by Blake Banner
He stood, shaking his head. “Well, you two will be wanting to examine that laptop, and I must be getting home with the wine if I don’t want to face a hearing of my own. Proceed as you see fit, but keep me posted.”
He hurried on ahead of us, down the stairs, across the wet floor and out into the wet night. We followed at a more forlorn pace and when the inspector had disappeared, I said, “I think we’ve caused enough trouble here, Dehan. Let’s go home and see what bombshells lie in Pandora’s laptop.”
And we too stepped out into the wet, November night.
* * *
While I opened the wine and peeled and cut the potatoes to make fries, Dehan had a hot shower and came down in dry jeans and a sweatshirt, toweling her hair.
“I just hope to Christ she used an operating system prior to Windows 8.”
I eyed her. “Why?”
“Windows 7 and earlier didn’t use a sign in page. Let’s hope she used an email client too. Or we’re going to have to hand this over to the techs.” She plugged in the cable and sat down, thinking aloud: “Twenty sixteen. Windows 10 was launched that year, there was never a Windows 9, did you know that? And 8 was really unpopular. It was crap. Millions of people actually downgraded back to Windows 7 because they hated 8 and 10 that much. So I guess we have an even chance that she might…”
The familiar Windows jingle sounded and she smiled. “It’s Windows 7, and dude! She has Thunderbird.”
“So her emails are downloaded automatically to the laptop?”
“Yup.”
I put the fries in the hot oil, dried my hands and pulled up a chair beside her. She opened the Thunderbird app and after a moment, the emails were listed. There were a couple of thousand of them, all but the last five or six marked as read. The last few were dated between the 4th and 9th November. I flopped back in my chair. Dehan voiced my thoughts.
“Where do we begin? At five minutes per email, that’s going to be a hundred and sixty-seven hours. If we worked twelve hours a day nonstop it would take us… two weeks.”
I looked at her a moment, then laughed. “We don’t need to do that. Take ten emails, identify the names that are not relevant. Put the ones that are not relevant into a folder. Keep going until you find a name that raises a flag. Then focus on that name.”
She was nodding vigorously before I’d finished, saying, “Yeahyeahyeah! You’re right.”
“Also,” I said, and stood. “Before you do anything else, search for Rod, see if it brings up an email address.”
“Yeah, I know, I was going to do that!”
“Sure you were.”
“Go away and let me work.”
While she searched for any reference to Rod in Celeste’s emails, and while the fries fried, I made an avocado salad with artichoke hearts, diced tomato and a simple dressing of olive oil and Maldon sea salt. By the time I got to putting the griddle on to heat, I heard her sigh.
“OK,” she said, “here they are.” I heard the printer whir and clunk and start disgorging pages. She stood and leaned on the breakfast bar. “There are only six.” She said. “But they are pretty intense.” She went and collected the emails from the printer and brought them over. “They only cover a week, and they are from six months before she died.”
While I read, she poured two glasses of wine and placed one next to me.
The first was from Lenny, and it was a reply to a long email from her complaining about how her father and Samuel controlled and pressured her, how they were constantly complaining to her and trying to force her to go to church and live in a way that made no sense to her. She was desperate to get out of the house and away from them. She had, she said, nobody to talk to. She ended up by apologizing for writing to him and saying that she had enjoyed chatting to him outside the church, and it was nice that he had visited her dad a couple of times recently. She hoped he would come again.
His reply was brief but friendly, rather than friendly but brief.
Hey, Celeste! Nice surprise to hear from you. How’s the family? Yeah, I enjoyed our chat too. Don’t often get to talk to somebody who ‘gets it’. So many sheep, right? I’d definitely like to drop in and see your dad (and you!) if I’m in the area. Hope to catch Samuel in too, though I’m not always sure when I can get a free half hour.
The next email from her told him exactly when Samuel was out and how her dad liked to sleep for a couple of hours after lunch. Then it suggested that that might be a good time because they could talk freely in her room without worrying about Samuel and her dad.
The next email was not from Lenny’s email account. It was from rod_wheeler.
Hi Babe, listen, I don’t want to go all cloak and dagger on you but I can’t receive emails like that at my personal email account. Most people just would not understand and I am not exaggerating if I tell you it could cost me my job and my marriage. But I gotta tell you, it put a big damn smile on my face. I can’t think of a way I’d rather spend my lunch hour…
It went on in that vein. The next were obviously after their encounter and it was obvious that they had had sex. She was besotted, if not with him, with the idea that he could somehow set her free, talking about eloping together to California to live in the desert. And he was half out of his mind with the fact that at his age, he had somehow seduced an attractive eighteen-year-old girl. Instead of telling her that things had gotten out of hand and he had to break it off, he nurtured her dream, knowing as he must that he would never leave his wife and kids, and he could never make it come true. It made grim and depressing reading.
The last one said that they had to stop using email. It was too risky, and he wanted her to delete all the emails she had sent him, and the ones she had received from him too. He was going to buy a burner and they could call each other and use Whatsapp to communicate. It would be better, he said. In her reply she promised to do that, and promised also to send him some ‘special’ photographs.
