by Jodi Picoult
A. Gray Wolf.
2. Q. Is that your given name?
A. John Delacour. My birthday’s December 5, 1898.
3. Q. Where do you currently reside?
A. I’m between places.
4. Q. Can you tell us where you were last night?
A. At the Rat Hole. A bar in Winooski.
5. Q. What time did you arrive?
A. About eight, I guess.
6. Q. And what time did you leave?
A. I don’t know . . . maybe midnight? One?
7. Q. Which was it? Midnight or one?
A. One.
8. Q. Is there anyone who could vouch for you?
A. The bartender. His name’s Lemuel.
9. Q. Do you know a Mrs. Spencer Pike?
A. [Pause] I do.
10. Q. Why?
A. I’ve been doing some work at her house.
11. Q. When was the last time you saw her?
A. Yesterday afternoon.
12. Q. What time yesterday afternoon?
A. About three.
13. Q. Are you aware that Mrs. Pike was found dead this morning?
A. She . . . she . . . oh, no. Oh, Jesus.
14. Q. How come you killed her?
A. I . . . God, no, I didn’t do it.
15. Q. We know you came back yesterday, after three o’clock.
A. I didn’t. I swear it.
16. Q. John, John. You should know better than to lie to us.
A. I—Jesus Christ, don’t hurt me!—I didn’t!
17. Q. You are one lying piece of shit Gypsy.
A. I’m not lying . . .
18. Q. No? That’s funny, because we know you killed her. You missing some personal property lately?
A. No.
19. Q. Really. This photo look familiar?
A. My . . . that’s my pipe.
20. Q. It was at the scene of the crime. Just like you were. With your filthy hands all over a lady—
A. I wasn’t—-
21. Q. Stop the tape, Duley. [STOPS]
A. [TAPE RESUMES] God, please . . . I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll tell you the truth. She was . . . I would never hurt her, never.
22. Q. Just like you didn’t hurt the last person you murdered, John?
Taken aback, Ross stopped in front of the closed door on the second floor of the police department. The secretary had directed him upstairs to find Eli Rochert, but surely the detective wasn’t getting high on inhalants—although, for all intents and purposes, it smelled that way right now. The scent made Ross dizzy; he knocked once and then pushed open the door to find Eli bent over a box with Plexiglas windows, removing a glass with one gloved hand. “You don’t want to come in here. I’m fuming.”
Ross ignored him, taking a step inside. “What pissed you off?”
Eli set the glass on a work counter. “No, I’m fuming. Super-Glue. The stuff’s noxious, but it develops the best latent ridge impressions.”
“No kidding?” Ross stepped over the ubiquitous hound that seemed to be the detective’s favorite accessory, and peered at the glass. “Who figured that out?”
“Some film company over in Japan, I think. The vapor released from heating glue makes Cyanoacrylate Ester adhere to the spots where there was moisture left on the surface. For a while there, before it started costing too much, forensic detectives were putting up tents and fuming dead bodies to see if they could get fingerprints of perps.” Eli nodded at his makeshift glue chamber. “Me, I have to settle for the small stuff.”
He took out a small jar of black powder and something that looked like the makeup brush Shelby used. As Eli swirled powder over the glass, the fumed fingerprints rose into stark relief. “Of course,” he said casually, “I couldn’t really discuss this procedure with someone who wasn’t involved in the case.” He glanced up, waiting.
Ross sat down on a lab stool in response.
“Spencer Pike’s drinking glass,” Eli said, setting it down again to take a photograph of the print. “Filched after an interview at the rest home. I’m getting the print off it before having it tested for DNA.”
“Why do you need to test it, if you know it was his?”
“The scientist I have working on the DNA evidence from the murder can compare this to the stuff she’s got from back then. And that just might incriminate the good professor in a way that wasn’t possible seventy years ago.”
“Whatever happened to hunches?” Ross murmured.
