Bitter Past

by Caroline Fardig

  “Does Eli’s roommate work for the newspaper, too?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Tad is the managing editor, just a step under Eli, and he and Eli butt heads over stuff all the time. Those two bros really shouldn’t live together.” He stopped, as if what he said had suddenly sunk in. His shoulders slumped. “I guess that won’t be a problem anymore.”

  “You’re doing a great job here, Tristan. We only have a few more things to go over. Do you need a drink or something? Maybe a snack?” I asked, hoping to steer his mind away from his emotional distress.

  “Could I get a Red Bull or something? I feel like I’m in a daze.”

  “Sure. Anything else?”

  “Some Skittles would be awesome.”

  I nodded to Baxter. Normally, I wouldn’t be left alone with a suspect, but my gut said Sterling was right—Tristan wasn’t to blame for Eli’s death. Baxter hurried out of the room to fill Tristan’s snack order.

  “Had Eli and Tad ever had such a big fight over a story before?” I asked.

  Tristan shook his head. “I don’t think so. Evidently Eli had something that would totally ruin someone’s rep. He said heads were going to roll on campus over it. Tad tried to block him from breaking the story for some reason. Eli was bitching about Tad losing his balls all of a sudden.”

  “It doesn’t seem like anything ever stopped them in the past from running stories that tarnished people’s reputations.” Like the headline story about Vasti and Cooper, which along with campus gossip had already ruined him, regardless of the warrant out for his arrest.

  “I know, right? Like why was this story different? Whatever the reason, Eli said Tad was hell-bent on not running it.”

  “Did you get this specific with Detective Sterling?”

  He cast his eyes down. “No, he yelled a lot, and I got nervous. I don’t think I answered his questions very well.” Fighting back tears, he continued, “He mainly grilled me about whether or not I killed Eli—not so much about the fight.”

  I grimaced. Sterling needed to dial it down. He’d come on way too strong with Tristan and may have missed some key information. He had also questioned Tad Ogelsby, Eli’s roommate and right-hand man at the newspaper, but all he’d learned was that Tad had been in orchestra rehearsal when his roommate was murdered. I wondered if Sterling had gotten to the bottom of why the fight occurred. Something told me we needed to find out more about this news story.

  Tristan put his head down on the table. He said, “I’m so exhausted. I haven’t slept for days, especially after seeing Vasti get shot…”

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be talking to him about Vasti’s murder, but he brought it up, so I urged him to continue. “That must have been so hard on you, Tristan. I hate that you had to go through it.”

  As he lifted his head, a tear slid down his cheek. His voice was rough. “I didn’t know what to do. She was dead, and I snapped. I should have called the police, but I didn’t. There was no point. She was already dead.”

  I put my hand over his and asked gently, “Did you see who shot her?” Sterling said he had asked him that, but it didn’t hurt to ask again.

  “No,” he whispered. “I heard the shots and saw her fall. I was several yards away, and by the time I got over to her, she was gone. The shots sounded like they’d come from far away, and I didn’t see anyone anywhere. I went back to my place and…self-medicated.”

  Baxter returned, so I abandoned my line of questioning about Vasti’s murder. He placed a can of Red Bull and a package of Skittles in front of Tristan. Tristan ripped open the Skittles bag and poured half of them into his mouth, chasing them with a big gulp of soda. The poor kid probably thought he was never going to get to eat again. Baxter watched him with disgust.

  “We’ll give you a minute to finish eating,” I said, getting up and motioning for Baxter to follow me into the hallway. Once we were out of Tristan’s earshot, I said, “You need to talk to Tad Ogelsby.”

  “The roommate? Sterling talked to him. I thought he alibied out,” Baxter replied.

  “He did, but I think he may know something else. Tristan said Tad was adamant about not running whatever big story Eli had. I think it’s worth looking into. If the story is as dramatic as Tristan made it out to be and it got run or even leaked, you may find someone with sufficient motive to kill. He said the story could ruin whoever it was about. It could be anything from cheating to hazing to drug abuse to inappropriate relationships between students and faculty.”

