by Roger Bray
“OK, so you each have a copy of my report. I’ll talk through what I did, what I found and any conclusions I may have. If you have any questions, we’ll work through them as well. OK?”
They nodded and opened their folders.
Phil started by introducing the reasons he had gone to the vehicle pound to look at Hazel’s car, covered the fact that he had permission from Hazel’s mom to do so in case the omission of that could render what came next in any way inadmissible. Steve knew but as it was explained to Alice that while they were looking at the evidence at the moment anything new or as a counter to the official story had a good chance of being presented in court at some point. It was always best to do things right the first time than have to scramble to make them lawful in the future, or find them thrown out of court on a technicality.
The pictures in front of them showed Hazel’s 2009 Titanium Gray Metallic Volvo V50 wagon, from all angles. From each corner; down each side from both directions; the front and the back then inside; across the front seats; the rear seats; the luggage compartment and the engine bay. Individual items which Phil had picked as needing special mention had their own sections and individual series of numbered photographs.
He continued through the narrative, listing the photographs, the tests and the results of what he had done. When he reached the conclusion, he closed his file and looked at them both again.
“At this point, I would normally walk you through the conclusions by way of dry facts, but in this case, the conclusions are linked not so much with what I found as what I didn’t find.”
“Which was?” Steve asked, a moment before Alice could.
“When the car was taken to the impound it was photographed and checked over much like I have done. I have a copy of the report that was done then, and it was thorough, but it doesn’t have much in the way of conclusions. That’s fine because all that we should be doing is presenting the facts. But the report did show a few things which are of importance.”
“Like?”
“The position of the driver’s seat, the distance between the seat rail and the controls, the position of the seat back and the measurement between that and the steering wheel. They have all changed since the car was first taken in, but those initial measurements are important.”
“Because they show what the car was like when it was bought in?” Alice guessed.
Phil nodded. “This vehicle, this model had the option for a powered driver’s seat which uses servo motors to achieve adjustment but also gave the driver the option of having a retained memory for an individual. As I say, this was an option on this vehicle which, I’m guessing Hazel didn’t take up when she bought the car new. I have checked with Volvo and they confirm that this vehicle was delivered without the option, so the adjustments of the seat are done manually.”
“Why is that important?” Alice asked.
“It may not be but someone unfamiliar with the electronic version of the seat controls may not have bothered trying to adjust the seat and driven it as it was.”
“Whereas?”
“Most people can work out normal mechanical controls in a few seconds. The electronic version can be a little difficult to work out in a hurry. At the least, people getting into a vehicle adjust the seat position and the rear-view mirror if needed.”
He looked at them for a moment before continuing, “The seat measurements which, I must admit, are not entirely accurate, showed that the last driver of the vehicle was in the range of five feet three to five feet seven. Both Alex and Hazel are well outside that parameter, and I would suggest that anyone of their heights would find driving at that adjustment quite awkward. Have you driven in the car with Hazel?”
Alice was taken back for a moment by the question as she was staring at the pictures of the front seats of Hazel’s Volvo.
“Er, yes,” she pulled herself together.
“And her driving style,” Phil asked, “was she a nervous or confident driver?
“Confident, extremely confident.”
“Did she drive seated away from the steering wheel or hunched over it?”
“Away from it, laid back, her legs were stretched in front of her.”
“Her knees were fairly straight then?”
“Absolutely,” Alice nodded, remembering.
“And, Alex, how was his driving style.”
Alice smiled, “Laid-back as well. Cool dude around town sort of thing.”
Phil nodded, “Given that and those measurements, I don’t think that either your brother, or Hazel, were the last people to drive that car. The small difference in height between them I would imagine that either could have driven with the seat in the position for the other. They wouldn’t have needed a great deal of adjustment.”
He stopped and pulled a sheaf of documents from the folder. He laid them out on the table and Alice and Steve could see that they were photocopied pages from the V50 owner’s manual and a corresponding photograph showed the relevant thing in Hazel’s car.
“To make major adjustments to the seat, as you can imagine a shorter person might do, they would need to adjust the seat position backward or forward by using the bar at the front of the seat.” He laid the corresponding pair of prints on the table, he continued, selecting the printouts as he did, pointing to the controls as he explained. “The seat back would be adjusted by the wheel on the side of the seat back, the rear-view mirror by swiveling it up or down and side to side around the axis of the bracket attached to the windshield, and the door mirrors by way of controls on the driver’s door insert.”
Phil opened the original forensic report and laid it down next to them.
“To do any of these things as well as open and close the front door would have left fingerprints all over these areas. The mirror, the handles and the other controls should have all had fingerprints on them. Hazel’s prints wouldn’t have been a surprise, or Alex’s, given that he drove it at times.
“Even without seat adjustment, it’s fairly difficult to drive a vehicle without touching the steering wheel, the shift, other controls, and the parking brake, which was engaged when the vehicle was discovered.”
