better-looking at night after he’d had a few drinks.
He slid her ID back and buzzed her through an adjoining door that opened into a small conference room. A beeper went off: the all-clear signal that she wasn’t carrying.
“They’ll be in soon.” His hair was brown, without a trace of gray. He could be any age from thirty to sixty. He was wearing a wedding ring and blue veins roped the backs of his hands, old hands, which had the curious effect, Grace thought, of making his face look even younger.
He glanced at the bag she was carrying. It was leather and brown with straps. She’d bought it at a Coach discount store in Cabazon when she first started working in the lab.
“There’s a wall outlet here if you need it.”
She nodded and pulled out her computer.
He closed the door and left her.
Grace looked up from her flash drive and for an instant, it felt as if she were flattened in another dimension, looking into her life from a distant place. There was no air in this other place. She couldn’t breathe. Her head felt squeezed, elongated.
Her dead father stood in front of her, bulkier, with drooping lids and fierce brown eyes. A welter of lines cracked his face as his lips moved.
He smiled with no tenderness.
“Uncle Pete.”
“SA Descanso in here.”
His voice was lower than her dad’s had been, and she could almost guarantee this man had never hit the high notes singing “Louie Louie” as a good-night song. She actually couldn’t imagine him singing much of anything to his five kids, now that she considered it, and for a moment, she wondered what her cousins’ lives had been like in some airless, cheerless dimension with a man who didn’t smile easily.
“Ready? They’re on their way in.”
She noticed he didn’t wait for an answer.
“What do you know about racial profiling using DNA?”
She looked down the table. Zsloski slouched next to her uncle. Across the table sat an investigator named Thantos from the Riverside sheriff’s department who was part of the joint terrorism task force, and another Palm Springs FBI agent named Beth Loganis.
The sounds of a busy office carried through the closed door into the room; somewhere a fax machine churned and phones rang. A small window had been cut into the door of the conference room; Grace caught a glimpse of two agents rushing past in the hall, voices urgent and muted.
She waited for it. Usually it took a beat before they got it.
Zsloski was frowning and doodling on a pad. He raised his shaggy head. “Wait a minute. Race is in the DNA?”
All the heads came up.
“We’ve been able to do it for a while; we just don’t call it that in press releases. We can figure out a suspect’s race from collected DNA found at a crime scene. We say race, and people think target, when what we’re actually talking about is the narrowing down of a suspect pool, catching a bad guy before he does it again.
“If you knew from collected DNA that a suspect was a white male whose skin easily sunburned, wouldn’t you want to know that chances are the perp has red hair and freckles? Figuring that out is a little complicated, but—”
Zsloski threw down his pen. “Uncomplicate it.”
She was trying not to stare at her uncle. In the way he held his pen she saw her dad; in the slope of his shoulders, her grandfather.
“It came out of an innocuous pastime, people wanting to trace family trees, get a handle on their ancestry. Now police use it to flag suspects. Somebody kill the lights.”
She started her flash drive as the room went semidark, illuminated by the ghost stamp of light still coming from the hall.
“First off, what the tests do is break down percentages, not actual race.”
She tapped the keypad and her first graphic came up. It was a map of the world with three small silhouettes standing along the bottom. She was using the wall as a screen; it worked fine.
“Basically a lot of our DNA is junk. It’s a matter of geography. Let’s say—a long time ago—we’ve got an Asian who lives someplace in the Pacific Rim. Let’s put him, for our purposes, in China.”
She transferred a small figure to China and filled in the figure with slanting lines.
“His family stays there for generations and over time, there are a few minute variations, some hiccups in his DNA that naturally occur randomly, and once they occur, they get passed down through generations. Those are called polymorphisms in the DNA, or SNPS, pronounced snips.”
She waited as the scribbling subsided and the group was ready for her to go on.
“Now let’s move a different guy to Cape Horn. He started out there and his family lives there for generations, long before recorded time. He’s called a sub-Saharan African.”
She placed a second figure in the south of Africa and filled in the outline with gray pixels.
“Same deal. Lives there eons and he has random snips that are passed down through his line and everybody in his part of the world has some of these same snips, but and here’s the key thing: the guy in Cape Horn probably never went to China, not to move there, not even on vacation—we’re talking thousands of years ago, not now, jumping on a plane. So, the guys in Asia are going to have different snips than the sub-Saharan Africans living at Cape Horn.”
She danced the third figure into what looked like the middle of France.
“Here’s our third guy. He started out in what is now Europe. He has his own snips that go way back in time and that we still see coming up in his relatives alive today. He’s called Indo-European.”
She filled the third figure in with dots and turned to the audience. “These snips insert themselves randomly and are then copied and passed down through generations. Different continents fostered different snips. We fast-forward to today.”
She tapped the keypad again and figures appeared across the world, each a mix of slanting lines, gray pixels, dots; each figure different.
“Nobody’s stayed in a neat little box, but we can pretty accurately trace percentages, how much percentage of a person comes from each of these subgroups. The most sophisticated tests involve one hundred and seventy-six of those snips, narrowing the ancestral pool pretty conclusively. Lights, please.”
Zsloski blinked in the sudden light, looking confused, and Grace amended it.
“It means that after testing a sample, the most sophisticated tests can accurately say that a person is maybe—say—ninety-two percent Indo-European and eight percent sub-Saharan African.”
“So we’d be looking for a white guy.”
“In that example, Mike, yes; if you had this DNA sample at a crime scene, you’d be focusing on white suspects, because it would be genetically impossible for the perp to have come from a predominantly different subgroup. It stands to reason that it would serve to narrow the suspect pool in a reasonable way and save valuable time on the street.”
“I got it.”
“It’s not an exact science but I can tell you this, there’s a DNA printing outfit in Florida that’s a leader in this type of thing; they routinely do blind tests and nail it, every single time, just based on DNA. That means that if they analyze a sample that’s predominantly Indo-Europe-an, the features of the actual person will express in Caucasian features and skin tones, ditto if it’s Asian or African.”
She clicked off the graphic.
“Any questions?”
FBI Special Agent Beth Loganis raised her hand; not