I put them down and looked up at Dehan.
She shook her head. “Why didn’t she delete the emails?”
“For the same reason he never got rid of the phone. They are a memento, a trophy even.”
“I guess. So they spent the next six months having an affair. His DNA will almost certainly be on the sheets. He is ruined. His life is finished. Even if he doesn’t go to prison, he has lost everything.”
I nodded.
She went on, “And he has gone right to the top of our list of suspects.”
I chewed my lip at her for a while, then went to throw the bison steaks onto the griddle which was at risk of catching fire. They sizzled noisily and I turned back to Dehan and sipped my wine. “You’re thinking that he found out about Chad and killed her.”
“It’s about the oldest and most reliable motive known to man, and woman.”
“Lenny and Chad, and Celeste in the middle, two-timing both of them.”
“Which one is the killer?”
“Take your pick.”
She thought about it for a moment while I turned the steaks. Then, she said, “My money is on Lenny. Lenny killed Celeste.”
TEN
I had called Frank, the ME, and Bob, the head of the CSI team that had examined Celeste’s room. They had both gone home, but agreed to see us first thing in the morning. First thing in the morning, for them, was six AM. So at five-fifty AM the next day, we were pulling off Seminole Avenue in the darkest hour before the dawn. We found a parking space, killed the engine and made our way to Frank’s office: a small pool of light in an empty building in semi-darkness. Bob was there with him. They were drinking coffee out of paper cups. They both looked up as we pushed into the lab.
Frank made the expressionless face that for him was a grin and said, “When newlyweds start getting up before six in the morning, that is a bad sign.”
Dehan grabbed a chair and said, “This from a man who gets all his social interaction from corpses.”
Frank raised an eyebrow and I sat, so we were all gathered around
his desk.
“They often have more to say than the living, believe me,” he said, “But my point is, what has you two up and about at this hour of the morning? Usually it’s just weirdoes like me and Robert.”
She pulled Celeste’s laptop from her bag and handed it to Bob. As she did it, I said, “For now, this has to stay very quiet between you, us and Deputy Inspector John Newman. It is not urgent the way other cases might be urgent. This started out as a cold case, the murder of Celeste Reynolds, but it has pretty quickly become clear that the case did not go cold through lack of evidence…”
Bob was frowning hard. “What do you mean?”
“It went cold because the detective investigating it was suppressing evidence: he hid evidence, failed to look for witnesses and didn’t follow up on obvious leads. In a sense, that was fortunate for us, because as a result, he failed to find her laptop. He looked for it in her room, but didn’t find it, because it was boxed up in her boyfriend’s basement, and he never interviewed her boyfriend.”
Bob looked squeamish. “I dread to ask what’s on it.”
“At first glance, it looks like a brief exchange of love letters. The evidence is pretty strong that the emails come from the investigating detective, but we need proof from your tech guys that the original email address is his, and that the new email address is also his.” I paused and held Bob’s eye. “Obviously, Bob, if we have a detective who has murdered an eighteen-year-old girl he was having an affair with, that is something that has to have the highest priority. We don’t know if he is doing the same thing to some other girl right now.”
He sighed, nodded, drained his paper cup and picked up the computer. “I’m on it, I’ll give it to the nerds right away.”
“And, Bob? The sheets you took from her room? The semen on them might be his. It also has to take priority. I need to get you a sample of his DNA somehow…”
He shook his head. “Lenny Davis is in the system. You’d be surprised how many are. They are profiled for purposes of elimination, and the profile stays in the database. You’re probably there yourself.”
He got up and left the office, taking the laptop with him. Frank said, “You are determined to make my life a misery.”
“It can’t be helped, Frank. If Lenny had sex with Celeste in her bedroom, it puts him very firmly in the frame…”
“You don’t need to tell me, John. It is not just physical evidence of a motive for murder, it’s a lot more than that.”
Dehan frowned. “What do you mean?”
He leaned back in his chair, so that the back of his head was touching the sickly green wall. “How old is he? A bit older than you, Stone. Late forties, early fifties? He’s married, he has kids, a long standing career with the NYPD and a spotless record. He has everything to lose.
“You tell me he is an old friend of the family of the victim, and the family have a record of tragedies: a schizophrenic daughter, the wife died in childbirth, and the victim herself turned out to be wild.” He shook his head like he was looking at something that defied belief. “If he had met an adult woman and had an affair out of town, at a hotel, on the mature, adult understanding that it was going to go no further than a one night stand, you might be able to accuse him of nothing more serious than poor judgment and bad taste.” He shrugged. “If the department got to hear about it, they might even look the other way, having privately cautioned and reprimanded him.
“But with an eighteen-year-old girl, in her own home, with the risk of a member of her family walking in on them at any moment…”
Dehan was nodding that she understood. “I see what you’re driving at. It’s beyond reckless. But it’s worse than that, the father is ill and confined to bed most of the time, so he was in the house, and her sister would have been just down the hall, in her room.”
