Wesley looked at me. “Let’s consider what he did with the body. He sat it upright, tried to dean it with towels, and left the clothes in a moderately neat stack on the floor near her ankles. Now, you can look at that two ways. He was lewdly displaying the body and thereby showing contempt. Or he was demonstrating what he considered caring. Personally, I think it was the latter.”
“And the way Eddie Heath’s body was displayed?”
“That feels different. The positioning of the boy mirrors the positioning of the woman, but something’s missing.”
Even as he spoke, I suddenly realized what it was. “A mirror image,” I said to Wesley in amazement. “A mirror reflects things backward or in reverse.”
He looked curiously at me.
“Remember when we were comparing Robyn Naisznith’s scene photographs with the diagram depicting the position of Eddie Heath’s body?”
“I remember vividly.”
“You said that what was done to the boy – from the bite marks to the way his body was propped against a boxy object to his clothing being left in a tidy pile nearby – was a mirror image of what had been done to Robyn. But the bite marks on Robyn’s inner thigh and above her breast were on the left side of her body. While Eddie’s injuries – what we believe are eradicated bite marks – were on the right. His right shoulder and right inner thigh.”
“Okay.” Wesley still looked perplexed.
“The photograph that Eddie’s scene most closely resembles is the one of her nude body propped against the console TV.”
“True.”
“What I’m suggesting is that maybe Eddie’s killer saw the same photograph of Robyn that we did. But his perspective is based on his own body’s left and right. And his right would have been Robyn’s left, and his left would have been her right, because in the photograph she’s facing whoever is looking on.”
“That’s not a pleasant thought,” Wesley said as the telephone rang.
“Aunt Kay?”
Lucy called out from the kitchen. “It’s Mr. Vander.”
“We got a confirmation,” Vander’s voice came over the line.
“Waddell did leave the print in Jennifer Deighton’s house?”
I asked.
“No, that’s just it. He definitely did not.”
12
Over the next few days, I retained Nicholas Grueman, delivering to him my financial records and other information he requested, the health commissioner summoned me to his office to suggest that I resign, and the publicity would not end. But I knew much that I had not known even a week before.
It was Ronnie-Joe Waddell who died in the electric chair the night of December 13. Yet his identity remained alive and was wreaking havoc in the city. As best as could be determined, prior to Waddell’s death his SID number in AFIS had been swapped with another’s. Then the other person’s SID number was dropped completely from the Central Computerized Records Exchange, or CCRE. This meant there was a violent offender at large who had no need of gloves when he committed his crimes. When his prints were run through AFIS, they would come back as a dead man’s every time. We knew this nefarious individual left a wake of feathers and flecks of paint, but we could surmise almost nothing about him until January 3 of the new year.
On that morning, the Richmond Times-Dispatch ran a planted story about highly prized eiderdown and its appeal to thieves. At one-fourteen P.m., Officer Tom Lucero, head of the fictitious investigation, received his third call of the day.
“Hi. My name’s Hilton Sullivan,” the voice said loudly.
“What can I do for you, sir?”
Lucero’s deep voice asked.
“It’s about the cases you’re investigating. The eiderdown clothes and things that are supposedly hot with thieves. There was this article about it in the paper this morning. It said you’re the detective.”
“Right”
“Well, it really pisses me off that the cops are so stupid.”
He got louder. “It said in the paper that since Thanksgiving this and that have been stolen from stores, cars, and homes in the greater Richmond metropolitan area. You know, comforters, a sleeping bag, three ski jackets, blah, blah, blah. And the reporter quoted several people.”