Supreme Justice by Phillip Margolin Read Free Book Online

to find a good job at a good college. Brett had been miserable working as an adjunct professor with no hope of tenure, who supplemented his income by teaching courses at a community college. Daphne loved her husband, and she’d been willing to make a sacrifice to see him happy.
    Daphne’s business card identified her as the chief homicide inspector of the Inverness Police Department, but she was usually working on crimes that had nothing to do with dead people, because there weren’t many murders in Inverness, and it usually didn’t take much sleuthing to solve them when they did occur. Inverness had never been the scene of a bizarre serial killing, and no one could recall finding a murder victim sealed in the locked room of an eerie mansion. Once or twice a year, someone who had too much to drink would hit his wife too hard and too often, or a bar fight would end in tragedy, and Daphne would make the arrest. There was usually a teary confession and a slew of witnesses, and the skills she’d developed in the Chicago PD were rarely needed.
    Early one Saturday afternoon, however, the Inverness Police Department received a call from a terrified coed concerning a body part she’d stumbled over in the forest surrounding the campus. Daphne, an officer, and a forensic expert met Tammy Cole at the trailhead. The coed was dressed in running shorts and a sports bra. Her complexion was ashen and her arms were wrapped around her body despite the unseasonably warm weather.
    Daphne showed the frightened girl her credentials. “Miss Cole, I’m Detective Haggard. This is Officer Pollard and Officer McCall. Can you tell us what happened?”
    The girl swallowed. “I usually go for long runs around this time of day. I run different routes. There’s a stream about five miles in on the trail I picked for today’s run. I got thirsty. The underbrush is thick in spots and I tripped over a root. When I . . .”
    Cole stopped and took a deep breath.
    “Take your time,” Daphne said.
    “I threw out my hands to break the fall,” Cole said when she was calm enough to continue. “It was soft, not like ground. There were insects, and it smelled rancid.”
    “What did?”
    “I’ll show you.”
    “It’s human,” Douglas McCall, the forensics expert, said after a brief examination.
    The thigh presented Daphne with the only interesting case she’d had since she’d moved to Inverness—a chance to do some real detective work—but she suppressed her excitement for fear that McCall would think her ghoulish.
    “Man or woman?” asked Daphne, who was squatting beside him.
    “Tough to tell. Lots of men and women weigh in the neighborhood of 150 pounds, and their thighs would look similar after decomposition because the hair gets lost and the skin turns green, like it has here.”
    “Isn’t there any way to tell who we’ve got? What about DNA?”
    “You could send the thigh to NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. It’s run by the Department of Justice, and they have a database they use to identify missing persons.”
    “How does that work?”
    “We’d send a tissue sample to the University of North Texas, where they do the DNA testing. Their people can extract DNA from soft tissue, like the deep muscle in the thigh, and do nuclear testing on it.”
    “Make it radioactive?”
    McCall laughed. “I thought you were the cop with the Ivy League degree.”
    “Spare me the wit. My degree’s in English lit.”
    “Hey, that rhymes. I bet you aced poetry.”
    “Fuck you, Doug,” Daphne answered with a grin.
    “I didn’t know you were so sensitive. Anyway, the term refers to the cell nucleus. That’s where they get the DNA from. You can do that type of testing with blood, hair. When they extract the DNA, they put the sample in their database and try to get a match. But it takes a while.”
    “What’s a while?”
    “If this was a high-priority case you could get them to act pretty fast, but I’m guessing,