The Rivers Run Dry (26 page)

“The latest trend,” he said. “Meth lab on wheels. Free delivery, just like pizza. All we need is somebody rear-ending that thing. The explosion will blow the car off the road.” He stuck out his hand. “Tom O'Brien.”

I asked about the FBI evidence that came in today, and Tom O'Brien said he'd personally scraped the soil from under the fingernail about an hour ago. He sent the soil by courier to Spokane, to Peter Rosser.

“He's the best with soils,” he added. “I have photos of every-thing though.”

He pivoted a half turn, lifting a stack of four-by-six color shots. At first glance, the object beside the ruler looked like something coughed up by the sea. Then I realized it was skin, black around the exposed edges. But the nail bothered me most. Its elliptical shape testified to months of expensive manicures, but in the magnified shots from the digital microscope, the new nicks and tears were evident and the nail bed was filled with compacted soil.

“Could be the tip of a right pinky,” Tom O'Brien said, as I stared at the photos. “You can see how the nail's torn—abrasion tears, like the finger scraped against something hard.”

“Was a fingerprint available?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Whoever cut it off was careful. We didn't even get a good partial print. We're using DNA for identification. You want to talk to the lab?”

He went to make copies of the fingertip photos, saying he'd leave them at the front desk, and I walked across the lab to the DNA section, one square room with an entire wall consumed by a white dry-erase board. On that, a running count of the state's DNA backlog, all 53,721 cases.

Two young women, each wearing white lab coats, stared into microscopes. On the floor between them a note was taped to a small refrigerator, reading, Food Only!

On television, the kind of shows that Felicia Kunkel adored, lab techs were often seen collecting evidence. But in real life, lab techs never participated in an investigation, and when it came to DNA, their sole purpose was to find the fourteen different gene locations and determine whether those alleles, as they were called, matched any other person's DNA. Provided it wasn't presented to the O. J. Simpson jury, DNA was straightforward science.

“I have three sets of DNA,” explained the first woman, a compact Asian girl whose black hair was cinched into a tight bun on top of her head. She began to explain how the DNA examination worked when I interrupted.

“I'm familiar with the process. I just need the conclusion.”

“Okay, great,” she said. “You can break it to them.”

“Break what, to whom?”

“Maybe they already know. One of them should.”

“I don't understand.”

“The DNA from the fingertip?”

“Yes.”

“It matches the mother's DNA.”

“Okay.”

“But it doesn't match the father.”

I took a moment. “You're saying—”

“I'm saying he is not the biological father. Not one of his alleles lined up with the girl's DNA. Hey, maybe it's an adoption. Sometimes people don't want to talk about that, you know.”

When David Harmon married my mother, he adopted me and my sister, Helen. I was five and Helen was eight, and if people haven't experienced adoptive love, there was little use trying to explain it to them. Description wouldn't help them recognize the territory, since most people couldn't comprehend the depths and heights and wide-open wilderness that appeared whenever a heart transcended desire for its own kind.

Adoptive love was not natural; it was not manufactured within our DNA. No evidence of its existence showed up in our blood types or facial features or the quaint familial traits that ran through generations, the genetic tendencies toward duty or distraction or drink. In scientific terms, adoption meant people were unrelated. Period.

But in the aftermath of my father's death, I came to realize, once again, that science never fully explained the world's greatest mysteries. Science was a high calling. It was a noble and wonder-filled endeavor. But science had yet to provide satisfactory answers for our most beautiful unknowns—all the things that transcended understanding, the miracles that pervaded individual lives and stretched back to a majesty spoken into existence, to a sacrifice that continued to resonate within our souls thousands of years later. A sacrifice based on adoption: he chose us, he loved us, then he died for the worst within us.

That afternoon, as I pulled into the VanAlstyne estate, my heart was keeping a rhythm that matched the thoughts jumping around my brain. Maybe Martin VanAlstyne knew Courtney was not his birth child; maybe he felt honored to be her adoptive father. But then, why the charade of taking DNA samples? And what about the white mask of dread I'd seen on Mrs. VanAlstyne's face? Lucia believed she was hiding something. Perhaps this was it.

A different state trooper guarded the front door now, and several Bureau figures had changed inside the house too. The atmosphere had downshifted slightly, a barely detectable emotional pullback from the earlier urgency. It had been six hours since the note with the finger had been discovered at the gate by the assistant named Sequoia. No further instructions had been given, and McLeod, I was told by another agent, had returned to the office, probably to brief the suits upstairs. Detective Markel had left to get a handwriting sample from Suggs.

The dark-haired assistant named Sequoia moved about the living room, pointing her severe gaze at various pieces of surveillance equipment, then barking her requests at the agents. As I stepped outside to phone McLeod, there was still no sign of Jack Stephanson. The wind was pulsing, lapping the lake water against the rocky bank. My hair blew across my face, and I pressed my free hand against my ear in order to hear McLeod's responses. I told him that Questioned Documents had examined the note. He interrupted me twice.

Then I said, “The mother's DNA matches the fingertip. But the father's DNA is completely different.”

“What?” he said.

“Martin VanAlstyne is not the birth father.”

“Then why'd he let us take his DNA?”

I let the question hang in the air, where the wind whirl-pooled fallen leaves at the edge of the driveway.

“Oh, great,” he said. “Another temple in a teapot. Let Lutini handle that information, Harmon. She's heading back there for the night, to stay with them. You focus on getting this girl back.”

“Yes, sir. But I'd like to broach the subject with the mother. I'd like to observe her reaction, without Lutini there to comfort her.”

