Origin Page 2

  But of course, we all know that the investigators wouldn’t bother sending cribs into the evidence room unless someone on the scene thought there was something irregular. It could be any fluky thing at all—a strange response from one of the family, an odd smell in the air, or just the simple desire to double-check everything. Cribs are unusual, but they were still just a few more items in the mountain of evidence we have to analyze every day. You get inured to things in a crime lab, and SIDS is such a commonplace tragedy. Sudden Infant Death—the examiner applies it to any unexplained infant death under age one. When the cribs came in, I hadn’t given them more than a routine going-over. I tracked the whirling ridges of mothers’ hands, babies’ rudimentary prints—so rarely do babies leave real traces, swimming through their cradles on their backs, hands and feet waving empty.

  “If I were her,” Margo says, quietly and deliberately, “and I thought there was even a possibility of someone . . . having done what I thought they’d done, I’d hire a professional.”

  Alyce makes a breathy impatient sound. She stares at the take-out salad she orders every day from the Student Services Building a block up State. Somewhere in her early fifties (she never tells), Alyce specializes in forensic chemistry; she helped start the original Lab twenty years ago for the city—back when the county and city had separate labs. And Sylvie—Trace Analysis—started six years later. Sylvie’s thirty-six and swears that if she doesn’t find a husband this year, she’s going to go to a sperm bank.

  The four of us have worked together, sharing the same office room and lab space, for years. It’s an odd arrangement—they brought Alyce over from Toxicology to temporarily head up the management of Trace Analysis and she just stayed on. Sometimes it seems that things are decent between us, all systems go. But often, tensions rise up—Alyce and Margo especially like to fling tiny lightning bolts at each other. Margo hints that Alyce should head back to her “own” division and leave Trace to “people who know what’s going on.” Alyce says it’s better to have an outsider manage an office because they’re more objective; then she’ll intimate that Margo is a prima donna and that she spoils her children. Margo says that until someone arranges to bear and raise a baby they basically don’t know the first thing about anything.

  Sylvie leans over her limp bologna sandwich and says, “What? You mean, like, hire a private eye?”

  “A bunch of retired rent-a-cops? Christ, those guys aren’t gonna be able to help you,” Alyce says. “Do you know what those people charge?”

  “One of my babies is involved?” Margo draws herself up. “I wouldn’t care! Mortgage the house, go rob a bank. Who cares? I’d want to know that I’d done everything in my earthly powers.”

  “I think that’s why she came looking for Lena,” Alyce says evenly.

  “Maybe I’d hire a hit man,” Margo says. But then she sighs and glances at me.

  I look down. I don’t want to eat this tuna, even though I just made it myself this morning; I put it back on the wax paper wrapping and fold it up. I can feel Margo looking at me, her irises so dark they blend into her pupils. “Lena?” I slide the sandwich back in the paper bag. “Lena?” Her voice is tenuous. “Do you, you know, sense anything on this one?”

  I shake my head. I can see the mother in her face. I see her waiting in there like an animal in a cave. I look down and say, “No, nothing in particular.” Sometimes the crime circumstances and motives come to me so clearly that I’ll feel shaken for days afterward. I’ll see the crust of blood on an embroidered handkerchief and the motives come to me out of nowhere: she wanted to kill her husband for a long, long time. Or: he was always afraid of the other children at school. Or: she couldn’t take the noise in that house one second more.

  Once, I collected a wilted page of notebook paper from a crime scene, that turned out to have been dampened with tears, and I saw it: the man writing that page had known that his killer was coming.

  But I smile at Margo and say, “Just doesn’t seem that unusual.”

  “No, I didn’t think so,” she says.

  Forensics takes a straightforward approach: it leans scientific principles up against the pursuit of the law. One set of rules crosshatches the other. You gaze at the hair and skin fibers scraped from under a victim’s nails: first under a hand lens, then the microscope, waiting for the legal-scientific thing called “evidence” to appear. The hope is, of course, that the harder and closer and longer you look, the more you see. But sometimes the thing you must do is lean back, relax, close your eyes. You can’t rush.

