Worth More Dead

outside.
    Cheryl Pitre hadn’t had a chance, and that galled the man who managed to get a message out to the Seattle Police investigators. With all the names that had come to the original detectives working Cheryl’s murder, the name this person put forward was new. Somehow he had never been mentioned in connection with her death. He wasn’t a big-time felon at all, just a druggie, both a user and a pusher.
    His name was Frederick James McKee. His mug shot showed a cadaverous man, pale and thin with haunted eyes. If he was a likely suspect, there was no tearing hurry to contact him; he wasn’t going anywhere. In 2003, Fred McKee was in the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla, serving twelve years for manufacturing methamphetamine. Pitre, still in prison himself at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe, couldn’t even hope for a parole hearing until 2018. The cold case detectives had plenty of time to investigate.
    McKee wasn’t listed as one of Roland’s close associates during his stint at McNeil Island in the eighties, but according to the prison informant, Roland had done fatal business with McKee.
    A convict’s accusing McKee of a fifteen-year-old murder wasn’t enough to charge him. Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon would have to find a way to connect him to Cheryl with physical evidence gleaned on the night of her murder.
    McKee was 29 or 30 at the time of Cheryl’s murder. Now he was 45. Roland was 51. It would be difficult to work back through the intricate connections among and between convicts who served parallel prison terms on McNeil Island in the eighties, their release dates, where they were while on supervised parole, and their associates. Roland had his close friends on the outside he’d kept up with, and he’d even tried to go back to prison to visit some of his tightest buddies, for instance, Bud Halser. Would it be possible to link Pitre and McKee? Or Pitre, Halser, and McKee?
    Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary to go that route. If Gagnon and Mixsell could tie McKee to some part of the direct physical evidence found in Cheryl’s Topaz, they would have a strong case.
    In 1988, DNA was a little-used forensic tool. It had been successful in closing a landmark homicide case in England the year before, but this had involved taking DNA samples from every male in a small town, more than five thousand of them. When Cheryl was murdered, detectives and crime scene specialists had retrieved blood, body fluid, hair, and tissue samples in the hope that they could obtain DNA matches. However, at the time it took a large sample to test for DNA, one that was usually destroyed by the tests themselves. Moreover, there was no national registry then of known DNA comparisons, not like the millions of fingerprints available from the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems) computer system. But the early investigators hadn’t been able to retrieve usable fingerprints. The cost of DNA testing was also prohibitive in the early days of forensic investigation.
    Fortunately, Hank Gruber is an extremely precise man, and he had saved and labeled every scintilla of possible evidence he gleaned from Cheryl Pitre’s car. Evidence from her autopsy had also been carefully preserved. Gruber had always believed that something that existed in that silver car on the night Cheryl’s body was found would lead to her killer, despite the many blind alleys they went down in the intervening fifteen years.
    Cheryl’s wrists had been bound behind her with strapping tape, and that tape still existed in the Seattle Police Department’s Evidence Room. The killer hadn’t left his fingerprints, but was it possible that he left something else of himself on that tape?
    Gregg Mixsell and Dick Gagnon obtained a search warrant to get Fred McKee’s DNA samples so they could compare them with material isolated from the strapping tape.
    And finally, after so many years, they learned that the crime scene processing done in October 1988 had come to fruition after all. It just happened to take more than fifteen years for forensic science to catch up with this unsolved murder.
    Fred McKee’s skin cells still clung to the tape he had used to bind Cheryl’s hands.
    He might as well have written his name in her blood on the night of October 15. What could have possessed him to carry out such a cruel assignment?
    McKee admitted to Mixsell and Gagnon that he met Roland Pitre and the anonymous protected witness while they were all