The question surprised her into facing Christine again. “Now and then.”
“Asking you out?”
Theresa cut the topic off without heat. “That would be problematic. I met him the day my fiance died.”
“Yeah, but…he seems nice. I saw him on TV yesterday, explaining how they tossed a camera into this domestic standoff. Nice dimples. I’m just saying, perhaps you should let him buy you dinner, put him out of his misery.”
Happy to discuss anyone but herself, Theresa pointed out, “A guy who’s seen with as many different women as he is is hardly miserable.”
“But he’s gorgeous,” the young woman persisted, teasing.
No one had dared to tease her for eight months, and it felt kind of good. “Think this through, Christine. This is a man whose entire job is to manipulate people, to get them to do what he wants them to do. Why would I want to date someone like that?”
“Ahem. Did you miss the gorgeous part?”
“I didn’t miss it. I’m just ignoring it. Besides, Rachael keeps me busy enough. She’s got a concert tonight, a school talent show this Wednesday, and she’s working on a ski trip. Doubling as her chauffeur eats up all my spare time.”
Theresa stepped out of the way as another pathologist shuffled in, his nose buried in a thick autopsy report. He began to ask Christine about a victim’s spleen, but she interrupted him. “How about Dr. Banachek, then? He’s cute.”
Theresa couldn’t help but laugh as Dr. Banachek, rotund, bespectacled, and old enough to be her grandfather, blinked at them in confusion. “I can’t go out with Phil. He’s married.”
“But,” he said, “I
CHAPTER 11
The lightening of her mood didn’t last one flight of stairs, and by the time she reached the trace evidence lab, she could feel the wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. Don spotted it too. “What are you looking so glum about?”
She perched on a task chair, hoping the hard rubber seat would massage out the imprint on her butt left by the ammo box handle, and rolled a few feet closer to him. “Jillian Perry.”
“The suicide-by-freezing?”
“Alleged suicide. Maybe accidental. Maybe homicide. I don’t know.”
He unwrapped a sterile, disposable scalpel and used it to cut a tiny square from a swab. The white cotton had barely been stained. “You know, you give me swabs for DNA analysis, you could at least make sure they have some DNA on them first.”
“That’s from the straps of the bra used to strangle Sarah Taylor. No blood, sorry. I’m hoping for some skin cells from the killer’s hands.”
“This was her bra,” he stated.
“Yep.”
“Which she wore right up against her skin.”
“Hey, I don’t make the circumstances, I just react to them. Sure, you’ll probably find a mixture, but the other half of it will most likely be male and then you can do Y-STRs.” She rested her chin on one hand.
“Which we don’t have a database of yet.” Y-STRs were the target strands on the Y chromosome used for DNA testing. They were useful for separating male-female mixtures of the same type of cells, but the results hadn’t been compiled into a database for years and years, as with the older PCR and STR analyses. They would need a suspect to compare to any Y-STRs found, and so far the cops didn’t have one.
“It can’t be that hard. They do it on TV all the time.”
He dropped the tuft of cotton into a microtube, squeezed the flip cap shut, and wrote a number on it with a thin Sharpie marker. “Did your Jillian Perry have any signs of violence?”
“Not a one.”
“Well then.”
Theresa sat up and buttoned her lab coat. “Yeah. I should probably just write it up and forget about it.”
“You probably should.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“No one can figure out what she died of. How often does that happen?”
“Lots of times. Heart attacks, SIDS…often there’s no obvious pathology.”
“It’s bugging Christine too.”
He folded the shirt back into its original packaging and pulled out the red evidence tape. “Oh, boy. You and Christine together. Jillian Perry’s case will remain open for the next hundred years.”
She watched him fill his row of microtubes, using a repeater pipette to dispense a reagent to break down the cells and release the DNA. “Don, do you like video games?”
He looked askance at her, but, as always, rolled with her shifts of mind. “They kept me sane during board exams. Why?”
“Jillian Perry’s husband has a game called Polizei. I mean, he created it, owns it, sells it, whatever you call it.”
“The guy who made that lives in Cleveland? I didn’t know that.”
“You’ve played it?”
“I never got all the way through. I get stuck at the banquet hall every time. At first you think these army- guard-looking guys are there to protect you, but once you close the doors they turn on you because they’re actually vampires, and-”
“Whoa. I’m not going to be playing it, thanks.”
“-it’s pretty cool,” he finished after gesturing with the pipette.
“Could I borrow it?”
“I thought you weren’t going to be playing it.”
“I’ll have Rachael handle the shooting and finding the secret passageways. How popular is this game?”
“It’s big. And getting bigger every day. If you’re a teenager and you’ve never heard of it, you’ll probably get beat up at school.”
“What a lovely analogy. So the guy who makes it must be pretty rich.”
“And getting richer.” He finished placing microtubes, one by one, into the incubator. “Why?”
“It kind of knocks out money as a motive.”
“Motive for what?”
“The perfect murder, apparently. One that doesn’t seem to be a murder, and probably isn’t.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
“I know. Tell me more about this game. I promise not to interrupt you this time.”
“I’d love to, but it’s time for lunch and I’m supposed to meet Janelle for a pizza. Want to join us?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got some samples from the clothing that I want to run through the FTIR.”
He slipped a timer into the pocket of his lab coat to remind him of when the DNA samples would be ready to come out of the incubator and stood up. Then he added, without looking at her, “It’s nice to see you semi-obsessing over a case again. But I wouldn’t let Leo catch you after you stuck him with that defense expert’s visit on Friday.”
“Catch me doing what?”
“Breathing.”
She watched him leave. His current girlfriend worked at the Rainbow and Babies & Children’s Hospital next door, and the attached medical school had a food court. Theresa felt a twinge of guilt at not being able to recall the last time she’d accompanied him to lunch; she usually liked to meet his girlfriends. Not one had yet lived up to her standards, any more than had Rachael’s boyfriends. She wanted perfection for the people she cared about, and she cared about Don.
