Identical (20 page)

Sofia Michalis had been one of those kids who stood out from the time she could talk. Maria was friendly at church with Sofia’s mom, who, with four older kids already, tended to act like her baby was possessed. Sofie could read, literally, not long after she was upright, and started school a year early. But unlike some other kids Tim had seen who were isolated by phenomenal intelligence, Sofia always seemed outwardly normal, with huge intense black eyes, almost like a cartoon character’s. She’d been a classmate of Tim’s middle daughter, Demetra, and Sofia was one of those little girls you couldn’t have in the house too often. She’d play jacks with De and then, if Tim was at home, would stop off in the kitchen to ask him about his latest case. By the age of seven, Sofia was reading the newspaper cover to cover every day. She was preoccupied frequently with questions about the methodology of detection-how did fingerprint powder stick to the ridges? How could you tell for sure what a person reduced to a skeleton had looked like? It was all he could do at times to keep from answering, ‘How in the hell do I know?’ But then, after mulling over his answers, she would turn back into a kid.

‘There aren’t any bad people like that around here, right?’ she asked him about one of Tim’s goriest cases, a serial murderer named Delbert Rooker who’d killed several young women.

‘Not a one,’ Tim had told her. Even at seven, Sofia, he realized, was too smart to fully believe him.

One of the games Sofia and Demetra played was doctor and nurse, Sofia the doctor, De the nurse and a bevy of dolls as the patients, and darn it, if that wasn’t exactly how it had turned out. De had done a PhD in nursing eventually and was chief nursing supervisor at Hutchinson out in Seattle. And Sofia had rocketed through med school and residencies and was now chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at U Hospital.

Sofia also was one of two or three neighborhood girls who helped them with Kate when she turned sick. Sofia would come over and read to Kate, or babysit for an hour while Maria ran to the grocery at times when Tim’s daughters couldn’t be there. Sofie wouldn’t take any money, not that they didn’t need it in her house. You could just never forget a kid like that.

Tim always felt a tinge of parental pride in Sofia’s achievements. If you were anywhere in the US but Kindle County, Sofia was probably better known than her husband, after leading teams of reconstructive surgeons to Iraq. Tim had seen her several times on CNN, talking about the horrible toll IEDs were taking both on our soldiers and on many Iraqis. It was a horrible thing about humans that as much as we had achieved in helping people thrive-in medicine, and agriculture and technology-we’d so magnified the malevolent force of a single bad actor. Sofia and her colleagues helped turn that around miraculously, grafting burns, getting shredded limbs ready for prosthetics and crafting the missing pieces of faces out of silicone.

Tim rang the bell of the Gianis residence and could hear footfalls down the stairs. The door swung open and Sofia stood stock-still. He had no intention of reminding her who he was, but with a brain like that, she likely forgot no one, and given her profession she probably could reimagine any face she saw without the wear of time.

“Mr. Brodie?” she asked.

He couldn’t keep from smiling. She surged forward to hug him and held him for several seconds.

“It’s so wonderful to see you. Come in, please. Come in.”

He shook his head. “Wish I could, sweetie, but I’m here on business.”

“Well, come in anyway. How are Demetra and Marina?” Tim’s oldest daughter was a musician who played French horn in the Seattle symphony and taught the horn players at the U. She’d started out in rock ’n’ roll and collected her share of bummy fellas along the way before finding Richard, a bassoonist. They’d never married-Richard was against it in principal-but they had two terrific girls, including Stefanie, who’d ended up moving back here.

One thing you knew for sure about Sofia, even when she was little, was that she wasn’t going to have the looks to be Miss America. But she kept herself nicely, wearing makeup even for the surgical theater. Her black hair was still shoulder-length, and showed the smoothing hand of a professional. Her fingernails were bright red. And you could still swim in those eyes. Her nose remained too much for her face, but even that was an impressive statement of self-acceptance, given her line of work.

