Whispers of the Dead

by Kope, Spencer

  She glances at me, then at Jimmy, then back at me. “I … I don’t have any other information. If this isn’t the real Larry Wilson, I don’t know who he is—I mean was!”

  Jimmy taps a box in the lower right corner of the registration form. “You have an area here for the guest’s license plate number. Did Larry Wilson fill that out?”

  “I’m sure he did,” Angela says. “It’s required.” Her fingers go to work on the keyboard and then she smiles. “It’s a Texas license plate, number 2FT2L8.”

  Jimmy scribbles it down and immediately walks away from the counter to make a call. “That’s exactly what we needed.” I beam, giving Angela’s hand a little pat, which sets her cheeks on fire.

  Jimmy paces the lobby a moment and then heads out the door, probably for better reception. He’s gone a full two minutes. When he returns I can see it on his face before he utters a word. “Tony says it’s a bad plate.” He tosses the piece of paper with the scribbled license number onto the front counter. “There goes our best shot.”

  “There’s still the room,” I offer.

  Jimmy says something in return, and though I hear the individual words I don’t piece them together into a coherent sentence because I’m suddenly distracted by the very paper he tossed on the counter.

  “Jimmy, take a look at this,” I say, cutting him off in midsentence. The tone of my voice gets his attention and he moves closer and looks down. Turning the piece of paper with the scribbled license number toward him, I ask him, “What do you see?”

  “Two-F-T-two-L-eight,” he replies. “What am I supposed to see?”

  “What is FT an abbreviation for?”

  His eyes widen. “Feet,” he says. “Two feet—but that could just be a coincidence. What’s the Two-L-Eight part?” I give him a moment and he doesn’t disappoint. “Two feet too late,” he says, sounding breathless. “Is it a message, or is he just toying with us?”

  “It’s a message,” I say. “Everything keeps coming back to feet. But is he talking about Larry Wilson’s feet, or someone else’s?”

  Jimmy ponders this a moment, and then he turns to Angela. “Any chance we can take a look at that room?” Thirty seconds later we’re taking the stairs two at a time with a room key dangling from Jimmy’s closed fingers.

  At first glance there’s nothing remarkable about the room—at least nothing remarkable that pertains to the case. The room itself is spectacular. From the bedding to the wallpaper, and from the carpet to the furnishings, the living space is Texas to the core. It pulls you in, and for a moment, except for the modern conveniences, you imagine that you’re in old Texas. A passing car sounds for a moment like a stagecoach rattling by, and I swear I hear a piano playing.

  Wait.

  I do hear a piano playing.

  Stepping over to one of the large windows, which is cracked open a few inches, I look down and across the street and, sure enough, there’s a guy in a tan cowboy hat playing an old upright piano just inside the door of a restaurant. “Texas,” I say, shaking my head. If I didn’t like the Pacific Northwest so much, I’d consider moving to the Lone Star State.

  “So … what are we looking for?” I ask, glancing around the room.

  “Latent prints. Check anything he may have touched,” Jimmy replies. “This is our last shot.…” He lets the words dangle, like the Sword of Damocles.

  As I’m turning left to the bathroom, with its double sinks and small closet, my focus is on light switches, the built-in hair dryer, various door handles, faucets, and countertops, so much so that I almost miss it, even though it’s bold and big and right in front of me.

  “Jimmy?”

  He finds me staring at the large mirror over the double sinks. When I don’t immediately say anything, he looks at me, then at my reflection, then at me again, saying, “Yes, I’m afraid that’s your real hair.”

  I punch him in the arm and then point at the mirror. “She wrote on it,” I say.

  “She wrote … Oh?” He looks at the mirror and sees nothing. “What’d she write?”

  As I speak, I trace the words and the shapes in the air without touching the mirror. “TW and then a large heart”—my finger sweeps widely over the face of the glass—“and on the other side an IW.”

  “W on both sides—like a last name? So they’re married!”

