“And this print found on a dining room chair is the only one you’ve identified?”
I asked Vander.
“Of course, a number of those lifted came back to Jennifer DOW” he said. “Particularly on the books by her bed and the folded sheet of paper – the poem. And a couple of unknown partials from her car, as you might expect, maybe left by whoever loaded groceries into her trunk or filled her tank with gas. That’s all for now.”
“And no luck with Eddie Heath?”
I asked.
“There wasn’t much to examine. The paper bag, can of soup, candy bar. I tried the Luma-Lite on his shoes and clothes. No luck.”
Later, he walked us out through the bay, where locked freezers stored the blood of enough convicted felons to fill a small city, the samples awaiting entry into the Commonwealth’s DNA data bank. Parked in front of the door was Jennifer Deighton’s car, and it looked more pathetic than I remembered, as if it had gone into a dramatic decline since the murder of its owner. Metal along the sides was creased and dented from being repeatedly struck by other car doors. Paint was rusting in spots and Scraped and gouged in others, and the vinyl top was peeling. Lucy paused to peer inside a sooty window.
“Hey, don’t touch nothing,” Marino said to her.
She looked levelly at him without a word, and all of us went outside.
Lucy drove off in my car and went straight to the house without waiting for Marino or me. When we walked in, she was already in my study with the door shut.
“I can see she’s still Miss Congeniality,” Marino said.
“You don’t win any prizes tonight, either.”
I opened the fireplace screen and added several logs.
“She’ll keep her mouth shut about what we were talking about?”
“Yes,” I said wearily. “Of course.”
“Yeah, well, I know you trust her, since you’re her aunt. But I’m not sure it was a good idea for her to hear all that, Doc.”
“I do trust Lucy. She means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. I hope the two of you will become friends. The bar is open, or I’ll be glad to put on a pot of coffee.”
“Coffee would be good.”
He sat on the edge of the hearth and got out his Swiss Army knee. While I made coffee, he trimmed his nails and tossed the shavings into the fire. I tried Susan’s number again, but there was no answer.
“I don’t think Susan took his prints,” Marino said when I set the coffee tray on the butler’s table.”
I’ve been thinking while you were in the kitchen. I know she didn’t do it while I was at the morgue that night, and I was there most of the time. So unless it was done right when the body was brought in, forget it.”
“It wasn’t done then,” I said, getting more unnerved. “Corrections was out of there in minutes. The entire scene was very distracting. It was late and everybody was tired. Susan forgot, and I was too busy with what I was doing to notice.”
“You hope she forgot.”
I reached for my coffee.
“Something’s going on with her, based on what you’ve been telling me. I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her,” he said.
Right now I didn’t.
“We need to talk to Benton,” he said.
“You saw Waddell on the table, Marino. You saw him executed. I can’t believe we can’t say it was him.”
“We can’t say it. We could compare mug shots and your morgue photos and still not say it. I hadn’t seen him since he got popped more than ten years ago. The guy they walked out to the chair was about eighty pounds heavier. His beard, mustache, and head had been shaved. Sure, there was enough resemblance that I just assumed. But I can’t swear it was him.”
I recalled Lucy’s walking off the plane the other night. She was my niece. I had seen her but a year ago, and still I almost had not recognized her. I knew all too well how unreliable visual identifications can be.