“And did the original examination find fingerprints?” Steve asked.
“The original report covered this by saying that no usable fingerprints could be found on any of these surfaces. They did check over the whole vehicle, including the interior driver’s side door control and, more importantly, the inside surface of the exterior door handle. My tests have shown, and I’m confident in this, the reason the original forensics found nothing is that each one of the surfaces had been wiped down.”
“Couldn’t it have been someone wearing gloves?” Steve asked.
“No,” Phil shook his head, “Gloves would leave a smear, possibly an indistinct smudge but they would not leave nothing. Even so, Hazel and Alex’s should still have been on those surfaces as they were found on other areas of the vehicle.”
“Such as?” Alice wanted to know.
“Pretty much everywhere else in the vehicle and outside on the tailgate. Where there were no fingerprints, at all, was in the area of the driver’s seat and any of the places that you would expect to find fingerprints of someone driving the vehicle. There was nothing, and I mean there was nothing there at all. No smudges, no smears.”
“The lack of fingerprints must prove something?” Alice asked.
“Certainly, it shows that someone didn’t want to leave fingerprints behind and the proof is that the surfaces were wiped down.”
“But we can’t prove that …” Alice said.
Phil smiled as he pulled another document from his case.
“Actually, I think we can.”
He passed them each a copy of the next document which was a test result for a number of samples. Each one listed with a number which Phil explained corresponded with a photograph he had taken and his own listing of the sample he had taken.
“What does this mean exactly?” Alice asked, as she quic
kly read through the list of incomprehensible chemical names.
“I took samples from each of the areas I have already shown you, plus a number of others from the vehicle to act as control areas. In all the areas of interest the same chemicals turned up. They did not show up in any of the control areas.”
“And what is it, what are these chemicals?” Alice asked as Steve was reading the results reports.
Phil waited until Steve had finished reading and looked up before saying, “Wet wipes.”
“You can tell that?”
He nodded, “Whoever was in the vehicle last gave each area a good going over with wet wipes. They left reside in the fabric of the seat and in the edges of the mirror frame, the door mirror controls, all over the steering wheel, shifter, and parking brake. The plastic of the door and the seat back around the adjustment knob had traces as did the back of the external door handle. Given time and more in-depth testing, I might pin down the actual brand that was used, but the list of chemical is, in my opinion, conclusive that a variety of wet wipe was used to wipe down areas of the vehicle.”
“Do you have conclusions for this?”
“I am a forensic examiner, I deal in facts, but I certainly have at times discussed conclusions with investigators like Steve. Not as conclusive evidence, unless I can do so, but to flesh out the narrative. My conclusion is that neither Alex nor Hazel drove the car to the rail road yards where it was located by the police. Whoever did so was around five feet four to five feet six tall and used wet wipes to clean any area he, or she, thought that they may have touched.”
“The ignition key?” Steve asked.
“It isn’t mentioned in the report as being found with the vehicle and as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t been found.”
Alice looked down at the pictures before asking.
“That’s it then? Someone else probably drove the car and then cleaned their prints off with wet wipes?”
Steve looked at her, “Are you disappointed?”
“Yes, well, I suppose not,” she ran her fingers through her hair with an exasperated sigh. “I suppose I wanted more, something, you know that will prove Alex didn’t do it.”
“I’m fairly sure we are doing that, Alice, this might be the final piece needed to get Alex out, with the statements we have and now this.”
“I would agree,” Phil said, “from what Steve’s told me, I would say you are getting closer. But that’s not all I got from the vehicle.”
“What, what else?”
“The supposed blood stain in the rear passenger foot well, I took some samples from the same places as the original forensic examination but also from other areas around it. There have been some major breakthroughs in analyzing blood over the past few years. I’ve sent it to a specialist lab in Germany and I think that they’ll be able to tell us the species the blood came from.”
“The DA’s bullshit that it ‘might’ come from Hazel can finally been disproved.”
“I hope so.”
“How long do you think before we can get some results?”
“The lab in Darmstadt is run by a guy I worked with a lot when I was based over there. He has promised to get the results to me as soon as he can, I was hoping for today, but I should hear this week. There’s something else,” Phil continued, “One more thing that wasn’t raised in the original report, maybe they missed it or possibly thought that it was insignificant, maybe it is.”
“What?”
“Did Alex or Hazel ride a bicycle?”
“Bicycle?” They both asked together,
“Why?” Steve finished, looking at Alice.
Phil flicked through the pile in front of him until he had picked out a number of pictures. He picked up one which showed the inside of the rear cargo area, from the outside with the tailgate fully up. He pointed out the back of the left-hand seat where it pushed against the front of the wheel arch on that side. He laid the picture down and then put it alongside a series getting closer into the area. Using his pen, he traced a mark in the fabric on the back of the seat and the edge of the wheel arch.
“That,” he said, pointing at a black mark, “is the outline of a bicycle tire. I can’t give you a size of the wheel, but my best guess would be it’s an adult sized bicycle, probably a twenty-six-inch rim, or at least it’s almost definitely not a child’s bike.”
