The Death Factory by Greg Iles Page A

contaminated. There was diluted blood on the floor. Some evidence was stored in such a way that cross-contamination was inevitable. Houston’s hot as hell in the summer, and they had oscillating fans on the tables. In rooms where they analyzed hair and fiber evidence! It was a disgrace. I’d had no idea, really. None of us did. I guess Dr. Kirmani had the place cleaned up whenever he knew ADAs were coming over.”
    “But surely the police knew about this?”
    “They claim they didn’t.”
    “Shit.” Jack looks incredulous. “And you had no suspicions prior to this?”
    “I’d always had a weird feeling about Dr. Kirmani. He seemed to enjoy testifying a little too much. You know, putting on the suit and playing the part of condescending expert to a bunch of laymen on the jury. And about a year before Vargas came to see me, there’d been a public scandal over a guy who’d gotten left in the county jail for seven months while awaiting DNA analysis in his case. And he was innocent.”
    “Christ.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, because of that feeling about Kirmani, I’d always made absolutely sure of my forensic evidence. When I had DNA evidence in capital cases, I always made Joe pay for outside geneticists to do the testimony. I wanted my cases bulletproof, so that when Barry Scheck or Alan Dershowitz came down the pike with some pro bono appeal years later—which was inevitable in Harris County—they wouldn’t find one hair out of place.”
    “Penn, it really stretches credibility that no one in authority knew about this.”
    “Not as much as you think. Kirmani was a master at manipulation. He hired people who were either barely qualified or lacked credentials, so they didn’t have the courage to challenge him. He kept a few competent people to whom he channeled the bulk of the work he didn’t understand. And his superiors had less technical knowledge than he did. They were awed by his advanced degree. Think about it. How often do you look under your hood to check your engine? Only when some problem gets so bad you can’t ignore it, right? There’s a major independent investigation of that lab going on as we speak. But I honestly don’t think we’ll ever know who knew what, and when. I think Felix knew a hell of a lot more than he told me about, but he kept quiet for fear of incriminating himself.”
    I park the BMW at the top of Jewish Hill, and we get out and walk to the end of the promontory, where a wire bench stands beneath a lonely flagpole. Behind the well-tended brick walls up here stand the graves of the Jews who came to Natchez in the nineteenth century and did as much as anyone to build the thriving mercantile business that eventually competed with cotton farming. We sit on the bench, but the vast panorama laid out before us seems to hold little interest for Jack.
    “Let’s hear it,” he says. “Tell me you blew the story wide open.”
    “Nope. By the time I got home from the crime lab, I was exhausted. Still, I couldn’t sleep. I went into Annie’s room and kissed her forehead, then went into the sickroom. Mom and Sarah’s mother were sitting on opposite sides of Sarah’s bed, hunched over her skeletal figure in the half-light. In that moment they looked like ancient women tending a leper in biblical times. I asked them to give me some time alone with her, and they vanished without a sound. Sarah was in that narcotized trance that substituted for sleep near the end. I’d wanted to talk to her, but she only had a few lucid moments before dawn. She couldn’t focus long. The brain metastases had initially caused only hand weakness, things like that. But by the end, her memory was severely affected. That was one of the most frightening things for her. For me, too, to be honest. It’s as though certain things you’ve done together never really happened, because they’ve been erased from the other person’s memory.
    “At some point during the night, I fell asleep. After dawn, I started awake