  “Seems so, and since she’s writing it, I’m assuming the T belongs to her: Tina, Tasha, Tammy, something like that.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It just makes sense. If you were writing it, you’d write Jimmy loves Jane, right; your name first because you’re the one declaring it? You wouldn’t write Jane loves Jimmy—that’s like putting words in her mouth.”

  “You’re right,” Jimmy agrees. “So, that makes Mr. IW our suspect.”

  “It does. Oh, and one more tidbit for you.” I wave my hand around the bathroom suite. “He wiped down everything: countertop, doorknobs, faucets, even the toilet seat and lid. He was pretty thorough too. Either that or the cleaning crew is really good.”

  Jimmy’s not so easily dissuaded. “Check the rest of the room.”

  I spend the next few minutes examining the room, every aspect of the room, but all of the recent shine has been carefully and completely wiped for prints—even the snooze button on the clock radio. Prospects for the old shine are even worse. Over the past eight to ten years every surface, button, knob, and drawer pull has been handled thousands of times and cleaned by the maids almost as often.

  There’s a single exception.

  Waving my partner over, I frame an area on the wall with both hands. “How do you feel about trying to recover a print that could be a decade old, from a porous, textured wall?”

  “Like I’d have better luck winning the lottery.” I give him a long stare and he sighs. “Go on. Tell me what you have.”

  “It’s both of them, IBK and our mystery lady; right here.” I emphasize a section of the wall for him. “She’s got her back flush up against the wall—just her back, nothing else touching. The only part of him I see is a full left palm print with fingers and thumb splayed. It’s right over where her shoulder would have been.”

  “So she’s got her back against the wall and he’s close enough to … Oh.”

  “Yeah.” I nod. “I don’t think he was helping her put her shoes on.”

  “Show me exactly where the handprint is.”

  Circling the spot with my left index finger, I step to the side and let Jimmy take a closer look. The invisible print is about five and a half feet from the floor. I can’t use shine to determine if any dermal ridges are present; it just doesn’t work like that.

  “Iodine fuming is obviously out. We can’t use normal dusting powder either; the print is just too old. Silver nitrate is going to be our best option—I think—though it’s going to leave a stain.” He weighs the options one more time in his head, then nods and says, “Can you run out to the car and get my kit?” I’m almost out the door when he adds, “Make sure the UV light is in the bag.”

  I wave at Angela on my way out, and then again on my way back in. She returns my wave both times, curiosity eating her up. I’m at the top of the stairs when something occurs to me, and I make my way back down and over to the counter.

  “Do you have any touch-up paint for the walls?”

  “Touch-up paint? What for?”

  “It’s nothing to be concerned about, we just found a spot on the wall that might have a latent print.”

  “A latent print?”

  “A fingerprint—from our suspect. The only problem is that no matter how we try to recover it, we could end up with a small mess on the wall. We can’t use dusting powder—the stuff you see on TV—because the print is too old; there’s nothing left for it to stick to. Special Agent Donovan is going to try silver nitrate, which reacts with the chloride in salt molecules left behind in print residue, even if those prints are really old and dried out. The chemical reaction creates silver chloride, which, when
exposed to ultraviolet light, turns black or brown.”

  Angela has a confused look on her face.

  “The bottom line,” I say hurriedly, “is that you’re going to have a small stain on the wall, possibly one that won’t come off easily, if at all.”

  She still looks confused. Her mouth is half open, like she wants to say something, but has no idea what it is.

  “I really don’t want to waste time getting a warrant,” I add in a congenial tone, planting the seed that we’re going to get this print one way or another. “Since you’re our new best friend, I just thought, you know…” I shrug, giving her a big grin, which she can’t help returning.

  “How big of a stain are we talking about?”

  I hold up my index fingers and leave a three-inch-gap between them.

  Angela sighs and waves away any concern. “I’ll just hang a picture over it.”

  “Thanks, Angela,” I say, flashing my best smile. “You’re a peach.”

