“He’s expecting us,” said Ross as he drove up the short drive and stopped in front of the closed garage.
They got out of the car and looked a moment at the single-story home. It was a white house in need of paint. On one end was a porch with square wooden columns and a swing. Two mailboxes attached to the side of the house next to the door were numbered 118 and 118½, one for Mr. Dance and one for his daughter.
“I’m going to start a ground survey of the property outside,” said Jin. “I’m wondering. You think we can go into that empty house?”
“We’ll talk about that later,” said Diane.
“Sure, Boss,” said Jin. With the carrying case containing his evidence bags slung over his shoulder, he left them on the porch and started a perimeter search of the area.
Diane missed having Jin along with her doing crime scene work. Since his focus was now on the DNA lab, it had been a while.
Kingsley knocked on the front door of the house. After only a few seconds, the door opened and Harmon Dance appeared. He stood in the threshold for a moment, nodded at Kingsley, and looked at Diane.
Harmon Dance had a rugged, deeply lined face. Creases around his mouth gave him a perpetual frown. Diane wondered whether he would ever smile again.
“Hello, Mr. Dance,” said Kingsley. “This is Dr. Diane Fallon, the forensic specialist I told you about.”
Dance nodded. “Thanks for coming.” He held the door open for them to enter, stopped, and looked beyond the two of them. “Not now,” he said under his breath.
Diane followed his gaze. A woman was walking with determination across the street toward them, her arms swinging in her hurry to get across ahead of an approaching car. She was middle-aged, portly, and had thinning, frizzy brown hair. Her jaw was set in a determined clinch.
“What is it, Mrs. Pate?” Dance said.
Mrs. Pate stopped at the foot of the steps with her hands on her hips and glared at the three of them. The skirt of her blue flowered housedress moved gently in the light breeze; her square-lens frameless glasses slipped on her nose.
“You gonna rent your girl’s apartment to that China-man?” she said. She nodded her head toward where Jin had walked into the woods.
“How is that your business?” Dance said, his own face settling deeper into granite.
“I won’t have it. Things are bad enough. Who are these people?” She looked as if she also disapproved of Diane and Ross standing on the porch. You real estate people? I want you to know this is a nice neighborhood, or it used to be before people started losing their homes. She glanced over at the empty house.
Diane saw that Kingsley was holding back a laugh. For herself, Diane felt a little irritated at the woman’s racism. Diane had to dig deep to find her compassion. The woman was probably scared. She was getting older and her neighborhood was changing . . . and there had been an untimely death just across the street. Trying to have some control in what must have felt like an out-of-control world probably bedeviled the poor woman and a belligerent demeanor was her only shield against it. But, then again, Diane was probably overanalyzing.
“These are not real estate people and I’m not renting out Stacy’s apartment. You can go back home now, Mrs. Pate.”
As irritating as Mrs. Pate was, she was a gem for investigators—a person who was always on the lookout.
“Mrs. Pate,” said Diane, “I’m Diane Fallon. May I ask you a few questions about the day Stacy died?”
The woman suddenly looked startled, as if a loud noise had gone off beside her. Her paranoia had focused on the possibility of new neighbors, not an investigation.
“What kind of questions?” she said, her hands suddenly clasped against her stomach.
“Where I live, in Rosewood, we have a Neighborhood Watch. Do you have one here?” asked Diane. She wanted to start out by making sure Mrs. Pate knew she was going to be judged well on her nosiness.
“Police ain’t much good here,” she said. “No use getting them to put up signs. We have to keep an eye out ourselves.”
“Did you see any suspicious people here that day?” said Diane.
“You people here to investigate her death?” Mrs. Pate darted a look at Mr. Dance. “I thought it was something else that killed her.”
“Did you see anything that made you uneasy?” asked Diane.
“That was a month ago. . . .”
“Mrs. Pate,” said Harmon Dance, his voice raspy, “Stacy was good to you. She was good to everybody here in the neighborhood.”
