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“We still have some things we need to talk about, but it can wait until after Christmas. Right now, let’s just enjoy the moment.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Webbcalledthelabagain, and Randy admonished him, again. “You do understand you aren’t the only one trying to close a case, right?”
Webb chuckled. “I understand. And you understand that I’m not gonna stop until I get my answer.”
“Mm-hm.” He sounded distracted. Or bored.
“Did you get the cookies I sent you?”
Randy laughed. “They’ve already been eaten.”
“Good, good. You can keep the tin, by the way.”
“I appreciate that. There’s a sewing kit in it as we speak.”
Webb laughed and checked his immediate surroundings. He was alone. “So what are you getting me?” he said, his voice a little deeper.
Randy was quiet for a few moments. “I’m at work, Vaughn.”
“So am I.”
“Check back in a few days on the DNA. As for the gift…I’ll get back to you this evening.”
“Cool, I’ll talk to you soon.”
The gift discussion came and went later that night, but the DNA news didn’t arrive until several days after. Randy called with the good news.
“So listen, I have some results. The search turned up 98 profiles, to be exact.”
“98?”
Randy sighed. “That’s gonna happen when you relax the search criteria. Don’t freak out. I’ve had samples ten times that size before. You got lucky. All you have to do is narrow them down.”
“Okay, thanks. Can you send—”
“Already sent. Check your inbox.”
Ackerman had a wife and daughter, and no interest in pissing them off, so Webb spent new year’s eve and new year’s day alone in the office, whittling down his list. He was looking for a family member of the male who had sex with Nyleah the night she died, likely just before she died, and finding them wasn't gonna be an easy task.
Randy had already explained that unrelated people can have matching genetic alleles, but the only way to know for sure that there’s no relation is to look into each and every profile and try to exclude them from your suspects using social factors.
Webb was able to cut his list in half on the first day simply by excluding non-black profiles. Randy’s search criteria were narrow enough that it should have only captured parent-child relationships, and since all of these kids were black, that was easy.
The second day was hard.
He didn’t have a prime suspect in the truest sense of the word, so he had eleven young men to compare the profiles to. If he narrowed it down to the Twelve kids, which he was leaning toward, that allowed him to exclude another thirty profiles. That left him with nineteen.
It was 4:30 pm when he debated going home, but he had no family to rush home to. He stayed, and set about calling all nineteen profiles.
His sixteenth call was to a Yolanda Bridges, age 43, who had been convicted of DUI in Henry County.
The phone rang and rang, and he was set to leave a generic voicemail that suggests urgency but doesn’t give enough information to scare someone out of calling back. But then someone answered. A woman.
“Yes, hello, my name is Detective Vaughn Webb. Is this Ms. Bridges?”
“Yes…” the woman answered cautiously.
