Erica Orloff - Trace Of Doubt

“Are you sure, Billie?”

I nodded and looked up at him. I knew I had no color in my face. “You and I know serial killers don’t retire. They may appear to stop killing, but they’ve either changed locations or MO, they’re in prison somewhere on an unrelated charge. Or they’re dead. All these years, Lewis, even as I’ve obsessed over this case, I told myself he’d met some gruesome end somewhere. It was how I slept—when I can sleep, that is. I told myself he was dead. And now…now I know he’s not only alive, he knows who I am.”

“Maybe a witness?” he offered hopefully, though I could hear how he didn’t believe it himself.

“A witness who has a scrap of a murder victim’s dress?”

“Could it be some elaborate hoax?”

I shook my head. “I don’t see how. I’ll need to have all this tested. The envelope, letter, the type and font, and the dress fabric itself.”

“Whatever you need. You know that.”

“Why now, Lewis? Whoever sent this, why now after all these years?”

“I don’t know.”

I got the evidence together and submitted it for processing, assigning it a lab number. About thirty minutes later Joe Franklin called.

“You want to meet at the sushi place in Ft. Lee?”

“Sure.”

“What’s the matter, Billie?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Lewis is coming.”

“Great. See you both around seven?”

“Fine.”

I went through some more lab results. We processed everything from DNA samples to drug samples. If the police find a kilo of white powder, they need to be eventually be able to tell a jury if it’s cocaine, heroin, or talcum powder. But I really couldn’t concentrate.

My mother was the total antithesis of my father, but somehow what they had together worked. She kept a garden, read the classics, went to church every Sunday and she was from the old model of Carol Brady housewife—ever cheerful, running her household with enthusiasm. She was an amazing cook and absolutely breathtaking. My father said he was a goner the minute he laid eyes on her. At first, he didn’t tell her what he did for a living…which was run a family within the Irish mob in Jersey. By the time he did sit down and tell her, she was already so in love, she made fragile peace with what he did even as she said a rosary each Sunday for his soul.

When she disappeared, the cops paid very little attention. They reasoned that she had tired of being married to the mob and had simply decided to take a hike. “Thousands of people walk away from their lives every year. They don’t want to get found,” was what one of the detectives told my father.

But her disappearance was so out of character, and even if she had tired of his involvement with “the life,” my father knew—and always told us—that she never would have left Mikey and me behind. Ever.

And by the time the authorities took his claims seriously, the trail was cold. Her body turned up—what little remained of it—in a secluded wooded area six months later. Animals had consumed parts of her bones. There was evidence that she was tortured, some ligature marks worn into the bones that were there. And though it would have been convenient for the cops to dismiss it as a mob killing, the fact is the mob, while not a bunch of choirboys, has its own code. You don’t touch the family of a mobster, no matter what he’s done, and my dad hadn’t been lying when he’d told the cops things were peaceful in his “business” at the time she disappeared.

My father was never the same after that. He wasn’t home when it happened—and he told himself he should have been. I was never the same. Mikey was never the same. Her absence left this gaping hole in our lives. We were never at home. Dad couldn’t cook much more than spaghetti or hot dogs, and if Mom haunted us, reminding us of the vacant empty spaces inside, we haunted diners. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, we ate out every day, usually at Greek diners, sliding across red leather seats into booths, plugging quarters into juke boxes on the table.

My brother followed Dad into the family business, but I tested off the IQ charts and was soon attending a snooty private school, with my father pushing me to go for it and become a doctor with my straight-A average and love of chemistry and biology. For me, science was about escape. And facts. I could write down a formula in black and white, and it was irrefutable. DNA fascinated me. And in that fascination was born an idea. I could become a criminalist…and maybe someday solve her murder.

Dad was disappointed. But I’m nearly through with my doctoral thesis, so I tell him that he’ll have a Dr. Quinn in the family, anyway.

After most of the lab had gone home that evening, Lewis came to collect me.

“Why don’t we go park your car at your place? You leave your car there, and I’ll drive us to the restaurant. You can get good and drunk. I think you need to.”

I was too drained to argue and nodded.

“Is David home? Why don’t you call him and see if he’ll join us?”

“No. He’s drywalling his father’s basement. Finishing off an area for his dad to do some woodworking.” David’s mother had died of cancer while he was in prison, but he and his father were exceedingly close. His father had never once given up hope that the real Suicide King killer would be found.

I followed Lewis to my place, then got in his car, and we took the New Jersey Turnpike and headed to Ft. Lee, a bedroom community for Manhattan just across the Hudson via the George Washington Bridge.

“Are you going to tell your father and Mike about the letter?”

“I have to. I just have to figure out how. You know how Dad gets.”

Lewis smirked. “Yes, I do. Two words—Tommy Salami.”

Tommy Salami was the overgrown steroid-huge pit bull of a bodyguard my father saddled me with when he was worried about me. When we were working the Suicide King case, Tommy had even taken a bullet for me. Which meant I was now forever indebted to a man who loved salami, as well as all other Italian cuts of meat. I often sent him gift baskets as a way of still trying to say thank you. But the last—and I mean the very last—thing I wanted to have happen was for my father to decide my mother’s murderer was after me. If Dad thought I was in danger, I’d once again be riding to work with Tommy Salami in my passenger seat—I refused to let him drive.

“We’ll have to call the police, too,” Lewis said. “We can run the tests, but you know, tracking down the postmark and so on, we’ll need to involve them.”

I sighed.

“What?”

“Trust me. Finding anyone on the police force interested in solving my mother’s case will be impossible. No man hours will be devoted to it. Nothing. Why? Because her last name, and mine, is the same as Dad’s. And Mikey’s. And their collective rap sheet is miles long. The Quinn name means they won’t be looking to help us, Lewis.”

“But it’s a murder.”

“An old murder. A cold case. You see how many rape kits we need to process. There are more pressing things for the police to do than find her killer. And to be honest, they botched it. When the trail was fresh, they should have looked more intensely for her. You know the department is loath to admit mistakes.”

He pursed his lips. “What if I try to find a cop to help us? I’m not director of the lab for nothing. More than a few detectives owe me.”

I shrugged. “You can try.”

“Good. Because I was going to whether you agreed or not.”

I smiled to myself and looked out the window. We arrived in Ft. Lee and spied the Japanese place Joe loves, and then circled the block four times until we found a spot.

We put change in the meter and entered the restaurant. Joe waved to us from the back. He’s hard to miss. He used to play football for the New Orleans Saints. A bum knee meant he was sidelined permanently, but they still had to pay out his contract. Unlike a lot of guys who might blow their proverbial wad on women and cars and bling, Joe went to law school. His mother had always wanted him to be a fancy lawyer anyway. Soon, he was negotiating multimillion-dollar deals for some of his old buddies, but a case he took pro bono to free an innocent kid changed him. Now he balances the big money with the Justice Foundation.