The ACLU probably had a file room full of such accusations.
“You’re not listening,” Abby said.
“I’m going up to take a bath,” I replied wearily.
She walked over to the sink where I was wringing out the dishrag.
“Kay?” I stopped what I was doing and looked at her.
“You want it to be easy,” she admonished.
“I’ve always wanted things to be easy. They almost never are.”
“You want it to be easy,” she repeated. “You don’t want to think that the people you trust could send an innocent man to the electric chair in order to cover their asses.”
“No question about that. I wouldn’t want to think it. I refuse to think it unless there is proof. And Marino was at Spurrier’s house. He would never have gone along with it.”
“He was there.” She walked away, from me. “But he wasn’t the first one there. By the time he arrived, he would have seen what they wanted him to see.”
17
The first person I saw when I reached the office on Monday was Fielding.
I had come in through the bay, and he was already dressed in scrubs, waiting to get on the elevator. When I noticed the plasticized blue paper booties over his running shoes, I thought of what the police had found inside Steven Spurrier’s house. Our medical supplies were on state contract. But there were any number of businesses in any city that sold booties and surgical gloves. One did not need to be a physician to purchase such items any more than one needed to be a police officer to buy a uniform, badge, or gun.
“Hope you got a good night’s rest,” Fielding warned as the elevator doors parted.
We stepped inside.
“Give me the bad news. What have we got this morning?”
I said.
“Six posts, every one of them a homicide.”
“Great,” I said irritably.
“Yeah, the Knife and Gun Club had a busy weekend. Four shootings, two stabbings. Spring has sprung.”
We got off on the second floor and I was already taking off my suit jacket and rolling up my sleeves when I walked into my office. Marino was sitting in a chair, his briefcase on his lap, a cigarette lit. I assumed one of the morning’s cases was his until he handed me two lab reports.
“Thought you’d want to see it for yourself,” he said.
Typed at the top of one report was the name Steven Spurrier. The serology lab had already completed a workup on his blood. The other report was eight years old, the results of the workup done on the blood found inside Elizabeth Mott’s car.
“Of course, it’s going to be a while before the DNA results are in,” Marino began to explain, “but so far so good.”
Settling behind my desk, I took a moment to study the reports. The blood from the Volkswagen was type O, PGM type 1, EAP type B, ADA type 1, and EsD type 1. This particular combination could be found in approximately 8 percent of the population. The results were consistent with those of the tests conducted on the blood from Spurrier’s suspect kit. He also was type O, types in other blood groups the same, but since more enzymes had been tested for, the combination had been narrowed to approximately 1 percent of the population.
“It’s not enough to charge him with murder,” I said to Marino. “You’d have to have more than the fact that his blood type includes him in a group of thousands of people.”
“A damn shame the report from the old blood isn’t more complete.”
“They didn’t routinely test for as many enzymes back then,” I replied.
“Maybe they could do it now?” he suggested. “If we could narrow it down, that would be a big help.
The damn DNA for Spurrier’s blood is going to take weeks.”
“They’re not going to be able to do it,” I told him. “The blood from Elizabeth’s car is too old.
After this many years the enzymes would have degraded, so the results this time would be less specific than what’s on this eight year old report. The best you could get now is the ABO grouping, and almost half of the population is type O. We have no choice but to wait for the DNA results. Besides,” I added, “even if you could lock him up this minute you know he’d make bail. He’s still under surveillance, I hope.”