“Didn’t take long?” I asked. “Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’ve been complaining about this for months, but as soon as I send an attorney around, well, that gets a reaction, doesn’t it.”
“Complaining about…?” Mel said.
Analise Kim moved to the next section of shelves, retrieved the stool, and once again clambered up high enough to reach the topmost shelf. She returned two books and then sorted and reshelved several that must have been put away in the wrong order.
“About the hostile work environment at the crime lab,” she said in answer to Mel’s unfinished question.
“Mrs. Kim,” Mel said, “we seem to be coming in in the middle of something. If you wouldn’t mind bringing us up to speed…”
“I like order,” Analise declared. “I like order at work, at home, and here. That’s why I come here once a week to do what I’m doing now—putting books away. I like to know that every book is where it belongs. If I don’t put a book away properly, then the next person who needs it won’t be able to find it. If books are just put away anywhere, what you have is chaos.”
I couldn’t tell if Analise Kim was giving us a glimpse into her basic philosophy of life or if this was something else.
“Some people aren’t interested in keeping things in order,” she continued. “Or in doing them in a timely fashion.” Pausing to straighten the spines of books that were less than properly aligned, she muttered, “LIFO,” almost under her breath. “That’s the way we used to do it, before…”
I glanced at Mel, who seemed to be as mystified about all this as I was. “Excuse me?” she said.
“LIFO,” Analise said impatiently, as though we were dim beyond bearing. “As in Last In First Out, as opposed to FIFO—First In First Out. LIFO is how we do things here, too. When I come in, the returned books are stacked right there under the counter. The last ones to come in go back on the shelves first. And when I get to the last stack, the one in the back, I know I’m catching up. I like that. It makes me feel as though I’m accomplishing something. Not only that, the last books that come in are often the newest and the most popular—the ones with the biggest demand—so it’s important to get them back out first thing.”
That pretty well clarified one thing. We really were talking about Analise Kim’s philosophy of life, but we also needed to get her back on track.
“To go back to what you said before. I’m assuming LIFO is how you used to do things at the crime lab, but now something has changed and you don’t do things that way anymore. Is that correct?”
“What changed is she came along,” Analise declared. The vehemence she put behind that single “she” said volumes.
“By ‘she,’ you mean Destry Hennessey?” Mel asked.
“Oh, no. Not her,” Analise said quickly. “But since she’s in charge, she’s the one who could have fixed it—the one who should have put a stop to it.”
“Who then?” I insisted.
“Yolanda Andrade,” Analise replied.
“One of your coworkers?”
“Not exactly. I’m just a clerk. Yolanda’s an actual DNA analyst. So even though she’s much newer, she thinks she’s better than I am and she wants everyone to do things her way. When I told her that was wrong, that’s when it started.”
“What started?” I asked.
“Yolanda likes to mess with me. She puts evidence kits back in the wrong place, just because she knows it drives me crazy. When I come to work she’ll have moved things around on my desk—my stapler; my tape holder; my pencils. She’ll put them in different places on my desk or in different drawers. Sometimes, when I put my lunch in the refrigerator in the morning, I’ll come back at noon and it’ll be on a different shelf. Or in the garbage.”
Watching Analise’s fierce dealings with unaligned library books, I could see how this kind of harassment would drive her absolutely nuts. She was someone who required order as much as she did air to breathe.
But Ross had mentioned something about evidence-handling irregularities.
“About the LIFO thing…” I suggested.
“Yolanda is supposed to develop profiles on the most recent cases,” Analise returned. “That’s the whole reason they hired her, so the newest cases could be run through those new violent offender DNA databases. But she keeps rummaging around in the old stuff. I know, because she takes kits out of cold storage and then she doesn’t return them to where they’re supposed to go.”