Like mapping out the location of the glasses on the bar shelf. If they were fortunate enough to match a fingerprint, they’d need to be able to prove to a jury that it was reasonable to believe that the glass might have been used by the suspect on the day in question based on the timing of visitors and washing. Often, it was the tracking of the evidence and not the work they did on the evidence itself that took most of their time.
The weekend techs had prepared the prints onto slides, and this morning, Naomi was scanning the images to run through the database. All in all, it was easily a seven- or eight-hour process. For evidence work, that wasn’t bad, especially if they got a hit.
Roger was focused on the baseball mitt Jamie Vail had brought in.
According to Jamie, it wasn’t Z’s mitt.
He believed her. He hoped that whatever he found on it left no doubt about who had attacked Charlotte.
Roger prided himself on letting the evidence tell the story. He wished the rest of his team was as discreet. Already this morning, Chase had been talking about the fact that Hailey and Hal subpoenaed a DNA sample from Zephenaya. Vich had been in the lab when Chase was talking, and it had taken all the restraint Roger had not to call Chase out in front of everyone.
Instead, Roger waited until Vich had left and pulled Chase aside to give him a special assignment. Chase was on his way to the scene of a potential stalker case where he would spend the remainder of the day, alone, combing the outside of the apartment building, its garage, and the dumpsters for signs of a break-in or evidence of how someone smuggled a huge bouquet of flowers into the building. Normally, Roger wouldn’t have sacrificed the manpower to something like dumpster-diving, especially in a case where they had no punishable crime. Unless they could prove that the deliveryman broke in first before leaving the flowers in the hall.
What jury would send a guy to jail for confessing his love with a huge bouquet of flowers?
For whatever reason, Vich was taking this particular case personally, and Chase needed some time to realign his priorities. The convergence of the two was a perfect opportunity.
Roger had told Chase to come back fifteen minutes before the end of his shift or when he found something. And not a minute before.
Earlier in his career, Roger had done his share of grunge evidence collection. His own mentor, a strangely angular man named Keith Hobart, had taught him some valuable lessons by making Roger spend time in some less than ideal conditions. Dumpsters or people’s trash or—the worst—combing through a getaway car after four burglars had died in a wreck. The inside—where he was supposed to locate evidence that would identify the crew’s henchman—was a mess of blood and tissue. He’d spent almost five hours searching for a single hair or print. In the end, they’d had to tie the leader to the crime without any physical evidence. Thankfully, the police’s forensic accountants had been more successful than Roger.
Roger turned to his work. Using an ethyl alcohol solution to moisten the stains on the mitt, Roger confirmed that what had stained the mitt was blood. He knew it was. Enough years on the job and he could taste the coppery scent of blood from a hundred yards, but he never assumed. Using sterile swabs, he took eight separate blood samples from the mitt. He ran the first four for blood type, the other four would go for DNA testing. Within minutes he confirmed that all four samples matched Charlotte’s blood type.
Next, he would have to cut apart the mitt to test it for other DNA. He wasn’t a ball player himself, but he could tell the mitt was well worn. That took a lot of energy. It was a shame to cut it apart. Roger set the thought aside and, opening a medical pack with a clean scalpel, he began to saw it apart at the stitching. He’d only made the first four-inch incision when an incoming e-mail made a dinging sound on his laptop.
He pulled off his gloves and went to his desk. He normally didn’t let himself stop a task for e-mail, but something about pulling apart that mitt was extremely unappealing. Most of the evidence that came across the lab was adult-oriented. Guns or clothing or fingerprints. They were usually connected to an adult, to adult crimes. Even when evidence was clothing from a child, he could somehow distance the material from the child. The mitt was harder. Knowing it might belong to Jamie’s son was awful.
The message in his inbox was from City View Condominiums. The building where the flowers had been delivered. It included a zipped file. Roger watched the file run through the department’s antivirus software. The attached e-mail was a list of video files that covered the four hours before and one hour after the package was delivered. Five hours wasn’t much. The guy could have snuck in the building much sooner than that, but certainly this was a start.
