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 assurance 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 hell. 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 hell 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 identity,” 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?”