Authors: Lisa Black
NINE
T
hey told Shephard. He had gone home and freshened up – to judge from the freshly (and hastily, leaving two tiny scabs at the back of his jaw) shaved face and the clean smell of Coast soap – and then come back, somehow assigning the case to himself. Apparently, he could do that. Two detectives had been put on it as well, of course, Williams and Conroy, called Ying and Yang both in and out of earshot. Williams’ skin was dark enough to have been sprayed on with a can of paint only that morning, and Conroy was so pale that if he fell naked into a snow bank he might be lost forever. They had always been friendly to Theresa, and today were even more so after learning that her cousin Frank was currently floating around the Caribbean and so would not be available to peer over their shoulders and home in on their case simply because it involved Theresa. Then they had gone off to speak to Dr Banachek.
Now they were busy interviewing the other deskmen and the dieners, so Shephard alone got to hear her great theory. To wit: somehow George Bain, Hubert Reese and Darryl Johnson were connected, other than simply by working in the same building, and someone had attacked them for some reason, which might be because he wanted something.
‘And that something would be?’ Shephard asked drily, drinking a cup of coffee Theresa had graciously provided him. Neenah, the Trace Evidence secretary, had arrived as well and sat at her desk but with her chair turned toward them, watching their verbal volleys with wide eyes. (Her bet still rested on Mrs Johnson, Darryl’s long-but-not-quietly-suffering wife. Neenah’s verdict: ‘Man had it coming for a long time now.’)
‘I have no idea,’ Theresa told Shephard. ‘But it’s something small, maybe a piece of paper, since he – the attacker – gravitates toward file cabinets, jewelry boxes and dresser drawers.’
Shephard studied the photos from George Bain’s death on their computer, since Janice wouldn’t let her leave the file room with the prints. Just as well, because then she could use the zoom feature to make certain points such as: Bain’s house might have been a wreck, but it was a neat wreck.
‘But Bain died of a heart attack,’ Shephard pointed out, his voice carefully neutral.
Theresa said, ‘Yes, he did. But it might have been brought on by the stress of being punched in the stomach. And the areas of his home which were disturbed—’
‘Given the condition of his home that’s a complete guess, and you’re making it entirely from photographs.’
‘—are the same as Dr Reese’s house. Nothing out of place, except for the home office and a jewelry box.
‘Which could indicate an interrupted burglary.’
‘Who looks for valuables in a filing cabinet?’
He didn’t answer that.
‘Who responded to Bain’s house?’ she asked.
Don said, ‘Patrol officers. Detectives declined to respond.’
Shephard scowled, forming wrinkles across his forehead that pulled taut the skin over his cheekbones.
‘That wasn’t unreasonable,’ she consoled him. ‘With no signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle and his valuables still in place, it looked like a heart attack.’
‘Which it was,’ he pointed out.
‘Except that it looks like someone was looking for something.’
‘And that couldn’t have been the victim?’
Theresa stopped. Of course, George could have been searching through his own belongings for some item, getting frustrated when he couldn’t find it, dumping more strain on an already overloaded heart. It began to seize up, and he stumbled around … ‘Except that most self-inflicted stumbling injuries will be to the arms, elbows and shins. Not the ribs and the shoulder, unless he actually fell on to something.’
‘Which he could easily have done.’
‘But even so, three deaths with a workplace in common? That feels like way too much coincidence to me.’
Shephard went on: ‘But why would the same person who attacked two men in their homes alone also attack two – if we assume Justin is not the killer – men in a workplace? There’s no evidence of searching in the deskmen’s office.’
Theresa couldn’t tell if he was arguing, playing the devil’s advocate, or simply brainstorming. ‘No,’ she admitted with reluctance.
‘Which would indicate Justin
is
the killer. He didn’t need to search the deskmen’s office because he’d had access to it for months already. He knew they wouldn’t be disturbed, that there were no bodies on the way, that he’d have all night to do what he wanted.’
So. He’d thought of that.
