BadBlood by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-05T01:24:58+00:00

23

I waited for Mike at the car. He had waved me off and stayed behind to talk to Baylor.

“What did Phin mean by that last shot?” I asked when he joined me ten minutes later.

“Just what he told us. That the Quillians always made their own trouble—he’s got no use for any of them. Says Trish ought to mind her own business before she goes pointing fingers at anyone else.”

“That’s all you got from him? He must have been making a point.”

“Like your interrogation techniques are any better than mine? The guy hasn’t squealed in more than a decade—had the fortitude to hold the flashlight while somebody amputated half his foot—and you think he’s going to go belly-up ’cause I’m butting heads with him over something that nitwit said to us back in the bar? I’ll let you out, blondie. Try playing footsie with him and call me tomorrow.”

Mike saw there was a message on his cell phone and held it to his ear.

“Sorry,” I said. “It just sounded like he had more to say. Did you ask him if he remembered Bex?”

He flipped the phone shut. “Yes, ma’am. Says he used to scare his own daughter by reminding her of what happened to the Hassett girl for hanging out with those bums in the park. ‘Lay down with dogs, you’re gonna have fleas.’ Life according to Phin.”

“That’s a tough old bird.”

Mike made a U-turn. “Want a look at the file?”

“You serious?”

“The message is from Spiro. If we stop by Bronx Homicide right now, he’ll take us into the Cold Case Squad. The Hassett file is sitting there, waiting its turn in the middle of a pile for one of the guys to pick it up and see whether any of the old evidence is suitable for DNA analysis.”

“I’m in. It’s only six thirty,” I said, looking at my watch. “Why not?”

Although prosecutors in America had been introduced to DNA technology in the mid-1980s, before I’d even dreamed of a career as a prosecutor, no court admitted evidence of genetic fingerprinting in a criminal case until 1989. The accuracy of this scientific technique revolutionized the criminal justice system, linking perpetrators to crime scenes with complete certainty, and allowing the exoneration of others mistakenly accused or wrongly identified.

Not until the start of the twenty-first century—after DNA testing methodology had undergone a decade of refinement—were state and national data banks established. In the infancy of this forensic breakthrough, evidence that had yielded enough DNA to create a unique human profile could only be compared to a specific donor—suspect or witness—who surfaced on the radar screen in an investigation.

But data banks offered a much broader capability for solving crimes. In every state, legislation mandated the creation of arrestee or convicted-offender DNA files, filled with profiles of growing numbers of miscreants, against which crime-scene evidence could be searched by computer. Matches were now being made daily all over the country—unsolved cases being connected to others in different jurisdictions by “linkage” data banks even as

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