Supervolcano All Fall Down(150)
He turned the page. Had they left fingerprints behind? Things would be easier if they had. Before he could find out, his phone rang. He picked it up. “Colin Ferguson, San Atanasio PD.”
“Hello, Lieutenant. This is Lucy Chen, over in the lab. Could I see you for a few minutes, please?”
“Sure,” Colin said, thinking Nice anybody wants to. “What’s cooking?”
“I’d rather talk about it here than over the phone, if that’s all right.”
“O-kay. Be right over.” Colin didn’t scratch his head, but he wanted to. He felt eyeballs boring into his back as he got up and walked out of the big, communal office. He might have been doing nothing more dramatic than taking a leak. Those eyeballs skewered him anyway.
The lab was down the hall, a couple of doors past the men’s room. The air inside it held a faint chemical odor. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was always there.
“What’s going on?” Colin asked Lucy. Whatever it was, he felt sure it would be something he needed to know about and no one else did. The DNA tech didn’t get excited without a good reason, or sometimes even with one—yet another reason she reminded Colin of his wife.
“This is a DNA analysis I ran last night,” Lucy Chen said, handing him a printout. “Tell me what you make of it.”
Colin wasn’t a DNA expert. He wasn’t a fingerprint expert, either, but he made a pretty fair amateur. He made a pretty fair amateur at DNA patterns, too, also because his line of work had turned him into one. And the pattern on the printout looked familiar. He’d seen it, or one much like it, way too many times. He whistled softly. “Lucy, if this isn’t the South Bay Strangler’s DNA, it’s mighty darn close.”
“It isn’t.” She took another printout off the countertop and gave it to him. “This one is from the Strangler.”
He held one in each hand. Excitement tingled through him. They were close. A break! At last, a break! After so many years, a break! If you had a relative’s DNA, you at least knew who the perp’s relative was, which put you a hell of a lot closer to grabbing him, too. He hefted the printout that didn’t come from the Strangler. “So, who does this belong to?”
She looked at it. She looked at him. “Darren Pitcavage,” she answered.
“You’re kidding,” he said automatically. One look at her face told him she wasn’t. He floundered: “But that’s crazy. It’s impossible. If that one’s from Darren, who—?” He ran out of words, but waved the other printout.
“It may be crazy. It is not impossible. We did the autopsy on the chief just a few days ago, so I had easy access to a DNA sample from him.” Lucy handed Colin one more printout. “This is from Darren’s father.”
He examined it. He examined the Strangler’s pattern. No, he wasn’t a DNA expert, but he was a pretty fair amateur. He was plenty good enough to understand what he was seeing. “They’re the same,” he said dully. “Mike Pitcavage’s DNA and the South Bay Strangler’s DNA are the same.”
“That’s right.” Lucy Chen’s mouth twisted as her head bobbed up and down. “I didn’t want to believe it, either. I still don’t want to believe it. But that’s what the evidence shows. Unless the chief has an identical twin I don’t know about . . .”
“He doesn’t.” Almost blindly, Colin reached for the countertop. He needed something to steady himself. Who wouldn’t, with the underpinnings of his world knocked out from under him? Yes, cops went bad. That was why police departments needed internal-affairs units. But bad like this? “Jesus!” he choked out.
“Are you all right?” Lucy sounded genuinely alarmed. What did he look like? How gray had he gone? He wasn’t just pale—he was sure of that.
And he wasn’t all right, either—nowhere close—so he answered, “No.” Before Lucy could ease him down into a chair or start CPR or do whatever else she thought he needed, he made haste to add, “But it’s nothing you can do anything about. It’s nothing anybody can do anything about, not any more.”
“No, not any more,” the DNA tech agreed.
Almost in spite of itself, Colin’s mind started working again. Things that hadn’t added up before suddenly made a lot more sense. “Well, now we know why he killed himself,” he ground out.
“That also occurred to me,” Lucy said. “No arrest. No trial. No jail cell. No waiting for them to stick the needle in his arm, if they ever get around to it. He took the easy way out.”