The Crime Writer

Chapter 16

The door swung open, and for a moment there was nothing but darkness, a curl of pale hand on the knob, and the incessant chirping of crickets. Then Lloyd stepped forward into the throw of light from the outdoor lamp and said, "The hell is this, Drew?"

"It's a clue." I held the to-go bag aloft. "Inside a doggie bag from Spago."

Unimpressed, Lloyd checked his watch. It was only six-thirty, but it was as dark as midnight, and I guessed he'd had a long day. His worse judgment got the better of him, and he said, "Wait here."

I stood on the porch for maybe five minutes while I heard him moving in the house, a soft, feminine voice answering his. Some shuffling, and then a door closed.

He opened the door again and beckoned me in. We sat in the same places, he on the sofa, I in the reading chair. The TV tray on the floor was still laden with tacos. Only one was unwrapped, missing the bite I'd seen him take. Down the hall, the same strip of yellow light glowed beneath the bedroom door. It was as if no time had elapsed since last night, as if no time ever elapsed in this house.

I caught him up on my Rampart adventure, ending with the electrical-tape wrapper I'd found in the fallen pigeon nest. His expression vacillated between shock, anger, and annoyed admiration.

"Jesus, you're really on this, aren't you?"

"Of course I am, Lloyd. Four months of jail time, a murder trial, and two dead women, one of whom I cared about quite a bit. The stakes are fairly personal here."

He eyed the restaurant bag, still unopened. "And what do you want from me?"

"I want you to dust it for prints."

"Look, Drew, offering you some facts is one thing. But running a print?"

"Tell me you're not curious."

"We don't even know it's our guy's. It could be trash that blew in from somewhere else. Or got picked up by a roaming pigeon."

"Could be."

"And what, the guy was so stupid he left a wrapper with his fingerprints lying around near the body?"

"The cops or you found a burnt plastic drop cloth in my trash can, maybe for lining a car trunk. Maybe he taped Broach inside his trunk, left the wrapper in there. It could've stuck to her body when he dumped her, then blown free."

But Lloyd wasn't to be dislodged from his objections. "And besides that, we've got no chain of custody for the evidence. There's nothing to keep a lawyer from saying you brought this in from somewhere else."

"I'm not just looking to put someone away." The comment hung self-righteously in the stale air.

"We'll need to if you want to exonerate yourself. Isn't that what you're driving at?"

"I just want to find out what happened" I caught myself "what's happening."

His stare had not left the bag.

"Tell me you're not curious," I said again.

He clasped his hands, let out a sigh that originated from somewhere deep inside him. "I'm curious."

"Remember when you lifted my DNA from my toothbrush to show me how it worked? What's the difference here?" I opened the bag and tilted it so he could look inside. "It's not like the cops found this evidence. It would've been lost anyway. I happened to find it lining a pigeon's nest."

"Pigeon nests are unlined. But they're big trash eaters, pigeons. It has a ridge of adhesive residue there." He pulled the pen from behind my ear to point. "That can be sweet. The bird probably mistook it for food and brought it to its nest."

The range of his knowledge, as always, staggered me. He knew virtually everything's intersection with crime. How swollen the maggot. How rare the dry-cleaning mark. How ripe the blowfly egg in the mouth cavity.

"Why don't you just dust it?" I said. "No point in arguing if there's not even a print."

I'd finally handed him the rationale he was looking for. He went out to the van and returned with a laptop and a case that opened into shelves and levels, like a tackle box. Down on the carpet, he set to work and within minutes managed to raise a single print a fragmentary ridge on the curved outside of the stiff wrapping, right beside the Home Depot price sticker. He sat back on his heels.

"Should have enough points for a match."

I couldn't tell if he sounded regretful or excited. Probably a combination.

I said nothing. Sometimes I actually know when to keep my mouth shut.

After a few moments of internal deliberation, he reached into his case and removed a tape lift, a clear adhesive strip the size of a small cell phone. He peeled it off its backing and applied it to the dusted area, then returned the strip to its backing, locking in the print in two dimensions. He disappeared into the rear of the house and returned with a digital camera. He shot the tape lift and uploaded the image into his laptop. When he angled the screen away from me so I couldn't see him input his password, I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to the fingerprint database.

I waited silently as he tapped away, pictures of him and Janice grinning back at me everywhere I looked. A wicked reversal on Dorian Gray all that wellness preserved behind glass while the real thing languished in a back room.

Lloyd's eyebrows rose and quivered. I resisted the urge to ask, and finally he spun the laptop around. A booking photo stared woefully out at me, a guy with deep-set eyes, a thinning pate, and a square jaw. Richard Collins. His birth date put him at thirty-one, but he looked at least a decade older. He'd gone down on two possession charges, the last three years ago, but he had a clean record since.

My first to-the-investigative-moment glimpse of Genevieve's or Broach's possible killer. I was disappointed that Collins didn't look more formidable; he seemed like a workman who'd do a shitty job on your house and not care when you wouldn't pay him.

"Who's this guy to you?" Lloyd asked.

I'd been asking myself the same question. Had my path crossed Richard Collins's during my days of wine and roses? Had I dated his sister? Elbowed him aside in a cocktail lounge?

"I don't know. I don't recognize him."

"Well, if he's been trying to frame you, it's a safe bet he recognizes you."

"Now what?"

"You hand it off to a detective."

"You can't run with it?"

"This isn't like on TV. The criminalist doesn't solve the case. Even if I didn't have my hands full." Lloyd placed the tape lift and a computer disk containing the digital photo into a Ziploc and said, "Anyone can take it from here. And don't tell them I ran it for you, or the secret handshake guys'll get after me."

His step seemed a little lighter as we headed out. Despite the caveats he'd offered to brake my excitement, he, too, felt the exhilaration of circling a suspect. I was winning him over, one selfish demand at a time.

My shoes crunched on the gravel driveway. "Good luck, Drew," he called after me. His tone was uncharacteristically upbeat, but when I turned around, the door had already closed behind him.