Dead End

by Susan Sleeman

  “I’m good,” he said and meant it, as he was enjoying watching her. He wondered if she knew that the tip of her tongue peeked out the side of her mouth when she sketched and it darted back in every time she looked up at the scene. Did she do the same thing when studying evidence? He couldn’t wait to see.

  She grabbed a magnifying glass and turned to the knob. She looked at it for a long time, changing angles, her tongue darting in and out.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Patent prints.”

  “Patent? I usually hear the term latent.”

  “Patent simply means prints that are visible to the naked eyed. Latents are hidden prints. They’re undetectable until brought out with a physical or chemical process designed to enhance print residue. Like this fingerprint powder.” She tapped the lid of a small jar in her kit that held black powder.

  She strapped a white mask over her mouth and nose. “Protection from the powder.”

  She didn’t offer him one, so he had to assume he didn’t need it.

  She dumped a bit in a small tray and chose a wide brush to dip into the powder. She gently swirled the brush over the knob and sat back. “I’ll need your prints for elimination purposes.”

  He could easily refuse her, but why? She didn’t actually need him to cooperate. She could have a law enforcement contact search AFIS. As a law enforcement officer, the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System would contain his prints, but she might actually find something useful here and having his prints right up front would make eliminating them easier for her.

  “You want to take them here or should I email my print card?” he asked, as she would know that all law enforcement officers were printed for such a situation.

  “Card,” she said without looking up.

  He continued to watch her work and a sad vibe emanated from her. Was she thinking about hearing about her biological father for the first time? That would freak anyone out. Even a strong woman—like Sierra was proving to be. And Reed was adding to her anguish.

  He didn’t much like that thought. “Maybe we could work together on this investigation.”

  Her head shot up. “Work together as in you share everything that has happened in the investigation up to this point?”

  “Well no, but—”

  “But you thought I’d agree and give you access to my information.” She shook her head and got a flashlight out of her kit. “Let me know when you’re ready to make this a two-way street, and then I’ll be glad to partner with you.”

  4

  Sierra couldn’t believe this agent’s continued nerve—give me everything you’ve got while I hold out on you. Seriously. Someone needed to teach law enforcement officers to share. They were excellent at holding things close to the vest. A lot of the time they had to keep quiet. She got that. Even appreciated their ability to keep leads quiet from the general public. But she wasn’t the general public. She was a partner in their investigations. Sadly, even when it would benefit them to get approval to read her in on their case files, they often didn’t.

  No point in even thinking about that. Not when she had work to do to keep her mind occupied. She dropped to her knees and shone her flashlight on the doorknob.

  She lifted her camera and snapped several shots of the fingerprints she’d developed. Might just be Mayor Parks’s prints from when he let her into the office, but it was a start. She took her camera and shot several pictures of the knob before cutting off a strip of tape.

  Reed stepped closer. “I’ve seen techs use wide tape like that as well as plain Scotch tape. Why use different tapes?”

  Did he plan to question her every move? If so, it would be a long night. Still, she liked to educate LEOs on the forensics process when she could. “Polyethylene tape like this works well on multi-curved surfaces because it stretches and conforms to the shape without distorting the print. Scotch tape is often used for soot removal as it’s less likely to tear, it’s more flexible, and has better surface cohesion than this tape. But it’s also often not large enough to lift an entire print.”

  She pressed the tape over each print and fixed them to individual fingerprint cards. She quickly filled in the information on the card regarding the scene and where she lifted the prints, along with noting them on her sketch. She placed them in a divided section of her kit.

  Each time she moved she was aware of the man standing over her. He was imposing, seeming to take up the entire space, and she couldn’t tune him out.

  She got up and met his gaze. “If you’re not going to leave, you might as well bring a chair over here and make yourself comfortable. This will take a while.”

  “I’m good,” he said.

  She pinned him with a sharp gaze. At least she hoped she had, but if so, he didn’t react at all. “Well, I’m not good with you lurking over me and studying my every move. So give me a break and take a seat.”

  He didn’t move.

  She marched across the room, grabbed the chair, and set it in front of him. “Sit.”

  A wide grin crossed his handsome face.

  “What?” She planted her hands on her hips and stared at him.

  “You’re cute when you get tough.” His grin widened.

  She wanted to shout at him, but she couldn’t seem to muster any anger at his comment. Not when his grin made her stomach flutter.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t very professional.”

  He dropped into the chair, but his focus remained locked on her, and she had to drag her attention back to her work. She would spend hours thoroughly processing this place, and then the rest of the night at the cottage. The work alone would tire her out, but this man’s study? That would mentally exhaust her. For now, she would focus on the work until she figured out how to get rid of him.

  She grabbed her magnifying glass, evidence markers, and her sketch, and went to the corner—as far from him as possible. She would cover every inch of this place before she was done, and she would forget he was here.

  You can do it. He’s just a guy.

