Kay Scarpet - Postmortem Part 26

When she finally met my eyes, her own were uneasy, suspicious.

She knew I hadn't asked her here for this. She sensed there was something else.

"It's really not why you called, is it?"

"Not entirely," I replied frankly.

Silence.

I could see the resentment, the anger building.

"What?" she demanded. "What is it you want from me?"

"I want to know what you're going to do."

Her eyes flashed. "Oh, I get it. You're worried about your G.o.ddam self. Jesus Christ. You're just like the rest of them!"

"I'm not worried about myself," I said very calmly. "I'm beyond that, Abby. You have enough to cause me trouble. If you want to run my office and me into the ground, then do it. That's your decision."

She looked uncertain, her eyes s.h.i.+fting away.

"I understand your rage."

"You couldn't possibly understand it."

"I understand it better than you might imagine."

Bill flashed in my mind. I could understand Abby's rage very well.

"You couldn't. n.o.body could!" she exclaimed. "He stole my sister from me. He stole a part of my life. I'm so d.a.m.n tired of people taking things from me! What kind of world is this," she choked, "where someone can do something like that? Oh, Jesus! I don't know what I'm going to do a"

I said firmly, "I know you intend to investigate your sister's death on your own, Abby. Don't do it."

"Somebody's got to!" she cried out. "What? I'm supposed to leave it up to the Keystone Kops?"

"Some matters you must leave to the police. But you can help. You can if you really want to."

"Don't patronize me!"

"I'm not."

"I'll do it my own way a"

"No. You won't do it your own way, Abby. Do it for your sister."

She stared blankly at me with red-rimmed eyes.

"I asked you here because I'm taking a gamble. I need your help."

"Right! You need me to help by leaving town and keeping the h.e.l.l out of it . ."

I was slowly shaking my head.

She looked surprised.

"Do you know Benton Wesley?"

"The profiler," she replied hesitantly. "I know who he is."

I glanced up at the wall clock. "He'll be here in ten minutes."

She stared at me for a long time. "What? What is it, exactly, you want me to do?"

"Use your journalistic connections to help us find him."

"Him?"

Her eyes widened.

I got up to see if there was any coffee left.

Wesley was reluctant when I had explained my plan over the telephone, but now that the three of us were in my office it seemed clear to me he'd accepted it.

"Your complete cooperation is non-negotiable," he said to Abby emphatically. "I've got to have your a.s.surance you'll do exactly what we agree upon. Any improvisation or creative thinking on your part could blow the investigation right out of the water. Your discretion is imperative."

She nodded, then pointed out, "If it's the killer breaking into the computer, why's he done it only once?"

"Once we're aware of," I reminded her.

"Still, it hasn't happened again since you discovered it."

Wesley suggested, "He's been running like h.e.l.l. He's murdered two women in two weeks and there's probably been sufficient information in the press to satisfy his curiosity. He could be sitting pretty, feeling smug, because by all news accounts we don't have anything on him."

"We've got to inflame him," I added. "We've got to do something to make him so paranoid he gets reckless. One way to do this is to make him think my office has found evidence that could be the break we've been waiting for."

"If he's the one getting into the computer," Wesley summarized, "this could be sufficient incentive for him to try again to discover what we supposedly know."

He looked at me.

The fact was we had no break in the case. I'd indefinitely banished Margaret from her office and the computer was to be left in answer mode. Wesley had set up a tracer to track all calls made to her extension. We were going to use the computer to lure the murderer by having Abby's paper print a story claiming the forensic investigation had come up with a "significant link."

"He's going to be paranoid, upset enough to believe it," I predicted. "If he's ever been treated in a hospital around here, for example, he's going to worry now that we might track him through old charts. If he gets any special medications from a pharmacy, he's got that to worry about, too."

All of this hinged on the peculiar odor Matt Petersen mentioned to the police. There was no other "evidence" to which we could safely allude.

