T he State of Illinois Forensic Science Center is located in the 1900 block of West Roosevelt Road, a mile or so from where O’Leary’s cow kicked over the lantern that burned down a city. I got there at just after six o’clock. The lab was large and empty. Nicole sat at her workstation.
“Let’s see it, Michael.”
I put the street file on her desk. She turned her nose up. I wasn’t sure if it was at me, the file, or both. Then she slipped on a pair of latex gloves and began to turn pages.
“You didn’t pull the file from this woman’s house?”
“She sent it to me.”
“Gibbons’ landlady?”
“Yes.”
“And now she’s dead?”
“Electrocuted.”
“An accident?”
I shook my head.
“Not likely. By the way, the DA’s giving me a clean bill of health on Gibbons.”
“Just like Bennett promised.”
“He’s rarely wrong,” I said.
“I’ll be happy for you tomorrow,” Nicole said. “What do you want today?”
I plucked a one-page hospital report from the file and handed it to her.
“This is from the ER nurse in ’97. Says my client was taken straight to surgery after admission.”
“Elaine Remington?”
“Yeah. I called the hospital but they won’t give me any more information.”
“This was almost ten years ago. They might not have anything on her. Even if they did, I’m not sure it would be a lot of help.”
“How about a rape kit?”
“If the hospital did one, it would be with the police.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
Nicole closed the file and pushed it across the table.
“Get rid of that. I never saw it.”
I pushed the file back into the fold of my jacket and waited. Nicole sighed and walked to a window.
“How much do you really know about rape, Michael?”
“That’s the second time I’ve been asked that in as many days.”
Nicole offered a thin look at her reflection in a contoured pane of glass. Then she turned back my way.
“I don’t mean the act itself. What I’m talking about is perhaps worse. In the lab we call it the politics of rape. Can be a tricky thing. Not like murder. I mean, in a murder the victim is dead. There’s that certainty. Rape- not so much.”
She walked across the room, held her ID against a scanner, and opened a large gray door.
“Come on.”
We entered a walk-in cooler filled with rows of steel shelving stacked to the ceiling with evidence kits.
“These are Cook County’s old rapes.”
“How many do you have?”
“There are almost seven hundred kits in this room. All of them contain semen or some other bodily fluid that needs DNA testing.”
I whistled.
“That’s nothing,” Nicole said. “On the South Side, we have an old slaughterhouse converted into cold storage. Probably another thousand kits stored there.”
“All waiting to be tested?” I said.
“Hard to say. A lot of the evidence is old and degraded. Not much left to test. Still, we get hits.”
“How many?”
“I’ve tested about a hundred kits myself and gotten ten cold hits.”
“Convictions?”
“In eight of the ten. Even better, three of the offenders were eventually linked to other assaults. One of the guys raped twenty women. Killed two of them.”
Nicole led me out of the evidence locker and slammed the door shut.
“Problem is, there’s only one of me.”
“And thousands of kits.”
“You got it. Plus, each test costs money. At least five thousand a pop for STR-DNA testing. And that’s where it gets complicated.”
“You have to decide who gets tested and who doesn’t.”
“Actually, the DA decides.”
“Who gets buried?” I said.
“Who do you think?”
“I’m gonna guess you’re not testing a lot of kits from ladies of the evening.”
“Hookers don’t get raped, didn’t you know that? And if you’re black? Well, the next priority request I get for a black woman’s kit to be tested will be the first.”
“I have a reporter you need to talk to.”
“Diane Lindsay? Not as easy as that, Michael. Not if I want to stay in the game.”
“Think about it.”
“Let’s talk about your girl. She’s not a hooker, and, good for her, she’s white. Problem is, she’s a nobody. A very cold case everyone has forgotten about.”
Nicole sat down at a computer terminal and typed in Elaine’s information.
“Let me see what I’ve got. May take a minute.”
I sat down at an adjacent workstation and picked through a stack of rape kits, still sealed and waiting to be processed. Each bore the name of the victim and date of the attack. After the victims’ names were a series of dates and letters, circled and initialed. I asked Nicole a question but already knew the answer.
“The D stands for deceased,” Nicole said. “The A means there was a violent assault attached to the crime. I told my boss I thought all sexual assaults were violent.”
“And you were wrong?”
“Date rape. The girl who drinks too much at the party. They go to the bottom of the pile as far as testing is concerned. We call it the ‘she asked for it’ syndrome.”
Nicole looked up from her terminal and then continued typing.
“I got your girl. It appears all her physical evidence, including a rape kit, was destroyed in 2004.”
I felt the padded envelope in my pocket. Inside it, a woman’s shirt covered in blood. For the moment, I figured it was better to play dumb. Besides, I was very good at it.
“Why would they do that?”
“Statute of limitations had run. Technically, the DA could still prosecute if they got a DNA match. In cases where there is no identified suspect, however, the evidence usually gets destroyed.”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Not these days. I can extract DNA from a sample that’s fifty years old.”
My friend shrugged.
“Like I said, you don’t really understand rape until you understand the politics around it.”