Each of the eleven files was footage taken from a different security camera view. The front, rear, and garage level of the building, as well as the camera on the floor where the package was delivered.
The process would take a few minutes, but Roger waited, using the time to clean out his inbox which had accumulated forty new messages since he’d checked it last night.
The lab phone rang. “Crime Lab. Roger here.”
“Roger, it’s Chase.”
Roger frowned. “You found something already?”
“I think so,” Chase said, a little breathless.
“Where are you?”
“I’m standing in the building’s dumpster.”
Roger suppressed a smile.
“I found a black gym bag. It’s empty other than a few leaves and two petals.”
“What color?”
“Yellow,” he said. “Two different kinds of flowers, and there is a little orangish-red residue that looks like that stuff inside those big flowers.”
“Lilies,” Roger said. “It’s pollen that comes off the stamen.”
“What?” Chase yelled over the noise of a truck. “Ah, shit. The garbage guys are here. Should I tell them to come back?”
“No,” Roger said. He didn’t have an actual crime scene so there was no real way to hold off the garbage collectors. “Check around where the bag was found, then come back in.”
“Okay,” Chase shouted. He’d actually gotten in the dumpster. Roger had assumed he’d half-ass the job and was pleasantly surprised.
On his desktop were the eleven files. Curious, Roger double-clicked on the last video file, the one that covered the hallway floor where the flowers had been left. He set it to play. The video captured the hallway from the elevator doors to the stairwell at the end of the corridor. There were three doors on either side of the hall. He watched nothing happen for a minute or so, then held down the fast-forward button.
For more than two hours of film time, nothing happened. Then, the elevator doors opened. Roger slowed the film to watch a man in his late thirties or early forties walk off the elevator and disappear into one of the apartments. Maybe forty minutes later, a woman exited the elevator and entered the same unit. The two emerged a short time later, together, and passed an older woman with a small dog on a leash who entered a different apartment.
A short while later, another woman came off the elevator. Her body language gave her away. She was their victim. It was in the way she looked over her shoulder as she stepped off the elevator, though there was nothing but wall there. The dipped slope of her shoulders. The forced rise of her chin as she fought some internal battle. She was afraid.
He recognized her. Stopping at her door, Annabelle Schwartzman glanced up at the camera, then let herself into her apartment. The time stamp on the video read 7:19 p.m. on Saturday night. Less than a half-hour later, the elevator door slid open again. A figure dressed completely in black walked slowly down the hallway. The bouquet of yellow flowers was held slightly above eye level, blocking any view of his—or her—face. In a black hoodie and black baseball cap, not a single part of the face was visible. Hands were covered in thick leather gloves, like the kind that were fleece lined for snow.
This time, the elevator door didn’t close. It remained open while the figure walked slowly down the hal
l and set the flowers by Schwartzman’s door.
A hand reached out and rang her bell and then, head down, the figure returned to the elevator, pushed a button, and the doors slid closed again.
Roger rewound the film and watched it again. Not a sliver of face. He rewound the film a third time, all the way to Schwartzman and studied how high her head hit on the door. Roger watched the deliveryman. He wasn’t that much taller than Schwartzman. A little broader, a little larger. Schwartzman was tall so Roger put this guy at about five feet ten and maybe one hundred sixty pounds. Could be a woman. He let the video play on.
Nothing happened for about fifteen minutes of film. Then, Schwartzman’s door opened. First, only several inches and then, fifteen seconds later, all the way. When she spotted the yellow flowers, she pressed her hand to her chest. She scanned the hallway quickly and pulled herself back into the apartment. Roger pressed the fast-forward option in slow bursts, studying the screen for motion.