  “Speaking of inappropriate relationships between students and faculty, were you aware that your friend Dr. Cooper and Vasti Marais had a sordid past?”

  I frowned at him. “Yes, I know, but I wasn’t aware of it until a few days ago. What does that have to do with the Eli Vanover case?”

  “Nothing. I just want to make sure that you’re not going to feel sorry for Cooper when we nail his ass to the wall.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I can deal with disappointment like it’s my job,” I muttered.

  He opened his mouth to reply but stopped, seeming to be at a loss for words.

  I used his silence as an opportunity to change the subject. “What do you have that connects the two crime scenes?”

  Baxter shook his head. “It may be nothing. Besides, I don’t want you anywhere near the Marais murder evidence. I don’t even want you to think about it. Until we have a solid connection, we’re investigating these as completely separate cases.”

  “But if the crimes do turn out to be connected, I’m going to be involved whether you like it or not.”

  “If it comes to that, we’ll deal with it then.”

  “Fine,” I replied, miffed at not being kept in the loop. “Do you want to ask Tristan any more questions?”

  “Just a few.”

  “Do you need me? Because I’d love to get cracking on the folding chair.”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  I headed for the forensics lab, looking forward to processing the chair we found at the crime scene. My excitement was extinguished when Beck Durant greeted me.

  “Hello, Ellie,” he sneered. “Are you gunning for my job? It was kind of shitty of you to swoop in and yank this case out from under me. I got stuck in the lab all night while you were out having all the fun.”

  I sighed. Staying up this late had already given me a headache, and Durant wasn’t helping. “Look, Beck, I didn’t swoop in. This case is complex, and the Sheriff wanted someone with a lot of experience.”

  “Experience? I have as many years under my belt at this job as you do.”

  “But I’ve continued my work in Criminalistics since I left here. I’ve been using my skills every day.”

  “Oh right, by sitting on the sidelines, teaching.” He said the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth.

  “I’m not here to argue. I’m here to work.” I said, shutting down his catty taunting.

  Beck turned his back on me in a huff. His assistant, who had been watching our exchange with wide eyes, went back to examining the clothing on the table in front of her.

  After finding a lab coat to wear, I went across the hall to evidence and requested to check out the chair to take to the lab. The evidence clerk got it for me, and I took it back to the lab and placed it on a workspace under a bench magnifier. After putting on gloves and removing the chair from the bag, I took a few additional photographs of it while it was illuminated by the magnifier’s light. By giving the chair a quick once-over with the magnifier, I saw that in addition to the partial shoeprint I’d noticed at the scene, I could get several dozen fingerprints from this piece of evidence. I loved lifting fingerprints from metal objects. Besides glass, metal was one of the easiest surfaces to process.

  Before I got out the fingerprint powder, I wanted to get any touch DNA I could off the chair. Noticing several fingerprints too smudged or too incomplete to be useful, I found a good source of possible epithelial cells, skin cells left behind when a person touche
s an object. Taking out a swab, I applied a drop of distilled water to the tip and rubbed it over one of the prints. I repeated the process for each smudged print I found, being careful not to disturb any of the usable prints. I set my samples aside to send to the Indiana State Police lab for testing.

  Since I was in the lab, I used regular fingerprint powder to dust for prints. Magnetic powder was less messy and much simpler to work with at a scene, but you couldn’t beat good old-fashioned black fingerprint powder for getting the best results. I brushed the powder onto the surface of the chair, paying special attention to the top of the chair back. I had seen the highest concentration of prints there, as people normally used the rolled frame as a handle of sorts when moving a folding chair. Once the powder was applied, I changed my gloves and took another look at the chair under the magnifier. I counted about twenty viable full and partial prints. Taking out some fingerprinting tape, I lifted them from the chair and labeled each one. Between the prints from the apartment and the chair, I was going to have one tedious and lengthy session in my future with the AFIS computer to examine and mark the individual features of each print and enter my findings into the system.

