WHEN DNA TESTING WAS NEW

Bill Burkett
10 min readJan 9, 2023

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DNA (and Moscow, Idaho) is all over the news today. Thirty years ago, where this novel is set, it was just becoming a thing. My story about a “family skelton...”

Chapter Three

Before I left Seattle the next morning, I called my old chum Maury Teller, a copy editor for the Seattle P-I. It was a long shot, but I was anxious to get something moving on the case. We exchanged ritual insults, and I told him what was on my mind.

First he complained. “You know how many college interns and copy clerks, let alone assistant editors, answer our damned main line?” Then his nose for news twitched. “Anything really hinky about this case so far, or is it just a gone girl?”

“So far, she’s just failed to report in to her parents. They’re hoping against hope she’s just exercising her independence. But they’re frightened.”

“I don’t blame ’em. King County is not the place for attractive young girls to wander loose. Look at its record: Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and who knows how many wannabes out there in the rain. If I had a daughter, I’d keep her on a short leash.”

“You’d try,” I said. “These are the nineties. You might not have much luck.”

“Yeah, the gay nineties. Except the word has been corrupted in this century, and there’s not much to be gay about. In any sense of the word.”

I drove to Auburn in a misting rain for which no native would bother to open a bumbershoot. There are as many varieties of rain here as flavors of latte. The Rainier Court manager lived in one of those double-wides that look fancier than most stick-built houses. She was a blowzy blonde wearing what they used to call a “wrapper” and honest-to-God hair curlers. She kept the screen door shut.

“There’s no soliciting in this park, Mister.” She sounded like she had a head cold. “The tenants don’t like it.”

“I couldn’t solicit my way out of wet paper bag.” I held up Filmore’s note. “I just wanted you to take a look at this.”

She snorted a kind of a laugh. “You ain’t a repo man, are you?”

“Nothing like that. I work for Mr. Filmore, who has his trailer parked here. He sent me up to check it over. His daughter goes to Green River?”

“Oh, sure. Jenny. Nice kid, nice parents, too. The kind of folks we like to stay with us.” She cracked the screen door and looked at the note. “Nothing’s wrong with the plumbing is there? Those travel trailers ain’t built the best in the world. You from th’ RV place?”

I retrieved Filmore’s note. “I don’t know anything about the plumbing being bad.”

“You got a key? I don’t think Jennifer’s home these days.”

“Traveling again?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know. Didn’t her daddy say?”

“Young Miss Filmore is well above the age of consent,” I said. “As she lets her parents know from time to time. Just because they pay the rent here, and the college tuition, does not mean she has to keep them informed every time she cuts class to scoot off to the beach or British Columbia with her friends.”

She let out a belly laugh. “Gawd! Kids these days. Can you top ‘em? So Jenny’s like that with her folks, too, huh? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but she’s the politest little thing I’ve seen in a while. Always a smile and a hello. Half the retireds here are ready to adopt her, know what I mean?”

“They’d have to arm-wrestle Mildred Filmore,” I said. “She dotes on that girl.”

“That’s sweet! That’s the way it should be, you know? Kids wouldn’t get in half the trouble they do if their parents gave a damn. You see it on these talk shows all the time. Throwaway kids, that’s what most of ’em are these days.”

“Jennifer hasn’t had any problems you know of, has she? Plumbing or anything else?”

“Hang on a minute.” She turned. “Sarah! C’mere a minute.” A slim dark-haired girl came to the door. “This’s my oldest,” the manager said. “Sarah went with Jenny to Victoria once. Didn’t you, honey? Your saying B.C. made me think about it, Mister. You know if Jenny’s off on a lark, honey?”

The girl looked at me from under dark bangs. “We never went to B.C. again. I don’t care what anybody tells you.”

“We never said you did, honey. You could go again if you wanted to. We ought to go when the weather gets nicer.”

“You’re always saying that. But we never go.” Resentment bubbled in her tones.