Tim refused to take off his coat, but he stood under the brass chandelier in the entry and they talked a solid ten minutes about his family and hers. Behind Sofia a baronial central staircase with a beautiful walnut balustrade rose to a window of stained glass on the landing. A dog penned up in the kitchen was barking forlornly and scratching the finish off a door. Sofia knew about Maria-in fact, she tried to remind Tim that she’d been to the wake, but that whole time to Tim had been like getting dragged under a tide, hoping you lasted long enough to get back to the air.

“And you say you’re working?” she asked. “I thought you retired ages ago.”

“I did. But I work some as a private investigator. Do some things for ZP, I’m afraid.”

“Oh dear,” Sofia answered. She laughed. “Now I understand why you didn’t want to come in.”

“Sorry to say it. I’ve got a subpoena for Cass. Just to get his fingerprints for the present. DNA later, if the judge ever allows it.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Brodie,” she answered, “but that’s for the lawyers.”

“Well, if you tell me he lives here,” he said, “I can just drop this and we can be done with it.” He’d drawn the papers out of the pocket of his overcoat.

She smiled with the same warmth but shook her head.

“I can’t say anything, Mr. Brodie. I hope you understand.”

“Course I do. Here’s my card. If you happen to see him, maybe he can give me a call.”

“I’ll keep the card,” she said, “but only so I know where you are.”

She asked him for Demetra’s current e-mail address before he left.

The next morning, he was outside the house by 5:30 a.m. The garage door went up no later than six. There was only one car now, and Sofia, in scrubs again, got in it. She backed out and zoomed down the street, then jammed on the brakes just as her older gold Lexus went past him. She backed up so she was abreast of him. Her window went down, and he lowered his.

“There’s still hot coffee in the house,” she said. “Can I get you a cup?”

“You were always too nice,” he answered. “I’m fine here. You go put some people back together.”

She waved, happy as a schoolgirl, and drove off. He knew for sure Cass was gone.

Today is the turning point,” Crully told him. It was 9:15 and the morning throng, many transported by earbuds to some electronic wonderland, stomped through the winter streets of Center City.

Mark and he were on the way back from a breakfast with the Fraternal Order of Police Leadership Council. The cops were going to endorse Paul eventually. They had nowhere else to go, but Tonsun Kim, the newly elected union chief, wanted to dance a minuet to the tune of his standard demands. More cops. Bigger raises. Larger pensions. Less oversight. But they liked Paul. As a former PA, he understood what it was like out there, and he reflected a natural affinity for these audiences. He was one of those kids who said from the age of six that he wanted to become a police officer. As a result, they heard him when he preached that street justice only made their jobs harder. If there was less hostility in the black and Latin communities, the police would hear less bullshit and more applause and get more assistance. He loved selling people on win-win approaches.

“With the cops?” he asked in response to Crully’s remark.

“No, with the lawsuit.” They were walking toward the Temple now. Afterward, he was going to have a long day on the phone, dialing for dollars. Hal’s ads had definitely slowed the flow of contributions. At some point, he also had to sneak off to call Beata about meeting him at the apartment tonight.

In the midst of a campaign, when you were like a tin duck in a shooting gallery, vexations were often shelved for a while, as if they were an itch you didn’t even feel until you had time to scratch it. But he remembered what was bothering him now that Mark mentioned court. The
Trib
headline this morning read, “Fingerprint Report Clears Gianis.” The story detailed Dickerman’s findings, which were not supposed to be public until Mo announced them to Judge Lands today. The hard spin on the facts would signal to anybody who knew about this stuff where the report had come from.

“I didn’t like the
Trib
headline,” he said.

Crully smirked. He thought Paul was posturing. Almost certainly, Crully had leaked the report, in order to produce two days of favorable headlines rather than one. But he’d done it without asking, because he wanted Paul to be able to say, ‘I had nothing to do with it.’

“I mean it, Mark. The judge will be pissed.”

“The judge is a big boy. He knows it’s an election. And you’re dodging Scuds from a billionaire crackpot. He knows you have to make news.” This was typical Mark, thinking he was an expert, even about an environment where he was actually a novice. Crully was caught up in his own slipstream. “Big public announcement that your prints aren’t at the scene,” said Crully. “Lands is going to say no DNA. That’s the end of the line for Kronon. And just in time.”

