To Die For Read Online Free PDF

detective mentor, he had no personal guidelines, no comfortable pattern of his own. Greco couldn’t resist beating himself up one more time—he was so green, he had never before called out the ID techs and county criminalists to work a crime scene. They hadn’t been necessary at his first homicide.
    Greco shook his head. He knew his self-doubt came from his feeling of failure, and his fear that he could have done more to solve the prostitute’s murder. Wallowing in guilt and inadequacy would take him nowhere. His mother had taught him that. If you write a script for your own failure, she used to tell him, it will come true.
    Greco was half-Japanese, half-Italian. His father was an intelligence officer in the air force, stationed at the Fuchu Air Force Base, when he met Greco’s mother in 1957. Greco and his three sisters were typical military brats, living all over the United States and Japan, usually spending no more than a few months in each new place. Greco, often mistaken for being Hispanic, remained fluent in Japanese. As he was growing up, his mother constantly encouraged him to think positive—there was nothing he couldn’t do.
    As he sipped his coffee, the previous day’s panic returned. Sitting at his desk on the morning after Norma’s body had been found, Greco organized his notes, typed them into his laptop computer and wrote his report, poring over every detail, trying to find a direction. No break-in. No known theft. Victim lived alone. A vicious attack. Greco wished that some of the physical evidence would yield a clue. The problem was that the criminalists couldn’t identify a perpetrator working only with a hair or a fiber from Norma’s house. An expert has to compare strands of hair collected from a crime scene with strands of hair removed from a suspect and then determine whether the samples came from the same person. But since different people can often share similar hair characteristics, a jury is unlikely to convict a suspect based solely on hair samples. The same goes for shoeprints. Greco was estatic that Cooksey found one—Greco was so inexperienced, he hadn’t even known it was possible to collect it. He’d heard of making molds of shoe impressions in mud, for example, by using plaster. He had watched, fascinated, as Cooksey had literally peeled the dusty print off the floor. The shoeprint had the potential to be a promising piece of evidence, but first he needed a suspect’s shoe to compare with the one lifted from Norma’s entryway.
    The knives, though, might yield what Greco wanted. He was counting on getting a good fingerprint from one of them. That would be a spectacular break. A fingerprint, unlike hair or a shoeprint, can positively identify one person and only one person—if it was a good, clear, full print. That would practically guarantee a conviction. When he’d sent the knives out to the lab first thing that morning, the lab techs told him they could probably have results by the afternoon. Better yet, Greco was hoping that the killer had left behind a little DNA, perhaps under Norma’s broken fingernail, perhaps from the blood on the chair on the stairway landing. DNA is as impressive and convincing as evidence can get in a courtroom, although it doesn’t exactly identify a suspect the same way a fingerprint does.
    DNA test results are reported to juries through statistics. For example, an expert might testify that there’s a 1 in 20 million probability that another person on earth shares the same genetic characteristics as the defendant. The prosecutor usually argues that those numbers make it rather unlikely that anyone other than the defendant deposited his or her DNA at a crime scene.
    He would sort through the evidence later in the week and decide which items to ship to the state DNA lab in Sacramento, hundreds of miles north. Of course he would send the knives, the fingernail clippings, the scrapings,