Mel had been quiet for a while. Now she spoke up. “What do you mean, old stuff?” she asked.
“Before the crime lab moved into the new building, they had storage facilities here, there, and the next place, and things were a mess. No one could find anything. Once we had everything gathered in one spot, it was my job to organize it. And I did. Working with years of unprocessed rape kits was no fun. I developed a system and was starting to get it organized, but then Yolanda came along and started messing around with those old evidence kits, ones from ten or fifteen or even twenty years ago. And even though I’ve tried talking to her about it, she hasn’t stopped, and Mrs. Hennessey won’t make her stop, either, probably because Yolanda is free and I’m not.”
“Free?” I asked.
“Right,” Analise said. “Someone else, I’m not sure who, is paying her wages. Mine come out of the crime lab budget. But I’ll be a lot more expensive when this is all over. I’m on leave to use up the rest of my vacation. After that, I’ll quit. Then I’m going to court.”
I made the connection then. Yolanda Andrade had to be the DNA profiler SASAC was paying for, the one I’d heard about on Friday night at the fund-raiser. When I glanced in Mel’s direction, she was grim-faced. And I knew why. If you’re going to launch a vigilante action, how much better to do it against people the cops didn’t know they were looking for. Those long-stored rape kits, with their unidentified DNA profiles, would be an open book. One of those could very well lead back to LaShawn Tompkins, for example, and to many others as well. Like to any number of ex-cons whose DNA profiles had been entered into the CODIS system or into our statewide DNA database simply because they’d been locked up in our prison system. Knowing we had stumbled into something important, I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.
“Did she ever get any hits on those old cases?” Mel asked. Her tone was easy, conversational, but I knew she was as on edge as I was.
“I never saw any,” Analise answered. “Getting a hit is a big deal, you see. We mark them off on a board and everything. We’re at 406 right now—406 hits, that is. And once there is one, the kit is moved to a different section in the evidence room—from cold case to pending.”
“Another part of your filing system?” Mel asked.
Analise nodded.
“Tell us about it,” Mel said.
“The filing system? It’s really nothing more or less than a shelf list, like the shelf lists kept by libraries everywhere. It’s an inventory system—a way to tell what’s missing and what isn’t.”
“Except this one isn’t about books,” I suggested.
“I added a few bells and whistles,” Analise said modestly.
“What kinds of bells and whistles?”
“The kits are filed by year and date,” she said. “A year or so ago, once I got wise to what Yolanda was doing, I started keeping track. I assigned each kit its own separate number—a sort of Dewey decimal number of rape kits. And that’s one of the things I did every single day—checked the shelves to see if any of my control numbers were missing.”
“And if they were?” Mel asked.
“I wrote down the kit number, noted when it left the shelf, when it came back on its own, or when I found it somewhere it didn’t belong.”
“You don’t still happen to have that list, do you?” Mel asked.
“Of course I do,” Analise returned. “Not here, not with me. But at home. Would you like to have a copy?”
“Yes,” Mel said. “It would be really helpful.”
“Fine, then,” Analise told us. “Once I finish here we can stop by the house. But I have to finish shelving the rest of the books.”
I had just that moment fallen in love with Analise Kim and her insatiable love of order. In fact, I had to resist the temptation to reach out and smother that incredibly wonderful record-keeping woman in an old-fashioned bear hug, but that might have been as unwelcome as an improperly aligned book spine. “We wouldn’t even consider taking you away from that,” I said.
At which point my phone rang. The withering look Analise sent in my direction made it clear cell phones were an unwelcome intrusion in her library. I raced for the door.
“It’s me,” Todd Hatcher said. “I was hoping to talk to you. I’ve turned up some pretty interesting stuff today, but it’s getting late. I’m about to head home.”
“You’re still at Belltown Terrace?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I ordered a pizza for dinner. Hope you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Hope it was good. Now, did Ross Connors happen to give you access to the SHIT squad’s LexisNexis program?”
“No,” Todd said. “He didn’t need to. I have my own. Why?”