No Way Out

“I’m coming.”

Juanita signaled Alex over to her desk with a flip of her index finger. He leaned forward when she touched her lips conspiratorially.

“He takes his coffee weak, with plenty of milk.”

Juanita smiled and leaned back smugly, as if this was supposed to be telling Alex something. He had no doubt that it was, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out what.

Seconds later he entered the room where Jerry Cole and Andi were standing. Andi ushered him in, while Cole hovered nervously in a tense, fidgety manner by the chair opposite the desk from which he had just risen. Andi closed the door behind Alex, who found himself facing a thin man of about forty with a stooped posture who kept rubbing his hands together in an almost obsequiousness manner. He felt the same feelings towards him that Andi had felt towards Sherman that first day at Levine and Webster, only more so. The man reminded him of Uriah Heap in David Copperfield.

“Alex this is Jerry Cole. As you know, he works in the same lab as Victor Alvarez.”

“Oh please, sit down,” said Alex, pointing to the chair. Cole sat down, awkwardly, looking around as if another chair for Alex might materialize from nowhere if he just waited long enough.

To put him at ease about the fact that he was standing, Alex went and stood by the window, while Andi took her seat.

“Did you have a good flight?”

“Oh er, yes.”

They had paid for his two-way flight and even for him to stay overnight and return tomorrow, so it wouldn’t be so stressful, making the round trip in one day.

“Mr. Cole,” said Andi, “why don’t you tell Mr. Sedaka what you told me.”

Cole took a nervous breath and started speaking

“First of all I can tell you something about the conditions in the lab. We were hopelessly understaffed. That’s why we have a huge backlog of cases that are deemed less important. And that means there are loads of samples waiting to be tested and scanned into the system.”

“And is that relevant to the Claymore case?” asked Alex. “I mean are there samples sitting there that you think could clear my client?”

“Well I didn’t see the tests being done on the Claymore or Newton samples but it’s relevant in the sense that we work under so much pressure that it’s very easy for mistakes to be made. Sometimes we had lab assistants with no college qualifications working virtually unsupervised.”

“And what sort of things can go wrong in practice? With DNA I mean?”

“Well the most obvious danger is cross-sample contamination.”

“How can that happen specifically?”

“Well you know about Polymerase Chain Reaction to increase the evidence sample.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that if there’s even the slightest contamination that gets into the sample before they put it into the thermal cycler then the contamination gets multiplied along with the evidence sample.”

Alex nodded.

“I believe it’s called allele drop-in.”

Cole looked surprised.

“Oh you know about it.”

“Of course.”

Alex was by now getting irritated. He thought that this man would have some specific information that would help them. But all he had were the vague generalizations about DNA labs in general that Alex had already learned from his preparation for this case.

“Well the thing is, I remember they were very busy on the day that the Claymore sample was tested. I know because the lab assistant who tested it seemed very nervous.”

Alex picked up on this.

“What was his name?”

“Steven, I think. Yes… Steven Johnson.”

“And do you have any idea what he was nervous about?”

“No, not really. I just noticed he was nervous. You have to remember it was busy for me too.”

“Do you also do DNA analysis?”

Cole appeared not to have heard the question, almost like he was in a trance.

“Mr. Cole?”

“Oh sorry… no… no I didn’t. I worked in the Forensic Alcohol Section. Sometimes I had to cover for some one in the Toxicology or Controlled Substance sections. But not DNA.”

Alex noticed the flicker in Andi’s eyes. She had picked up on the past tense. Alex, of course, had already known this. Cole had told him. But he hadn’t been so willing to say why and Alex wasn’t ready to close in on that yet.

“Any particular reason for that?”

“No, it’s just the way it was. We all had our jobs to do and different lab assistants worked in the different departments.”

Alex decided to plump for a wild guess, based on Jerry Cole’s apparent age.

“But weren’t you the most senior of the lab assistants working there?”

Jerry smiled proudly.

“Yes I was.”

“Then surely they should have let you work in the DNA section. I mean, let’s face it, that must be the most important section there — certainly the most prestigious.”

“Yes but the head of the lab was against me because…”

He trailed off into embarrassed silence.

“Anyway, I didn’t work in the DNA section.”

Alex realized that the time had come to probe the issue of the past tense.

“But you don’t work there any more — at the lab I mean.”

There were two possibilities and both involved Cole being pushed rather than taking a walk of his own free will. The better scenario was that Cole knew too much and was sacked to silence and discredit him. The less attractive alternative was that he was sacked for some legitimate reason and was now looking for revenge. In fact it was more complicated than that because even if it was former, the lab would probably claim the latter and if it was the latter, Jerry Cole would no doubt hide his shame behind the former.

“No, they fired me.”

“What for?”

“They said I made some mistake on a test batch. Normally, if you make a mistake like that, they send you for retraining. But in my case they decided to sack me.”

“But you did make a mistake, though,” Alex pressed on. “I mean it’s not like they made it up, surely?”

He left it to Andi to monitor Cole’s face. Alex just wanted to hear Cole’s reply.

“I don’t know. I mean they say I did, but I have no way of knowing. It’s not like they showed me the results in writing. They just told me I’d messed up, pointed out that I’d had one warning already and then gave me fifteen minutes to clear out my locker. They didn’t even let me work out the day or the week or let me say goodbye to my friend.”

Alex picked up on the singular, but ignored it.

“Did you say you already had a warning?”

“Yes, I mean I did make a mistake before that with a live batch. It was just an accident, using a stale solution that I thought was fresh. But that just goes to prove what I said about working under pressure.”

“Did you say anything to anyone about that Steven Johnson looking nervous?”

“What?” Again the loss of attention span, or maybe just a misunderstanding of the question.