A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  Delgado laughed at seeing his own name on the list, but the rest of us had been where he was at one time or another, and we all did that little look-away thing that tried not to show concern. “Why am I on this list?”

  “Because you stopped investigating right after Shayna Murry lied about Creighton’s alibi?” I put a question mark after that, but Delgado still took offense.

  “What the hell are you even doing in this meeting?” he countered, at least for a flash dropping his small-town Lothario shtick, more comfortable after the boss, didn’t matter whose boss, was gone.

  “Easy there, guys,” Todd said. “That doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  “Alison Samuels,” I said. Most of the people at the table looked blank. Except Todd. I was probably the only person at the table who could read his face. I saw him following some chain of thoughts before openly staring at Laura. And I watched him think something cops never want to think. An icy finger reached into my chest and flicked my heart. Oh, little brother, you’re thinking of that night at Laura’s place, aren’t you? I regretted mentioning Samuels’s name but couldn’t back down now. I said, “She’s the representative from the Haven, and she was hot to get Creighton dead. She’s not on the list.”

  I felt Laura flinch beside me. “Beyond what Brigid and I know, there’s nothing that formally links her to the case,” she said.

  “She was pretty public with that TV interview,” I said.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Todd said, a little more slowly than he usually spoke. “We’ll have a patrolman keep an eye out.”

  “Where’s David Lancer these days?” Delgado asked. “The prosecutor.”

  Laura said, “I called Lancer on the way over here. His housekeeper answered and said he was on a cruise through the Panama Canal.” She opened the file that she had brought to the meeting. She was the only one who brought her own materials. She wrote down the name and address of the state’s attorney who had prosecuted Marcus Creighton and flipped the paper across the table to Todd. “That’s for when he gets back,” she said.

  Madeline Stanley spoke for the first time, rocking irritably like she had a hemorrhoid. “It’s too bad when people are only doing their job.”

  I thought, Or taking orders. That’s another good excuse. But I said, “If it’s a vigilante killer, the murders don’t need a logical basis. It doesn’t matter whether people in the justice system were behaving ethically at the time. It doesn’t matter whether they were, as Detective Stanley says, ‘only doing their job.’”

  Delgado agreed with me. “It’s about ultimate justice in the mind of the vigilante. Now we need to find out who still cares about Marcus Creighton.”

  I willed Laura to keep her mouth shut, but no dice. “Somebody cares,” she said. “Enough to kill. This is partly about finding who killed Shayna Murry, and partly about stopping the killer before he can do it again. But there’s another angle. Because Marcus Creighton was innocent—”

  “That’s not true,” Madeline said, her tone sounding like a rattling saber. I remembered that she and Delgado were tight.

  “Goddam right it is,” Laura said. “That means that whoever murdered his family may still be out there. Maybe still in the area. Maybe he’s tying up loose ends. If we want to do this right, we have to consider the second motive I raised. We have to return to the Creighton case.”

  Todd looked a little impatient as he held out a cautionary hand to Madeline. “In the meantime we follow the revenge motive, and get on the process of protecting other potential victims until Delgado finds this guy.”

  Laura stayed silent now, but her face took on that narrow-eyed judgment that she’d turned on me not too long ago.

  I watched Todd watching Laura with a speculative look.

  “Todd?” I said, to bring him back to the table.

  His eyes cleared and he picked up my gaze.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  He wasn’t ready to deal with me yet, so he said, “Detective Stanley can notify McClay that she’ll be organizing the security detail down our way.”

  Madeline said, “If this is still ongoing we can tell Lancer when he gets back from his cruise. The others, do we tell them?”

  “I wouldn’t, not just yet. What do you think?” Todd said.

  “Agreed,” Madeline said.