“Yes, she was,” said Mrs. Pate. “You think somebody kilt her?”
“We’re looking into the possibility,” said Kingsley.
The woman was quiet for several moments. Diane thought she was trying to remember. Mrs. Pate scratched the back of her hand and put a palm on her cheek.
“Not that day, but one or two days before, there was a car, an SUV kind of car. I noticed it ’cause it circled the block a couple of times”—she gestured with her hand, moving it in a circle—“and slowed down here when it went by. It stopped for a time—maybe a few minutes—on the cross street there above your house,” she said, nodding to Dance. “The windows were dark and I couldn’t see inside. It was a black car. No good comes from a black car with dark windows like that.”
“Did you see a license plate or a window sticker?” asked Diane. “Anything that might help to track down the vehicle?”
“No. I tried to get a fix on the license, but couldn’t. You think it was them? Somebody in that car did something to poor Stacy?”
She looked alarmed. Diane guessed that the thought of perhaps having laid eyes on a murderer—or his vehicle—was frightening to her.
“Have you seen it since?” asked Diane.
She shook her head. “No, I haven’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police?” said Dance.
“They never come talk to me, did they?” she said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pate,” said Kingsley. He handed her a card. “Please call me if you remember anything more.”
She studied the card a moment and looked up at him. She put the card in the pocket of her dress and nodded her head sharply. “Glad you ain’t renting to that Chinese guy.”
They watched her cross the street and go back into her house.
Dance invited them inside. His home was sparse, neat, and smelled like vegetable soup. Diane sat down on a blue corduroy sofa. Kingsley sat beside her. Harmon Dance sat in a mission-style rocking chair with matching blue cushions opposite them. It creaked with his weight as he rocked.
“So you think my little girl was murdered by somebody?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” said Kingsley. “But Dr. Fallon has examined the photographs and thinks it may be a possibility.”
Dance nodded his head up and down and seemed to shiver. “I told the detective. He had this idiotic idea that because Stacy wasn’t a beauty queen, nobody would fool with killing her, or some such notion. I’m not sure what he thought; he kept changing his mind. He said she did this shameful thing to herself. Well, Stacy may not have been Miss Georgia, but she was a good girl and lots of people liked her. You could go up and down this street and find a lot of older folks who liked her. She was good to them. Took them shopping if they needed to go. Stacy was a decent girl, not what he tried to make her out to be.”
“Mr. Dance,” said Kingsley, “we would like your permission to have her exhumed. I know that’s painful to think about, but we need to have someone else look at her.”
Dance was nodding his head as Ross spoke. “You do that. I want everybody to know that Stacy was a good girl.”
“Mr. Dance,” said Diane, “I would like to take a look at her room. Dr. Kingsley here said you left it as it was?”
He nodded. “I haven’t touched it.”
“I need to take a look,” Diane said.
Harmon Dance nodded his head. “Do what you have to do.”
“Examining her room can be a little destructive,”
said Diane. “I have fingerprint powders and—”
“Do whatever you have to do,” he said again. “Whatever it takes.” His chair creaked as he rocked in it.
Chapter 16
Diane opened the door to the garage apartment with the key Mr. Dance had given them. She reached around to the light switch on the inside wall and turned on the lights without stepping inside.
“Wow,” said Kingsley softly. “The crime scene photo doesn’t do this room justice.”
“No,” said Diane, “it doesn’t.”
Stacy’s apartment was charming. There was an efficiency kitchenette in one corner with a small round oak table and four chairs. The living room held a love seat sofa, two stuffed chairs, and a coffee table. Her bedroom area was half hidden by curtains. The small bathroom was across from the bed. The walls were painted a light dusty rose. One wall was covered in matching shades of striped wallpaper. The curtains were a complementary pink, as were the pillows on the cream-colored sofa and chairs. She had découpaged her chest of drawers with prints from a book of rococo art. A vase of flowers in the middle of the dining table had dried out, the water evaporated.
