Advent of DNA in Forensics
Chapter Eight
When I woke up the next morning, it was almost nine a.m. Seattle was having a morning sun break, as they’re known out here. I wasn’t awake ten minutes before flashbacks of the shooting started again. I stayed under the shower until the water started to cool, and tried to think of other things. By the time I dug another pistol out of my gun safe and got coffee and some instant grits going, I was more or less ready to chart out my day.
The answering service had messages from reporters in Thurston County who probably wanted a playback of the shooting. Maury Teller at the Post-Intelligencer had called, too. I called him back.
“Roger East is the reporter I’m looking for,” I said. “He wrote a story about using DNA to identify a Jane Doe. My gone girl was interested in forensics and called the desk several times, once from Olympia and the rest from her trailer in Auburn.”
“Jesus, you are a detective, after all. I was just about to tell you to talk to Roger. He works nights, but said you could call him at home.” He gave me the number. “Now, as the TV talking heads say, how does it feel to gun down a Ranger Commando, Mr. Hummel, sir?”
“Christ, did that make the wire services?”
“You bet. You’re famous again, and just in time, too. You’ve been laboring along in blessed obscurity too long. Let me patch you through to the copshop reporter, okay?”
“Nothing doing,” I said. “They haven’t officially closed the case as justifiable yet. I’m not giving some Thurston County prosecutor any reason to get pissed off at me now. What did those stories say?”
“Basically, witnesses confirm that this guy attacked you with a club and you shot in self defense. What was he, some rabid birdwatcher and you parked in his favorite spot?”
“He followed me down I-5 from Auburn. I tried to duck him, and he cornered me.”
“What were you doing in Auburn? Working the gone girl case?”
“Yes.”
“This may be hot, Eddie: what if he did the girl you’re looking for, and this is another Green River-type serial killer you offed? Come on, give us something!”
I thought about Woodford’s speculation about a task force last night. “Not for attribution, okay? The cops can add two and two as well as you can. They’ll probably try to determine if he was ever stationed at Ft. Lewis, and match any women who went missing, or whose deaths remain open, to that. Not only is this not for attribution, it’s pure speculation. My job is to find the girl, period. The cops won’t be talking to me unless they want my clients to get in touch with their daughter’s dentist.”
“We can do something with that, thanks. Call Roger East. He actually does remember a girl named Jennifer Filmore calling him about that DNA story.”
“That’s my gone girl,” I said.
East sounded drugged when I woke him up a few minutes later.
“Sure I remember her,” he said. “Strangest phone calls I’ve had in months. Maury says she’s missing? You’re trying to find her?” He was waking up fast now, and I realized that some of his slurring had been a thick Southern accent. “How long has she been missing? Any reason to suspect her call to me has anything to do with it? Do you suspect foul…”
“Please,” I interrupted. “So far, this is a straight missing persons case. She did sometimes take off on a lark without telling her parents. So that may be all that’s happened here.”
“She was a student at Green River. Has she been attending classes?”
He was quick; I would never get used to being on the receiving end of questions. Still, I knew the drill.
“Green River protects students’ privacy, even from their own parents. Never mind who’s paying the tuition. It’s none of our business whether she’s still going to class.”
“You’ve been to the school?”
“Yes.” Never get caught in a traceable lie; that’s rule number one in dealing with the media. “I didn’t find her car, and I didn’t find her.” Elaborate on irrelevancies; that’s rule number two.
“What kind of car?”
“A 1964 Barracuda, red.” More of rule number two.
He whistled. “A real classic, huh? Punch-button drive or not?”
I told him I didn’t know, but I did have the license plate. He said he probably wouldn’t do a story, because a missing twenty-year-old wasn’t really news. He didn’t ask about the shooting, so he must have gone home for the night before the wire story came north from Olympia. Media rule number three: never answer questions they don’t ask.
“Could you tell me what Miss Filmore wanted to talk to you about?”
“Sure,” he said. “Mitochondrial DNA analysis.”
“I read that term in your story. It wasn’t clear to me how it works.”
“You need a relative of the unidentified,” East said. “The editor didn’t want all the technical jargon in the story. But basically, they compare the DNA from the known person to the DNA of the unknown. It’s better than fingerprints or dental records, because you can get a hit when there aren’t any fingerprints or teeth. You know what DNA is, right?”
“More or less.”
“Me, too, but I’m studyin’ up on it now. The remains of the girl in the story were identified by matching DNA from her bones to DNA from a relative’s blood sample. It’s the same kind of test they used in South America to positively ID the bones of that Nazi doctor, Mengele. Though who’d admit to being his relative I don’t know.”
“Did Jennifer Filmore have a skeleton she wanted to test?”
