Every Breath You Take
Page 64
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For the first time in weeks, the team seemed energized by the new evidence. Caruso was right, The Sandman was starting to slip up.
"I just got off the phone with Ashley Devers," Chin said a short time later. "She said most assignments they do for the professors is done online nowadays. Papers and tests are submitted that way, and the comments and grades come back over the computer as well. She said she only had one paper that the professor had put a comment on. She scanned it and sent it to me."
Chin set the page down, the words 'Good interpretation of gender perspectives. B+,' in printed letters at the top of the page. Caruso placed it next to the invoice.
"It's a little different," he said. "But like Ian said, it is possible that Drummond purposely wrote it differently, maybe even leaving it as a red herring to make us think it wasn't him."
"I've got a listing of vehicles after running that partial plate," Wallace called out. They team gathered around his computer screen. He scrolled through listing after listing.
"Jesus, there's a lot of black cars," Caruso said as Wallace kept rolling through the list. "How many hits did you get?"
"With those first three letters, and filtering for black or navy blue, it's showing 788 results."
"Run it with just the north side of the city, from Dundas Street up."
Wallace hit a few buttons and then waited. Seconds later, the search results stopped. "421," he said.
"We'll start with those 421. Rupert, divide this list up and send them around. Okay people," Caruso said as he stood up and looked at the team members. "You know what you have to do. This is what police work is all about-putting in the time. We've got something to go on, let's make the most of it."
Wallace sent the list to all the team members, assigning a section to each pair of detectives. He and Pepper had just gotten started when an e-mail came in from The Flamingo Kid. It was the photos of the shoe imprint they'd found at the crime scene, along with pictures of the casting he'd made, with a short report.
"Men's shoe. Size 44 (Canadian size 10.5-11). Smooth sole, lightly-treaded heel. No visible make."
"Look at the close-up of the casting, you can clearly see the tiny 44 in the middle of the sole," Pepper said as he zoomed in on the photo.
"Singleton did a good job. That's perfect," Wallace replied. "Hopefully they'll be able to identify what kind of shoe it is."
Pepper and Wallace made progress through their portion of the vehicle list, eliminating some while making note of others to come back to on the second run-though. They'd been at it for a couple of hours when Janssen and Singleton walked into the squad room. Inspector Caruso spotted them and came out of his office.
"We've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we were able to pull a partial fingerprint off that pizza invoice slip," Janssen said.
"And the bad news?"
"Like I said, it's just a partial print, and it's smudged."
"Can it be used?" Caruso asked.
"I'd say only if we had a sample from the specific finger it came from, and even then, maybe not." Janssen paused as the team remained silent. "I tried running it a couple of ways. I tried it against Drummond's first."
"I didn't think we had anything of Drummond's in the system?" Caruso said, a confused look on his face.
"We didn't, but when we had his car in to do that search, I took the prints off his car key. There were two different prints. I ran them and was able to eliminate Rupert's, which left me with what were likely Drummond's thumb and index finger. I thought it would be good to have in case we needed it-like now. So I tried this smudged print against those two of Drummond's, and it didn't match, but like I said, the sample is pretty bad. I then ran it through the whole system, but nothing came of that either. I called a colleague of mine in Toronto and talked to her about it. She suggested I try treating it with a couple of new chemicals they've been using, to see if I can draw out the definition of the print. I ordered the chemicals I need, but it's going to be a day or two to see if we can get a sharper print. If it works, I'll pair it against Drummond's, and if there's nothing there, we'll run it through the system."
"Good work, Tanya."
The two lab techs left, leaving the detectives to their work. They worked late into the night, going through the list of vehicles with licence plate numbers starting with BKH. At eleven p.m., one of them turned on the TV in the squad room and the group watched as Anthony Fragakos reported on the most recent murder. The term serial killer was now being used by every member of the media and the story had garnered national attention. The mayor and police chief had held another press conference late in the afternoon, trying to calm the increasingly nervous public. Fragakos was all over that in his following commentary, ripping the police to shreds for their ineffectiveness as the news ticker 'Serial Killer on Campus' stretched across the bottom of the screen. As his segment finished, Caruso snapped off the TV. The detectives went back to work and it was after midnight before Caruso sent them home. DiCicco and Harris stayed through the night, in case there were any new developments.