  I watch Margo settle into the chair. Her hand unconsciously taps the purse where she keeps her children’s photographs. Sometimes in the Lab, we’ll say things just to soothe each other. Margo has decided, for now, to believe me. She knows full well about how evidence can look a certain way when you stand in one light, then change utterly when you stand in another. She nods again and squeezes my hand. “I’m paranoid,” she says weakly.

  “What do you expect?” Alyce brandishes one hand as if we were at the gates of hell. “Working here?”

  “The worst humanity has to offer, on a daily basis,” Sylvie says. “It’s like when medical students start to think they’re getting all the diseases they’re studying.”

  Alyce says, “We think we’re gonna get all the crimes.”

  Margo is smiling, but she doesn’t stop gazing at me, either. My eyes feel hot, X-rayed.

  The women look at each other, then laugh as if startled, the sound rippling around me, silvery little waves at the base of a rock, swirling with anxiety.

  The detectives think the Lab techs are a little creepy—with our jokes and our attitude. But the street police, the infantry, know—you’ve got to hang on to a sliver of humor. We’re pieceworkers, trained on our segment of the mystery. Which is just how I like it—working in a mute space all my own.

  Margo says, very casually, “It’s a good thing you don’t have any of your own, Lena. Really, girl, you are so so lucky.”

  CHAPTER 2

  MY OFFICIAL JOB DESCRIPTION IS FINGERPRINT EXAMINER AND technician. But, off the record, I’m steered to investigations concerning lost or hurt or damaged children. In the investigative world, a woman without children is supposedly the least encumbered by emotional baggage. It’s pure cop-think—they love that detachment thing so much, the chief wouldn’t let anyone marry or reproduce if he had any say in the matter.

  So the most pitiful cases are shuffled into my case load. Each folder is a box that shouldn’t be opened. Once in a while, there will be a file containing a school picture, miniature prints, or in the case of babies, footprints. And for days, as I read these files, the world is colored by images of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Until I forget about it, shed the images, and move on to the next disaster.

  But it really started with the Haverstraw case. It happened in ’97, nearly five years ago now. A young boy, Troy Haverstraw, had been found murdered in his bed, and the detectives had no leads. When I popped up with the critical evidence, certain detectives were incredulous to the point of indignation. I was a Lab tech, one step away from secretarial staff—they thought I couldn’t possibly have seen what the rest of them missed. Some of them took it as a personal insult.

  The Lab director, Frank Viso, on the other hand, wanted to promote me after the Haverstraw case broke. He was afraid I might run away and join the FBI. I wasn’t interested either way: promotions mean the public—gloomy work at crime scenes, hands-on investigations with obsessive-compulsive detectives, mind-numbing hours of testimony in court. I basically like to be left alone and unfussed-with. I don’t want to cook, go dancing, chase children, drive cars, plant flowers, do yoga, or any of the dozens of other things people advise me to do. I love the private pleasure of adjusting a slide, feathering the magnification of my microscope so slightly, barely a touch. And just at that moment when everything is about to g
o out of focus, the thing before me dissolves—in a manner of speaking—so it’s no longer just evidence—instead, some element of truth emerges. It opens itself to my scrutiny and I feel my nostrils widen; my mouth salivates, I feel the damp bump of my heart, and at that instant I know that I’ve found the place where the criminal made a mistake.

  EVERY DAY, I STROLL through my blue world. The tinted windows, the floors glowing around my feet as I walk down the corridor: every day I feel a melancholy sweetness: I read somewhere that Isaac Newton said he felt like a child picking up shells beside the ocean of truth. I look through the interior glass walls at the tables full of modern equipment and I understand what he meant.

