Bad Blood

6. Family Affairs

"What?" The Lieutenant's face was a mask of incredulity, and it looked like he was about to turn severely apoplectic.

"The DNA was a perfect match to Master Sergeant Travis Barker, born in Odessa, Texas, January 11, 1980, killed in an accident on Interstate 495 on Long Island, New York on October 8, 2012. Sergeant Barker served with Task Force 88 in Iraq from the beginning of the war until 2010 when he was honorably discharged. Before that he was an Army Ranger."

"Couldn't it be someone else?" Although having sat through several seminars on DNA identification, the Lieutenant still had to ask the question.

"The likelihood is one in ten billion. Not the kind of odds I would bet against." Henson looked a little annoyed as could be expected. "The first thing we should look for is an identical twin. Blood from an identical twin would generate the same DNA profile. The FBI is helping us with that."

"And if he was an only child?"

"Then we have to put our thinking caps on. I am not aware of any case like this in the annals of forensic medicine."

The Lieutenant called the meeting off, and Trotter and O'Shea walked with Henson to the elevators.

"Seriously Dave, what does this mean?" Trotter felt like he had just been given the correct answers to an exam, only to have them pulled away from him a moment later.

"I don't know. If it's not a twin, then it's most likely a database error. The FBI is looking into that aspect too. The criteria for having a profile uploaded to CODIS are pretty stringent, but once in a while someone screws up. If the profiles were mixed up we'll find out and have the identity of our perp in a few days."

"A mix-up, right?" Trotter was not convinced.

"I'm willing to bet my medical degree on that."

Trotter and O'Shea returned to their desks. Trotter was still feeling uncomfortable about the whole DNA identification process, and the fact that their entire case now relied on someone having made a mistake when uploading a profile several years ago. He turned to O'Shea.

"Keep digging at that litigation, see if you can find someone involved with the case ... a lawyer or a judge, or someone. If this DNA thing doesn't pan out, we're back to square one."

Trotter sat down at his desk and started a database search on Master Sergeant Travis Barker. There was not a lot of information to be found in the publicly available databases. Travis had enrolled in the Army straight out of high school in 1998, and went to Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2001. By 2003 he was out of the country, fighting behind enemy lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. He left the armed forces in 2010, but was struggling to find a new occupation and a stable home.

He spent a short time in Texas with his family and childhood friends, but then abruptly moved to California and took a job as a contractor at a naval shipyard, a job he held for a year. When the contract was up he left California and started to drift back east ... a temp job in a factory in Idaho, contract work at an Army base in Kentucky, and finally another Navy shipyard job in New York. Travis didn't stay long in any one place, and he was not ready to settle down or establish a permanent home. Trotter knew this was a common pattern among vets returning from war.

He found a brief news article from 2012, describing the accident that killed Travis Barker. Travis was rear-ended by a suspected drunk driver and thrown into a car that had stopped in front of him. He was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries and died on the operating table a few hours later. Sadly, the article made no mention of his honorable service, or of his struggles to readjust to civil life after returning from the war.

Trotter leaned back as a wave of hopelessness surged through him. There was no doubt that Travis Barker had died on the New York highway many years ago, and he could not have been in the Reeds' house last weekend. Hence, any further research on him would be a complete waste of time. Trotter angrily picked up a stack of papers he had printed out but not yet browsed through. The printouts were the searches he had done on Travis' family, when looking for an identical twin. But Travis had no siblings as far as Trotter could tell. His mother and father were still alive and retired, living in Scottsdale, Arizona. The mother a former nurse, the father a former antique dealer.

Antique dealer ... Trotter quickly brought up the relevant information on his computer. Lloyd Baker had owned his own antique shop in San Antonio for over forty years. His specialty: estate jewelry, watches and rare coins. Trotter turned around.

"Timmy, come here. I have something else for you to look into."