  Yeah, a guy who piqued her interest when none had in over a year. Not since she broke up with her last boyfriend. He wanted to get married, but to her, marriage meant smothering her independence like her parents and brothers often did. She wouldn’t give up her independence for any man.

  Remember that and having him around will be easier.

  She dropped to the floor and collected soil samples. She bent closer and discovered a hair wedged in a floorboard. Perfect. It could provide DNA and they could run it through CODIS—Combined DNA Index System managed by the FBI. The tech probably thought they couldn’t get it out with root and follicular tissue intact and left it behind. Which also told her if that was the case, that they might have retrieved other hairs of similar color. Or with very little of the hair protruding above the boards, they simply could’ve missed it.

  She took out a plastic tweezer, and after grasping the end of the hair, she patiently worked the entire strand free with a bamboo skewer and bagged it. She held the strand up to the light and believed it to be ordinary brown in color. Eddie’s?

  She logged the find on her drawing and looked over her shoulder at Reed. “Do you have a picture of Eddie without a cap on?”

  “I do.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Don’t see why not.” He got up and came to squat behind her. She swiveled, coming face-to-face with him, her knee bumping his leg. She felt oddly nervous about touching him. Sure, he slapped cuffs on her wrists and removed them, but touching him like this? That was a whole different thing. She scooted back. That earned her a cocked head and more intense study.

  “The picture.” She pointed at his phone.

  He held out the phone, but kept his focus pinned to her.

  She didn’t care at the moment. Not when another picture of her biological father was right in front of her. She could hardly process the fact that she was using that term in relationship to herse
lf. Crazy. Totally crazy.

  She studied the man who looked to be about the same age as the picture on the wall, his skin tan and coarse from years of sun exposure, but the skin around his eyes was whiter likely from sunglasses. He had a head of thick, shaggy surfer-blond hair with hints of gray. Her assessment seemed apropos as he looked more like a surfer than a businessman.

  “Your mouth resembles his,” Reed said.

  She didn’t like him focusing on her mouth and turned back to her findings. “Thanks. You can go back to your chair now.”

  She tucked the hair sample into her tote and felt a sense of vindication as this hair wasn’t from Eddie’s head and could be an important lead. She finished searching the floor and stood to look at the desk.

  A nine-inch whale figurine was one of the few things remaining on the dusty desk. If Eddie had been taken forcefully, the solid metal whale was the perfect item to knock him over the head. She shone her light on it, but as she suspected, it didn’t reflect any prints or blood. If it did, the techs would have taken it. But that didn’t deter her. Careful not to smudge any unseen prints, she slid it into a paper bag.

  “Okay, tell me why you’re taking that,” Reed demanded.

  “Just a gut feel.”

  “For what?”

  “Maybe it was used to hit Eddie over the head.”

  “No blood or the techs would’ve found it.”

  “Unless the person doing the hitting cleaned the whale. Then any blood residue would be so minuscule that it couldn’t be seen without additional testing.”

  He looked skeptical.

  “And no offense to the local techs, but your case theory that Eddie took off on his own was likely communicated to the techs. They could’ve had a bias as they processed this space. Why look for blood in your scenario?”

  He opened his mouth as if to shoot down her point, but then snapped it closed. Could he actually be keeping an open mind here? Not that it mattered, except she liked the fact that he might be considering her theory, too.

  She continued searching the desk and developed a number of prints before combing through the drawers. She found an autographed baseball, golf tees, several matchbooks from local bars, and a stack of golf score cards that were filled in. She flipped through the dated cards. Eddie had played every day until the twelfth of August, about four weeks ago. About the time he disappeared.

  She looked up at Reed. “Who was the last person to see Eddie and when?”

  “Mayor Parks actually. August twelfth. Here in Eddie’s office late in the afternoon around five.”

  The same day as the final round of golf. Could Eddie have argued with his golf partner and it carried over to later in the day after the mayor had left the office? She snapped a picture of that card and bagged all of them. Eddie had identified his golfing partners by initials only. She would have Nick Thorn, the team’s cyber expert, try to match the initials to names, focusing on the person who played the last round with Eddie.

  In the bottom drawer she found a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She took them all out and was surprised to see latents still on the items where fingerprint dust coated them. The only explanation was that there were duplicate prints on the items and the techs only lifted a few of them. She would never routinely leave any prints behind, but in a public space like this there would be a huge catalogue of prints to review. Maybe the techs were lazy and didn’t want to do all the work.

  She lifted several good prints, then swabbed the bottle and glasses for DNA and bagged them. Another drawer held snacks and yet another was filled with paper plates, napkins, plastic silverware, and condiments.

  She found zero paperwork or files in any of the drawers that would indicate Eddie actually worked at this desk. “I’m assuming you took Eddie’s computer into evidence.”

  “We did.”

  “Any way I can get an image of the hard drive?” Law enforcement routinely made copies of hard drives to preserve the computer’s integrity.

  “No.”

  “Of course not,” she snapped and instantly regretted her outburst.

  He didn’t say a word, but his jaw tightened.