  We have new computers, updated techniques—fluorescing powders, better chemicals and microscopes, and DNA capability—but outside the Lab, people keep doing the same horrible, predictable things to each other. Crimes come without end, a stream of criminals, their fingers wrapped around a wrist, a vase, a piece of paper, leaving only the finest traces of sweat and grease, maybe salt or old blood, to mark where they’ve been. I avoid reading too much into case reports—personalities tint my analysis of latent prints. I don’t believe I suffer from “confirmation bias”; still, the less I know about who the prints came from, the easier to read them. Latent prints are made up of sweat and dust, and they’re everywhere, left by the ridges on fingers, hands, and feet. They’re completely our own, unique down to the individual features of each individual ridge. Twins have their own fingerprints. Babies are born with the prints they’ll grow into.

  The prints flood my desk, each one lifted on a piece of tape or dusted and pressed onto a card—to be matched to its exemplar, the original set of prints.

  “Hey, Lena! Lena!” Alyce runs up behind me as I walk from the ladies’ room back to the office. I let my fingers drag cold streaks through the condensation on the corridor windows. It helps me focus, those points of damp cold, but I know that tonight Daisy, our custodian, will once again be cursing me for marking her windows. Not to mention the mess of papers, tissues, and crumbs I’ve left, again, around my desk. I know it’s there, but I can’t seem to remember to do anything about it. “Hey, how are you?” She catches up to me.

  “Just hunky-dory.”

  “I don’t think we should go any further with this Cogan case.” She twines her long, gray-blond hair back around one hand. There’s something permanently mournful about her: a sort of eternal virgin. Margo says she’s “schoolmarmish,” but Sylvie says Alyce makes her feel safe. Either way, I know that Alyce has little patience for the sorts of people or requests that she deems “not serious.”

  “But you’ve considered it? Going further?”

  She tightens her mouth, trying to look tough. “No.”

  “Well, then, you see . . .” I gesture helplessly, hand flopping.

  “Like you listen to me?”

  I smile.

  “Just please tell me something—I’m curious,” Alyce says. “That woman—you don’t think she has a case, do you? I mean, obviously. It’s just kind of sad. That’s pretty much all it is, is sad. But I noticed—I thought she got to you, down there in the lobby. Was it just because she was so crazy, or what was it?” She stares at me, her mouth set in its deep folds.

  I consider this for a moment. “Well, I thought I knew her.”

  “You knew her? You knew Erin Cogan?”

  I wrap my arms around myself, hold my elbows. “No. It just seems like I do—or, no, more like I used to know her—really well—and then completely sort of forgot her. Does that make any sense?”

  She turns her lips, looking at me, frowning.

  A stifled moan rises from the walls—the heating system here is balky—and I jump. Alyce folds her narrow arms and regards me closely. “When’s the last time you talked to your foster mom?”

  “Pia? Why?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Maybe you should.”

  “Talk to her? No. Thanks a bunch, though.”

  “She might be able to tell you something—like, if that woman was someone you knew—from your past.”

  “That’s exactly the sort of thing Pia won’t tell me.”

  “Well, even so.” She rakes her fingers through her wispy hair, pulling it forward. “When things are sort of—falling apart—sometimes it’s good to talk to family.”

  I stare at her. She knows this is a sore point—the McWilliamses never adopted me. I veer between wishing to feel close to them and wanting to disown them entirely. It’s been ages since we’ve been in contact. “Oh . . . yeah—sorry—” She takes a step back so she’s touching the wall behind her. Up and down the corridor, the central heating groans.

  “Besides, nothing is falling apart,” I say, fully aware how risky it is to say things like that out loud. “That I know of.”

  “Fine. Nothing is falling apart,” Alyce says with her ironic lilt. “Which is why you look like this.”

  “What?” I hold my hands out. “Look like what?”

  “Like you haven’t showered or slept in about a thousand years.”

  I touch my hair; it does feel stiff. “The hot water hasn’t been working very well.”

  “Okay, so . . .” She starts walking backward. “Everything’s just dandy. You live in the coldest city in the world in a building with no hot water.” She recedes down the hallway, waving.

  “Yeah, I like it that way,” I say. I watch her go.