“We still get them,” Eli said. “But now we back them up.” He pushed an index card in Ross’s direction. “This is a print I lifted from a stone pipe before I sent it off to Frankie for DNA analysis. It’s Abenaki; my grandfather had one just like it. It was found under the porch where Cecelia Pike was hanged. Now, common sense says it belonged to Gray Wolf. But these are Gray Wolf’s prints, courtesy of the State Prison . . . and they don’t match.”
Ross squinted at the second card, with its ten tiny boxes set like teeth, and a fingerprint in each one. He tried to liken one of these to the print that Eli had taken from the pipe, but the latter one was far less distinct, and seemed to be missing its bottom half. “How can you tell?”
“Look at the shape of the fingerprint,” Eli suggested. “Whether it’s an arch, a loop, or a whirl, the position—which finger it’s on, the size—the ridge count of loops, for example. What you’ll notice about Gray Wolf’s prints is that they’re pretty unique—the guy’s got arches on eight of his fingers, which only five percent of the population has. The print I lifted off the pipe isn’t great, but you can still tell it’s a loop. And check out the ridge detail.”
“Ridge detail?”
“Right there.” Eli leaned over Ross’s shoulder and pointed to a spot on the fingerprint where the lines forked. “A bifurcation, for example. Or a ridge that just ends suddenly. Or a dot. Finding eight similar characteristics in two different fingerprints happens about as often as tossing a rock up in the air and not having it come back down.” He took away the prison fingerprint card and set down the new print he’d taken from Spencer Pike’s glass. “The point is—even if that pipe did belong to Gray Wolf, his prints weren’t the ones on it. And I’m awfully curious to see whose were.”
Wheels began to turn for Ross. “If Spencer Pike handled the pipe, he might have planted it.”
“There you go.” Eli leaned forward, elbowing Ross out of the way as he scrutinized the two prints with a magnifying glass. “It starts to add up, if you look at it . . . according to the police report, Pike fired Gray Wolf and threw him off his property that afternoon. He was pissed off at the guy—maybe pissed off enough to pin a murder on him. I had the lab in Montpelier working on some of the old crime-scene photos. You can see how the window was broken in the bedroom—it was smashed from the inside.”
Ross had gone still. “I thought her husband was beating her,” he said softly. “But she told me that he just loved her too much.”
“You can love something to death,” Eli answered. “I see it all the time.”
“So you think she was running away from him?”
“I don’t know,” Eli admitted. “But I do think she fought with him that day. The autopsy report showed bruising on the wrists that happened hours before the death.”
“Do you think . . .” Ross swallowed. “Do you think he killed her some other way and then made it look like a hanging?”
“No. The autopsy proves it, and the photographs . . . well, anyway, the answer is no. Plus, those photos I enlarged—on the sawdust, beneath where the body was found hanging—there are two sets of footprints. One boot sole is smaller, and seems to correspond to the footwear taken off the victim’s body. The other sole is larger, presumably a man’s. Now, Pike admits to cutting down his wife’s body. But he also says that someone else hanged her. So then where are Gray Wolf’s footprints?” Swearing, Eli put down the magnifying glass and pushed away the fingerprint cards. “Shoot. Pike wasn’t the one holding the pipe.”
R
oss pulled the card closer, staring at the whirlpool of parallel lines. He was familiar with crime-scene linkage, which said that any person who came into contact with an object or another person left a piece of himself behind. Detectives, like Eli, would use this to document that a suspect was in a certain place at a certain time, to find the cause that led to this particular effect. But the same theory could be used to prove the existence of a ghost. Or to make a man rethink suicide. Or to explain why love felt like a phantom limb, long after it was over.
Forensic detectives already knew what most people spent a lifetime learning: you couldn’t pass through this world without affecting someone else.
Ross’s chest suddenly felt so tight he thought he might pass out. “You okay?” Eli asked, staring at him curiously. Even the dog cocked its head. Ross grabbed the first thing he could on the table—another set of prints that had been tucked underneath some crime-scene photos. He bent down, pretending to be absorbed by the lines and dips that made up the fingerprints.