Stacy had enj oyed her life. Diane saw it in the room. Everything was carefully chosen, pretty, much of it handmade.
Kingsley started to walk in, but Diane stopped him.
“Wait until I examine the floor,” she said. Diane slipped covers over her shoes. “I’m closing the door. I’m afraid you’ll have to stand out here until I clear you a place to stand. It’ll take a while.”
Kingsley nodded. “As Mr. Dance said, whatever it takes. I’ll make some phone calls.”
Diane left most of the crime scene kit outside and stepped in, closed the door, and turned off the light. The room smelled like death. She set her crime lamp on the floor, turned it on, and squatted so she could see what it illuminated. She began systematically looking for shoe prints the low-angle light would show up. There were many. She began the painstaking process of lifting the prints from the floor with electrostatic film. Most of the prints would be from the police and the coroner’s people who carried Stacy out, and most would be overlapping. But she might get lucky.
She cleared the floor around the door and let Kingsley come in out of the chilly air to stand inside in the dark.
“You’ll get used to the smell,” she said.
He made light conversation as she went from print to print, placing the Mylar-coated silver foil over each print, lifting it using static electricity, rolling up the film, and putting it in a tube.
Most of the shoe prints were on the hardwood floor around the bed where Stacy was found. But there were a few in other locations on the floor.
“I didn’t realize this is such time-consuming work,” said Kingsley.
“And we’re still on the floor,” said Diane. “We’ve got the furniture and ceiling to do.”
“Ceiling? You expect to find something on the ceiling?” asked Kingsley.
“Expect it? No, but it’s standard protocol to look. Could find some kind of spatter, for instance, that might give us critical information.”
When Diane finished, she took the tubes of rolled-up film and put them in a carrying case beside the door. There was a gentle knock from outside.
“It’s me, Boss. Can I come in?”
“Come on in, Jin,” said Diane. “Carefully.”
The door opened slowly and Jin stepped inside. He was holding his digital SLR camera, his newest toy.
“Hey, Boss, I finished outside. How’s it going here?” he said.
“I’m starting with the black light,” she told him.
“The ultraviolet light detects organic stains from body fluids such as blood, saliva, semen, and urine,” Jin said to Kingsley.
They watched as Diane again systematically examined the floor.
“I can do that, Boss, and you can . . . ,” Jin began.
Just as he started to speak Diane stopped. On the floor near the dining table, a large area luminesced.
“What is it?” asked Kingsley.
“Perhaps where she was killed,” said Diane.
“What do you mean?” Kingsley said. “How do you know? She was strangled, wasn’t she? Is that blood someone tried to clean up?”
“More likely urine and maybe feces that someone tried to clean up,” said Diane. “Often during a death like Stacy’s, the bladder and colon relax and evacuate. Murderers usually don’t count on that.”
“You want me to take the samples?” said Jin.
Diane nodded. “Get some shots of this first, and let me go over the rest of the room.”
Jin took multiple photos of the luminesced image in rapid succession from several angles.
“Nice camera,” said Kingsley.
“Yeah, you bet,” said Jin, a big grin on his face. “Don’t know what I ever did without it.”
Diane worked her way around the small apartment and finished with the bed.
“There’s very little on the bed. You would expect urine to be here if she died here,” said Diane. “Particularly if she was left in an upright position for an extended period after death. Jin, go ahead and collect samples, photograph everything, and do the bathroom.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” he said.
Armed with evidence bags, Diane began a search of the apartment. She used the same systematic procedure she had used with the floor to make sure she covered every spot. Just under the bed she found the towel that was around Stacy’s neck in the photo, along with the knotted rope that had been around her neck and anchored her to the bedpost. Evidently the coroner’s people had cut it off and dropped it on the floor and it got kicked under the bed. She put the items in evidence bags.
Diane went around the room and searched the tops of dressers, tables, and door frames for prints. She lifted several. She enlisted Kingsley’s help in searching all the drawers in the apartment for any items that might shed light on Stacy’s life up until the time she died.
