11
After Emma signed a release at the morgue and had her mouth swabbed for a DNA sample, I drove her back to her hotel. I was on my way home when DeShay called and asked me to meet him at the House of Pies on Kirby.
When I walked into the diner-House of Pies isn’t only about dessert-I was never so grateful for the combined odors of baking pies and greasy hamburgers. I’d always loved this restaurant, not only because they have about forty different desserts on the menu, but because the thin neon-red tube lights bordering the mirrored back wall, the mismatched Tiffany light fixtures and the sixties-style wallpaper were so gaudy and wonderful all at the same time. Open twenty-four/seven, this relic must be an ideal place for homicide cops who often worked nonstop on a case.
DeShay waved to me from the back of the small restaurant, and seconds later I slid into an ancient twoseater booth. “Feels like that morgue smell is still clinging to me like cobwebs,” I said.
“All in your head, Abby, my girl. You smell like you always do. Delicious. Almost as delicious as this.” He picked up his fork and dug into a humongous slice of fresh apple pie.
A maroon-clad waitress appeared and took my order. Her apron and the gray-trimmed uniform pockets and collar matched the retro atmosphere. I scanned the place mat that served as the pie menu and went with lemon meringue-even though strawberry cheesecake would have tasted oh-so-wonderful in all its twice-as- many-calories splendor. With Jeff not around to kick me out of bed and into my running shoes every morning, I hadn’t been exercising, and reckless cheesecake intake requires plenty of exercise.
“Was that your first time at the morgue?” DeShay loaded up his fork again.
“Yes. Took us only a half hour, but that was about twenty-five minutes too long. Apparently they had a decomp and decomps stink up even the office areas.”
“Indeed they do,” he said, still attacking his pie and doing plenty of damage.
“When you told me to meet you here, I thought I’d be chewing Turns and not eating. But pie is a healing food, right?”
“Thinking like that, I’d say you’re almost a cop, Abby.” DeShay grinned.
My lemon meringue slice and a stoneware mug of coffee arrived and we ate in silence for a while, both of us lost in pie heaven. Once I’d wiped out half the dessert, I said, “I take it you found out something about Christine O’Meara?”
“We did,” he said.
“We?”
“I told you this isn’t my case,” DeShay said. “The more I thought about it, I knew I had to talk to Don White, tell him what you wanted me to check on. Guy wasn’t too happy, but that’s nothing I didn’t expect.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. People like Emma hire PIs, and the PIs do their job. Simple as that. Fact is, he’s more focused on the baby’s death than the mother’s disappearance right now. Even gave me the go-ahead to research Christine, though he grumbled long and hard.”
“I apologize for putting you in that position. I realize you have to work with those guys every day.”
“You think I care if that old fart White wants to whine?” DeShay said.
“Obviously you don’t,” I said with a smile. “What did you find out?”
He shoveled in several mouthfuls before he said, “Christine O’Meara was arrested once. Picked up for loitering along with several other
“She was a prostitute as well as a drunk?” I hoped Emma was unaware, if this were true.
“I don’t think so. If she was a true pro, she’d have a distinguished rap sheet, but she was never arrested again.”
“You’re saying you got nothing useful from the arrest report?”
“She was picked up on South Main back when the city was trying to clean up that area. Astrodome-goers didn’t appreciate their kids seeing women wearing postage-stamp skirts leaning into open car windows. Maybe her being there was bad luck.”
“Or she had a friend who was a prostitute?” I said.
“Or she was waiting for a bus. Or she was hanging around and looked the part, got caught in the net. The report is sketchy. Us cops are experts at sketchy. She made a deal for jail time served-a couple days-and that was it.”
“You don’t know who she was with when she was picked up?” I said.
“That would take some serious cross-checking of old records, use lots of my time for a questionable lead,” he said.
I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “Gosh, where do I go from here?”
DeShay reached into his jacket pocket and took out one of his business cards. “All is not lost, Abby girl. I did get two case numbers. Unidentified female homicide victims from 1997 who fit Christine O’Meara’s description.”
