given him an opportunity. And opportunities were always accompanied by
choices. Burton had finally made his. He wasn’t proud of it.
If things worked out according to plan, he would do his best to forget
it had ever happened. If things didn’t work out?
Well, that was just too bad. But if he went down, so would everyone
else.
That thought triggered another idea. Burton reached across and popped
open the car’s glove compartment. He pulled out a minicassette recorder
and a handful of tapes. He looked back up at the house as he puffed on
his cigarette.
He put the car in gear. As he passed Gloria Russell’s house, he figured
the lights there would remain on for a long time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUR-A SIMON HAD JUST ABOUT GIVEN UP HOPE OF FINDING U.
The exterior and interior of the van had been minutely dusted and then
fumed for prints. A special laser from the state police headquarters in
Richmond had even been brought up, but every time they found a match, it
was someone else’s prints. Someone they could account for. She knew
Pettis’s prints by heart now. He was unfortunate enough to have all
arches, one of the rarest of fingerprint compositions, as well as a tiny
scar on his thumb that had in fact led to his arrest years earlier for
grand-theft auto. Perps with scars across their fingertips were an ident
tech’s best friend.
Budizinski’s prints had shown up once because he’d stuck his finger in a
solvent and then pressed it against a piece of plywood kept in the back
of the van, a print as perfect as if she had fingerprinted him herself.
All told, she had found fifty-three prints, but none were of any use to
her. She sat in the middle of the van and glumly looked around its
interior. She had gone over every spot where a print could reasonably be
expected to exist. She had hit every nook and cranny of the vehicle with
the hand-held laser and was running out of ideas where else to took.
For the twentieth time she went through the motions of men loading the
truck, driving it–the rearview rniffor was an ideal spot for
prints-moving the equipment, lifting the bottles of cleaners, dragging
the hoses, opening and closing the doors. The difficulty of her task was
increased by the fact that prints tended to disappear over time,
depending on the surface containing them and the surrounding climate.
Wet and warm were the best preservatives, dry and cool, the worst.
She opened the glove compartment and went through the contents again.
Every item had already been inventoried and dusted. She idly flipped
through the van’s maintenance log.
Purplish stains on the paper reminded her that the lab’s stock of
ninhydrin was low. The pages were well-worn although the van had had
very few breakdowns the three years it had been in commission.
Apparently the company believed in a rigorous maintenance program. Each
entry was carefully noted, initialed and dated. The company had its own
inhouse maintenance crew.
As she scanned the pages, one entry caught her eye. All the other
entries had been initiated by either a G. Henry or an H. Thomas, both
mechanics employed by Metro. This entry had J.P. initialed beside it.
Jerome Pettis. The entry indicated that the van had run low on oil and
a couple of quarts had been added. All that was terribly unexciting
except that the date was the day the Sullivan place had been cleaned.
Simon’s breathing accelerated slightly as she crossed her fingers and
got out of the van. She popped the hood and began looking at the engine.
She shone her light around and within a minute she found it. An oily
thumbprint that preened back at her from the side of the windshield
washer fluid reservoir. Where someone would naturally rest their hand
when they were applying leverage to open or close the oil cap. And a
glance told her it wasn’t Pettis’s. Nor was it either of the two
mechanics. She grabbed a file card with Budizinski’s prints on it. She
was ninety-nine percent sure they weren’t his and she turned out to be