  She turned back to her work and finished the desk area, not recovering anything else of interest. She found a pair of athletic shoes under the desk and bagged them.

  “What’s the point in taking the shoes?” Reed asked. “Our techs would’ve already ruled them out as being unimportant.”

  “How could they? Without taking them to a lab they could only have considered the loosely held particles on the shoes.”

  “Explain,” he said, but it was more like a demand.

  She looked at him and tried not to glare at his continued demands. “There are three different categories of particles found on a shoe—loosely, moderately, and tightly held. The loosely held particles are like they sound, particles that will fall off quite easily, and that’s where techs often focus. But if you really want to know where a person has been, you need to look at the recessed surfaces of the shoes. These areas hold a mixture of particles arising from activity before, during, and after a crime—or in this case, a disappearance. Examining this area allows me to develop a more sophisticated profile of where a shoe has been.”

  “And that can only be done in a lab?”

  “I suppose a tech could do it on scene, but they would have to own expensive portable equipment, which I know a rural county agency wouldn’t have the money for.”

  He gave a clipped nod, a hint of admiration in his expression.

  Her shoulders rose of their own accord making her a prideful fool. Something she never wanted to be. Yeah, she was good at her job. Not because she wanted people to think highly of her, but because she wanted to find the truth.

  What was the truth here? The truth of Eddie Barnes? He didn’t seem to be a hard worker or there would be more evidence of his work in his desk drawers, not just food and sports-related items. Even his pictures on the wall were all about sports.

  “Does Eddie have a business manager?” she asked Reed.

  “No. It’s a one-man operation. He does have an accountant in Portland.”

  “Couldn’t the accountant have taken the money?”

  Reed shook his head. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, but there’s no evidence to suggest that—or to suggest Eddie was abducted.”

  Which was why no one was seriously considering that angle, and she had to. If he’d been hit over the head with the whale, blood could have sprayed on the wall.

  “How tall is Eddie?” she asked.

  “Five-eleven.”

  She was an inch shorter, and that would place the spatter around and above her eye level. She went to her kit, dropped BLUESTAR tablets into a spray bottle with water, and swirled the liquid to mix it.

  “What’s that?” Reed asked.

  “It’s a blood reagent like luminol, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.” She set the bottle on the desk and went to close the blinds.

  “But you’re not using luminol?”

  She shook her head. “It can alter DNA, but BLUESTAR claims it won’t. Plus with the window in the door, I can’t eliminate all ambient light, and BLUESTAR doesn’t need one hundred percent darkness to display the stain.”

  He gave an impressed nod again, and she worked hard not to let it puff up her pride.

  She ripped off her gloves. “I need to grab another tripod from the car while this mixes. Be right back.”

  She eased past him to step outside. She took a moment to inhale the fishy ocean air and blow out the tension she’d been feeling under this man’s focused attention. He’d kept his gaze trained on her, never seeming bored or acting like his mind was wandering. That kind of attention to detail was the hallmark of a strong forensic tech and strong law enforcement officer. Maybe he was good at his job, even if he seemed to be unwilling to think Eddie was abducted. With no evidence pointing that way, she could see how he would come to and hold that conclusion as fact. She didn’t like it, but
she could understand it.

  She grabbed her tripod, and as she closed the trunk, she noticed security cameras on several businesses across the street. Reed would already have asked the owners for any video feed catching this side of the road, he wouldn’t share with her. She made a mental note to have her teammates talk to those shop owners. She carried the tripod inside and mounted her camera making sure to leave the shutter wide open to catch any luminescence of blood.

  Eddie could’ve been struck on either side of the desk. If on the far side she might find blood on the wall. If on the closer side, blood would have sprayed onto the closed blinds.

  She set her camera facing the blinds, put on a fresh pair of gloves, and sprayed the BLUESTAR mixture. A flashing hot release of white light appeared and disappeared rapidly, leaving only a blue glow.

  “I knew it.” She hurried behind her camera and took pictures of the glow before it disappeared—typically in thirty seconds or so with reagents.

  “What?” Reed asked.

  “Blood, but cleaned up with bleach. That’s what’s causing the white flashing light.”

  Reed crossed over to her and stared at the blinds as if he was seeing the blood for the first time. “Could’ve been from another incident, right?”

  She looked at him. “Didn’t the forensic team find this?”

  He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “There was nothing in the forensics report about blood, but they could have checked for it and didn’t find any.”

  “If that’s true, then this could have occurred after the techs processed the place.”

  “You’re saying Barnes came back here at a later date and no one saw him?”

  “It’s possible, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “It could also explain the hair I found on the floor. That the techs were thorough and didn’t miss it.”

  Reed didn’t say anything else but went back to his seat and started typing on his phone.

  She decided to spray the floor and found more cleaned-up blood. She sprayed the wall, but with the distance from the window she didn’t expect to find anything, and she didn’t. She resprayed all areas where she located blood and snapped photos, then collected several samples before turning the lights back on.