  Todd looked at Gabriel Delgado. “Hey, don’t look at me,” Delgado said, back to jocular normal. “You’ve got all the bases covered on the protection angle. I’m going to go home and check my security system.” A grateful twitter diluted the tension in the room, bringing Laura’s into contrast. But everyone would suppose that was just the FBI way. Delgado said, “Seriously, I’m not saying there’s no connection between Creighton and Murry, but I think you’re jumping to conclusions with this vigilante theory. You guys go ahead and worry about someone else being killed. I’m going to focus on the Shayna Murry investigation. Let’s meet back here in twenty-four hours.”

  “Where’s Will Hench these days?” Todd asked.

  Laura said, “Will Hench. I think he’s trying to catch up on cases he put aside because of Marcus Creighton. I’ll call him. Let him know what’s going on. I don’t think he’s in trouble.”

  Everybody split, leaving Todd and me in the room.

  “What?” Todd said.

  I gave him an opportunity to say what he was thinking, but he didn’t take it. So I threw in another option. “Laura was good in her assessment, but she left out one possibility. Killer could just be a crank who has nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Nothing. Could be someone who lost someone else to the death penalty and is taking revenge on others.”

  “Well, that would be truly lousy,” he said, but in a more formal tone than he usually used with me, added, “We should follow up. Would you ask Laura to check the FBI records to see if there are any other homicides that fit this pattern?”

  “Anywhere in the country. Will do.” Nothing more to do here, and I hadn’t been given an assignment, so I decided to tie up a loose end that no one else appeared to notice. Something about a fingerprint. It would also keep me from thinking about what Todd might have been thinking about when he looked at Laura that way.

  Thirty-five

  FROM THE DIRECT EXAMINATION OF TRACY MACK

  By Attorney Lancer:

  Q: Dr. Mack, would you please explain these two images that have been set in front of the jury?

  A: The print on the right side of this chart was taken of Marcus Creighton’s right thumb at the time of his booking for the murder—

  By Attorney Croft: Objection.

  The Court: Sustained.

  Q: Go on.

  A: The print on the left was developed from the plug on the hair dryer found in the victim’s tub.

  Q: Would you please briefly explain the process of fingerprint analysis.

  A: Print analysis, or in this case latent analysis, is performed by highlighting with a chemical process fingerprints that are not visible to the naked eye. In this case I checked the plug, which was the most likely place to have been touched by the murderer. I used a superfuming technique that revealed the print shown on the left photograph.

  Q: And would you please let the court know what your analysis showed.

  A: I’ve marked with numbers certain sections of each print. You can see on both the similarity of facets of prints we call whorls. I found twelve identical points between the prints.

  Q: And your conclusion was?

  A: They came from the same person.

  Q: From Mr. Creighton.

  A: Even though he denied he had ever touched the hair dryer.

  By Attorney Croft: Objection. Hearsay.

  The Court: Sustained.

  Q: Would you say conclusively that the fingerprint found on the plug of the hair dryer, the presumed last person to touch it, belongs to Marcus Creighton?

  A: I conclude it is a match. Yes.

  Q: Thank you. Your witness.

  CROSS-EXAMINATION OF
TRACY MACK

  By Attorney Croft:

  Q: How many fingerprint analyses have you performed in your career so far?

  A: I would say over five thousand. I don’t know for sure.

  Q: And in how many of those cases did you exclude the suspect?

  A: I’m sorry. I don’t understand your question.

  Q: It’s a forensic term, Mr. Mack. It means that you find that the fingerprint you’re looking at does not match the person in custody. In how many of those five thousand cases did you exclude the suspect?

  A: I understand that, I just don’t have that number, sir, off the top of my head.

  Q: You seem to be in great doubt over numbers, Mr. Mack, but very certain when it comes to fingerprint comparisons.

  The Court: Please ask a question.

  Q: Never mind. Do you know whether Mr. Creighton is left- or right-handed?

  A: No, sir. I do not.

