Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

At the front door, Jack raised her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “You need to go home and pretend that you never came here tonight.”

Chad began to curse, loudly and fluently. Jack forced himself to concentrate on the sound of this girl’s retreating footsteps. They were light as snow, nearly as silent, but they crashed and swelled within him like an opera.

“Jesus!” Chad yelled the minute Jack turned around. “How the hell could you do that?”

How couldn’t I, Jack thought.

June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

The blood on the victim’s shirt was definitely the suspect’s.

Matt felt a smile fight its way out from inside. “I knew it,” he murmured. He’d met Frankie, at her request, at a 1950s-style restaurant. They sat at an outside table beneath a big green umbrella while waitresses with change counters on their belts roller-skated by to take the orders of other patrons.

She looked up at Matt. “I know you’re dying to ask . . . so yeah, there was semen on the swab from the thigh.”

“Yes!” Matt smacked his fist onto the table, delighted. Rape cases without DNA evidence were the hardest kinds to win.

“Let me finish.” Frankie cocked her head. “What do you remember about DNA?”

“It couldn’t nail O. J.”

“Other than that?”

“Well . . . it’s why I have ten toes,” Matt answered.

“And, no doubt, that razor-sharp mind,” Frankie said dryly. “Did you even pass biology in high school?”

“I was a wordsmith, not a scientist.”

“Okay. Basic genetics: everything about you came from your mom and your dad. She gives you one allele, he gives you another . . . and that’s why you wind up with blue eyes or good teeth or dangling earlobes.”

“Or excessive charm,” Matt added.

“Well, sometimes you get the short end of the straw,” Frankie sympathized. “Anyway, all those traits are on the DNA molecule, which is microscopically over six feet long. But for forensic purposes, you don’t care if someone has dangling earlobes. So I test eight areas that the general public has no idea about-like TPOX or CSF1P0. Every person is going to have a ‘type’ at those areas-two alleles . . . one from Mom and one from Dad.”

Matt nodded, and glanced at Frankie’s results.

“The one hundred line is the sample of blood that came from the victim. The two hundred line is the sample that came from the suspect. These are the standards . . . the known samples that we use to compare everything else we get. The numbers in each of those boxes are alleles, found at different places on the DNA molecule. The DNA we extracted from the blood on the shirt, as you can see, is an identical match to the suspect’s standard.”

“So far,” Matt said, “I’m a happy camper.”

“Good. Because the fingernail residue is a slightly different story. The victim’s own skin cells are naturally there, as well as some skin cells that are not hers.”

“Like a mixture?” Matt asked.

“Exactly. You’ll see numbers that correspond to the victim and the other party.”

“Is that what the parentheses are for?”

“Yup. Different intensities, based on the combination of alleles from each person. Say, for example, that the suspect and the victim both have an eleven at the TPOX location . . . but only the victim has an eight. In a combination of their DNA, I’d expect to find a thicker band at the eleven than I would at the 8. The parentheses suggest just that.”

The waitress sailed over and slapped two chocolate milk shakes down on the table. “Thanks,” Frankie and Matt said simultaneously.

They left the glasses sweating rings, their attention absorbed by Frankie’s chart. “For the semen, unfortunately, the results were inconclusive.”

Matt’s face fell. “Why?”

“There’s no result in the CSF system and the D16 system. That’s because sometimes, when there’s not much DNA, we can’t get readings at those loci.”

Staring at the numbers, Matt frowned. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

“Yes. Since we’re talking about semen, I know it’s going to be a mixture of the victim’s inner thigh skin and some male’s sperm.”

“Like the fingernail residue?”

Frankie nodded. “Compare those two lines.”

Matt studied the chart for a moment, then shrugged. “The numbers are all the same . . . they’re just mixed up in a few spots. That means you can’t eliminate the suspect, doesn’t it?”

“Technically, that’s right,” Frankie admitted. “But there’s something there making me a little hesitant to finger him, too.”

Matt tossed the papers down and leaned back in his chair. “Talk.”

“Think of all the people in the world, and all the different alleles they’ve inherited. I’ve never seen a mixture of two unrelated individuals where I didn’t have four distinct numbers at some location. You’d think, just by probability statistics, that there’d be some place where the suspect would be-let’s say-a twelve, thirteen and the victim would be an eleven, fourteen . . . but not according to this.” She pointed to the thigh analysis. “Look at the overlap. In fact, at only a handful of locations is there any number foreign to the victim’s own DNA.”

“Are you telling me there’s a lab error?”

“Thanks so much for the vote of confidence.”

“Maybe you didn’t have enough DNA. Isn’t it possible that if the sample was better, you might have gotten four alleles?”

“It’s remotely possible,” Frankie conceded. “But that’s not all that’s bugging me. Look at the TH01 system, for example. The victim and a suspect are both six, seven there, so a mixture of their DNA should always be six, seven there.”

“It is.”

“Not in the semen sample. There’s a lighter seven, along with the six. That doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head. “I’m not trying to ruin your case. But while I can’t eliminate your suspect . . . he’s not the most perfect fit, either.”

Matt was silent for a moment, tracing his finger through the wet stain the milk shake had left on the table. “C’mon, Frank. You could combine the DNA of every guy in Salem Falls with my victim’s and still not come up with a precise textbook mixture.”

Frankie considered this. “Maybe they’re related.”

“Suspect and victim? Not a chance.”

“Well, then, the suspect you gave me to test . . . and another guy who actually did contribute to the sperm sample. Relatives have DNA profiles that overlap . . . which can sometimes account for bizarre results.”

Matt exhaled slowly. “You’re telling me my victim scratched the hell out of the suspect, who bled all over her shirt . . . and then brought his brother in to rape her?”

Frankie raised an eyebrow. “It’s a possibility.”

“It would be if the suspect had a brother!”

“Don’t shoot the messenger.” Frankie gathered up her reports. “A private lab could test more systems to see if there’s an elimination further down.”

“And if we don’t have the funding for that?”

“I’d go check your suspect’s family tree.”

Matt drained his milk shake and took out his wallet. “Is it his blood?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And is there a good chance that he got scratched by the victim?”

Frankie nodded.

“And you can’t say that sperm sample isn’t his.”

“No.”

Matt tossed a ten-dollar bill on the table. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

The girls arrived, flushed and sweaty in their silky shorts and bouncing ponytails, like a flock of sparrows that had swept into the locker room through an open door. Chattering in twos and threes, they made their way toward the showers, ignoring the woman who stood in the entry staring at last year’s varsity photo.