“But you can run tests on evidence that old?”
“I just said that, Michael. What is it you need?”
“Maybe a little DNA testing. Just between friends.”
“Are we talking about this woman here?”
I nodded, slid the envelope out and across the desk. Nicole looked at it but didn’t touch.
“So you do have something.”
“Evidence warehouse. No name, no case number, and conveniently misplaced.”
Nicole slid on a second pair of gloves, picked up the envelope, and examined the seal.
“You cut this open?”
“Couple of days ago. Prior to that it was dated and initialed. Those are Gibbons’ initials, by the way.”
“And the date?”
“The day Elaine Remington was attacked. Nine years ago.”
She pulled at the open end of the envelope, shook out the shirt and played her fingers through the knife holes.
“How many times was this woman stabbed?”
“Not sure, but I make it to be about fifteen.”
“And you say she survived?”
“Sort of. She drinks seven shots of whiskey a day. But she’s pretty good at it.”
“Girl has got some major problems.”
“Probably. Right now she’s a client, and this is her best shot at getting some answers.”
Nicole put the shirt back in its envelope but didn’t seal it.
“Follow me.”
We walked through another set of doors, down a white corridor, and into yet another white lab.
“This is our prep area for DNA extraction. First thing I need to do is examine the garment and figure out what kinds of tests to run.”
“You all right with this?” I said.
Nicole stretched the shirt onto an examining table and handed me a pair of goggles.
“Let’s try not to talk about it. Put these on.”
She pulled a wand from a holster bolted to the examining table and flicked off the overhead lights.
“This is an ultraviolet laser. We use it to search for bodily fluids the human eye cannot see.”
As she spoke, an intense green light arrowed through the darkness and found a piece of the torn shirt. Nicole continued talking as she played the light across the garment.
“Different wavelengths of light react with different fluids, causing them to glow. Depending on how I set the laser, I can pick up bloodstains, saliva, and, of course, everyone’s favorite, semen.”
“What color is semen?”
“Yellow’s the lucky color. Sort of like that right there.”
Nicole pointed a gloved finger to the lower right side of the garment. I saw a spray of yellow, translucent against the lasered green, just below a large bloodstain. Nicole carefully marked the location with pins and photographed the site. Then she examined the rest of the garment, finding three other possible hits. After an hour she turned off the laser and flicked on the lights.
“We got something.”
“You think so?”
Nicole took a pair of scissors and carefully began to cut at the areas she had marked with pins.
“I’ll run a presumptive chemical test, but you can take it on credit. Someone left semen on that shirt.”
Each piece of shirt was placed into an evidence bag and tagged. Nicole shut down the inspection area and led me back to her workstation.
“I can start DNA extraction tonight.”
“How long will that take?”
“Usually we’re talking six weeks. If I drop everything, I can have preliminary results back in twenty-four hours.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Two things. First, I want this piece of evidence out of my life as soon as possible. Second, I think you need to get your friend in contact with some people I know.”
“After this is done, I’ll talk to her.”
“Do that, Michael.”
“Fine. Now, here’s a question. Say we get a profile. Then what?”
“Let me guess,” Nicole said. “You want a run through CODIS?”
CODIS was the state’s genetic databank, home to the DNA of thousands of felons from across the country.
“Is that possible?” I said.
“It might get flagged, but I can probably hide it. The real problem comes if you get a match. You’d have a name and not a thing you could do about it.”
“Legally,” I said.
“That’s right, Michael. Legally. Your evidence is probably tainted, as well as the CODIS search.”
“Let’s just get the name, Nicole. After that I’ll figure out the rest.”
My friend was about to respond when voices drifted down the corridor. Nicole packaged up the shirt and slid it into a drawer behind her desk.
“I’ll hang on to this and give you a call when I get something.”
She pulled one of her cards from a pocket and wrote on the back.
“Unless I miss my guess, you have no discernible social life these days. At least this will get you out of the house.”
Nicole pushed the card across the table. On the reverse she had written “Drake Hotel, Friday, 8 p.m.”
“It’s this Friday. In the main ballroom. Don’t be late, and wear something you haven’t picked up off the floor. That means black tie.”
“What am I attending?”
“A fund-raiser. For the Rape Volunteer Association. All these issues we’ve been talking about and maybe some help for your girl. There will be a lot of women there.”
I smiled.
“Don’t be too happy. It’s going to cost you five hundred dollars to get in.”
“That’s okay.”
“And most of the women you meet will have been raped. So watch your step. By the way, Ms. Lindsay will be there.”
“Really?”
“Yes, indeed. So we can see you two together, out on the town.”
I felt my face grow a little warm and dropped my eyes.
“So you two are sleeping together,” Nicole said.
“It’s not like that.”
“It never is. But she’ll be there anyway. Now get out of here. I still have a couple hours’ worth of work to get through.”
“Thanks, Nicole.”
“Don’t thank me until you see what I can do.”
She didn’t sound happy. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t have the right to ask for her help, but I did anyway. Now we’d all live with the consequences.