Author: Sidney Sheldon
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/38519_56
The technician sighed. “No. I’m afraid that’s typical. Unless there’s a trial and the prospect of fortune and glory, the Tropezien police’s attitude to evidence preservation is laissez-faire, to say the least.”
Thirty-six hours later, Claude Demartin was meeting the technician face-to-face. His name was Albert Dumas. In his early fifties, tall, thin and angular, with a white lab coat so crisp you could get a paper cut from looking at it, and a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his volelike nose, he was instantly recognizable to Demartin as a fellow forensics nerd. The two men took to each other instantly.
“Come inside, Detective.” Dumas pumped Claude Demartin’s hand enthusiastically. “I think you’ll be excited by what we found.”
Inside, the lab was one giant, open-plan space, with a series of glass-enclosed cubicles arranged around the perimeter. Some of these were offices, simple, IKEA-furnished affairs. Others were teaching rooms, set up with whiteboards, benches and laser pointers, and with banks of microscopes neatly arranged along the back walls. Others still were labs. Albert Dumas led Claude Demartin into one of the offices, where a neat stack of printouts sat next to a computer on the desk.
“So the local police kept no record of this data?” asked Claude.
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“So your boss told me. I can’t say I was surprised.”
“But you keep your own independent records?”
Dumas sounded offended. “Of course. We have semen analysis, hair analysis, blood work, fingerprints. It’s all here. I’ve run a comparison with the data you sent us from the other cases.”
“And…?”
“The bad news is that the blood work you’ve sent us is pretty much useless.”
Claude frowned. That’s supposed to get me excited?
“The Henley samples had clearly been contaminated somehow in the Scotland Yard lab.”
“How about the Jakes results?”
Albert Dumas flipped through his printouts. “No blood other than the victims’ was found at the Los Angeles crime scene. Which was the same with the Anjou case, by the way.”
“So we’ve got nothing?”
“Not quite. Hong Kong was a little more promising. There were three distinct samples taken from the Barings’ home. But the blood that did not come from the victims themselves was standard type O, I’m afraid.”
“Which narrows our suspect pool to about forty percent of the world population,” Claude Demartin said bleakly. “Terrific. So what’s the good news?”
“Ah, well.” Dumas brightened. “At first I thought there wasn’t any. Most of the fingerprints were compromised, so there were no clear matches there, and the semen results were conflicted.”
“Conflicted how?”
“Both Mrs. Henley and Mrs. Jakes had had intercourse with their husbands on the nights in question, and there was no ejaculation during the Baring rape. That left us with only one decent semen sample: ours, from Irina Anjou. I sent the data to Assistant Director McGuire’s office first thing this morning while you were driving down here, but unfortunately it didn’t match with any of the sex offenders on Interpol’s systems.”
Demartin waited for the “but.” Please let there be a “but.”
“But,” Albert Dumas said obligingly, “I had a thought a few hours ago about other physical evidence. There were numerous hair samples collected at the Hong Kong crime scene. Nowhere else. Just at the Baring house.”
Claude Demartin vaguely remembered. “The Chinese ran tests on those at the time, though, and got nowhere. And those guys don’t mess around. Their forensic facilities are some of the best in the world.”
“True. But the Anjou evidence was never logged in any police database. They could only study what they had, and they never had access to our data.”
Claude felt the familiar tingle of excitement he always got when a case was about to break. Human behavior was riddled with errors and inconsistencies. But forensic evidence, if properly handled, never lied.
Albert Dumas grinned. “I am now able to tell you, with a hundred percent certainty, that one of the hairs found in Mr. Baring’s bedroom—item 0029076 in Inspector Liu’s evidence log—is an exact DNA match to the semen retrieved from Mrs. Anjou.” He handed Claude Demartin the relevant piece of paper.
“It was the same man,” Claude whispered excitedly. “The same killer.”
Albert Dumas frowned. “That’s for you to decide, Detective. I couldn’t possibly hazard a guess.”
“But the results…”
“Tell us only that the man who inseminated Irina Anjou on May 16, 2005, was the same man whose hair was found in Miles Baring’s bedroom. That much is a scientifically provable fact. Anything beyond that is mere conjecture.”