Trace Of Doubt

He handed me five or six pieces of mail.

“Thanks, Zig.”

“When you gonna run away with me?”

“Zig, you know I have a boyfriend.”

“Yeah. My dumb luck.”

“Give me a break. Your girlfriend is stunning. She puts the rest of us females to shame.”

“Yeah…and Shiana believes my band is just one break short of superstardom. She’s a righteous lady.”

“Yes, she is.” Actually, I’d heard Ziggy’s band, and Shiana was right. They were awesome.

Ziggy left, and I opened my mail—several flyers from a publishing company advertising new texts in the science of DNA, genetic testing and crime-scene investigations. Most of the textbooks were twice as thick as dictionaries and cost hundreds of dollars. Lewis used them to keep the lid on Ripper’s tank.

Then there was one with no return address. I turned it over in my hand, then turned it back to the front. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. “Ms. Billie McNamara Quinn.” How odd, I thought. I never used my middle name—actually my mother’s maiden name—because it was unwieldy, and people thought it was a married name and tended to hyphenate it.

I opened the letter. Inside was a simple, typewritten piece of paper with the words:

I KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HER

Then my heart stopped as something fluttered to my desk. A tiny scrap of fabric. Lavender roses on it. A piece of the dress my mother was wearing when she disappeared.

Chapter 4

“Jesus Christ!” I stifled a scream, then instinctively looked around as if the person who sent me the letter was there somehow, watching me, seeing how freaked out I was. But of course no one was there.

My hands shook, and I immediately put down the envelope and letter so that my fingerprints weren’t all over it. I buzzed Lewis on the phone. We have Caller ID, so he knew it was me.

“Lewis LeBarge, resident genius speaking.”

“I need you to come to my desk. This second.”

“You all right?” His voice changed from playful to earnest.

“Just come,” I managed to squeak.

Lewis was at my desk in under a minute. In that time, I’d donned rubbed gloves. I showed him the letter and the fabric.

“My mother’s dress,” I whispered.

“Are you sure, Billie?”

I nodded and looked up at him. I knew I had no color in my face. “You and I know serial killers don’t retire. They may appear to stop killing, but they’ve either changed locations or MO, they’re in prison somewhere on an unrelated charge. Or they’re dead. All these years, Lewis, even as I’ve obsessed over this case, I told myself he’d met some gruesome end somewhere. It was how I slept—when I can sleep, that is. I told myself he was dead. And now…now I know he’s not only alive, he knows who I am.”

“Maybe a witness?” he offered hopefully, though I could hear how he didn’t believe it himself.

“A witness who has a scrap of a murder victim’s dress?”

“Could it be some elaborate hoax?”

I shook my head. “I don’t see how. I’ll need to have all this tested. The envelope, letter, the type and font, and the dress fabric itself.”

“Whatever you need. You know that.”

“Why now, Lewis? Whoever sent this, why now after all these years?”

“I don’t know.”

I got the evidence together and submitted it for processing, assigning it a lab number. About thirty minutes later Joe Franklin called.

“You want to meet at the sushi place in Ft. Lee?”

“Sure.”

“What’s the matter, Billie?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Lewis is coming.”

“Great. See you both around seven?”

“Fine.”

I went through some more lab results. We processed everything from DNA samples to drug samples. If the police find a kilo of white powder, they need to be eventually be able to tell a jury if it’s cocaine, heroin, or talcum powder. But I really couldn’t concentrate.

My mother was the total antithesis of my father, but somehow what they had together worked. She kept a garden, read the classics, went to church every Sunday and she was from the old model of Carol Brady housewife—ever cheerful, running her household with enthusiasm. She was an amazing cook and absolutely breathtaking. My father said he was a goner the minute he laid eyes on her. At first, he didn’t tell her what he did for a living…which was run a family within the Irish mob in Jersey. By the time he did sit down and tell her, she was already so in love, she made fragile peace with what he did even as she said a rosary each Sunday for his soul.

When she disappeared, the cops paid very little attention. They reasoned that she had tired of being married to the mob and had simply decided to take a hike. “Thousands of people walk away from their lives every year. They don’t want to get found,” was what one of the detectives told my father.

But her disappearance was so out of character, and even if she had tired of his involvement with “the life,” my father knew—and always told us—that she never would have left Mikey and me behind. Ever.

And by the time the authorities took his claims seriously, the trail was cold. Her body turned up—what little remained of it—in a secluded wooded area six months later. Animals had consumed parts of her bones. There was evidence that she was tortured, some ligature marks worn into the bones that were there. And though it would have been convenient for the cops to dismiss it as a mob killing, the fact is the mob, while not a bunch of choirboys, has its own code. You don’t touch the family of a mobster, no matter what he’s done, and my dad hadn’t been lying when he’d told the cops things were peaceful in his “business” at the time she disappeared.

My father was never the same after that. He wasn’t home when it happened—and he told himself he should have been. I was never the same. Mikey was never the same. Her absence left this gaping hole in our lives. We were never at home. Dad couldn’t cook much more than spaghetti or hot dogs, and if Mom haunted us, reminding us of the vacant empty spaces inside, we haunted diners. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, we ate out every day, usually at Greek diners, sliding across red leather seats into booths, plugging quarters into juke boxes on the table.

My brother followed Dad into the family business, but I tested off the IQ charts and was soon attending a snooty private school, with my father pushing me to go for it and become a doctor with my straight-A average and love of chemistry and biology. For me, science was about escape. And facts. I could write down a formula in black and white, and it was irrefutable. DNA fascinated me. And in that fascination was born an idea. I could become a criminalist…and maybe someday solve her murder.

Dad was disappointed. But I’m nearly through with my doctoral thesis, so I tell him that he’ll have a Dr. Quinn in the family, anyway.

After most of the lab had gone home that evening, Lewis came to collect me.

“Why don’t we go park your car at your place? You leave your car there, and I’ll drive us to the restaurant. You can get good and drunk. I think you need to.”

I was too drained to argue and nodded.

“Is David home? Why don’t you call him and see if he’ll join us?”