Theresa said, ‘Do we know that Justin was even here and not home with the flu? Maybe he got sick or felt like taking the night off and nothing was happening, so Darryl told him to go ahead.’ Though she couldn’t picture Darryl covering for another employee without a few dozen phone calls, a hefty bribe and maybe a signed agreement.
Shephard told her, ‘He was here at eleven when a heart attack victim came in. The driver from the hospital spoke with him. And we checked the apartment he’s renting – his car isn’t in the lot, and no one answers the door. We’re getting a warrant to go in, but that will take a while.’
Theresa couldn’t say why she felt so reluctant to believe that Justin was their killer. ‘But George Bain retired before Justin was even hired. They never even met.’
‘Because, as you say, he’s looking for something.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t ask me. It’s your theory.’
Don said, ‘Where does Dr Reese come in?’
But Shephard had moved on to something else. ‘Since Justin did work here, though, and already had access to everything in the building he needed—’
Don and Theresa cocked their heads at him in unison, quizzical starlings that had encountered an oddly colored speck of birdseed.
‘—then why would he still be here after most of the blood had dried? When he knew you would be coming back from the hit-and-run … or, at least, he should have known. All he had to do was check the CAD screen.’
He had thought of that, too.
‘So maybe it isn’t Justin,’ Don said, taking the words out of her mouth. ‘The killer got Darryl out of the way so he could search the rest of the building. But of course all the offices were locked and Darryl didn’t have the keys. By the time the killer figures that out, Theresa is coming in the back door.’ He put one hand on her arm, his lips pressed together. He had just realized how closely the killer and Theresa had passed in the night, and it scared him.
That would have warmed her to her toes, had she not been scared as well.
Shephard said, ‘Except that the deskmen’s office
wasn’t
searched and there’s no blood smears through the rest of the building. He didn’t rattle the door knobs or check the drawers. So how did he know that what he wanted wasn’t in there if he wasn’t Justin?’
The man worked in challenging syntax, but she saw what he meant. ‘If we’re lucky we might be able to find out one way or the other.’
The two men and Neenah stared as she got up and went to her desk.
‘The prints I lifted from the gurney. In the – event – of finding Dr Reese, I’d almost forgotten about them. Let’s see if they belong to Justin, or not.’
Fingerprints are the second most important piece of forensic evidence (actually, the first, since even identical twins with identical DNA will have different fingerprints, but just get a DNA analyst to admit that) while ranking, quite possibly, the first most tedious. Fingerprint examiners spend most of their time sitting in front of a computer monitor looking at black lines on the screen, which is exactly as exciting and glamorous as it sounds. But it’s the pattern of where those lines end and divide that distinguishes one finger from all the other fingers on earth. Or palms, or feet, as the case may be.
From a little fabric basket Theresa kept on her desk she pulled out two loupes, small magnifying glasses about two inches in diameter, with their own adjustable stands. Then two pointers, pen-like, evil-looking spikes with wooden handles. Examiners rest the tip against the ends or divisions in the ridges of the unknown print (these areas are called ‘points of minutiae’) to keep their place while their attention switches to the other, known fingerprint. If they find a corresponding ‘point’ in that print, they move on to another set of points, until they find one that doesn’t correspond. Or if they don’t find a set that doesn’t correspond – in fact they don’t find any significant differences at all – they can then be sure that those two prints, the known (collected at arrest or, as in Justin’s case, employment) and the unknown (collected at a crime scene or from a piece of evidence), were made by the same finger.
It takes a couple years of practice and a lot of patience and attention to detail. It’s also hard on the neck, Theresa reflected as she bent over Justin’s finger and palm prints and the copy of the print she’d lifted from the gurney. Theresa wondered if she could get either Don or Shephard to rub it for her … after all, if they were going to hover over her like that, they might as well make themselves useful.
‘You can sit at the table and wait, you know,’ she pointed out. ‘This isn’t going to go any faster just because you’re standing there.’
‘But I love watching you work,’ Don said.
‘I’m good,’ Shephard said.
There were times, certainly, when she could appreciate a little bit of attention – it didn’t come her way that often any more, nothing like when she wore the skin of a twenty-four-year-old – but not while she worked. ‘Seriously, this could take a while.’