  It wasn’t just incompetence, even if Ronald Croft, the public defender, wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. At least he made appeals possible with his objections on record, but at the time of the Creighton trial a forensic technician could get away with the “because I said so” argument. People trusted visual comparison by anyone who could identify himself as a forensic scientist. Those were the days when they were rock stars, riding high on the O. J. Simpson case. If Mack said it was a match, it was a match. These days the defense is challenging whether fingerprints are even unique. They say it’s never actually been proven statistically.

  Everyone else had been sucked into the clusterfuck of running hither and yon, following all leads at once, for both suspects and other potential victims. But I thought it was a good idea to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. What really happened that night? If Creighton didn’t kill his family, then who did? If Creighton was innocent, the mass murder of his family had turned from a solved crime into a cold case. And the killer could still be alive. And trying to silence Shayna Murry? What about Manny Gutierrez? Or even Derek Evers? What about any of the investigators?

  Everyone else had forgotten the one piece of evidence that got us all involved in the first place. The hair dryer had finally arrived.

  From the outside, on Dixie Highway, you couldn’t tell that Frank Puccio’s lab was a lab. It was housed in a building that looked like a Quonset hut with the long side facing the street and had three separate entrances. It shared space with a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and a place called, plainly, Religious Articles. The lab itself was unnamed, and you could only find it if you had the address that I had given to Derek Evers. Puccio greeted me at the door.

  Stocky, without a neck, Frank Puccio looked like he had had the choice of doing this or punching tickets for the mob, and had incongruously, incredibly, decided to do this.

  “Dr. Puccio, I’m Brigid Quinn,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “Call me Frank, Brigid.” He flung out his arms as if he was going to hug me and then decided against it and took my hand in his dry, warm grasp. “I feel as if I know you. Your brother and I have had some dealings.”

  “And not on the same side, I’d expect.”

  He said through a half smile, “Regrettably, this is often true. But not always. If I had some advance notice I would have prepared light refreshments.”

  The voice didn’t go with the way his ears were attached to his shoulders, but you never know what you’re going to find with forensic scientists. The only thing you can be sure of is that none of them match any of the quirky stereotypes you see on television.

  His hand swept me inside with that come-on-come-on scooping gesture. I stepped through the door and found what I would have expected, a small but unmistakable place where science was done. It couldn’t compete with the shiny gizmos at the county level, but good enough to get the odd piece of defense evidence analyzed.

  Puccio was unapologetic but still felt the need to put any hesitation on my part to rest. “I’m certified. When the big guys get swamped I even get some overflow if urgency is needed. My setup is the modest minimum, but I do some good work now and again, and there’s a thriving business in DNA analysis for paternity tests and veterinary work. I even got into pet DNA analysis in case you want to know whether your dog with a head like an anvil is part pit bull.”

  Assurance finished, he indicated where he had a little workstation set up for the Creighton evidence. We stood before a slab of wood laid out over a couple of two-drawer filing cabinets with cinder blocks on top to give it good height for standing. Frank picked up an eight-by-ten glossy of a smudge that just barely looked like a print.

  “Is that what got him?”

  He sneered. “That’s the one.” He picked up in his right hand a similarly blown-up image of another print, this one fairly perfect in its detail. “And here’s the exemplar they got of Creighton’s thumb. You can see how the one they lifted from the dryer plug is marked with twelve points? That was the minimum they needed at the time to show a conclusive match. However, only five of them actually match, in my opinion. The bastard guessed at the remaining. He may as well have pinned it to the wall and thrown darts.”

  “Creighton’s appeals attorney should have been able to secure a stay of execution with this, then?”

  “On the strength of point comparison? Unfortunately, no. Since his trial the standards have become less rigorous rather than more.”

  “But you’re sure it’s not Creighton?”

  “There’s no way to tell who it is. I could possibly commit to a cautious opinion that it’s human.”

  “Thanks for doing this, Frank. I know it’s too late.”

  “It’s never too late.” He dropped the hail-fellow-well-met aspect and looked as serious as anyone can get. “It may be too late for Creighton, but not for the next poor schmuck who comes up against the system.”