The one piece of evidence the killer would have trouble with was DNA.

I could bluff him from h.e.l.l to breakfast with it, and it might not even be a bluff.

Several days ago, I had gotten copies of the reports from the first two cases. I studied the vertical array of bands of varying shades and widths, patterns that looked remarkably like the bar codes stamped on supermarket packaged foods. There were three radioactive probes in each case, and the position of the bands in each probe for Patty Lewis's case was indistinguishable from the position of the bands in the three probes in Brenda Steppe's.

"Of course this doesn't give us his ident.i.ty," I explained to Abby and Wesley. "All we can say is if he's black, then only one out of 135 million men theoretically can fit the same pattern. If he's Caucasian, only one out of 500 million men."

DNA is the microcosm of the total person, his life code. Genetic engineers in a private laboratory in New York had isolated the DNA from the samples of seminal fluid I collected. They snipped the samples at specific sites, and the fragments migrated to discrete regions of an electrically charged surface covered with a thick gel. A positively charged pole was at one end of the surface, a negatively charged pole at the other.

"DNA carries a negative charge," I went on. "Opposites attract."

The shorter fragments traveled farther and faster in the positive direction than the longer ones did, and the fragments spread out across the gel, forming the band pattern. This was transferred to a nylon membrane and exposed to a probe.

"I don't get it," Abby interrupted. "What probe?"

I explained. "The killer's double-stranded DNA fragments were broken, or denatured, into single strands. In more simplistic terms, they were unzipped like a zipper. The probe is a solution of single-stranded DNA of a specific base sequence that's labeled with a radioactive marker. When the solution, or probe, was washed over the nylon membrane, the probe sought out and bonded with complementary single strands-with the killer's complementary single strands."

"So the zipper is zipped back up?" she asked. "But it's radioactive now?"

"The point is that his pattern can now be visualized on X-ray film," I said.

"Yeah, his bar code. Too bad we can't run it over a scanner and come up with his name," Wesley dryly added.

"Everything about him is there," I continued. "The problem is the technology isn't sophisticated enough yet to read the specifics, such as genetic defects, eye and hair color, that sort of thing. There are so many bands present covering so many points in the person's genetic makeup it's simply too complex to definitively make anything more out of it than a match or a nonmatch."

"But the killer doesn't know that."

Wesley looked speculatively at me.

"That's right."

"Not unless he's a scientist or something," Abby interjected.

"We'll a.s.sume he isn't," I told them. "I suspect he never gave DNA profiling a thought until he started reading about it in the papers. I doubt he understands the concept very well."

"I'll explain the procedure in my story," Abby thought out loud. "I'll make him understand it just enough to freak him."

"Just enough to make him think we know about his defect," Wesley agreed. "If he has a defect a That's what worries me, Kay."

He looked levelly at me. "What if he doesn't?"

I patiently went over it again. "What continues to stand out to me is Matt Petersen's reference to *pancakes,' to the smell inside the bedroom reminding him of pancakes, of something sweet but sweaty."

"Maple syrup," Wesley recalled.

"Yes. If the killer has a body odor reminiscent of maple syrup, he may have some sort of anomaly, some type of metabolic disorder. Specifically, *maple syrup urine disease.'"

"And it's genetic?" Wesley had asked this twice.

"That's the beauty of it, Benton. If he has it, it's in his DNA somewhere."

"I've never heard of it," Abby said. "This disease."

"Well, it's not exactly your common cold."

"Then exactly what is it?"

I got up from my desk and went to a bookcase. Sliding out the fat Textbook of Medicine, I opened it to the right page and set it before them.

"It's an enzyme defect," I explained as I sat back down. "The defect results in amino acids acc.u.mulating in the body like a poison. In the cla.s.sic or acute form, the person suffers severe mental r.e.t.a.r.dation and/or death at infancy, which is why it's rare to find healthy adults of sound mind who suffer from the disease. But it's possible. In its mild form, which would have to be what the killer suffers from if this is his affliction, postnatal development is normal, symptoms are intermittent, and the disease can be treated through a low-protein diet, and possibly through dietary supplements-specifically, thiamine, or vitamin B1, at ten times the normal daily intake."