‘I didn’t think you could work from a copy,’ Shephard said. Theresa had given the original lifted print to Jen for the CPD case.
‘Sure. As long as it’s a one-to-one reproduction. A copy is fine, a scan is fine, as long as you don’t change the scale by enlarging or shrinking it and the resolution is good enough. An emailed scan is fine. Anything except a fax.’ She slid the loupe along Justin’s fingerprint card.
Of course he asked, ‘Why not a fax?’
‘It sort of digitizes the image at one end and reassembles at the other. You can’t be sure it reassembled it correctly.’
After another few minutes he said, ‘I thought you did this by computer now.’
‘We keep the database on a computer. All the arrestees’ prints are entered, and the latent prints, from crime scenes and suchlike, are also entered. Then the computer looks to find the most closely matching pattern it’s got. Unlike what you see on TV every day, the computer just comes up with the best it’s got. It does not light up with a big banner that says ‘
Match!
’.
Computers do not match people,’ she added primly. ‘Only people match people.’
‘Same with DNA,’ Don put in.
She continued: ‘The computer is a tool to narrow down possibilities and point us in the right direction. But if we’re already pointed in a direction, then there’s no need to go through the extra and pointless work of involving the computer. Since I still have to go through the same process, it doesn’t save any time.’
‘Oh,’ Shephard said, probably making a mental note not to ask any more questions.
Plus, it was a palm print. She liked working with palm prints because they were usually larger than fingerprints and therefore one had more information to work with. They were also easier to orient. Theresa had never quite gotten the hang of looking at a fingerprint and knowing right away which finger it probably came from. She could guess a little finger (examiners don’t write
pinkie
) from a thumb based on size, and loops most often slant toward the outside of the hand so that the lines on a right-hand finger come in and go out toward the right and the left toward the left, but after that it became strictly a guess for her. But palms are chiral, or mirror images, and what with that and the permanent creases and the differences in the three main areas, it could be fairly easy to hone in on the right area of the corresponding print. And that’s what she was trying to do while sandwiched in between the heat of the two men at each of her shoulders.
It wasn’t going well.
Theresa sat up and rubbed her neck. Neither of them took the hint.
‘Are you done?’ Shephard asked. ‘Is it him?’
Without looking at him she said, ‘Go sit down. Over there. Both of you.’
Theresa gestured with the pointer, and they must have intuited how ready she felt to use it as a weapon because they finally shuffled off. She bent over again, long enough to produce twinges in both her neck
and
her spine.
Shephard, as it was turning out, tended to be chatty. ‘So why is your ME under scrutiny from the county?’
Don shrugged.
Theresa said, ‘Isn’t everyone?’
‘Think they’ll find anything?’
‘No,’ both scientists answered in unison.
‘Nice to see people with faith in their boss.’
‘It’s not that,’ Theresa said. ‘It’s just that the medical examiner’s office isn’t a likely center for corruption.’
Don translated: ‘There’s not a lot of money in dead people.’
Theresa spoke while following the black and white ridges under the loupes. ‘On the rare occasions that a coroner or medical examiner have been prosecuted for wrongdoing, it’s usually because they were overcharging for private or out-of-county autopsies. That’s one of the few avenues to bring in extra cash around here. But I’ve never noticed us having a significant number of non-county autopsies.’
‘Me, neither,’ Don said. ‘Or jobs, the county loves to trade in jobs. But we don’t have that big of a staff, so it’s kind of hard to hide a full-scale giveaway in a place like this. I don’t know anyone here who’s related to this or that bigwig. Anyone who is has managed to keep it really quiet.’
‘And that would never work,’ Theresa said. ‘You can’t keep a secret in this place to save your life.’
Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words, since apparently someone had a secret, and lives were exactly what keeping it had cost.
She straightened both prints and started over, going over every area on each one, just to make sure.
After a while she stood up and dropped the pointers on her desk.
Once she had disarmed, Shephard asked, ‘Well? Is it him?’
Theresa shook her head. ‘Whoever was lying on that gurney when I came in this morning, it wasn’t Justin Warner.’