  “And it’s never too late to find out who killed that family.”

  “Yes, indeedy.” As if to show me a just-discovered archaeological artifact, he turned both palms up in a balletic gesture at odds with those pudgy hands. I looked where he directed and saw a rickety metal frame covered from top to bottom with clear plastic. From a hook at a crossbar over the top of the frame hung a silver metallic hair dryer. The cord stretched out and off the platform. A plastic cup, the kind you’d keep in the bathroom to rinse your mouth, sat next to the dryer.

  “I’ll do the DNA test that Will Hench wants, but first I’m processing the latents. It looks like the dryer is finished, and I’ve vented the cyanoacrylate.” He drew on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted the plastic sealing that had kept the superglue from escaping its plastic cell. “Nonporous, so it’s an ideal surface,” he said, with the hushed tone of a connoisseur. “The little cup of water rehydrated the prints after being in the evidence locker for such a long time.” There’s something about a forensic scientist that always makes them want to teach you something. “Looks like there’s a lot of story here.”

  Still examining the dryer, which was dotted here and there with what you could tell even now were fingerprints, Puccio reached for some black dusting powder and lightly covered the spots with it, revealing them more.

  “There are so many prints we’ll be lucky if we can find one that’s isolated enough,” he said, turning to me. “I’m sure the majority of them are the victim’s. But see this one? I’ve been looking at prints a long time, and this one looks different from the rest.” He had a little smudge of dusting powder on his chin. I resisted wetting my thumb and rubbing it off, that thing mothers do. Must be hardwired.

  I said, “The testimony of the examiner said he didn’t look at the dryer because it had been submerged and there would be nothing to see.”

  “Well,” Puccio said, with satisfaction, “this shows he was either ignorant or lying.”

  “Which is worse?”

  Puccio gave a small smile in acknowledgment. “If the current isn’t too fast to wear away the body oils, you can get prints off a gun that’s been in a r
iver for three weeks. Only this guy, Tracy Mack, once he found evidence to support the suspicion of Creighton he didn’t look any further.”

  I thought of Delgado. “It appears that was going around at the time.”

  Puccio shook away his satisfaction and looked sad. “Poor Tracy, I heard he was a good scientist, once.”

  I called Todd. He said he wanted to see me.

  I thought of calling Laura, but didn’t. I told myself she didn’t need to have her flames fanned any more than they were already.

  I got assurance from Frank Puccio that he would compare the prints against the exemplars he had on file for Kathleen and Marcus Creighton, and confirm there was at least one that didn’t match up to anyone in the family. He promised to call Delgado and let him know what he found. As I let myself out he was softly singing “Ruby Tuesday” and reaching for some tape to lift the prints off the hair dryer.

  Thirty-six

  With what followed after finding Shayna Murry’s body I hadn’t come to the hospital since the morning before, when I had that dustup with Mom. You can only use the cool-down reason for so long. So when Todd said he wanted to see me I told him to meet me in the Palms Coffee Shop at St. Luke’s Hospital. He pulled out the chair across from mine and sat down.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he started.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, which didn’t draw as much as a curl of his lip, he was that intent. “Want coffee?”

  “Does a wild pope shit in the woods?” Todd said. Quinn family in-joke. That meant he was nervous. Nobody else could tell, but I could.

  I pushed my empty cup across the table and said, “Get me some more, too, would you? Black is fine.”

  Neither of us got up. Instead, Todd pulled open a soft-sided briefcase and drew an eight-by-ten sheet of paper from it with names and addresses on it. It looked like the list of possible victims.

  “Here’s the list of suspects as it stands.”

  It wasn’t just that Todd didn’t have a good poker face. He was pretty good at covering, but you don’t grow up with someone and not be able to read them, almost read their thoughts. “Suspects. I didn’t know you were going to do this part. I thought it was Delgado going to do this.” From the moment he sat down I could read my little brother like a book. I was just stalling the inevitable.