Clayton said he’d help us any way he could. We stood outside his office and bullshitted. I looked down the hallway. My mind wandered. I walked down that hallway the first time in June ’58. Thirty-nine years had intervened. I was still obsessed and hungry at the cusp of 50.
Bill and I drove to Sergeant Tom Armstrong’s office. Armstrong ran the El Monte PD’s Internal Affairs Unit. He worked out of a PD adjunct building.
Bill ran down the Scales case. Armstrong keyed on the kid. He said he’d request full paper on him. Bill said full was essential. We had to know him before we tried to find him.
Bill grabbed Armstrong’s phone and called Joe Walker. Joe is a civilian crime analyst. He knows computer search systems. He helped us locate people in my mother’s case.
Bill laid out the kid. Joe said he’d find him–dead or alive.
Bill and I drove to Sheriff’s Homicide. Bill ran a DMV check on William David Scales. He hit. Scales was fifty-one years old now. He lived in Rancho Cucamonga.
Close. A straight shot through the San Gabriel Valley.
Bill said Valley folks never strayed far. I said the Valley was a fucking life sentence. Bill said, “For you it is.”
The evidence vault adjoined the Sheriff’s Academy. Evidence bags were stored on shelves stacked twenty-five feet high. The vault looked like an airplane hangar. Two dozen shelves ate up most of the floor space. Technicians accessed them with forklifts.
It was my second visit. I viewed the evidence from my mother’s case the first time.
I’d touched the stocking and the cotton cord that killed her. I put the dress she died in to my face and caught a trace of her perfume.
Bill requisitioned the Scales bag. A technician found it. We examined it in a small room next to the vault.
The red-pink sweater, the panties, the bra. Separate items in separate envelopes.
Bill filled out a routing form and placed the items in a cardboard box. I didn’t touch them. They looked like cheap stuff purchased at Sears or JC Penney. They smelled like dust and old synthetics.
We dropped the items off at the Sheriff’s Crime Lab. A serologist named Valorie Scherr logged them in. She explained DNA in a wholly precise and stupefyingly soporific manner.
Scherr said the prescreen would take ten days. They had to identify semen or other fluids first. The amount did not matter. DNA could be successfully typed off a single cell. Dissipation might factor in. The event occurred twenty-four years ago. The stains might have eroded during storage.
Scherr gave Bill eight swab sticks and containers. She said he should tell the husband to scrape the inside of his mouth vigorously,
She advised a backup procedure.
They might not have a valid victim sample. He should try to locate the victim’s parents or a sibling and take scrapings from them. This would help identify the victim’s DNA.
Bill grabbed Scherr’s phone and called Sheriff’s Homicide. A colleague tapped the DMV computer. He got a hit on Bud Bedford. His last known address: a trailer park in Fresno.
Bill got his number from Fresno information. He called him and stated his business. Bedford agreed to be interviewed. He said he’d submit a cell sample. He said his ex-wife was still in Fresno. He gave Bill her number.
Bill called her. She said she’d cooperate.
We broke it off for the day. I went back to my hotel room and stared at a picture of Betty Jean smiling. I sensed that things went stray for her–beyond her already low expectations. I wanted to know how they stood on the night she died.
We door-knocked Bill Scales. He stepped out of a time warp and let us into his house.
He was tall and rangy and an old 51. His voice matched the voice on the interview tape down to subtle inflections.
Bill stated our business and stressed that he was not a suspect. Scales said he’d help all he could. Bud Bedford still thought he did it. Bud had Bill Scales’s own daughter convinced.
The house was small, neatly tended, and starkly underfurnished. We sat down at a dinette table.