Linda Fairstein - The DeadHouse

I slept fitfully and got out of bed at six-thirty, when I heard the thud of the Sunday Times landing against my door.

I poured coffee beans into the machine and opened the paper while they ground and the brew began to drip, looking for stories about local crimes in the Metro section, before turning to the national and international news.

Mike was right about the food supply in my home, too. There were three English muffins left in my freezer, so I defrosted one and popped it into the toaster. I sat at the table and made a shopping list of groceries to order, figuring that there were some new leaves easier to turn over in my life than others. Filling the bare cupboards was one of them.

"When the phone rang at seven-thirty, I was sure it was Jake, and I picked it up, eager to make our plans for the holiday week. "Alex? It's Ned Tacchi. Sorry to hit you so early on a Sunday, but we picked one up during the night that you'll want to know about."

Tacchi and his partner, Alan Vandomir, were two of my favorite detectives at Special Victims. Smart, sensitive, and good-humored, they got victims through the investigative process with kid gloves. When they called me, I knew it was something I needed to hear.

"Sure. "What did you get?"

"Push-in sodomy. East Sixty-fourth Street, right off York Avenue. Fifty-five-year-old woman coming home from a Christmas party at three this morning."

"How is she?"

"Seems to be doing okay. She's in the ER now. We'll pick her up as soon as she's released and do a more thorough interview."

"Injuries?"

"Nope. In fact, she called nine-one-one to report it, but didn't want to go to the hospital. The perp pushed in behind her when she opened the vestibule door. A bit tipsy."

"Him or her?"

"She was. A little too much holiday cheer. He knew exactly what he wanted. Told her to get down on her knees, right there in the hallway. First he lifted her sweater, opened her bra, and put his mouth on her breasts. Then he exposed himself and made her put her mouth on his penis."

"Did he ejaculate?"

"Yeah. But she went right upstairs and brushed her teeth. Doubt we'll get anything for DNA, but she still said she had an awful taste in her mouth. That's probably more psychological than anything else. We asked the nurse examiner to do the swabs anyway. We're also having them swab her breasts."

"Good thinking." Even the microscopic amounts of saliva that might be found on the victim's torso would yield enough material for the newer kind of DNA process-STR testing-in which "short tandem repeats" of the genetic fingerprint are multiplied millions of times to yield the unique, identifiable patterns.

"Get her toothbrush, too. You may get lucky. Did he take anything?"

"Yeah. Left with her pocketbook. Didn't get much. She was holding her keys in her hand the whole time. Just had thirty bucks in her purse, along with some business cards and her cell phone. Schmuck dumped the bag in a trash basket a block away. Cell phone is gone, but we've got the purse. I'm sending the cards over to latent prints, hoping they can lift something off the surfaces, if he touched them."

"Has she canceled the cell phone yet?"

"No. We told her not to for twenty-four hours."

"Great. When I get to the office in the morning, I'll fax you up a subpoena." Most of the guys who stole cell phones during robberies were stupid enough to make calls on them until the phones were cut off or the batteries went dead. With records from the companies available in three or four days, we could often track down the offenders through the calls they placed to friends or relatives.

"Thought Battaglia might want to know that the commissioner is looking over a bunch of cases in the Nineteenth Precinct. They're probably going to declare this as part of a pattern." "I didn't know we had anything else like this going on." "Not up at our shop. But the precinct has about four other push-in robberies between Sixtieth and Sixty-eighth Streets, Second Avenue to the river, since the beginning of November. Mostly weekends. All the victims are women. This is the first time the perp has forced a sexual assault, but the MO is pretty much the same. Then he snatches the bag every time and he always runs south."

"Same 'scrip?"

"Pretty close. Most describe him as a male black, five-ten to six feet, stocky. Well dressed, clean-cut, very articulate. Has a slight accent, but nobody can place exactly what it is. Some say islands, some say French. Hard to know."

"Can you get all the paperwork down to me in the morning so I can assign it? I'm jammed up with the Dakota case. I'll probably give it to Marisa Bourges or Catherine Dashfer, okay? But keep me posted on any developments. Are they going to beef up patrol in that area on the midnight tour, Friday to Sunday?"

"The boss in the Nineteenth wants them to saturate it, but we've still got Savino and his gang running the task force on the West Side rapist, so we're stripped of manpower as it is." For almost three years, an attacker had been operating on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and despite an extensive manhunt and a genetic profile that had been entered in local, state, and national data banks, he continued to elude us. "We'll call you later if we break anything else on this today."

I crunched on the cold muffin and poured a second cup of coffee. Shortly before I started at the district attorney's office more than ten years ago, not a court in the United States accepted DNA technology as a valid forensic technique. By the late eighties, as the methodology was refined in the handful of laboratories that performed the testing, Frye hearings were held in criminal courtrooms around the country. Every prosecutor, case by case and state by state, had to convince the judge-before the evidence could be used at a trial-that the kind of genetic testing at issue had been deemed reliable by the scientific community.

By the time this groundbreaking investigative tool had gained general acceptance in the criminal justice system, it roared into the headlines in the O. J. Simpson trial, and skeptics everywhere attacked the soundness of its findings. As a result, standards in lab procedures were instituted and accreditation practices were firmly established to reassure investigators of the value and accuracy of this innovative technique.

Even more important, the actual method of testing improved and changed dramatically. The original means of performing the exams was referred to as RFLP, for restriction fragment length polymorphism. It required large amounts of body fluid, in good condition, to yield a result. By the late nineties, the transfer to PCR-based technology-polymerase chain reaction-and the use of short tandem repeats, almost like photocopying the minuscule particles, expanded the horizons enormously. It is a method that requires just a minute amount of material from which to test, and is even successful with old and degraded samples. DNA technology had revolutionized the nature of our Work in the short time that I had come to the practice of law, and was making possible solutions to crimes that had not been dreamed of a short decade before.

Within a week's time, the swabs taken from a victim's body hours earlier might supply us with a secret code, unique in all the world to the man who forced himself upon her this morning. It would be analyzed and mapped, serologists detailing at least thirteen distinctive loci, or places on the assailant's genetic fingerprint that matched no other human being's on earth. They would feed it to the medical examiner's crime scene computer database to see whether this offender had committed a similar offense anywhere in New York City. Within the month, his profile would be uploaded to the state's files in Albany and the FBI's system in Washington, in hopes that one of those sources would have this suspect on record in an unrelated arrest, and solve this latest case with a computer-generated cold hit.