“It is,” Stynes said. “
Again, the room fell silent. Stynes understood where Ashleigh was coming from-he felt the exact same way. At some point, he no longer cared what the answer was-yes, this man in the jail was Justin Manning or, no, the man in the jail wasn’t Justin Manning-he just wanted a final answer.
But their options for answering that question were limited.
“Look,” Stynes said. “I know how frustrating this is. I get it. If that man in the jail is your brother, then we convicted the wrong man twenty-five years ago. And that’s on me. Big-time. And if he’s not your brother, then I want to see him punished for harassing you.”
“He never told me he was Justin,” Janet said. “Never.”
“He still pretended to be Justin to some extent,” Stynes said. “People do that. They use the identities of deceased children because they know there isn’t much of a paper trail on a child. No arrests, no work history. It’s easy to acquire that information through a public record search and then get false identification made. He broke the law by doing that.” Stynes thought about it and chose the right words. “He raised your hopes. He led you on. That’s wrong.”
“So what are our options here, besides just waiting around?” Janet asked.
“Do you mean what options do we have for proving that man’s relationship or lack of one to you?” Stynes asked. “Absent a witness who will swear to something, which I don’t think we have, there’s only DNA or fingerprinting. Your brother didn’t have any prominent scars or anything like that, did he?”
Janet shook her head.
“So take a DNA sample,” Ashleigh said.
“From the man in the jail?” Stynes asked.
“Yes. Compare it to Mom. Then you’d know.”
“We already asked him to do that, and he didn’t respond,” Stynes said. “And we can’t just force him to do it. It’s invasive. We’d have to have a court order, and in a case like this, I don’t know if a judge would grant it. They tend to do that with sexual assault and murder cases, but with this-” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Can’t you just get him to lick an envelope or something?” Ashleigh asked. “Or steal his gum?”
“This isn’t TV,” Stynes said.
“What would it take to get a DNA sample from the body in Justin’s grave?” Janet asked.
“You’d still need a court order, but there wouldn’t be any obstacles to getting it because the family would be making the request. But the judge would have to weigh the cost and time against the potential value that would come out of it. It might be a tough sell. And if I can be perfectly frank, we wouldn’t even know how much viable DNA they could get off the body. Remember, he was buried in those woods for a number of weeks. The body was skeletonized when we found it. And there was no embalming, no preservation possible. After another twenty-five years in the ground, who knows?”
“But it’s possible?” Janet asked.
“It is possible. They can do great things these days. They may be able to recover some tissue or even something from the bone marrow or the teeth. Then they’d take a cheek swab from you and compare. But you still have to get a judge to agree to have the city take on the cost in a case in which there is no abundantly clear evidence to justify the exhumation.”
Janet and Ashleigh exchanged a look. They knew something.
“What?” Stynes asked.
“Did you get my phone message today?” Janet asked.
“I did, but I didn’t have time to call back.”
“Did you hear what the message said?” she asked.
“You said something about a donation and a burial,” he said.
Janet told him, and as she spoke, the words from the message came back to Stynes again. And then he understood the look exchanged between Janet and Ashleigh. They had the money to exhume and rebury the body. Acquiring the court order would be easier than he thought.
They could finally find out who was buried in that grave, if it was Justin or someone else.
“Okay,” Stynes said. “It should take a couple of days to get the ball rolling. The next big thing for you, Janet, is that they’ll take a sample from your cheek. It’s quick and painless.”
“Detective?”
Stynes looked up. So did Janet and Ashleigh. Behind them, in the doorway that led back to the bedrooms, stood Bill Manning. Stynes wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there. He must have walked up silently, but he acted as though he had heard a fair amount of the conversation.
“I’d like to give a sample for this test,” Bill said.
“Dad, it’s not-”
“Actually, it might help,” Stynes said. “If the sample in the ground is degraded, having another point of reference would help. Are you sure you want to do that, Mr. Manning?”
“I said I did.”
“Then I’ll include that in the request,” Stynes said, but he said those words to Bill Manning’s back. He had already turned back down the hallway.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Late that night, after Detective Stynes had left the house promising to call and keep Janet up-to-date as things progressed, and after Ashleigh went upstairs to bed, Janet knocked on her father’s bedroom door.
She knew he’d be awake. The TV still droned behind the closed door, and she had noticed over the previous six months or so that he was staying up later than ever before. He used to be an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, bragging about being able to wake up at five thirty on the dot every day without the help of an alarm clock. But unemployment had shifted his living patterns, and even after eleven Janet knew she could likely catch him still awake, staring at a baseball game or news show.
“Dad?” she said.
“Come in,” he said from the other side of the door.
Janet didn’t think she’d heard him correctly. He always opened the door and then treated his room like a private sanctuary, a boundary territory not to be crossed by anyone. She’d grown used to talking to him in the doorway, a far cry from the moments of her childhood when she could climb into bed with her mother in the morning. Her dad would be gone to work, and Janet would sneak in and lie next to her mother, feel her warmth and affection.
Inside the room, her dad lay across the bed, the covers thrown back. He wore a white T-shirt and a striped pair of boxer shorts. Without a regular shirt on, Janet saw that he had gained some weight in the preceding months. His belly bulged against the cotton fabric of the T-shirt more than she would have expected.
He didn’t mute the volume on the TV or turn to face her. Janet looked at the screen. In black and white Humphrey Bogart and a band of American soldiers stormed their way across the desert.
“I’m sorry to interrupt.”
“Are you going out?” he asked.
“No, it’s too late for that.”
“Well, the other night…” He left the thought unfinished.
The room filled with the sound of tank and artillery fire. “Dad? Can you turn that down a little?”
He frowned but thumbed the volume control. He still didn’t look at her.
“Dad, I just wanted to know why you volunteered to give that sample tonight. You’ve acted so cold about everything else. It seemed out of the blue.”
He kept his eyes directed to the TV screen. He looked like he was planning on ignoring Janet and hoping she’d go away. But she wouldn’t go away, and before she’d said anything else, he said, “Won’t that put the
