Darker Angels

Drew picked up the letter he had ignored when the clerk left it on his desk. It had a DOJ return address and Drew knew it was a DNA cold hit. He pulled out the letter and recognized the case number. It was a 2000 open-unsolved he and Li had reviewed six-months previously. They had found a pair of women’s slacks in the evidence box with a small bloodstain on one cuff. When they checked the murder book, they found no mention of the slacks by the original investigators and no sign they had submitted the slacks to the lab for testing and analysis. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no leads—nothing that met the unit’s criteria for reopening the case. But the detectives had sent the garment to the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center’s Serology/DNA Unit for analysis before returning the box to the archives. Evidently, the lab had extracted DNA from the bloodstain and uploaded the profile into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, for searching against state and federal databases of known offenders. The automated system had generated a single match, or in the parlance of the Open-Unsolved Unit, a cold hit.