The Body Box by Lynn Abercrombie Page B

white po-lices was all like, ‘You telling us a fairy tale, Roscoe.’ Motherfuckers kept calling me Roscoe . Telling me they can’t find no receipt to prove he done sprayed that house! Damn. Telling me Mr. Shively say he ain’t sent no bug man.” Vernell leaned toward me. “But that bug man, he wasn’t no fairy tale. Bug man, he all the time be putting his hands on Marquavious.” He groaned a little for effect, showing me how hard it was for him to even think about this.
    â€œYou remember his name, this bug man?”
    â€œNever did hear it.”
    â€œWhat about the company?”
    Vernell shrugged. “Damn sure wasn’t no Orkin. That’s all I know.”
    â€œAnything else at all?”
    â€œI wish I could remember something else. I surely do.”
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    I bagged the mouth swab and drove it over to the south side of Decatur, where the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has a big complex. The forensic science center was in the back, a four-story brick building with a glass-fronted atrium.
    I’d dealt with one of the techs there on a regular basis back when I was in Vice. He was a boyish-looking blond guy named Mark Terry, who flirted outrageously with everything that moved.
    â€œMechelle Deakes!” he said, making a little frame with his fingers, then looking through it at me like a photographer getting ready to take my picture. “Mm- mmmm! Work it! Yes! You know that’s right!”
    I vamped a little.
    â€œSaw you on TV the other day,” he said. “You get all famous, can’t come see us little people anymore?”
    â€œI’m in the Cold Case Unit now.” I decided to skip telling him all about my fall from grace, my year on suspension.
    â€œOooo! Big promotion, huh?”
    â€œBaby,” I said, “if you want to call it a big promotion, you just go head on. Tell me I’m beautiful, too.”
    â€œYou are beautiful,” Mark Terry said. “I’ve always said that.” He gave me a big, leering once-over. “Good to see you put some of that weight back on. You were getting straight-up gaunt for a while there.”
    â€œNow, don’t you be making me feel bad.”
    â€œShoot, girl. I like a woman with curves.”
    â€œThat a fact?”
    â€œScout’s honor.” He turned to his keyboard and tapped in some information, then checked the seals on Moncrief’s DNA swab, recorded the number in the computer. “When you need this by?”
    â€œTomorrow.”
    He made a big show, laughing and flopping around. “No, seriously,” he said finally.
    â€œWhen can you get it done?”
    He peered at the case numbers on the evidence, then at the monitor. “The computer estimates that we’re looking at a two-hundred-and-forty-one day turnaround.”
    â€œYou’re kidding me. That’s almost a year.”
    â€œWe had four techs last year, and we were already running six weeks behind. The state put a hiring freeze on us, and two techs quit the next day. I got eighteen hundred rape kits and another four, five hundred blood and semen samples in the queue. You do the math.”
    â€œI heard you got new machines, you could do this stuff overnight.”
    â€œIf God himself asked us real nice, we might consider giving him overnight service.”
    I laughed. Terry and I made a little chitchat about the job while he was logging in the evidence. He asked about the Cold Case Unit, and when I mentioned Lt. Gooch, Terry’s grin faded and his eyes went just a little dark.
    â€œYou and Gooch have met, huh?” I said.
    â€œYeah, me and the good lieutenant go back a long, long way.” Terry squinted at the information he had just put into the computer. “In fact, I thought he’d already sent this in before.”
    â€œSent what in?”
    â€œDNA. For this case.”
    â€œI don’t see how he could have. This is my case.”
    Terry