He asked what “just in time” meant. Crully tried to hold back for a second, then spilled.

“Greenway did some polling for Willie Dixon.” Dixon was the strongest black candidate, a city councilman from the North End, smart, but sometimes too strident for his own good. Still, Willie was running a strong campaign on a shoestring, punching way above his weight. There were two other African-Americans on the ballot, including May Waterman, a friend of Paul’s from the senate, who was in the race because Paul had told her several months ago that he wouldn’t mind at all if she ran. The same paid petition handlers had gathered signatures for both of them, and as Crully had predicted, no one had noticed. “You know there’s a guy over there with Willie playing both sides.”

In a campaign, there were always staffers who were looking over the hill. The mayor’s election would run in two stages, the first trip to the polls April 3, and then another ballot in May between April’s two highest finishers, assuming neither of them had reached a majority in April. If Willie didn’t make the runoff, some of Dixon’s people would want to jump to Paul and they were building their cred with Mark now.

“Anyway,” said Crully, “my guy says we’re only up six.”

Six. He nodded, holding back any panic. Crully was actually making sense. They’d absorbed Hal’s onslaught, the fingerprints would clear him, and the lawsuit, without the DNA test looming, would no longer tantalize the press. Today would be a good day.

Lands strode onto the bench with his face rigid. He knew D.B. well enough to see the judge was put out. Lands asked Mo Dickerman, who was seated in the first row of the courtroom, to step forward, and Mo limped up in front of the bench.

“Dr. Dickerman, I’ve seen your written report. Would you agree that what I read on the front page of the
Tribune
this morning is a fair summary?”

The courtroom filled with laughter, but Du Bois’s gray eyes shot toward Ray for just a second. He didn’t allow his gaze to drift to Paul, but there was no doubt where D.B. was placing the blame. It was part of this life that you often took a pasting for stuff you’d never wanted anybody to do.

“It seemed fairly accurate,” Mo said. “I could not identify any of the latent prints accumulated in 1982 in Ms. Kronon’s bedroom as being from Senator Gianis. There were a few about which I could not reach any conclusion without also seeing Cass Gianis’s prints, which I’ve suggested to both sides they might want to obtain. But the senator was otherwise excluded on any identifiable print from the scene.”

There was a little riffle from the spectators and the journalists’ row.

“Well,” said the judge, “I’m going to place your report in the court file, so it’s available to everyone else who may not have seen a copy in advance.” Du Bois was laying it on thick.

“Judge, I would just like to say-”

“No need, Mr. Horgan. We all know how this goes. It might be your side, it might be your opponents, it might be someone else whose agenda none of us understands. So I make no assumptions. And even though this was designated as a report to the court, I realize in retrospect that I didn’t explicitly advise the parties against premature disclosure. But let me be clear now. There will be a full investigation of any similar incident in the future. Understood?”

At the podium, Ray nodded several times, virtually bowing, his whole stout upper body canting from the waist like a knight’s before the throne.

“Judge,” said Tooley, “we’ll cooperate in any inquiry you want to make right now.”

“All right,” said Du Bois, ignoring Mel. Like many other people in this courthouse, the judge didn’t seem to hold Tooley in high regard. “So the pending matter is Mr. Kronon’s request to enforce his subpoenas to obtain the blood standards and the other evidence that remains in the hands of the state police, with the express intention that defendant Kronon can attempt to do DNA identification on the blood and any other genetic evidence from the crime scene. In addition, Mr. Kronon asks me to order Senator Gianis to provide a DNA sample by way of an oral swab.”

The judge looked briefly at a folder he had with him, then webbed his hands to address the courtroom.

“I’ve given this a great deal of thought. We know from Dr. Yavem that the DNA results are very, very likely to be inconclusive. And the fingerprint report of Dr. Dickerman reinforces that estimate. I agree with Mr. Horgan that at some point a chance of success that ends up getting measured in basis points makes a test burdensome and oppressive. But that’s not really the problem here. The question I have been wrestling with is whether inconclusive results could be relevant in any way to this proceeding.