He mumbled something incomprehensible.

I pressed my hand against my ear. “Pardon?”

“You're right, you're right. Go ahead. I was thinking about keeping the peace instead of solving the case. Too much time upstairs.” He sighed. “Besides, if you make them mad, what do we lose? They already don't like you.”

I closed the phone and walked back to the front door.

“She's upstairs,” the trooper said. The nameplate on his shirt said Officer Dirk Duncan.

“Do you know where Mr. VanAlstyne is?”

“Downstairs, in the gym.”

“Thank you, officer.”

I walked to the curving iron staircase, the rail's cold, hammered metal against the palm of my hand. On the second floor, I knocked on the closed doors, waiting a moment before turning each knob. The rooms were empty and the furniture had a showroom quality, as though I could reach under any of the silk lampshades and find a price tag that would knock the air out of my lungs.

When I got back to the stairs, I looked down at the pink marble foyer, then up. The stairs made one last small pirouette. I followed it to a crow's nest resting above the mansion's main roof. An upholstered chaise longue the color of cinnabar stretched under the rectangular windows and outside, a falling dusk made the lake look like slate. The crown of her platinum hair was visible above the chaise's back.

“Mrs. VanAlstyne?” I walked around the side of the chair.

For a moment, I wondered if she were sleeping, she was so still. But her eyes were open, fixed on the water, her irises mirroring the flat color of the lake.

I waited several moments. “We have the results back from the lab. The DNA.”

She turned her head slowly, rolling it against the chaise's back, as though realizing my presence for the first time. “He doesn't know,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“He loves her so much.”

“I'm certain that's true.”

She didn't try to blink away the tears that rose in her eyes. The tears hovered, pooling against her strangely colored eyes. “How do I tell him? What do I say?”

I had no answer. Only more questions. “Ma'am, who is the birth father?”

She pressed her long white fingers flat against her eyelids, as though pushing the tears back from where they came. “Tell me, Agent Harmon. Does DNA carry a gene for gambling?”

“Ma'am?”

She lifted her thin legs, setting her black ballet flats on the carpeting. When she stood, one pale hand grabbed the window-sill. Her body swayed. When I took her elbow, it felt as delicate as a bird's wing.

“I'm feeling light-headed,” she said.

“That's understandable.”

A pink flush came to her cheeks. She walked down one flight of stairs, moving like a person in a somnambulant daze. On the second floor, she turned down the hall, her steps dirgelike to the third door. She opened it, walking inside, closing the door behind us.

The room had a peppery scent, like fading carnations, and the pink walls held black-and-white photographs, each identically framed in silver. They seemed familiar somehow. And then I recognized them. The same photos I'd seen in the condominium that Courtney shared with Stacee Warner. The same stunning symmetry. Six-sided, perfect crystals. I couldn't help myself.

“Microscopic images of crystals?” I asked.

“Snowflakes,” she said. “They're photographs of snowflakes. Courtney takes them all the time.”

The facet of each flake was visible, down to the beveled edge on every termination. Not one flake was the same.

“You'd think they would melt, wouldn't you?” she said in her dull husky voice. “But her father invented a camera that keeps the flakes frozen under the magnifying lens . . .” Her voice trailed off. She set herself down on the edge of the large bed. “Her father,” she whispered.

“Mr. VanAlstyne is still her father.”

She looked at me for a moment. “I made a mistake. A horrible mistake. I've spent the last twenty years hoping nobody would find out. When Courtney disappeared, I knew it was my fault. I was being punished. My reprieve was over.”

“Does the birth father know?”

“About Courtney?”

I nodded.

She placed her hands on the bed, bracing her thin body. She nodded.

“At the time, I was lonely,” she said. “Martin and I had been married five years. It was difficult, it wasn't the marriage I thought it would be. Martin worked eighty, ninety hours a week. He didn't have time for me. I tried to cheer myself up by remodeling the house. The builder, he was here every day.” She looked at me. “Have you ever wanted a man to pay attention to you? Just pay attention, listen. That's all I wanted.”

I did not attempt to comfort her; that was Lutini's job. And as she wept, a quiet polite sobbing, I stared at the snowflakes that Courtney VanAlstyne had captured. She had managed to transfer the sensation of cold into the photographs, making them look as though a glacial blue existed between black and white.

When Mrs. VanAlstyne dropped her hands into her lap, she spoke staring at the floor.

“I love my husband. I've always loved him. And I didn't want to lose him. But I didn't break off the affair until Courtney was almost nine. I . . . I realize now I was getting back at Martin. I can see that now. He loved his work so much, and I loved him. I was jealous of his inventions.” She threw a hand toward the photos. “I was even jealous of those cameras. Pathetic, isn't it?”

I gave a condoling smile.

“Then, suddenly, Martin suffered a health scare. They found prostate cancer. They removed it, but it scared him. He decided to retire, decided it was time to savor life. We began spending time together, as a family. And he took such a deep interest in Courtney, a real interest. Finally, we were what we should have been all along. Except, of course, we weren't. I knew the truth. And Courtney knew the truth.”

“You told her?”

“Children have a way of knowing. The builder was here so much when she was young. And they developed a relationship.”

“Did she ever say anything to you, to Mr. VanAlstyne?”

She shook her head. “She loves Martin. She would never want to injure him in any way.”

“And the birth father?”

She chewed her lower lip. Then, realizing what she was doing, ran an index finger over the spot, as though searching for any injury. “My daughter is a genius with numbers. I don't know if anybody's told you.”