Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(32)
“Thank you,” I murmured, and I meant it with every atom of my being.
Harriet leaned back in her chair then and regarded me over the tops of our respective coffee cups. “As I said earlier,” she began, instantly and effortlessly making the switch from shaman to scientist and from comforter to investigator, “we were able to obtain a DNA profile, but even though we’ve continued running it through CODIS from time to time, so far there are no matches.”
“Did you find anything else in the den?” I asked. “Things like items of clothing might help us identify the victim?”
Harriet shook her head. “We found nothing,” she said, “not in the den and not anywhere around it either. We searched the whole area, checking bear scat for something that shouldn’t have been there—buttons, rivets, or zipper fragments—that would have indicated the presence of clothing. Nada. The den was close enough to the lake that I suspect anything else might have gotten washed away during the breakup, something most people in Anchorage would find disturbing, since Eklutna Lake is the main source of the city’s water supply.”
“Do you think the victim was killed there or somewhere else?” I asked.
“In my opinion it’s likely the homicide occurred somewhere else before the body was transported to the lake and dumped. The lack of clothing suggests some effort to make identification of the remains as difficult as possible, but things have certainly changed on that score, haven’t they, Mr. Beaumont?” Harriet added with a small smile. “Do you happen to know if there’s a way for me to access Jared Danielson’s DNA?”
At the time Jared was leaving our house in Bellingham three days earlier, I’d suggested that he submit a DNA sample to something like Ancestry.com, but even had he done so immediately, getting his profile would probably take several weeks. What was needed now was a much faster turnaround. In the old days, I’d had friends in the crime lab who would have helped out in a heartbeat. Now, however, there was a good chance that train had gone off the rails.
“I might be able to get one,” I said dubiously. “Why?”
“I’ll need to notify AST about this development,” she said, “but before I call them in, I’d like to be able to provide a positive ID.”
I knew exactly what Harriet was doing—allowing me a short window in which I was free to proceed with my own investigation before she was obliged to call in the home team.
“Do you happen to have Geoffrey’s case number handy?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s on the box,” she told me. “Hang on. I’ll go get it.”
Chapter 12
While Harriet went to retrieve the banker’s box, I hauled out my phone. A few months prior, I’d been embroiled in an investigation into what eventually turned out to be a case of wrongful imprisonment. Close to twenty years earlier, a young man named Mateo Vega had been a recent college graduate living and working in Seattle when his girlfriend, a young woman named Emily Anne Tarrant, was murdered shortly after she and Mateo attended a summertime beach party. Unfortunately for Mateo, other guests at the party had witnessed and been willing to testify to the fact that the two of them—Mateo and Emily Anne—had engaged in a heated argument as they were leaving the party shortly before her homicide.
The flawed police investigation that followed had focused totally on the boyfriend, to the exclusion of any and all other potential suspects. Two separate male DNA profiles had been found on the body, and one of those belonged to Mateo. That was no surprise, since Mateo told investigators that he and Emily had engaged in consensual sex prior to attending the party. Nonetheless, at the urging of his public defender, Mateo had eventually accepted a plea deal to a lesser charge of second-degree homicide in order to avoid going to trial on first-degree homicide and risking a possible life sentence.
Released on parole after serving sixteen years in prison, Mateo had gone to work for the same people who’d employed him prior to his being sent to prison, and it was his employers who brought me into the case by way of my involvement with TLC, The Last Chance, a volunteer cold-case outfit for which I’ve done some work in retirement.
In the course of my investigation, I discovered that neither of the two profiles taken from the homicide victim’s body at the crime scene had ever been uploaded into CODIS. One of those profiles had, of course, belonged to the boyfriend, who was also the presumed killer. The second profile wouldn’t have rung any investigative bells at the time, because at that point the person involved was still a juvenile with no police record. It wasn’t until much later when I came along that the second crime-scene profile was finally uploaded into the system. Once that happened, alarm bells started going off all over the place, because by then that innocent-looking kid from way back then had turned into a convicted serial killer, and Emily Anne Tarrant had been his first victim.
Over the years I had done a lot of work with the folks at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, and I knew many of them personally. When I had asked Gretchen Walther, one of the crime lab’s DNA techs, to look into the Emily Anne Tarrant homicide, she did so as a personal favor to me. Although she hadn’t been responsible for the clerical error that resulted in the profiles not being uploaded in a timely fashion, she happened to be the one who discovered the oversight.