The elevator opened again. A man walked down the hall. He was too big to be the deliveryman. Over six feet, close to two hundred pounds. He gave the flowers a long look, then let himself into the apartment past Schwartzman’s. Next, a man in a uniform arrived at Schwartzman’s door. He knocked, knocked again, and Schwartzman stepped out, pointed to the flowers, motioned to his hands, and returned into the apartment. She wanted him to take the flowers. Wear gloves.
Another gentleman appeared at her door in a suit along with a second man in a uniform. More building staff, Roger assumed. Schwartzman stepped into the hall to talk to them before retreating into her home again. Just before the film ended, Roger watched Vich arrive. Schwartzman hesitated slightly, then opened the apartment door to let him pass.
Roger saved the videos onto the lab’s shared hard drive and crossed to David Ting’s desk. “You got time to work on something else?”
Ting glanced up. “Sure. I’m trying to repair the jpg file we pulled off that phone.”
One of Saturday night’s rape victims. If they could repair the file, they might have an image of the young woman’s attacker. Roger couldn’t pull Ting off that, even for Schwartzman. “You almost done?”
Ting nodded. “Another ten minutes or so before I can run the repair program. Might take the program a while though.”
“That’s okay,” Roger said. “I want you to look at something else while it’s running.”
“What’ve you got?”
“I need to try to ID a guy from some video that came in.”
“Sure. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m done.”
The mitt lay beside the scalpel and gloves he’d set aside.
Instead of returning to his work, he dialed Chase’s cell phone. “You close?”
“Coming down the stairs now.”
“Good.” Roger hung up the phone and waited for Chase. He’d work on the bag first, then force himself to get back to that damn mitt.
Chapter 35
Ronald Ikerd Private Investigations was not what Jamie expected. The office was in a small, sunny, ’40s style bungalow home in Cow Hollow, an area mostly filled with young urban professionals of a much higher ilk than the seedy PI office she’d expected. The stucco front was beige, the front door and windowsills black. The paint job was immaculate and recent. The small yard was rimmed with a manicured hedge; along the front of the house was a line of droopy, pink peonies about to bloom.
Jamie rang the bell. She and Vich were greeted by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Ikerd. “Please, come in. They are waiting for you in the den.”
The entrance was old hardwood, across the floors and also up the walls in a rich wood paneling, capped with an attractive chair railing. The ceiling, too, was an inlaid wood design that appeared original, or at least restored to original. While the downstairs had the feel of an office, Jamie glanced up the stairs and was certain that this was also where the Ikerds lived.
“You said ‘they’ are waiting for us?” Vich asked.
Mrs. Ikerd offered no explanation as she led them down a short hallway. Along the walls were images of the city that dated back to the early 20th century. Mrs. Ikerd paused at a smoky glass window and gave three quick raps.
“Come in, please,” a man’s voice said.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside, moving aside for Jamie and Vich.
“Please join us,” said a gentleman seated behind a large mahogany desk. His mustache was waxed and curled at the ends, like a character from the old westerns her father sometimes left on TV while he was making dinner or cleaning up. While the man’s hair was salt and pepper, the mustache was solidly brunette, making it the center of focus of his whole head. The room smelled so faintly of cigar smoke, it might have been bathed in it a decade or so ago. There were no ashtrays visible, and the windows were spotless with no evidence of recent smoke.
As Jamie stepped into the room, she looked at the second man. Easily late sixties, he was trim and tall, dressed in a light gray three-piece suit. A chain ran from the center button of his vest to his pocket where Jamie imagined he carried an old gold pocket watch.
Beneath a pair of small round spectacles, the high arch of his brow and the almond-shaped eyes were familiar. Unlike his daughter’s though, his eyes were gray and smoky with cataracts. Sitting in the room with the private investigator was Reginald Bishop, Sondra’s father.
“Mr. Bishop,” Jamie said. “I’m Inspector Jamie Vail.” She stepped forward to shake his hand. “And this is my partner—”
Bishop nodded. “Alexander Kovalevich.” He made no move to shake. “I hope I pronounced that correctly.”