"In other words," Wesley said, leaning forward and frowning as he scanned the book, "he could suffer from the mild form, lead a fairly normal life, be smart as h.e.l.l-but stink?"

I nodded. "The most common indication of maple syrup urine disease is a characteristic odor, a distinctive maple syrupy odor of the urine and perspiration. The symptoms are going to be more acute when he's under stress, the odor more p.r.o.nounced when he's doing what stresses him most, which is committing these murders. The odor's going to get into his clothing. He's going to have a long history of being self-conscious about his problem."

"You wouldn't smell it in his seminal fluid?" Wesley asked.

"Not necessarily."

"Well," Abby said, "if he's got this body odor, then he must take a lot of showers. If he works around people. They'd notice it, the smell."

I didn't respond.

She didn't know about the glittery residue, and I wasn't going to tell her. If the killer has this chronic odor, it wouldn't be the least bit unusual for him to be compulsive about was.h.i.+ng his armpits, his face and hands, frequently throughout the day while he's exposed to people who might notice his problem. He might be was.h.i.+ng himself while at work, where there might be a dispenser of borax soap in the men's room.

"It's a gamble." Wesley leaned back in his chair. "Jeez."

Shaking his head. "If the smell Petersen mentioned was something he imagined or something he confused with another odor maybe a cologne the killer was wearing-we're going to look like fools. The squirrel's going to be all the more certain we don't know what the h.e.l.l we're doing."

"I don't think Petersen imagined the smell," I said with conviction. "As shocked as he was when he found his wife's body, the smell had to be unusual and potent for Petersen to notice and remember it. I can't think of a single cologne that would smell like sweaty maple syrup. I'm speculating the killer was sweating profusely, that he'd left the bedroom maybe minutes before Petersen walked in."

"The disease causes r.e.t.a.r.dation a" Abby was flipping through the book.

"If it's not treated immediately after birth," I repeated.

"Well, this b.a.s.t.a.r.d isn't r.e.t.a.r.ded." She looked up at me, her eyes hard.

"Of course he isn't," Wesley agreed. "Psychopaths are anything but stupid. What we want to do is make the guy think we think he's stupid. Hit him where it hurts-his G.o.ddam pride, which is hooked up with his grandiose notions of his off-the-charts IQ."

"This disease," I told them, "could do that. If he has it, he's going to know it. Possibly it runs in his family. He's going to be hyper-sensitive, not only about his body odor, but also about the mental deficiencies the defect is known to cause."

Abby was making notes to herself. Wesley was staring off at the wall, his face tense. He didn't look happy.

Blowing in frustration, he said, "I just don't know, Kay. If the guy doesn't have this maple syrup whatever a"

He shook his head. "He'll be on to us in a flash. It could set the investigation back."

"You can't set back something that is already backed into a corner," I said evenly. "I have no intention of naming the disease in the article."

I turned to Abby. "We'll refer to it as a metabolic disorder. This could be a number of things. He's going to worry. Maybe it's something he doesn't know he has. He thinks he's in perfect health? How can he be sure? He's never had a team of genetic engineers studying his body fluids before. Even if the guy's a physician, he can't rule out the possibility he has an abnormality that's been latent most of his life, sitting there like a bomb waiting to go off. We'll plant the anxiety in his head. Let him stew over it. h.e.l.l, let him think he's got something fatal.

Maybe it will send him to the nearest clinic for a physical. Maybe it will send him to the nearest medical library. The police can make a check, see who seeks out a local doctor or frantically begins riffling through medical reference books at one of the libraries. If he's the one who's been breaking into the computer here, he'll probably do it again. Whatever happens, my gut tells me something will happen. It's going to rattle his cage."