“This is what I’m thinking,” Eli mused. “Pike’s an influential guy. He told the investigating officers a story, and they believed it because it was far easier to blame an Indian than to stand up to a guy who was so well-respected in the town. The question, of course, is why Pike killed his wife, if that’s the way it went down.” He snapped on latex gloves and began to pack the glass for transport to his DNA scientist. “Money, maybe. He did inherit the land.”
Frowning, Ross glanced from one of the index cards to the print that had come off the pipe. “Uh, I’m not sure about this . . . but don’t these two match?”
Eli took the cards out of his hands and began to bob his head back and forth. “Hmmph.” Settling down on a stool, he picked up his magnifying glass and began to scrutinize them. After about five minutes, he rubbed his jaw. “I’ll be damned. I’m going to have to have the experts at the lab take a second glance, but yeah, I’d say this is a match.”
“So whose prints are they?”
Eli looked at him. “Cecelia Pike’s. They were rolled postmortem. Standard procedure.”
“If Gray Wolf wasn’t even there, what was she doing with his pipe?”
“Holding onto it, apparently,” Eli said. “Among other things.”
“Like?”
“Maybe Gray Wolf himself. Say the wife was having an affair . . . getting rid of her and framing her lover would kill two birds with one stone.”
“Shut up,” Ross said, his voice rising. “Just shut up, all right? There was no lover. There was no one. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Easy . . .” Eli held up his palms, placating. “I’m not the bad guy here.”
Ross forced himself to relax, realizing how crazy he must have sounded. “It’s just . . . she was not having an affair. You didn’t know her.”
Eli stared at him. “Neither did you.”
WITNESS STATEMENT
Date: September 22, 1932
Time: 8:15 AM
INTERVIEW OF: Lemuel Tollande INTERVIEW BY: Officer Duley Wiggs and Detective
F. Olivette of the Comtosook Police Department
LOCATION: Comtosook PD
SUBJECT:
1. Q. State your name and address for the record, please.
A. Lemuel Tollande, 45A Chestnut Street, Burlington.
2. Q. Where do you work, Mr. Tollande?
A. The Rat Hole in Winooski. I tend bar.
3. Q. Do you know John Delacour, aka Gray Wolf?
A. Sure. He’s a friend, a regular.
4. Q. Did you see this man on the night of September 18th?
A. Yeah. He came in about eight, eight-thirty, and left near one.
5. Q. At any point did he leave the bar during that time?
A. I think he went out to get some smokes . . .
6. Q. How long was he gone?
A. I can’t say. The bar was awful busy that night.
7. Q. Well, are we talking five minutes? An hour?
A. I . . . I really can’t tell you. All’s I know is he was gone and then he was back.
8. Q. Did he tell you he’d been fired from his job?
A. No . . . but Gray Wolf’s a pretty private fella.
He keeps his business to himself. [Pause] He ain’t no murderer, though. Wasn’t the first time around, and not this time neither.
9. Q. Mr. Tollande, have you seen Gray Wolf lately?
A. Not since that night in the bar.
10. Q. Do you know where we might find him?
A. He moves around a lot.
11. Q. Your people always do. And you lie, too, don’t you?
What Eli first thought, stepping into the musty, stuffed room that made up the Comtosook Public Library, was that someone with all the bright bloom of Shelby Wakeman didn’t belong in a such a closeted place. He imagined her sitting, instead, among a kaleidoscope of tulips in the Netherlands, or swimming with a rainbow of Caribbean fish, and then drew himself up short at being caught in such a flight of fancy.
Watson, unused to being on a leash, yanked so hard all of a sudden that Eli went flying, nearly jackknifing himself on the front desk. The resulting noise caused Shelby to look up from the computer terminal where she sat. “Well, hello,” she said, getting up and coming around the counter. She looked at Watson, who was wagging his ridiculous tail so hard it made his face shake. “You aren’t allowed in here,” she scolded, but she was patting him all the same. “Then again, who am I to tell a cop what to do.”
When she smiled at him, Eli’s heart raced like a Roman candle. “Hey,” he managed.
Brilliant, Rochert. She works in a library, she knows the whole dictionary, and that’s the only word you can scrape out?