  You’re a peach?

  I don’t know why I said that, except it sounds like something southern folks would say. Angela doesn’t seem offended and she’s still smiling at me as I make my way up the stairs, so maybe I got it right. Either that or she’s wondering what kind of citified Yankee idget is messing up her motel.

  I set Jimmy’s bag on the carpet and dig out the UV light, along with an eight-ounce clear plastic spray bottle with 3% written in black marker on the side: it contains silver nitrate diluted down to a 3 percent solution using distilled water.

  Since the shine shows me exactly where any possible prints might be, I get the honor of spraying the handprint. Once that’s completed, we unfold a metal stand and attach the UV light so that it’s about a foot away from the wall.

  Now we wait for the silver nitrate to do its job. It could be ten or twenty minutes; it could be as much as an hour. Jimmy flips on the TV and clicks through a couple dozen channels before turning it off again.

  “Three hundred channels and nothing worth watching,” I say.

  “Mmm.”

  I mention Angela’s hesitant cooperation to Jimmy so he can heap on some praise when we leave. And from there we end up talking about investigative procedures, forensics, and detective work in general.

  Fifteen minutes into our science experiment the chemicals finish processing, and the faint outline of a hand appears on the wall. Jimmy moves in with a jeweler’s lens and studies the fingertips one by one.

  After a minute, his arm drops to his side. “Nothing,” he says, defeated. “The walls must have been wiped down or washed at some point. There’s barely anything left of the print.”

  It’s a hard blow.

  We tear down the UV light stand and pack everything back up. Just like that, the long grind falls on its face and breaks into a thousand pieces. I feel sick to my stomach, like someone just gut-punched me.

  Back in the lobby, we return the key to Angela and share our disappointing results. “Thanks,” Jimmy says in a deflated voice. He hands her his card. “You’ve been great.” The words are flat, hollow, lifeless. “If you think of anything, can you please give me a call?”

  She nods, her lips pressed tightly together as if she can feel our pain … which would be impossible, since her backside wasn’t planted in a car seat for the last two days scouring hotels, motels, and rest stops from morning till night.

  Jimmy’s go-bag is dangling limply from his right hand as we exit the inn and meander toward the car.

  “Hey, we got something,” I say, searching for the bright side.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Initials. TW and IW—it’s more than we had before. Maybe Diane can cross-reference some databases, align some satellites; you know, do her thing. Plus we have the cryptic ‘two feet too late’ message.”

  “Another needle in a haystack of needles,” Jimmy replies.

  He’s right, of course. The ugly reality is that we failed; the long grind failed. We may have found where IBK stayed after dumping the body in Baton Rouge, but with no prints and no name we’ve gained little to nothing.

  We’re going home empty-handed … and Diane’s going to give us an earful that’ll make waterboarding look like a pleasant distraction.

  Jimmy throws his bag into the back none too gently, and then slides into the driver’s seat and fires up the beast. He’s just backing out when the front door of the Southern Cross flies open and Angela races after us, waving a piece of paper in the air.

  “I found it,” she pants when Jimmy rolls down the window. She thrusts a piece of paper through the opening, and then points at the bottom right-hand corner. “I was thinking about your Mr. Wilson, and I suddenly remembered that when he checked in, he wrote down his license number wrong. We check the plates in our parking lot every couple hours,” she explains. “There’s limited parking downtown, and we get customers from other businesses parking here all the time; it’s a constant battle. I did a lot check shortly after he arrived, so I remembered what his car looked like—only, his plate wasn’t on my list. I figured he might have written down a plate from one of his other cars by mistake, so I just added it to my list and wrote it on his registration form when I came back in.” She holds up the form, IBK’s form, and points to the scratched-out 2FT2L8 in the bottom corner. Next to it is a standard seven-digit Texas plate number.

  “So this is his real plate number?”

  Angela’s half smile is hopeful. “Does that help?”