  Fingerprint identification is not as simple as on television where prints are scanned and magically matched by the computer in mere seconds. Real fingerprint matching is done by a human plotting all of the features of a fingerprint—core, ridge endings, bifurcations, deltas, et cetera—and inputting that information into AFIS, which can take anywhere from two to ten minutes per print, depending on the quality of it. The results are not absolute. Instead of one positive match, AFIS provides a list of possible matches, which then have to be compared (by a human) to the original print to be verified. If you know what you’re doing, it isn’t a difficult process, just a time-consuming one. Maybe I could convince Beck or his assistant to do the work for me while I taught my classes later this morning.

  I turned my attention to the shoe impression on the side of the chair’s seat. I was fairly certain that this shoeprint belonged to the killer because the chair frame was bent where the shoe had made contact with it. In my opinion, the chair would have been damaged when the killer kicked it out from under Eli’s feet. I pondered which method would be best to capture the shoeprint. The print looked dusty, so I could lift it straight from the chair using a large section of lifting tape, rather than getting more technical with an electrostatic lifting device. Lifting single shoeprints made me more nervous than collecting a handful of fingerprints because I only had one shot to get the single impression. Before I disturbed the print, I took a swab and got a sample of the dusty residue left by the shoe, being sure to take my sample near the edge to eliminate as little of the print as possible. The sample would have to be sent to another lab because we didn’t have the staff or the technology to determine unknown substances here, if it was even deemed relevant enough to be processed at all.

  I smoothed the lifting material onto the side of the chair over the shoe impression, and then I used a fingerprint roller to eliminate any air pockets that might have formed. After taking a deep breath, I pulled the tape up and studied the impression under the bench magnifier. From the rugged pattern of the tread, it seemed to be some sort of work boot. It wasn’t a great impression, and having come from the side of the chair, it was only about a two-inch by four-inch section of the shoe. The only saving grace was that there was part of a word on the sole of the shoe: STICK. I couldn’t recall any brand of shoes with “stick” in the name, so I would have to do some research.

  I then remembered that we had found another possible shoeprint at the scene on a busted pizza box. Returning the chair to its bag and resealing it, I checked it back into evidence and took the pizza box. On my way back to the lab, I bumped into Baxter.

  “Hey, working hard?” he asked, his eyes red and bloodshot.

  “Yes. I’m going to compare the partial shoe impression I found on the chair to the mystery impression on this pizza box.” I took a closer look at his eyes. “What have you been doing—crying or hitting the sauce?”

  “Very funny. I’ve been watching the videos on your dumbass campus newspaper blog.” He shook his head. “I hate to say this, but that editor guy was asking for it. He’s got videos of a lot of kids doing a lot of stupid shit they should be ashamed of. I’ve got a list of potential suspects a mile long now. The guy must walk around perpetually taking videos. There are dozens of them on that blog, and he’s only been at it a few weeks.”

  “I told you Cooper isn’t the only person with motive.”

  “Right, but the last video Vanover ever uploaded was of the fight between Cooper and Sellers.”

  “Ooh. That looks bad. I don’t remember seeing Eli there during the fight, but there were plenty of students recording it on their phones. Maybe he had a street team or something.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Hell if I know. What I do know is that when I was in college, I didn’t do idiotic stuff like these kids are doing.”

  “Or, back in the olden days before everyone had a smartphone, your every move wasn’t being recorded,” I pointed out.

  “I’m not that old.”

  “You’re older than I am.”

  “Not by much.”

  I laughed. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Want to grab some breakfast after you’re done?”

  “Is it almost that time?” I asked, yawning.

  “It’s five AM already. By the time we get to a stopping point here and grab something to eat, it should be time for you to call your buddy Cooper and set up our meeting.”

  “You mean ambush.”

  “You say potato…” he joked.

  “The man is not going to last a day in jail,” I murmured, worry forming a knot in my stomach.

