Chapter 70
THIS WAS ANOTHER reason Private was the best place for Justine to work, or investigate a murder. Processing DNA took an eternity at the city lab because of the length of the line and the sheer volume of cases. At Private, it would take twenty-four hours from the git to the go because the forensic lab was Private’s, and because Wendy Borman was job one.
The basement level was blazing with artificial light at four in the morning. Sci’s crew had been working for twenty hours straight, running swabs over Wendy Borman’s clothes, which had been stored in the LAPD evidence room for five years.
The clothing had been packaged correctly after Borman’s body was discovered, but the rain and garbage had already contaminated the evidence. Still, more sensitive equipment and a new form of capturing trace had emerged since the murder. It was called “touch DNA.”
Sci believed in happy endings, and his optimism drove him across the desert of repetitive tasks, inconclusive results, and negative findings.
He had ordered the Borman clothing to be swabbed under the left arm of the jersey shirt and in the fold of a sock, places that hadn’t been soaked by the rain.
After separating the DNA from the substrate and copying the DNA in a thermal cycler, Sci ran the samples through an instrument the size and shape of an office copy machine, a method called capillary electrophoresis. In this procedure, the material was sent through a long pathway, a capillary, that separated the DNA with attached dye by size and electrical charge. The output would be displayed as an electrophoretogram, ready to be matched against the national DNA database.
Kat’s image was on one of Sci’s desktop monitors. He glanced in her direction to tell her how the work was going.
“Still here with me, sweetheart?”
“You forget the time difference, Sci,” she said. “There are other things I should be doing.”
“Like what? Name something.”
“Anything would be more productive, darling. Defragging my hard drive. Organizing my tax receipts. Having a nice lunch with Helga, whom I despise—Sci. Look at your integrator. You have something there!”
Sci looked at the printout. There was one set of peaks—and then another. It was a freaking miracle: two single-source samples had been identified, both with Y chromosomes.
This was a bombshell, actually.
Sci turned to Kit-Kat, his open mouth curling into a smile.
“Two males put their hands on Wendy Borman’s clothes. You believe it, Kat? We’ve got evidence. Beautiful, solid evidence.”
Kat was saying, “I must be bringing you the luck.”
“Baby, baby, what a lucky charm you are.”
“So, you are welcome, and I will be going now.”
“Stick around while I run the profiles through the system.”
“You are looking for a spindle in a haystack,” said Kat. “And there are haystacks out to the horizon. As far as the eye can see.”
“We can pass the time together, anyway,” said Sci. “I like it when you’re here with me.”
Kat smiled. “Okay. Let’s dance, good-looking.”