“Do you need anything from inside the house before we go?” she asks.
“Give me just a minute,” I tell her. “Was Dr. Zenner here when you arrived?”
I feel her stiffen a little. “I got here just a few minutes before you did.”
Evasion, I think as I climb the front steps. I unlock the door and turn off the burglar alarm. The foyer is dark, the great chandelier and Christmas tree lights off. I write Anna a note and thank her for her friendship and hospitality. I need to return to my own home tomorrow and know she will understand why I must. Mostly, I want her to believe I am not upset with her, that I realize she is as victimized by circumstances as I am. I say circumstances because I am no longer sure who is holding a gun to Anna’s head and ordering her to divulge confidences about me. Rocky Caggiano may be next in line, unless I am indicted. If that should happen, I will be no factor in Chandonne’s trial, not hardly. I leave the note on Anna’s immaculately made Biedermeier bed. Then I get in Berger’s car and begin to tell her about my day in James City County, about the abandoned campsite and the long, pale hairs. She listens intently, driving, knowing where she is going as if she has lived in Richmond all of her life.
“Can we prove the hairs are Chandonne’s?” she finally asks. “Assuming there are no roots, as usual. And there weren’t roots with the ones found at the crime scenes, right? Your crime scenes. Luong and Bray.”
“No roots,” I say, rankled by the reference to my crime scenes. They aren’t my crime scenes, I silently protest. “He shed those hairs, so there are no roots,” I tell Berger. “But we can get mitochondrial DNA from the shafts. So yes, we can definitely know if the hairs from the campground are his.”
“Please explain,” she says. “I’m not an expert on mitochondrial DNA. Or an expert on hair for that matter, especially the kind of hair he has.”
The subject of DNA is a difficult one. Explaining human life on a molecular level tells most people far more than they can understand or care to know. Cops and prosecutors love what DNA can do. They hate to talk about it scientifically. Few of them understand it. The old joke is, most people can’t even spell DNA. I explain that nuclear DNA is what we get when cells with nuclei are present, such as with blood, tissue, seminal fluid and hair roots. Nuclear DNA is inherited equally from both parents, so if we have someone’s nuclear DNA we have, in a sense, all of him, and can compare his DNA profile to any other biological sample this same person has left at, say, another crime scene.
“Can we just compare the hairs from the campground to the hairs he left at the murder scenes?” Berger asks.
“Not successfully,” I reply. “Examining microscopic characteristics in this instance won’t tell us much because the hairs are unpigmented. The most we will be able to say is their morphologies are similar or consistent with each other.”
“Not conclusive to a jury.” She thinks out loud.
“Not in the least.”
“If we don’t do a microscopic comparison anyway, the defense will bring that up,” Berger considers. “He’ll say, Why didn’t you?”
“Well, we can microscopically compare the hairs, if you want.”
“The ones from Susan Pless’s body and the ones from your cases.”
“If you want,” I repeat.
“Explain hair shafts. How does DNA work with those?”
I tell her that mitochondrial DNA is found in the walls of cells and not in their nuclei, meaning mitochondrial DNA is the anthropological DNA of hair, fingernail, tooth and bone. Mitochondrial DNA is the molecules that make up our mortar and stone, I say. The limited usefulness lies in that mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the female lineage. I use the analogy of an egg. Think of mitochondrial DNA as the egg white, while nuclear DNA is the yolk. You can’t compare one to the other. But if you have DNA from blood, you have the whole egg and can compare mitochondrial to mitochondrial egg white to egg white. We have blood because we have Chandonne. He had to give up a blood sample while in the hospital. We have his complete DNA profile and can compare the mitochondrial DNA of unknown hairs to the mitochondrial DNA from his blood sample.