  Cooper was used to his easy, privileged life. Murderer or not, he was not going to fare well with the other inmates. He was weak, and it showed. He was also quite handsome, and for some reason hardened criminals seemed to delight in rearranging nice faces.

  “Then he shouldn’t have killed someone.”

  Ready to end the conversation about Cooper’s impending incarceration, I nodded, pushing past Baxter and making my way into the lab. My mind knew the evidence against Cooper had to have been strong, otherwise they never would have been able to get a warrant issued for his arrest. However, my heart couldn’t accept the fact that he was a killer.

  Beck was nowhere in sight, so I assumed he was taking one of his lengthy “smoke” breaks. I wasn’t convinced that he even smoked—he just liked breaks. His assistant was missing as well. Maybe both of them had given up and gone home. Nevertheless, I was happy for the quiet.

  I removed the pizza box from its evidence bag and set it on the table in front of me. Once again, I took extra photos from all angles of the alleged shoeprint, now slightly more visible to the naked eye in the good lighting of the lab. I went to the storage cabinet full of chemical reagents and perused the stock. If I sprayed the incorrect reagent on the print, it could become unrecoverable. I was waffling back and forth between using Bromophenol Blue and potassium thiocyanate. The proper chemical to be used would depend on the compounds making up the dust or dirt I was trying to enhance. For example, Bromophenol Blue worked better for soil containing carbonate while potassium thiocyanate worked better for soil with traces of iron. I needed a chemist, and I didn’t have time to wait for weeks to send my sample to the usual lab.

  Not caring that it was only a few minutes after five in the morning, I called my fellow Ashmore professor, Rich Porter.

  He answered, griping, “Why would you call me at this ungodly early hour of the morning?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Rich,” I said. “I need your chemistry expertise.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “Not really. I need to know how much of a substance you need in order to mass spectrometerize it.”

  He snorted. “Spectrometerize is not even a word. Are you trying to ask how much of a sample I need
to run a gas chromatography mass spectrometry analysis, Professor?”

  “Yes,” I replied, knowing I hadn’t used the proper term. I was exhausted and not overly worried about correct word choice.

  “Just a dab will do.”

  “That’s not a very scientific measurement, Professor.”

  He ignored my jab. “You know, you forgot to ask me pretty please if I would agree to run your little test for you. How do you know I won’t say no?”

  “Because it’s for the Sheriff’s office.”

  “Are you back in the saddle again?”

  “You could say that.”

  “In that case, I’ll do it. I’ve done testing for them in the past.” He changed the subject. “Hey, speaking of the long arm of the law, did you hear that the Voice’s editor is dead and that foul play is suspected?”

  “Um…yeah.” The less I could tell Rich, the better. Even though he was a brilliant professor in his fifties, he gossiped like a thirteen-year-old girl.

  “All of campus is buzzing about it. I could barely teach my night class yesterday with my students so amped up. The other big story is that Dr. Dudley Dipshit is AWOL. He left campus yesterday after a fight with a student and no one’s seen or heard from him since.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to let on what I knew. “Gianna was running around telling everyone.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s a bitch on wheels.”

  “So I’ll get those samples to you first thing, okay?”

  “Samples? Like more than one?” he asked.

  “Only two. Thanks a bunch.” I hung up before he could protest.

  I swabbed an area of the shoeprint, trying to disturb as little of the outline as possible. I also measured the length of the impression as best I could, so we would at least have a general idea of the size foot we were looking for. The dust pattern was between twelve and thirteen inches long. Quickly consulting a shoe-sizing database online and doing some simple math, I surmised that the wearer’s shoe size had to be roughly a twelve or thirteen. I noted that in the file. Once I was able to enhance the impression and get a true measurement, I could more accurately pinpoint the shoe size. After returning the pizza box to the evidence bag, I gathered my chair swab and my pizza box swab and placed them in a container to take to Rich. I checked the pizza box back into evidence, created a chain of custody sheet for both swabs, and checked the swabs into evidence for safekeeping until I was ready to transport them to Rich.