“Never mind that now. Do you know if Jenny’s gone off somewhere?”

“What if she has?”

“This nice man is a friend of her daddy’s, stopping by to check on her. That’s all. They just want to know she’s all right.”

“You look like another cop to me.”

“Another cop?” I said. “Why would a cop want to talk to Jennifer? She’s not in any trouble, is she?”

“You tell me.”

“Sarah, you stop that this minute.”

“I told those others,” the girl said stubbornly. “I don’t know nothing about what Jenny’s doing. If she’s gone somewhere she didn’t invite me this time, did she? Or I wouldn’t be here. I’m missing my program.” She stalked back into the trailer.

“Kids!” the woman said. “What’re you going to do?”

“The police were here asking about Jennifer Filmore?”

“Not to me. Why should they?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to.” I gave her my card. “Would you call me if you can get anything out of Sarah?”

“I don’t know if I can. What does a parent ever know, right? That’s why you’re here, ain’t it?”

She told me how to get to Space 37A, and I went over there. I wrote down Sarah’s name and address, just in case. The Filmore travel trailer turned out to be a twenty-eight-foot Wilderness, pretty large as travel trailers went, but dwarfed by the permanent units on either side. The carport was empty. There was a padlock on the storage room. I knocked lightly on the trailer door to avoid rousing the neighbors’ curiosity. No answer. I used the key. The heat was off and it seemed chillier inside than outside. The dank air was scented lightly with a seductive perfume. I closed the door and stood there, feeling like a prowler, while my eyes adjusted to the dim light through drawn curtains.

“Miss Filmore?” I said. “Jennifer? Are you home?”

The feathery brush of raindrops on the metal roof was my only answer.

The unit had a front kitchen. There was a bowl and plate in the sink, clean enough to use right now. I opened the compact refrigerator and sniffed. Nothing was going bad that I could tell. There was a carton of frozen yogurt and two ice trays in the small freezer. The dining booth was pretty much taken up by an old desktop computer, monitor and small printer. What flat space remained was covered with textbooks and assorted papers.

Down the narrow aisle past the bathroom, I turned on one of those little 12-volt overhead lights. There was a blue nylon sleeping bag neatly spread on the rear double bed. A stuffed teddy bear smiled at me from atop a mound of pillows. There was a mammoth ghetto blaster on the side table, and a small electric space heater near the bed. A pair of Nikes was lined precisely beside a pair of those black clunky shoes that were all the fashion for girls right then.

The closets smelled of cedar and that exotic perfume. Blouses, most of them silk, and an assortment of sweaters and sweat shirts. Neatly folded jeans in the bottom. Not a skirt or dress in sight. The drawers turned up undergarments and stacks of paperback books. The cupboards held more books, tape cassettes and a pile of compact disks.

In the tiny bathroom, more fresh young-woman smells: bath powder, shampoo, cologne. A big fluffy towel was folded neatly over the top of the coffin-sized shower. No men’s toiletries. I operated the toilet just because the manager had mentioned plumbing. It worked fine.

I traced a faint sour smell to a couple of empty half-gallon milk cartons under the kitchen counter. The expiration dates were recent. The garbage can was empty. I sat in front of the computer and glanced over the text books and school assignments. English, Sociology, Advanced Algebra. Three old-fashioned tractor-feed pages wound out of the little Okidata printer: an unfinished assignment on Mallory’s symbolism in the Arthurian legend. Handwritten algebra problems on a yellow pad.

In the cupboards above the dining nook, I turned up a rubber-banded stack of Christmas cards under a Victoria’s Secret catalog. All had been addressed to her in Olympia; the catalog had come to the trailer. Nothing leaped out at me from the scrawled notes on the Christmas cards, but one custom card had a gold-embossed signature line, Brigadier General (ret) and Mrs. J.G. Filmore. The card showed George Washington watching his men light candles on a Christmas tree in the snow. Beneath the embossing was a calligraphy-perfect signature, Uncle Jeff and Aunt Miranda, and a note saying young Jeffie had appreciated her kindness during his recent bereavement.