He held up the card and I snatched it, though I really wanted to throw my remaining pie in his face. “You always have to play around, don’t you?” Along with the case numbers, I read the name he’d written on the back of the card-Julie Rappaport. There were some numbers, too.
“I love to see you when you don’t get what you want,” DeShay said. “Great expression. You could do movies.”
“I will never so much as
“Julie works at the ME’s office, and you can talk to her about the unidentified corpses. But here’s the deal. White wants whatever you get as soon as you get it. I think he was secretly grateful you’d be going there instead of him. I’ve heard he and Benson switch off on morgue visits and it was Don’s turn. He hates that place.”
“I don’t blame him,” I said.
“Added to that, they landed a fresh case right when I was leaving Travis. They’ll be plenty busy today.”
“Julie Rappaport, huh? You’re sure she’ll talk to me, even though I’m not a cop?”
He nodded. “Yup. She’s waiting for your call. Nice little lady. Smart as hell.”
“You could go with me,” I said sweetly.
“I have a witness interview in about twenty minutes,” he said.
“I have to go back to that place alone?” I said.
“I got one word for you. Vicks.”
“What?”
He rubbed under his nose. “Right here. Vicks. Before you go in the building.”
“Ah. Gotcha,” I said.
I called Julie Rappaport right after I left DeShay and she told me to come to the ME’s office straightaway. Turned out Julie was a skeletal remains and cold-case expert, the HCME investigator who’d worked on Emma’s property when the bones were found. Not only was she the person who could help me learn whether Christine O’Meara was one of the unidentified corpses from 1997; she was working the baby case as well.
The receptionist behind the glass at the front desk remembered me from when I’d signed in earlier. Rappaport must have let her know I was coming, because she picked up the phone and made a call.
Julie came out and got me. Can’t say I recognized her from the other day, maybe because she wasn’t wearing fatigues. She was small-looked like a kid-and wore a black baseball cap with FORENSICS in white letters on the front and a denim jacket that had seen better days. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and brought out through the back of the cap. She smelled like bleach. I’d bet bleach was the chemical of choice in this place.
Once we were seated in her cubicle, I said, “I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to talk to me on such short notice.” I hadn’t had time to pick up Vicks, so I’d slathered Burt’s Bees raspberry lip balm under my nose. It wasn’t working. Even though this part of the building was shut off from the morgue, the smell of death hung in the air.
“No need to thank me,” she said. “I got excited when you called. Any chance I can put a cold case to rest is a great day for me. We get PIs in here on occasion, but none so highly recommended. DeShay thinks a lot of you.”
“That goes both ways. What have you got for me?”
“I pulled the tracking sheets on the two unidentifieds DeShay mentioned,” she said.
“What are tracking sheets?”
“They tell us what’s been done so far on a cold case to identify the remains, what avenues we’ve pursued, any subsequent evidence that was unearthed. In addition, since DNA from all unidentified bodies is entered into CODIS, we document when the DNA profile was done and submitted. What’s great is that today your client, Ms. Lopez, gave us DNA for the infant bones. But we can also match her DNA against these two cold cases, see if she’s related to either woman.”
I nodded. “You mentioned CODIS. That’s a police database, right?”
“Yes. Used all over the country. The Combined DNA Index System.”
“How long will it take to see if there’s a match to Emma in either case?”
“If this were a TV show, five minutes. In reality, cold cases aren’t a priority when you’ve got fresh homicides piling up.”
“Even the infant bones won’t be a priority?”
“Oh, yes. We’re already feeling the publicity heat on that one. The police need a positive ID to pursue leads, so we’ll run a mitochondrial DNA comparison against Emma Lopez pretty quickly. Fortunately, our facility is one of very few in the U.S. that does mitochondrial. I extracted the DNA from the baby’s femur myself, and we should have the results tomorrow.”
“I take it that’s a super-special DNA process?”
“That’s right. It works only through maternal lineage.”