“You can see a bicycle tire there? I can’t. The ghost of a smudge mark.” Alice said, squinting at the picture while Steve sat in silence knowing what Phil was capable of when let loose with some decent image enhancement software.
“I ran it and scrubbed it, cleaned it up, played with the contrast and depth a bit and this came out.”
He pulled a second photo out and the outline of the tire could now be seen, in a surreal spectrum but now quite clear.
“As you can see, the tire is a knobbly one, from a mountain bike or something similar. Did either Hazel or Alex ride bicycles, did they have reason to be transporting a bicycle?”
Alice laughed in spite of herself, “Alex rode a bike when he was a kid, who didn’t, but not since he was an adult. Hazel? I’ve never heard her say that she did or wanted to ride a bike. I’ll need to double check with Alex, but I would be confident to say she didn’t.”
“And no mention of any reason why they might have a bike in the boot of Hazel’s car?”
“None that I can think of, unless it was something that she did with Nicholas Rowe.”
Alice excused herself, grabbed her cell phone and left the room but was back after a few minutes.
“I rang Rowe. He seems overly keen to help now, probably guilt,” she said pointedly before continuing, “No, he doesn’t own a mountain bike. He almost laughed when I suggested Hazel riding a bike.”
“What about him,” Steve asked, “does he own any kind of bike?”
“Yes, he does but definitely not we’re after. He fancied himself as a bit of a road racer a few years ago and still has a Sarto Davanti road bike in his collection. According to him it has …” she checked a piece of paper in her hand, “…Vittoria Corsa 25mm tires on it. Nothing knobbly about them at all.”
“And he’s over six feet tall so as much as he’s a bit of a swine, I think that we can count Rowe out of this,” Steve said.
Alice gave him a look which he translated as her disappointment that they couldn’t prove anything against Rowe.
“Well, there was definitely something in there. A knobbly tired wheel, presumably attached to a mountain bike. I can’t tell you when or why, but it was there at some point.”
Phil started gathering his copies of the reports and photographs and putting them back into his case.
“I’d better be going, I have to be in Carson City this evening. When I get the blood reports from Jürgen, I’ll let you know straight away.”
“Thanks, man,” Steve said as they walked out to Phil’s car.
Phil turned and smiled, giving his friend a bear hug before getting into his Jeep.
“It’s my pleasure, Steve, if there’s anything else, then let me know. And look after that girl, she’s a keeper I think.”
Before Steve could answer he took off down the street with a wave.
Chapter Eighteen
She woke the next morning surprised that she had fallen asleep at all and so deeply. But she hadn’t had much sleep in the previous forty-eight hours because she couldn’t consider being kidnapped and rendered unconscious to be quality sleep time. At some point during the night, the cold had half woken her, and she had quickly got under the sheets and blankets and pulled them around her to warm up.
For a moment, she actually felt as relaxed as she always did after a good night’s sleep, but then she remembered where she was. She sat up and the first thing she was drawn to was the camera dome up on the ceiling. Was he watching, how could she know? There was no little light to give away if the prying eye was on or not, so she had to presume that he was always there, always watching.
In her senior
year they had read Nineteen Eighty-Four and the idea of constant surveillance had been laughable to her and her friends, but now? Now with the dark bubble in the roof she began to understand a little more of Winston Smith’s fear and paranoia. The ceiling was too high for her to reach the camera and all the furniture was bolted in position so she couldn’t move any to stand on. She supposed that if she balled up some wet tissues and tried to throw them at the dome and if they managed to stick, she could somehow block the view.
Why it was up there, she didn’t know but could guess. It was obviously there so that she could be watched, but was it to ensure she was still in there or some sort of voyeurism, she didn’t know and little cared if she was honest. If he wanted to watch her butt naked while she was showering or on the toilet then there wasn’t a real lot she could do about it. Worrying made it worse, maybe there was no camera and the little dome was a dummy set there to scare her and keep her compliant.
*****
The dome wasn’t a dummy, and he sat back in his chair with a smile on his face looking at the big twenty-seven-inch, LED computer monitor and the feed from the Internet protocol (IP) camera in Hazel’s room. He was pleased with the result. It was a nice and clear picture. High resolution with an infrared capability so he could watch her all day and night. When he couldn’t watch live, he could record the feed on an external hard drive. He had already sat there for an hour, flicking between reading the USA Today news site and watching Hazel sleep, buried deep under the covers. He couldn’t blame her and that was why he had made sure to leave plenty of extra blankets. It could get quite cold out there, and winter was coming on.
He would make sure that she was all right when he went out there in the morning. Until then, he would sit back and watch.
Maybe she would take a shower.
Chapter Nineteen
“Wow, you have been busy. I didn’t think there was much left in this case. There didn’t seem to be any doubts left but you’ve proved us all wrong.”