There’s a long, uncomfortable silence.
“Well, we’re FBI,” Jimmy says. “We don’t take orders from Sheriff Mendall, or Chief whatever-the-hell-his-name-was at Redding PD.” To me he says, “Grab your vest.”
“Where are we going?” Like I don’t know.
“Swanson’s. When the dust settles, you can go in and see if his—” He almost says shine, but then remembers Walt is standing next to him. He pauses. “You can see if his track matches Sad Face.”
Slapping down the Velcro straps on my body armor, I make sure my Walther P22 is easily accessible and then throw on my black Windbreaker with FBI in large letters on the back.
Jimmy pauses and turns at the conference room door.
“You coming?” he says to Walt.
“Hell, yeah, I’m coming,” the sheriff growls.
*
“Shots fired! Shots fired!”
We’re still three minutes from the Swanson residence when the call comes out over TAC 3, the short-range tactical channel used by Redding PD for raids like this. We’ve been running with just lights up to this point, but now Walt hits the siren and the accelerator at the same time. We race through traffic, blowing through red lights and past parted traffic, wondering what kind of soup sandwich awaits us at the end of the road.
It’s bad.
The wail of an approaching siren sets the tone as we spill from the Expedition and onto the Swanson family’s front yard. The house is a typical middle-class two-story painted in earth tones with white shutters. A two-car attached garage is on the left, and the covered porch is wide enough for a pair of wooden rocking chairs.
The impeccable landscaping has three recent additions: Mrs. Swanson and two of the boys are flex-cuffed and facedown on the grass, a mix of shock and horror on their faces.
Inside the house, on the living room floor, seventeen-year-old Matt Swanson is fighting for his life. A silver universal remote control lies on the carpet two feet from his right hand. Steve Swanson is flex-cuffed on the carpet ten feet away. He’s in shock. His eyes are fixed on Matt, his eldest son. He’s oblivious to the whirlwind around him, to the shouted questions, to the drone of the arriving ambulance.
His shine is a beautiful sky-blue with a texture as smooth as glass. It’s lovely to behold; mesmerizing. Perhaps a reflection of the soul parked under the skin.
He’s not Sad Face.
He sings in the choir.
But some of us already knew that.
July 5, 6:33 P.M.
Jimmy answers the phone on the first ring, expecting Walt with an update on Matt Swanson’s condition. Jimmy made him promise to call before we headed back to the hotel. Shasta County isn’t on the hook for the shooting, but everyone is taking it pretty hard nonetheless. You don’t look down at a young kid bleeding out on his living room floor and not walk away with an empty hole in your chest.
“Diane? Yeah, hang on. Let me put you on speaker.” He pulls the phone away from his ear, presses a button, and lays it down on the nightstand next to the alarm clock.
“Go ahead, Diane.”
“Janet Burlingame tried calling you earlier this afternoon. She couldn’t get through, so she left the message with me.”
“Yeah, we were tied up.”
“I know,” Diane says.
“How do you know?” Jimmy replies.
“Please!”
“Right—the all-knowing super-analyst,” Jimmy chides, trying to project some humor with his words. It doesn’t work. He just doesn’t have it in him at the moment. “What did Janet say?”
“The DNA from the blood sample doesn’t match Chas, so it’s got to be the suspect’s. The bad news is she ran the profile through CODIS and didn’t get a hit.”
CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Indexing System, is a comprehensive repository of DNA data from across the country. It holds not just DNA profiles of certain convicted felons and sex offenders, but profiles from unsolved homicides and rapes. This allows the FBI to link cases that they otherwise couldn’t.
Say a murderer in Hawaii leaves behind his DNA at the crime scene and then ten years later he kills again in Maine. CODIS would automatically match the DNA from Hawaii to the new DNA from Maine, and investigators would know with certainty that the two cases are linked, though separated by a decade, a continent, and an ocean.
But it’s still just a database, and databases are only as good as the data within.
“No hit. You’re sure?” Jimmy says.
“Well,” Diane replies, “I didn’t run the test myself, but it’s a pretty simple hit-or-no-hit system, so, on Janet’s behalf, I’m going to say, yes, I’m sure.”
She’s a little testy.
“That just doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “Why would he go through all that trouble cleaning up, particularly using the bleach, if his DNA isn’t in the system?”
“No, think about it,” Jimmy says. “Remember Valerie Heagle? He washed her down with bleach before dumping her in the cemetery, and I’m betting he did it to the others as well; we just weren’t looking for it in the autopsies. And if Valerie hadn’t been found right after she was killed, the coroner might not have picked up on it.”
“That still doesn’t explain why,” I say. “He’s obviously not worried about us linking the cases together or he wouldn’t leave his twisted little signature behind.”