“Same question I asked her. She said just a family skeleton, and so far her research hadn’t turned up any test for those. Great line. Maybe now I’ll get to use it if somethin’ has happened to her.”
I had nothing to say to that. More than once in my own newspapering days I had been guilty of that same casually callous attitude toward victims who made good copy. It had been a long time since I counted my working hours by the number of good news stories, and never mind that the victims were real people with real pain.
“Hummel?” East prompted. “Do you think somethin’ has happened to her? Because of some family skeleton that’s more than just a good line for a story?”
“Her parents are half-afraid she’s just off partying, and will disown them when she finds out they made a fuss when she didn’t check in.”
“Well — okay, but look: this really could turn into an intriguing story. Maury says you used to be a reporter a couple of hundred years ago, so you should know. Did she try to dig into somethin’ — maybe literally — that she shouldn’t have? Somethin’ that woke up and bit her, in the best approved manner of sleeping dogs? Was it somethin’ in her own family, as she implied? Some ancient domestic beef that got somebody killed? That nobody knows about? Maybe she saw it as a child, only half remembers? Somethin’ like that?”
“You read the headlines, now see the made-for-TV movie.”
“You got it, Bro. ‘Bout the last time she called with more questions about DNA, I was getting’ real interested in this anonymous family skeleton. When I finished telling her what she wanted to know and started askin’ her questions, she got real dodgy about this alleged family skeleton and said she had to go. I guess it was the last time, ’cause she never called me again.”
“Where you from, anyway?” I said. “Georgia, Alabama?”
He laughed. “Your own accent is comin’ back, just talkin’ to me. Maury said you worked papers down there back in the day. Try Arkansas. Though I worked them other states too on my way west. Call us back if you catch up with your girl and get the rest…of the story. As Paul Harvey has been known to intone. I gotta get some shuteye.”
We didn’t say goodbye. I got my notebook and dialed the eastern Washington number the dead man had called from his SeaTac motel.
A chirrupy country voice said, “Lakeview Motel, Moses Lake.
“Moses Lake?”
“Yes, sir. Did you punch in the correct area code?”
“Yes, 509. I guess this is the number I want.”
“How can I help you?”
“I’m checking up on five calls made to this number from Western Washington. How’s your switchboard set up?”
“I’m sorry, sir, we don’t have a switchboard. Our guest rooms don’t have phones. They have to come up to the lobby to take calls. We’re very small, sir.”
“How do your guests get messages?”
“We go knock on the door.”
I took a deep breath. “You wouldn’t happen to know which of your guests received one call each day for the past five days from the SeaTac Motel Eight, would you?”
“Yes, sir, I do, as I said earlier. But I’m sorry, sir. She checked out last night, right after your office called.”
“My office?”
“Yes, sir. We took her the message at 10:30 p.m. last night: please call the Port of Seattle Police Department.”
Being mistaken for a cop has its uses. “She didn’t call back.” I made it a statement.
“Not from here, she didn’t. She said she would take care of it. But she checked out an hour later, as I told that detective from Thurston County.”
“Doolin, or Carey?”
“I don’t know, sir. I didn’t catch his name.”
“When did he call?”
“He didn’t call. He was here this morning early.”
“He came there in person?” I was pretty surprised one of them would have gone so far away, if they were the only two detectives in Thurston County last night. They hadn’t seemed that interested in Dunn.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I thought SeaTac was in King County?”
“It is,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“Has something happened to Sergeant Dunn, sir?”
“Sergeant Dunn?”
“The man who called her every day.”
“That’s under investigation.” Talking to reporters sharpens your reflexes. “I don’t have her name right here. Who did Sergeant Dunn call?”
“Oh, Miss Filmore, sir. Jennifer Filmore. The way Sergeant Dunn asked me if she was all right, first thing, every time he called, I got the impression he was worried about her. I think he was her boyfriend, you know?”
My reflexes hadn’t been sharpened enough to have anything to say to that.
“Sir? Are you still there?”
“Uh…was she driving her red Barracuda?”
“It’s red, all right. Some kind of old classic car? A huge back window?”
She described her departed guest as a young blonde, nineteen or twenty. Close enough; hair color can change.
“Miss Filmore didn’t say where she was going, did she?” I held my breath.
“No, sir. The detective who was here thought she might be going back to Seattle. The way he acted, I thought Sergeant Dunn might have had an accident or something. He said he had to get right back over there himself. But then I saw her car back over at the nursing home after he left.”
“Nursing home?”
“She was spending time every day with her aunt over there. Must have stopped in to say goodbye before she left, if she was going back.”
She gave me the name of the nursing home, and even looked up the phone number. Then I just sat there and stared at the sunlight on my kitchen floor. Curiouser and curiouser, as Mr. Carroll once wrote.