“Were you looking for something in particular?” Shelby asked, and Eli opened his mouth only to realize that she was speaking to Watson. “Hound of the Baskervilles, maybe, with your namesake? Or Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers?”
“Actually, he just came to keep me company,” Eli said. “I was looking for town records from the thirties.”
He was not particularly looking for town records from the thirties. In fact, he’d come expressly to see if Shelby was working today. But the murder case was on his mind, and that excuse was the first to pop into his head. It occurred to Eli that, between his investigation of a seventy-year-old murder case and his itch to see this woman, he was clocking precious little time for police work.
She was staring at him curiously, wondering, no doubt, why a policeman wouldn’t know that all municipal records were stored next door to the department in the town clerk’s office. “I know exactly where they are . . . but it’s not here.”
“Any chance you can show me?”
Before Shelby could even pose the question, the other librarian on duty—one who’d been so still and wrinkled Eli hadn’t realized she was animate—waved her along. They walked down the steps with Watson between them, Shelby squinting in the sun.
“Beautiful out, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I forget how bright it gets, sometimes.”
“You mean working in the library all day?”
“That, and staying up all night with Ethan. It’s the only time he can go out to play.” They began to walk down Main Street, Watson sniffing at cracks in the sidewalk and patches of gum stuck to the ground.
“When do you sleep? You must be exhausted.”
She smiled tightly. “You do what you have to do.”
A kid on a scooter passed them on the left, pushing Shelby toward Eli. He felt the charge that came from being so close. He could trip, blame it on Watson, and brush up against her. He could even push Watson into her, and then catch her when she fell.
What would she feel like in his arms?
Then they were at the municipal offices, and Eli felt a slow roll of frustration. Had the buildings in this town always been so close together? He followed Shelby up the stone steps and into the first room on the right. “Lottie,” she said to the colossal town clerk, “hav
e you lost weight?”
If she’d lost an ounce, Eli would eat Watson’s grain for a week. But the woman beamed. “I think that diet’s working,” she tittered, waving them into the bowels of the building without question.
The basement was dark and moldy, with spiderwebs festooning the ceiling. Watson immediately tugged free of his leash to chase a rodent behind a stack of boxes. Unerringly, Shelby crawled over a small bunker of crates into a narrow aisle of filing cabinets that had not seen the better half of this century. She opened a drawer and pulled out a yellowed stack of cards. “These are from 1932.”
Stupefied, Eli could only stare at her. “Are you psychic too?”
“Ross isn’t psychic,” Shelby corrected. “And no, I’m not either. I found them the hard way the last time I was here— by going through every other drawer before I hit this one.”
He moved into the narrow aisle to stand beside her, only to realize there wasn’t really space for two. They were pressed up against each other from chest to hip; Eli could feel her breath against his shoulder. In this basement, with the air thick as blood around them, Eli thought time might have stopped. After all, lately, stranger things had happened.
“Why are you doing this?” Shelby asked quietly. “It isn’t going to solve anything.”
It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the murder case. Eli shrugged. “People do all sorts of crazy things every day.” A shaft of sunlight fell onto her cheek from the one window in this cellar, as if it had sought and found the only object of beauty worth illuminating. Eli leaned forward, toward that halo. Would it be warm, there?
Shelby reared back so suddenly that a short wall of boxes tumbled to the ground, spilling their contents. She thrust the stack of cards into Eli’s hand. From across the room, Watson sneezed. “The one, um, that you want should be in front,” she murmured.
Eli took her lead, forcing himself to concentrate on the brittle pile of death certificates he now held. He glanced down at Cecelia Pike’s, signed by the same ME who had done the autopsy. He had responded to a call placed to the Comtosook Police Department at 10:58, concerning an alleged homicide. The time of death had been certified at 11:32 A.M. Stuck to this card with what could only be blood was one for the newborn, also certified at 11:32. His mind scrambled back to his talk with Wesley Sneap, who’d said Cecelia Pike had been hanged near midnight, and cut down to a horizontal position about 6 or 7 A.M. But the police hadn’t been called in until eleven . . . which gave Pike plenty of time to stage the scene.
