Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 94

Justine was back at the Topanga Canyon cabin, this time in sunlight, standing with Dr. Sci and Nora Cronin a few yards from the flower bed where fresh tire tracks had been pressed into the earth.

A car had parked among the flowers recently, just as Danny had said. And Danny had also said that whoever killed Piper had to have been driving that car.

The LAPD’s tire track specialist aimed his Minolta at the tread marks and fired off a few shots. He put a scale down next to the impressions and fired off another few rounds.

“Thanks, Stan. We’re good for now,” said Nora.

Dr. Sci was as excited as a kid on his birthday. “This is a beautiful thing, Justine. What a great tread mark.”

The LAPD had two big Leica scanners back at the lab.

Sci was using Private’s state-of-the art, handheld ZScanner 700 CX, which captured images in three dimensions, in full color, with self-positioning in real time. There was no scanner anywhere that could top it.

Nora said, “I don’t care if you show off, Sci. But gloating is just uncool.”

Sci laughed. “Just sayin’, you’re going to thank Jack for spending the fifty grand on this.”

“If we catch the dirtbag because of your scanner, I’ll kiss Jack on the mouth, okay?”

Sci grinned. “If it’s okay with Jack, it’s okay with me.”

The 3-D scanner looked something like two hairdryer heads fused onto one handgrip. Sci laid down a net of small positioning markers in the tire track, then passed the scanner above the track in one continuous motion. As he did so, the image transferred to the laptop Justine had set up on a nearby tree stump. Every ridge, wave, and detail of the tread mark appeared right on her screen.

Nora came over to watch as Justine ran the image through the software that compared the image to six thousand distinct patterns in the TreadMate database.

Justine held her breath as the computer stopped at a tread mark identical to the image Sci had scanned. The word match flashed onscreen.

“We have a hit,” she said.

Sci joined Nora in looking over Justine’s shoulder.

“An N-spec,” Sci said. “That’s a Porsche standard tire. Justine, may I?”

Sci tapped the laptop keys and found what he was looking for.

“The N-spec tires have a special tread design. Yep, it’s got a thin groove around the outboard shoulder. I’m gonna say it’s the tire of choice on the Porsche 911.

“Hey-hey. Look at this,” Sci continued. He pointed to a flat mark near the image that wasn’t part of the tire track. “This is a partial shoe print. Part of the toe. The guy stepped in the dirt when he got out of the car. Too bad he backed over the rest of the prints on his way out.”

“Can you run that?” Justine asked.

“Even if we could identify the type of shoe, it’s not enough to give us a size or idiosyncratic wear patterns.”

Justine was thinking back to way early yesterday morning.

She had started down the trail behind Danny’s cabin in the direction of his cries. Del Rio had caught up to her, and then they’d heard car doors slamming behind them.

Del Rio had gone on ahead while Justine had gone back to the cabin. When she got there, she spoke with each of the men who’d arrived to help Danny: Schuster, Barstow, Koulos.

She hadn’t been looking at cars, couldn’t make a positive ID on any vehicle she’d glimpsed at four a.m. in the dark.

Still, she thought one of those cars had been a Porsche.

What model? Who had been driving it?

She couldn’t say. But all the cars had parked in the gravel driveway. If one of those three men had arrived earlier, while Danny was sleeping, if he had been in a hurry and parked his Porsche beside the Ferrari, not behind it, in the flower bed…

Justine said, “We can get a match the old-fashioned way.”

“Justine, there’s no way,” Nora shouted at her, right there in front of Sci and Stan and every other tech within earshot. “I can’t get a warrant based on a tire track that could match any of six jillion Porsches in LA.”

Justine stood speechless, not used to having a rule book, not used to be shouted at either. Of course Nora was right. But there were other ways.

“Can you look at traffic cam footage, Nora? Can you do that without a warrant?”