Page 28 of Tear Me Apart
“She said she would never tell. I just want to be sure I’m safe. I don’t like not knowing.”
Roger says, “You know what it will cost you.”
I tap my fingers on the table, ash tipping off the end of my Marlboro onto the scarred wood.
“Quid pro quo, kid.” He doesn’t leer. This is a business transaction. I have no money to pay him, nor favors to bestow, nor property of any kind that’s worth anything to him. Except me. And that I’m not willing to give. Not for this.
“I can’t,” I say, looking away.
“Suit yourself. One of these days, you’re going to change your mind. Now finish that smoke and get to bed.”
In our room, Liesel is having a nightmare. I lie on my bed, on top of the scratchy covers, and listen to her moan and pant. She murmurs “No, no, no, no” and punches in the air, and I can’t help but wonder what—who—she’s fighting.
14
DENVER, COLORADO
CURRENT DAY
Juliet drives back to Denver, her mind in overdrive. Lauren is hiding something. She is sure of it. Her reaction, so vehement, so visceral... Juliet hasn’t seen this side of her sister since they were children. Before Lauren became a mother and her life turned into a fairy tale.
Because make no mistake about it, Lauren is living a fairy tale. Great husband, utterly devoted. Beautiful, talented daughter who is also a hardworking athlete who makes them all proud. Lauren herself, an artist who makes her own hours, does whatever she wants. Travel, money, looks. She is totally and completely free.
Juliet isn’t. She has none of these things, only a career she loves.
She isn’t jealous. Of course she isn’t. She has plenty of time for her own happily ever after. And how could she be jealous, now, especially? Now that she knows what she knows?
As she speeds down from the mountains, the evergreens and rocky slopes covered in snow as familiar as the back of her hand, she begins to see things with new eyes. She’s never noticed that sheer drop-off. She’s never seen that frozen waterfall. When did they put up that netting so the rockslides wouldn’t make it across the entire highway?
She is so used to the drive, so used to—so desensitized to—the reality in which she is living, she’s been in a fugue state. If all of these things along her path are new and different, what does this mean? Is it possible that Mindy too is simply new and different? Or has she been a wolf in sheep’s clothing her whole life, seventeen years a stranger in their midst, and none of them knew it?
It makes her uncomfortable, at best. The idea that their family is an outlier, suddenly different, being unmade, rocks her to the core. Juliet likes the known. The quantifiable. Theories that can be proven, not imagined.
And with that, she knows exactly what she needs to do. She isn’t going to report this, not yet. She will find Kyle Noonan. Get a sample of his blood, let Cameron run it. If he isn’t Mindy’s father, then she can go to Lauren with empirical evidence and make her see sense, make her see reason. It is the only way.
* * *
Back in the lab, she answers some email, forwards two mitochondrial profiles to the team of agents she’s been working with who are on a unique manhunt, looking for a suspect of both Asian and Scottish descent, then shelves all her projects. She gives herself an hour. She is law enforcement. She has access to all the databases. If anyone asks what she is doing, she’ll chalk it up to research.
Juliet has more leeway than most simply because she is breaking new ground with her techniques. Entranced with the idea of familial DNA to solve crimes, she set out over a year earlier to perfect the method known as DNA phenotyping. Instead of searching for an exact match in CODIS—the combined DNA index used to identify and match a criminal’s DNA with crime scene evidence—phenotyping is a more organic, environmental approach: decoding the DNA source sample itself.
The idea is simple. As Juliet told Lauren, blood doesn’t lie. Blood is its own witness. A tech can take a blood sample and within twenty-four hours have a full-blown profile of who it belongs to: white, black, blue eyes, green, blonde, brunette, red, male, female. In theory, if a witness says she was raped by a man of African descent, yet the DNA sample belongs to a white male of European descent, the police will know immediately a mistake has been made; that the witness is wrong, her memory fuzzy, or she has an agenda.
Juliet’s phenotyping method is gaining traction, too, turning profiling on its ear. It is becoming exceptionally useful in murder cases. If law enforcement officials are looking into a serial killer, and all the signs pointed to a specific type of person, the phenotype DNA can help prove or disprove their theory.
Which is all well and good, but Juliet wants to take it further. She is working on a new kind of phenotypic analysis, looking for facial features and familial traits, and applying them to the possible perpetrators of the crimes committed. She’s been matching DNA samples with the FBI’s NGI facial recognition system. So far, she’s helped the CBI close twenty cold-case murders, and she has another massive stack in her to-do pile.
She is an unconventional leader in her field. Not to mention the program she has written allows her to input DNA material into a 3-D printer and have it spit out a face. Completely unusable in court, for now, but she’s been using it to double-check her work once a suspect is caught. A third control, as it were.
Thinking of this, the idea glimmers in the back of her mind, there but not acknowledged. It is this phenotypic method she can use to narrow down Mindy’s true biological parents, should it come to that. But she can’t do it without permission from all involved, including her bosses. Working on the project behind everyone’s backs is unethical, at best; illegal at worst, and quite possibly a waste of time. There are better ways to prove her theories.
Lauren and Kyle didn’t part on good terms, but her famously private sister never let any other news leak. All Juliet knows is he was furious about the pregnancy, filed for divorce, and requested a transfer to another office, preferably as far away from Lauren as he could get. How he ended up in California was beyond her, but it worked to get him away as well as if he’d decided to join the space program and go to the moon.
Kyle wasn’t smart enough for that.
Catty, Juliet.
She racks her brain—what firm did he work for before he took off? Spencer something... Spencer Landry. That’s it. She grabs the phone and looks up the number on the web, dials it. The receptionist answers, her long vowels a dead giveaway that she’s from the north.
