“Eddie Heath’s body was positioned in a manner reminiscent of Robyn Naismith’s case. The boy was attacked &e night Ronnie Waddell was to be executed. Don’t you there’s some weird thread here?”
“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I don’t want to think it.”
“Neither of us wants to. Benton, what’s your gut feel He motioned for the waitress to bring more cognac, candlelight illuminating the clean lines of his left cheek bone and chin.
“My gut feeling? Okay. I have a very bad gut feeling about all of this,” he said. “I believe Ronnie Waddell is the common denominator, but I don’t know what that means. A latent print recently found at a scene was identified as his, yet we can’t locate his ten print cards or anything else that might effect a positive identification.
He also wasn’t printed at the morgue, and the person who allegedly forgot to do so has since been murdered with the same gun used on Eddie Heath. Waddell’s legal counsel, Nick Grueman, apparently knew Jennifer Deighton, and in fact, it appears she faxed a message to Grueman days before she was murdered. Finally, yes, there is a subtle and peculiar similarity between Eddie Heath’s and Robyn Naismith’s deaths. Frankly, I can’t help but wonder if the attack on Heath wasn’t, for some reason, intended to be symbolic.”
He waited until our drinks had been set before us, then opened a manila envelope that was attached to Robyn Naismith’s case. That small act triggered something I had not thought of before.
“I had to get her photographs from Archives,” I said.
Wesley glanced at me as he slipped on his glasses.
“In cases this old, the paper records have been reduced to microfilm, the printouts of which are in the file you’ve got. The original documents are destroyed, but we keep the original photos. They go to Archives.”
“Which is what? A room in your building?”
“No, Benton. A warehouse near the state library – the same warehouse where the Bureau of Forensic Science stores evidence from its old cases.”
“Vander still hasn’t found the photograph of the bloody thumbprint Waddell left inside Robyn Naismith’s house?”
“No,” I said as Wesley met my eyes. We both knew that Vander was never going to find it.
“Christ,” he said. “Who retrieved Robyn Naismith’s photos for you?”
“My administrator,” I replied. “Ben Stevens. He made a trip to Archives a week or so before Waddell’s execution.”
“Why?”
“During the final stages of the appeals process, there are always a lot of questions asked and I like to have ready, access to the case or cases involved. So a trip to Archives is routine. What’s a little different in the instance we’re talking about is I didn’t have to ask Stevens to get the photos from Archives. He volunteered.”
“And that’s unusual?”
“In retrospect, I must admit that it is.”
“The implication,” Wesley said, “is that your administrator may have volunteered because what he was really interested in was Waddell’s file – or more specifically, the photograph of the bloody thumbprint that’s supposed to be inside it.”
“All I can say with certainty is if Stevens wanted to tamper with a file in Archives, he couldn’t do so unless he had legitimate reason for visiting Archives. If, for example, it came back to me that he had been there when none of the medical examiners had made a request, it would look odd.”
I went on to tell Wesley about the breach of security in my office computer, explaining that the two terminals involved were assigned to me and Stevens. While I talked, Wesley took notes. When I fell silent he looked up at me.
“It doesn’t sound as if they found what they were looking for,” he said.
“My suspicion is that they didn’t.”
“That brings us around to the obvious question. What were they looking for?”
I slowly swirled my cognac. In the candlelight it was liquid amber, and each sip deliciously burned going down. “Maybe something pertaining to Eddie Heath’s death. I was looking for any other cases in which victims may have had bite marks or cannibalistic-type injuries, and had a file in my directory. Beyond that, I can’t imagine what anyone might have been looking for.”