“Perfect scores are few and far between, but we got one here.”
Vander began typing, and a bright white fingerprint filled the seen. “Right index finger, plain whorl.”
He pointed to the vortex of lines swirling behind glass. “A damn good partial recovered from Jennifer Deighton’s house.”
“Wherein her house?” I asked.
“From a dining room chair. At first I wondered if there was some mistake. But apparently not.”
Vander continued staring at the screen, then resumed typing as he talked. “The print comes back to Ronnie Joe Waddell.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, shocked.
“You would think so,” Vander replied abstractedly.
“Did you find anything in Jennifer Deighton’s house that might indicate she and Waddell were acquainted?”
I asked Marino as I opened Waddell’s case file.
“No.”
“If you’ve got Waddell’s prints from the morgue,” Vander said to me, “we’ll see how they compare to what’s in AFIS.”
I pulled out two manila envelopes, and it struck me wrong immediately that both weren’t heavy and thick. I felt my face get hot as I opened each and found the expected photographs inside and nothing else. There was no envelope containing Waddell’s ten print cards. When I looked up, everybody was looking at me.
“I don’t understand this,” I said, conscious of Lucy’s uneasy stare.
“You don’t have his prints?” Marino asked in disbelief.
I rifled through the file again. “They’re not here.”
“Susan usually does it, right?” he said.
“Yes. Always. She was supposed to make two sets. One for Corrections and one for us. Maybe she gave them to Fielding and he forgot to give them to me.”
I got out my address book and reached for the phone. Fielding was home and knew nothing about the fingerprint cards.
“No, I didn’t notice her printing him, but I don’t notice half of what other people are doing down there,” he said. “I just assumed she’d given the cards to you.”
Dialing Susan’s number next, I tried to remember seeing her get out the spoon and print cards, or rolling Waddell’s fingers on the ink pad.
“Do you remember seeing Susan print Waddell?” I asked Marino as Susan’s phone continued to ring.
“She didn’t do it while I was there. I would have offered to help if she had.”
“No answer.”
I hung up.
“Waddell was cremated,” Vander said.
“Yes,” I said.
We were silent for a moment.
Then Marino said to Lucy with unnecessary brusqueness, “You mind? We need to talk alone for a minute.”
“You can sit in my office,” Vander said to her. “Down the hall, last one on the right.”
When she was gone, Marino said, “Waddell’s supposedly been locked up ten years, and there’s no way the print we got from Jennifer Deighton’s chair was left ten years ago. She didn’t even move into her house on Southside until a few months ago, and the dining room furniture looks brand-new. Plus, there were indentations on the carpet in the living room that make it appear a dining room chair was carried in there, maybe on the night she died. That’s why I wanted the chairs dusted to begin with.”
“An uncanny possibility,” Vander said. “At this moment, we can’t prove that the man who was executed last week was Ronnie Joe Waddell.”
“Perhaps there is some other explanation for how Waddell’s print ended up on a chair in Jennifer Deighton’s house,” I said. “For example, the penitentiary has a wood shop that makes furniture.”
“Unlikely as hell,” Marino said. “For one thing, they don’t do woodworking or make license plates on death row. And even if they did, most civilians don’t end up with prison-made furniture in their house.”
“All the same,” Vander said to Marino, “it would be interesting if you could track down who and where she bought her dining room set from.”
“Don’t worry. It’s a top priority.”
“Waddell’s complete past arrest record, including his prints, should all be in one file at the FBI,” Vander added. “I’ll get a copy of their print card and retrieve the photograph of the thumbprint from Robyn Naismith’s case. Where else was Waddell arrested?”
“Nowhere else,” Marino said. “The only jurisdiction that will have his records should be Richmond.”