  The heating system groans in the corners. Pauline Connor, one of the police clerks, walks by, gestures to the window, the snow-whitened sky, and says, “Where’s global warming when you need it?”

  CHAPTER 3

  THE CENTRO DRIVER ON THE NUMBER 14 EASES HIS ROUND WEIGHT forward, the vinyl seat creaking, his cap set back on a cropped gray Afro. The heat is cranked high and his skin gleams. “Hi, my dear,” he says as I climb on. “Rough day, hunh?”

  I drop my palmful of change in the chute. “Oh man,” I say—though I know he makes this same observation to a number of the regulars, over and over, Rough day, hunh.

  I don’t usually take the bus, but I never quite regained equilibrium after this morning’s encounter and I’m too wrung out to walk the twenty cold blocks home. I let my head drift against the window; the vibrations rumble through my skull, racketing away all the thoughts of Erin Cogan and baby cribs and print files. The snow has just started in earnest this year, a week after New Year’s, and it casts a fresh sheen on the narrow university streets. The bus coasts down Jefferson, past more Georgian and neo-gothic government and county buildings, modern plastic surgery centers, public fountains, and city parking lots. I’d once read a landscape architect’s observation that Syracuse had developed around “squares and triangles,” and nowhere does this seem as clear to me as from a bus window. Gradually, the driver downshifts and we ease into the traffic snarl of downtown after-work flight.

  I watch the snow dashing over the backs of cars, snow washing back and forth in the desynchronous wipers on the huge bus windshield. Snow hangs in puffs under the streetlamps and powders the Victorian houses. I sink into watching, a soft enchantment. Watching releases me to memory, specifically to thoughts of my own mother—foster mother—disappointer and betrayer—Pia.

  I went to live with Pia and Henry McWilliams when I was almost three. They were vague about where I’d come from. They mentioned places like “the hospital” and “the agency.” I’d always been conscious that there were certain types of questions—about my earlier life or earlier parents—that were dangerous. Almost as if asking them would mean endangering Pia.

  Pia never looked directly at me—it seemed at times that the sight of me frightened her or was somehow too hard for her to take in. She had a doll-like chin, as well as rich, round lips, naturally red beside the translucence of her skin. She barely allowed herself to eat, keeping herself starved to a stem-fine fragil
ity, her chest so heavy that her narrow shoulders seemed to collapse around it. She was forever crossing her arms high and tight across her breasts. It was startling and strange to hug her; as I got older, embracing Pia felt like consoling a child. I could feel the knobs in her vertebrae, the pulse of her heart through her back. She insisted on a hug once a day when I came home from school, which was plenty for both of us; then she would turn away, fingers pressed to her breastbone, as if I’d squeezed just a hair too tightly.

  She used to say that she and Henry would be officially adopting me very soon, as soon as they got “organized” and pulled the “paperwork” together. Once when I asked her about it, a few days after my twelfth birthday, she laughed in her rueful, airy way, her blue gaze floating over my left shoulder, and said, “Well, really, it’s just a lot of paperwork and formality, and what’s the point of it anyway? It’s not necessary—we know you’re our daughter—isn’t that all that matters? Do we really need some judge to tell us so? Isn’t that some sort of insult, really, when you think about it?”

  She also told me on several occasions that she believed a parent’s most important obligation was to protect their child from “the unpleasantness of the world.” This was, evidently, something she believed her own mother had failed at with her.

  Henry would frown at his hands loose in his lap. There were certain kinds of things that it seemed he couldn’t talk much about—subjects that belonged to Pia—but other things—like how to fix engines, clocks, televisions, can openers—he loved to discourse on. He let me duck into the oily air under the car hood and showed me how each piece of the engine fit together, precise as the cogs and coils inside a windup watch.

  So even if he couldn’t talk to me about love or family or regret, it was fine because he could talk to me about building engines. At night, he would come to check on me, swipe the hair off my forehead, and say, “You still awake, old buddy?”