False Mermaid

“Have you and Karin been partners long?” Nora could hear the brittle note in her voice.

Frank didn’t look up. “Two years.” From his tone, she knew he wasn’t in the mood to talk about Karin Bledsoe—or anything else.

She decided not to push. Maybe after that disastrous conversation a few minutes ago, she ought to count herself lucky that Frank was willing to stay here and work with her. That his need for justice was stronger than his pride.

They worked for a long time in silence, Frank removing bagged items one by one from each box and handing them to Nora. They both knew exactly what they were looking for: when Tríona’s body was discovered, her right shoe was missing, presumably lost at the crime scene or somewhere along the way to the parking garage. Her purse had been found in the car trunk with the body, but her cell phone—the same one Nora had tried calling from the hotel lobby—had never turned up.

The evidence collected from Natalie Russo’s grave site at Hidden Falls was mostly an odd assortment of litter. Nora counted at least a dozen cigarette butts, a couple of flattened beer cans, six sodden matchbooks, innumerable food wrappers, two used condoms, an empty spray paint can. How was it possible to focus on what was important? She watched Frank linger over a prescription pill bottle, trying to read the faded label, as she peered through evidence bags at a stone arrowhead; an ancient, corroded pocket watch; a rusty penknife. The next box contained a handful of mildewed pages that looked as though they’d been ripped from a book of poems. Nora watched as Frank flipped through the curled, black-smudged pages, looking for writing in the margin, underlined words, anything that might tell more. How was it possible to know which stories might be connected? Maybe the pill bottle and the cigarette butts were part of the same story—or perhaps the penknife and the poetry? It was also possible that these fragments were all from completely disconnected tales that overlapped only in the physical world, rubbing together in the layers of detritus left by different generations. Two hours later, they were getting near the end of their search through the evidence, with no sign of a shoe or a cell phone.

“There might be more on the way,” Frank said. “The state crime lab is still processing the rest.”

“What’s that?” Nora pointed to a manila envelope, the last item in the box.

Frank checked the label. “‘Soil and plant material.” He used his penknife to slit open the initialed seal and shook out a heap of dirt and organic material onto a large plastic tray.

Nora began to poke at the pile with a pencil. Some of the leaves were easily recognizable: cottonwood, ash and elm, buckthorn, along with loamy soil studded with many different kinds of seeds. She didn’t look up. “Frank, do you remember the stuff Buck Callaway combed from Tríona’s hair?”

“Sure—that’s how we knew her body had been moved.”

“If we compared these leaves and seeds—”

“What could that tell us? We already know Tríona was probably killed somewhere along the river.”

Nora spoke slowly: “Yes, but if Tríona was attacked near the spot where Natalie Russo was buried, she might have carried away something very specific to that site. We never had anything to compare to the material from Tríona’s hair. I’m just thinking—the leaves and seeds from a single parent plant carry the same genetic fingerprint.”

“But DNA testing takes weeks, months, you know that. The state crime lab is always backed up—”

Nora waved a hand to stop him. “The testing wouldn’t have to be done at the state lab. Do you remember Holly Blume, my friend at the University Herbarium? The forensic botanist who identified the seeds from Tríona’s hair. Her specialty is population genetics—she runs DNA profiles on plants all the time. We could ask Holly to compare the samples from the two cases, see if we can’t come up with a match on the crime scenes that way. It may be a long shot, but it’s at least worth a try.”

5

Thirty minutes later, Nora led Frank Cordova down an air-conditioned corridor on the eighth floor of the Biological Sciences Building on the University of Minnesota’s Saint Paul campus. She knocked on an office door, and a small, dark-haired woman answered. Holly Blume’s face brightened at the sight of her two unexpected visitors, but Nora was unprepared for her friend’s fierce embrace.

“Nora Gavin! What happened to you? You dropped off the face of the earth. We were all so worried about you—”

Nora had gone away believing that she’d lost everything, but perhaps she’d been mistaken in thinking she had lost all her friends. As Holly drew back to study her, Nora had to fight to keep her emotions in check. “I’m fine, Holly. I’ve been abroad for a while.”