“You did,” Vich told him before raising an eyebrow at Jamie.
“Please join us, Inspectors,” Ikerd said, motioning to the empty seats before addressing his wife. “Marjorie, would you please bring us some tea?”
“Of course, Ronald. I’ve got some black for you if you’d like it, Reginald.”
“You’re a dear, Marjorie,” Bishop told her.
Marjorie excused herself, closing the door behind her, while Vich and Jamie sat in the two empty chairs across from Ikerd’s desk. Jamie removed her notebook and flipped it open to the first free page. “I assume by your presence that you were the one who placed a tracking device on your daughter’s car.”
Saying nothing, Bishop drew the gold watch from his pocket by the chain and studied the face as though it would take him some minutes to ascertain the time.
“Mr. Bishop,” Jamie pressed.
“We have invited you here so that we might address your concerns,” Ikerd said. The mustache bobbed as his upper lip moved. “We shall do that as long as it can be done without disrupting my client’s efforts to protect his family.”
The protection of his family was illegal, Jamie thought, but didn’t say. Instead, she exchanged a quick look with Vich. She would have liked to have asked him if he, too, felt as though they’d stepped into some 1950s noir film. Instead, she ignored Ikerd’s warning and pressed on. “When did you put the tracking device on the Mercedes?” she asked.
“The device was installed when the car was purchased,” Ikerd said.
“So, Sondra knew that the car was being tracked?” Jamie asked the question to Ikerd, but kept a watch on Bishop. No reaction from him as he focused on his watch.
“Mr. Bishop purchased the car,” Ikerd said, which offered no actual answer.
“So, Sondra didn’t know that her car was being tracked?” Jamie asked again, waiting for clarification.
“What are you really after, Inspector?” Ikerd asked. “You want to know why Mr. Bishop tracks the expensive cars he purchases, or who attacked Charlotte?”
“We believe one may lead to the other.”
“That’s hogwash,” Bishop said, drawing out the words as he slid the gold watch back into the small pocket of his vest. Moving slowly, he pressed his hands into his knees and leaned forward so that the buttons of his vest strained against the bulk of his chest. “I’d like to make a requ
est that we kindly cut the crap. Please?”
“Happy to,” Jamie said. “You first, Mr. Bishop.”
Bishop raised an eyebrow like he found her slightly amusing.
“Inspector, you requested an audience with me, and I have granted that,” Ikerd said, and there was a small sense of relief when he reached up and stretched out one end of his mustache into a long thin strip which reached almost to the edge of his jaw. “Neither Mr. Bishop nor I are under any obligation to speak to you, and we certainly will not tolerate your insults.”
Jamie couldn’t think of what she’d said that would have insulted either of them. She opened her mouth when Vich cut in.
“Mr. Ikerd, Mr. Bishop,” he began, and Jamie forced herself to sit back in her chair. Her instinct was to tear them to shreds, but Ikerd was right. She had nothing to hold them on, no ammunition to load that could pressure them to answer any of her questions. In fact, she was surprised—suspiciously so—that Bishop was here at all. What incentive did he possibly have to talk to them? Unless he knew something about Charlotte’s attack that he wanted them to know… or make sure they didn’t find out.
“I assume we are all here for the same purpose,” Vich continued. “The tracking device is of little interest to the police unless it is somehow involved in the how or why of Charlotte’s brutal attack.” Vich folded his hands into his lap. Jamie saw that he was infinitely more suited to this old boys’ game than she. “From our perspective, we can only assume the device is related because it is both unusual and not yet accounted for by the Borden household.”
Jamie watched the silent exchange between Ikerd and Bishop. Damn, Vich was good.
“I agree, Inspector Kovalevich,” Bishop said.
“Please,” Vich said. “Call me Alex.”
Everything to Lose Page 24