The Eyewitness by Stephen Leather Read Free Book Online Page A

magnifying-glass before she had finished. Twenty-seven of the people at the wedding were members of the immediate family. One was a cousin of the bride who had been killed by a land mine just weeks afterwards. Six were friends of the bride and groom, whom she knew by name. She didn't know who the remaining five were, but she was sure they weren't relatives. For each person she identified, Kimete filled out a missing person's information form, with as many details as possible, when and where they had last been seen. Teuter Berisha's information was sketchy at best: in many cases all she had was a name and how its owner was related to her.
    When they had finished, Solomon thanked her and put away the notebook. He folded up the bloodstained card. On the back there were four identical bar codes on self-adhesive labels. He pulled one off and gave it to Kimete, who stuck it on to the top of the blood-donor's information sheet. When the sample went to the lab no one would know who had given it or where it had come from. The bar code was the only form of identification.
    Solomon put the card into a foil zip-lock pouch and sealed it.
    “What happens now?” the old woman asked Kimete.
    “We isolate your DNA from the blood sample, and we compare it with DNA samples from the bodies,” said Kimete.
    “We do that in our lab in Sarajevo. Then I'll come back. As I said, it shouldn't take more than a few days.”
    Before he left, Solomon shoved two logs into the stove and wrapped the old woman's shawl around her shoulders before kissing her forehead lightly.
    “Bring more cigarettes next time,” she said.
    Solomon stood back and studied the photographs on the white board Alain Audette had couriered from Belgrade photographs of the twenty-six bodies in the truck. Solomon had stuck them around the edge of the board. In some cases Audette had been able to obtain names from information found on the bodies, and Solomon had written them under the respective photographs with a black marker-pen.
    In the centre of the white board he had stuck a copy of the photograph that Teuter Berisha had given him. He'd used his computer to blow it up to four times its original size so that he could see the faces more clearly. In many cases he could match the faces of the dead with faces in the wedding picture.
    The five people in the wedding photograph that Teuter Berisha hadn't been able to identify didn't appear to be among the dead, and neither did the six friends of the bride. That left twenty-seven people in the wedding photograph, and Solomon could match all but one to the smaller photographs around the edge of the white board Chuck Miller knocked on Solomon's open door.
    “How's it going, Jack?” he asked.
    “Identification's easy,” said Solomon.
    “Doubt we're even going to need the DNA evidence.”
    Miller waved the file he was holding.
    “So this is a waste of six thousand bucks, then?” he said.
    “Those are the results?”
    “Hot off the presses.”
    Solomon held out his hand and Miller gave him the file. It contained the DNA profiles from the bodies in the truck, and the blood taken from Teuter Berisha. A computer program had compared the samples and highlighted similarities that pointed to a genetic link. The closer the old woman's relationship to the dead, the more genetic similarities there were. Mother-child relationships were the easiest to spot, followed by siblings, but the program was accurate enough to pinpoint more distant relationships. Solomon went through the twenty-six reports. In more than half of the cases there was a clear genetic link to Teuter Berisha's blood sample.
    “Seems pretty conclusive,” said Miller, as he walked over to the white board “Yeah, the pictures are, too.”
    Miller studied the wedding photograph.
    “Jeez ... so everyone at that wedding was killed?”
    Solomon shook his head.
    “Not all of them. But the ones in the truck were all members of the same family and lived on the farm.”
    “I