He spread his hands. “That is not just poor judgment and bad taste, that is a reckless disregard for consequences, not only to himself, but to the girl and her family. A man in that frame of mind should not be walking around with a gun.”
I sighed. “Frank, is there anything you can tell me about the body? Anything that might help to identify where she was dropped in the river, anything about the killer…”
He sat forward and the jointed mechanism in his chair clunked loudly. He folded his forearms on the desk. “I won’t say I was ahead of you, John, but I remembered the case. It struck me as odd at the time.”
“What struck you as odd?”
“She had been strangled. She had a lot of bruising around her neck and there were marks on her esophagus that were clearly thumb marks. There was no water in her lungs, so it was clear that she had been strangled and dumped in the water post mortem.”
“Yeah, we read that in the report.”
He ignored me and went on. “She had been in the water for about a week. Now, the eccrine glands in the skin’s surfaces on your finger and palms secrete water that contains soluble solids. So prints deposited by only eccrine secretions get dissolved when the print is submersed in water. But it is possible for prints to survive in water or exposure to the elements if a non-water soluble contaminant was present on the fingers, or if it was already present on the surface which has been touched.”
“What are you driving at, Frank? In layman’s terms.”
“Well, for example, sebaceous glands in the skin secrete an oil called sebum into the hair follicles to lubricate the skin and hair. Then, also, women have a tendency to smother their skin in all kinds of oils, from coconut to aloe vera and beyond. All of these might—I stress might—survive a period of submersion in water, especially if it was very cold. So if skin covered in sebum, or aloe vera or coconut oil, for example, were pressed very firmly, the resulting print…”
Dehan’s eyebrows had shot up. “Seriously?”
He frowned and nodded. “The FBI Laboratory’s Latent Fingerprint Section, Knoxville Police Department and the University of Tennessee did a lot of research in the ’90s developing a workable method for getting identifiable prints from human skin, even after prolonged exposure to the elements. What they eventually came up with was the glue fuming chamber. It has a built-in heat source and a small electric fan. You put glue into a small aluminum pan in the chamber and the glue fumes are gently blown out onto the prints for ten to fifteen seconds. After that, powder is applied and often as not, you can lift a print.”
I frowned hard. “Are you telling me that you lifted prints from Celeste’s neck?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m not telling you that. We didn’t, but listen…”
“You’re losing me.”
“I proposed using the glue fuming method to Lenny. I grant you it was a borderline case, she had been in the river for a week, but it was worth a try. We might have got something. The thumbs had been pressed very forcefully into her throat and that would have increased or even caused oil secretion.”
Dehan said, “But he said no…?”
“He said it was a waste of taxpayer’s money. After that much time in the river, he thought there was no chance of getting a print. He might well have been right, but I thought it was worth a try.” He gave a laugh. “Especially as the family were friends of his. Usually what I get is pains in the ass like you two, hassling me to do more and go faster. I don’t often get a detective telling me not to bother with a test.”
I shook my head. “Son of a gun. It’s a shame you didn’t do it anyway. He doesn’t dictate…”
“Oh, I did! I did! I’m not going to be dictated to by the likes of him. I did the tests. He was partially right. We got a few partials that were not really usable—not in court, anyway, though they might have been helpful in an investigation. He never came back to me, the case went cold, so I filed them away and that was it.”
“So you have partials of Celeste’s killer’s thumbs?”
“I have largely unusable partials of Celeste’s killer’s thumbs. They might be suggestive, but they would not be conclusive or probative of guilt.”
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Dehan snorted. “It’s a damn sight more than we had last night.”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t be so sure. Personally, what struck me as most significant was the detective’s refusal to have the test done.”
I nodded. “That could be very significant. Frank, can you run a comparison of the partials you got with Lenny’s prints? See how close they actually are?”
“Of course.” He glared at me. “I have other work which also involves murder, people who are important to other people and killers who might strike again! But I will try and get it done today.”
“You’re the best, Frank.”
“Now, both of you, get out and let me get back to work. The dead are calling to me. I must go to them…”
Outside, the eastern horizon was turning a smoky blue-gray and the air was shifting from night to grainy twilight. The traffic was desultory and had a sleepy quality to it, as though the occasional car, with its hazy headlamps, was driving out of a dream toward the waking hours.
Dehan opened the passenger door, but instead of climbing in, she leaned her forearms on the roof and looked up at the plane trees across the road, where the dawn chorus was starting its noisy chatter.
“What do we do now, Sensei?”
“We go to the station, we pick up some coffee and croissants on the way, we make a list of all the businesses that back onto the river from Starlight Park to where Celeste was found, and we start phoning them, one by one, asking for their lists of employees for November 2016.”
She shifted her eyes from the trees to stare at me.
“Holy…”
“It’s a Chinese puzzle, Dehan. Nothing quite answers everything.”
“That’s why you asked me who my money was on. You were already thinking about that.”
I sighed and leaned my arms on my side of the roof. “The fact is it could just as easily be Lenny or Chad, though Lenny has worked much harder at incriminating himself. But whichever one you pick, you are still faced with the original questions: how the hell did they get her into the river, and why did they dump her upstream?”