Another cupboard yielded a few dozen photos, still in their developers’ envelopes. The photos were crisp, taken through a good lens. I found the Filmores in a couple of them, and the park-manager’s daughter with another girl, posed against the Victoria waterfront. The other subjects,male and female and mostly young, didn’t have any messages for me in their watch-the-birdy grimaces. Jennifer turned out not to be the kind who wrote identities on the back, but she did seem the kind who recorded every outing. Since I couldn’t find a camera, maybe that was a good sign.

I found only one bill for the trailer phone. She hadn’t made many long-distance calls, but she was a talker when she did. One of the in-state phone numbers matched one I had written down from her parents’ bill, an Everett prefix: Michelle Romney, her high school chum who had moved up there. Two numbers had a 301 area code, which the phone book told me was in Maryland. Maryland didn’t tell me anything, but I copied them into my notebook.

Several of the textbooks had class work folded into them. Racial and Ethnic Groups turned up a neatly printed discourse on wartime detention of Japanese in the Pacific Northwest, and a couple of newspaper clippings about ongoing reparation debates. It also yielded an old, yellowed pamphlet, printed during World War Two, which justified relocation of the nisei. The pamphlet gave generous credit for the concentration-camp legislation to one of the most famous Democratic Senators from this state. The day wasn’t a total loss; I had some cocktail trivia for my next encounter with a politically correct Democrat.

One of the textbooks was rubber-banded to a spiral notebook with My Major Project printed on the cover with a felt tip pen. The textbook surprised me: Criminal Investigation. My clients hadn’t mentioned their daughter was studying into law enforcement.

There was a news clipping from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tucked into the textbook when I slipped it out of the rubber band. The article was heavily highlighted. Its date and the P-I’s city-desk number were penciled in the margin. The article reported how the new DNA matching techniques had cleared up the identity of skeletal female remains believed to belong to a victim of the Green River Killer. The phone call to the P-I from the Filmore home had been made within a week of the article.

The notebook itself had the name of the reporter whose byline appeared on the DNA story, and the city desk phone number, followed by copious notes from what she abbreviated as:telcon w/reporter. She had underlined hair follicles three times, followed by roots required! There were reminders to herself to check the college library computer for more source material, and the names of what she identified as three different private laboratories that were specializing in the new DNA testing. None of them were in Maryland.

I put the reporter’s name in my notebook along with the headline of the story. It probably was just another dead end, homework for the investigation class, but I’d check it out.

There was a little green college folder tucked in the algebra book, college issue, with all her teachers and her advisors entered carefully in a nice round hand. She was enrolled in Investigation 101, under the law enforcement curriculum. Her instructor’s name was Lt. Bob Hannigan, with the “Lt.” carefully underlined. I didn’t know him, but recognized his name: King County Police.

I thumbed back through the photographs, but no psychic vibrations transmitted themselves to me from the emulsions. The rain began to tap more insistently on the roof. I developed a hankering for a pipeful of tobacco, but restrained it. Given the times, she’d probably show up and have me sued for stinking up her cozy little nest.

She’d been gone a day, or a month. There had been apparent gaps in her clothing, but whether she had packed for a trip, or just didn’t have enough to fill all the closets, was beyond me. I hadn’t found any kind of luggage, but didn’t know if she even had any. Why bother, when she could just pack the trailer for the school year before leaving Olympia?

The very ordinariness of everything gave me hope Mildred Filmore was in for a hard time from her daughter for hiring a real-life detective to snoop in her cherished private space. On that cheering thought, I locked up and headed up the hill to the college.

available at Amazon Books

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Bill Burkett
Bill Burkett

Written by Bill Burkett

Professional writer, Pacific Northwest. 20 Books: “Sleeping Planet” 1964 to “Venus Mons Iliad” 2018–19. Most on Amazon for sale. Il faut d’abord durer.