In a small desk Kingsley found a tablet of yellow legal-sized paper. It was about half used up. Perhaps Stacy used it for notes. Diane bagged it. They could bring out the indented impressions in the paper using the electrostatic detection apparatus at the lab and see at least what had been written on the page before it.
Diane and Kingsley searched the pockets of the clothes hanging in Stacy’s closet and came up only with movie ticket stubs from several months before. They searched all the trash cans, the clothes hamper, and the kitchen cabinets. Diane felt under the drawers and tables for anything that might be taped under them. She looked behind the pictures on the walls. She slid photographs out of their frames and looked for anything Stacy might have stashed behind them.
It was almost dark when they finished. Kingsley gave the key back to Mr. Dance and they left for Rosewood.
“So you think she was murdered,” said Ross Kingsley.
“A good possibility,” said Diane. “I’ll analyze the evidence when we get back to the lab.”
“So, then, to find out who did it, you’ll have to find out who framed the brother,” said Jin. “Unless it was her boyfriend, or a girlfriend, or a member of her band, or a neighbor, or someone from her job. What was her job?”
“She was a student,” said Diane, “and the next big thing we need to do is get the body exhumed and have a new autopsy.”
“Whom can we get to do it? The autopsy, I mean,” said Kingsley. “I have some funds I can use.”
“Good,” said Diane. “There is only so much you’re going to be able to get for free.”
“Did you find anything outside?” Diane asked Jin.
“I found a few cigarette butts at the side of the road nearest the steps to her apartment. I don’t expect much from those. Most look too new. Could be from anybody before or since. I searched the wooded area in back of the house. Didn’t find anything. Took a lot of pictures. But there is an empty house just beyond the woods. There are a lot of empty houses in the neighborhood. I kind of wanted t
o see if I could get in, but I figured you wouldn’t want me to.”
“I think if we find enough to get the police to reopen the case, they can call the GBI in to do a search,” said Diane.
They stopped at the museum to drop Jin off. Diane had called ahead and a member of museum security was waiting at the door with a cart to transport the crime scene gear inside.
“I’ll start analyzing the evidence for you, Boss,” he said, unloading the crime scene equipment and a duffel bag filled with the bags of evidence they had collected.
“Do you have time?” she asked.
“I’ll do it in my free time. We’re doing good in the lab. Don’t worry,” he said. “Am I ever not on top of things?”
“I never worry about the DNA lab,” said Diane. “Thanks, Jin.”
“Sure thing, Boss. We’ll have to do this again sometime. It was fun.”
“Where to now?” said Kingsley. “Shall I take you home?”
Diane shook her head. “Let’s arrange for a medical examiner. I have someone in mind.” Diane made a call on her cell to see if it was a convenient time for a visit, and directed Kingsley to the home of Lynn Webber. She lived in an apartment complex close to the university.
“Hey,” said Lynn when she answered the door. “This is a surprise. What are you doing in this area?” She looked at Ross Kingsley as Diane was about to introduce him. “I know you. You’re the FBI profiler, aren’t you? I worked on those hanging victims. That was just terrible.”
“That’s right,” said Ross. “I’m not with the FBI anymore. I work for a private firm.”
“Well, come in and tell me about it,” she said.
Lynn Webber’s home was clean, neat, and modern. There were a lot of white- and cream-colored fabrics, shiny chrome, crystal fixtures, and modern art.
Lynn was about five feet five, shorter than either Kingsley or Diane. She had short, shiny black hair that always looked as if it had been done at an expensive salon. Her eyes were dark and her smile bright. She wore turquoise silk slacks and a white silk shirt and silver jewelry. Many men who met her fell in love with her. Diane could see Kingsley found her interesting. But she wasn’t particularly worried about him. Kingsley’s wife, Lydia, was pretty interesting herself and more than a match for Lynn.
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