposed to the sun.”

“What if it had been kept in a lab for some reason?”

“Not our labs in Virginia or Washington either,” I remind him. “There would have been no blood drawn, obviously, because there was no case, no autopsy, not if Martin Lagos jumped off the Fourteenth Street Bridge and his body was never found. When the police worked his mother’s murder and realized he was missing, I assume they got his DNA profile from a toothbrush, his hairbrush, something like that.”

“Yes,” Benton answers. “I’m not saying it isn’t his blood. I’m saying I don’t understand how it got there and I don’t trust it worth a damn. It’s what someone wants us to think.”

“What does the BAU say about what you’re suggesting?” I can only imagine the reaction.

“They think I’ve been doing this too long.”

“You won’t retire. That’s not you.”

He’s not going to teach somewhere or be one more former FBI profiler out there who’s a hired gun or on TV whenever there’s a big crime or a big trial.

“I’m pissing everybody off and talking to you without authorization. I’ve talked to Lucy and you know that without my saying it,” Benton says. “If they find out, well why should I even care anymore? As far off course as this has gotten and what it very likely means…Christ, Granby and all of them can go to hell.”