  “Oh, Angela,” Jimmy purrs, “I could just kiss you.” Her cheeks light up red and she tries to contain her blossoming smile, but fails.

  * * *

  Tony picks up the phone on the first ring, and when asked to run the plate, he doesn’t question the why or how of it. He just reads the number back, and when Jimmy confirms it, he says, “Let me call dispatch. I’ll have a name and address for you in a couple minutes.”

  But a few minutes pass, and then a few more. When Jimmy’s phone finally chimes, it’s not a call, but a text. He slides his finger across the screen and the message materializes: Slight delay. Complicated.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.

  Jimmy shrugs resignedly. “Just another roadblock.”

  The next fifteen minutes are agonizing. By the time the phone rings, Jimmy and I are so on edge that we flinch involuntarily.

  “Tony? What’s up?” Jimmy puts the phone on speaker.

  “Ran into a little hiccup, but before you get your shorts all wadded up, I got it sorted out—you’re welcome, and you can buy me a beer. The plate comes back to a rental, a white Ford Fusion. Normally we’d have to find a judge, get a warrant, blah, blah, blah, but fortunately for you I just so happen to have a contact at the rental agency. I made a call, then my contact made a call, and we got an answer. You ready for this? The guy’s name is Isaiah Webster, thirty-four years old according to his New Mexico license, and he lives in Albuquerque.”

  Bam! That’s how it happens.

  If someone were to ask me how Jimmy and I solve homicides, I’d have to paraphrase Hemingway and say, Two ways: gradually, and then all of a sudden.

  “Albuquerque,” I hiss at Jimmy, nudging his shoulder.

  He waves at me like I’m some kind of mosquito.

  “Do you have an address?”

  Tony rattles off an address on Carlisle Boulevard Southeast and then pauses so Jimmy has time to scribble it down. “I already ran this guy, Jimmy. He’s about as clean as they come. I couldn’t even find a parking ticket. You sure he’s the one?”

  “Pretty sure,” Jimmy says, giving me a look.

  “What’s your next move?”

  Jimmy gives a one-word reply: “Albuquerque.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Brookshire, Texas—September 13, 12:17 P.M.

  Brookshire.

  We’re right back where we started this morning.

  It’s actually a bit of luck. We thought we’d have to drive all the way to Houston to meet up with Les and Mar
ty, but, as it turns out, Brookshire plays host to the Houston Executive Airport, which has a runway just long enough to accommodate a Gulfstream G100.

  It’s only a twenty-five-minute drive from the motel in Sealy to the airport, so we arrive well ahead of Betsy and crew, which gives us time to place calls and prepare for whatever awaits us in Albuquerque. Jimmy’s on the phone with a contact at Albuquerque PD. Words like “SWAT” and “surveillance” are being tossed around like dough in a New York pizza parlor.

  It’s safe to assume that APD will have surveillance on the house within the hour; probably a couple scruffy-looking detectives in doper cars, courtesy of some flavor of local drug task force. In my experience with agencies all across the country, drug and vice detectives are almost always the best surveillance option. They have cultivated looks that range from Mr. Goodtime, to neo-homeless, to hard-core tweaker; whatever fits the particular bill.

  I’ve been trying to get through to Diane for the last twenty minutes with no luck. She’s not answering the office phone or her cell, which is unusual for her. I’m calling every minute now; first the office, then her cell, then the office again.

  This time I hear a click.

  “Diane?” I say as soon as the phone picks up. “Diane?”

  “’Es,” a voice says, sounding similar to Diane, but only if you stuffed a sock in her mouth.

  “Diane?”

  “’Es!” The voice is impatient this time, making it sound even more like Diane.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Eadding.”

  “Eating?”

  “’Es.”

  “Do you want me to wait until you finish chewing?”

  “’Es.”

  Diane chews while I wait. She chews and chews and chews, until I start to imagine that she’s the reincarnation of Horace Fletcher, the Great Masticator, who used to chew each mouthful a hundred times and attributed his health and long life to the practice.