Unknown Means (26 page)

Sweat began to roll from between her shoulder blades. She could have taken off the lab coat, but that would have meant exposing her bare arms and a shirt she felt rather fond of.

After fifteen bags of garbage, and deciding to write a note to the people on eight to point out the importance of shredding one’s credit card bills, she found not William Markham’s garbage but Marissa’s. A piece of junk mail with Robert’s name on it sat on top, stuck to an empty RavioliOs can.

She felt the same sense of unease as she had when opening Marissa’s purse. Surely parts of Marissa’s life were not for public consumption, or even for a close friend’s. Everyone, Evelyn reminded herself, has secrets.

But protecting Marissa’s life by catching her attacker took priority over her sensibilities. Evelyn knelt uncomfortably on the grimy concrete and ripped a clean garbage bag off the roll she had brought along. Then she went through her best friend’s trash, piece by piece.

After fifteen minutes she had discovered nothing except that one or both of the couple worried about plaque on their teeth and Robert had been living on TV dinners for the past few days. No newspaper clippings or any other papers mentioning Grace Markham or Frances Duarte turned up.

Robert tended to throw his junk mail away unopened. Marissa had the habit of opening most of hers, then tearing the solicitations in half before disposing of them. One, however, had been torn into several pieces, and the letterhead read “Butterfly Ba——”

It took another fifteen minutes to reassemble the letter, a standard solicitation for the capital campaign. The printed signature read Jenna Lawson, but at the bottom another hand had scrawled: “I hope you’ll come to the Gala Night in June. I can’t wait to see you again. Love, Mark.”

To judge from the number of pieces to which she had reduced the letter, Marissa hadn’t felt any enthusiasm for the idea. Or she hadn’t wanted Robert to see it.

What had gone on here? A teacher-student affair? The note and Mark Sargeant’s sexy drawl when he’d spoken of Marissa seemed to suggest it. Or perhaps Sargeant had tried for an affair and didn’t comprehend the word no even now—though the letter was dated April and the note mentioned seeing her in June. Hardly a hot and heavy pursuit, and even if that were the case, the outspoken Marissa would have told her fiancé. Hell, she would have told the whole world.

Unless she didn’t want the information to affect Robert’s plans, in case he decided to take a position at Butterfly. Perhaps she’d contacted Sargeant, told him to leave her alone once and for all. The hospital sat right next door to her workplace—Marissa could have stormed into his office at any time.

Not for the first time, Evelyn wished her friend could be awake and healthy.

She put the letter in a brown paper bag, again pushing aside her qualms. At least she would not enter it at the lab unless necessary.

The chain of custody had long been broken—meaning she didn’t need a search warrant to do her Dumpster diving, and turning in the evidence later rather than sooner wouldn’t make a difference.

She finally located Markham’s bags, tucked neatly into a corner

of the metal box. Bags and bags. The man had thrown out all of Grace’s clothing.

The waste of it horrified Evelyn. He could at least have dumped the bags a few blocks away, at the Goodwill at East Fifty-fifth. For a haul like this, they probably would have come to pick it up. Evelyn’s thrifty soul quailed, but while she might happily have shelled out cash for the items at a resale shop, she drew the line at taking a dead woman’s clothing out of a Dumpster. Even a gorgeous Halston sweater like this one . . .

Markham had tossed away every single thing his wife owned except for her jewelry—her papers, photos, old bills, toothpaste, schoolbooks, a high school report card. Evelyn believed Markham to be a self-centered jerk of the highest caliber, but did this indicate a guilty conscience as well?

The skin on the back of her neck begin to burn as she skimmed the belongings. The cops had already searched the apartment from end to end, but that had occurred before they knew about Frances Duarte and the possible significance of the children’s hospital.

Nothing new, however, came to light.

The child’s picture from the refrigerator turned up in a bag with granola bar wrappers and the remains of egg foo yong. Markham had wadded it into a ball, causing the brittle paper to break more than it wrinkled. Evelyn recovered as many pieces as she could and sealed them in a manila envelope. After speeding through the two last bags, she hefted the resealed garbage bags back into the Dumpster, returned the ladder to Gerard, and left, tired, thirsty, and smelling worse than the garbage had.

“I APOLOGIZE for my appearance,” Evelyn began. “But I was already in the neighborhood, and I’m kind of pressed for time.”

“Looks like you’ve had quite a morning.”

“I smell like it too.” She sipped ice-cold water from the Culligan

cooler Henry Taylor kept in the corner of his office. Little more than a cubbyhole in the Cleveland Police Department Crime Lab, it afforded at least a skinny window with a glimpse of the lake. Paper covered the walls—technical bulletins, Midwestern Association of Forensic Scientists (MAFS) meeting notices, and cartoons—as seemed appropriate for the Questioned Document Examination Department. The department consisted, in its entirety, of Henry Taylor.

“Did I tell you I’m running for president?”

She didn’t have to ask of what. Henry had been a vocal member of MAFS for all of the twenty-five years he had worked with the crime lab. “Yes, you did. Good luck.”

“It’s going to be quite an election. Ruby and Jillian are running against each other for treasurer, you know. I’m going to do them a favor and vote for someone else; if one wins over the other, the St.

Louis lab will become a war zone. You’re going to the conference, right?”

She shook her head. “Tony can’t spare me. His words.”

“But it’s right in Parkersburg! Only four hours.”

“I’ll cast my vote by proxy. I promise. Now about this paper—”

He abandoned politics with obvious reluctance. “What do you have for me? A family disputing Daddy’s will, in which he leaves his estate to his twenty-year-old wife? Forged prescription? Hold-up note?”

She opened the paper bag she had brought from Frances Duarte’s apartment. “Art, actually. Here we have a lovely pastoral scene, depicting a summer stroll. Regrettably, unsigned by the artist.”

Henry’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead.

“In this bag, we have a damaged product.” She held up the crin-kled picture, which dusted the outer edge of his desk with flakes of paper. “Sorry. A nice rendering of a house with a car out front. At least I think that’s what it is. Note the artist’s use of fluorescent color here, quite bold.”

The questioned document examiner sat back in his chair. “I can’t wait to hear the story behind this. Before you go any further, Evelyn, let me say—I’ve done children’s handwriting and I’ve done documents in crayon. One time involved both. But I’ve never compared drawings. I couldn’t—”

“I’m not asking about the drawings. It’s what they’re drawn on.”

Evelyn placed the more intact picture in front of him. “The paper—it’s not from a coloring book or a sketch pad. It’s torn, neatly, at both ends, almost as if it came from a roll or from some larger piece.

It’s brittle enough to rip off in a straight line if you fold it back and forth once.”

He stared in horror. “You ripped it?”

“I experimented with a piece from this one, the one Markham wadded up.”

Henry Taylor pulled on a pair of cloth gloves but still did not touch the picture, observing it from a distance of four or five inches.

His neck must hurt at the end of the day, she thought, like mine when I’m at the comparison microscope too long.

“This is the Grace Markham case?”

She explained the similarities between Grace’s murder scene and Frances Duarte’s. “I need to know if the paper used could have a common origin.”

“I can tell if they came off the same roll, perhaps even in sequence. Let’s go into the lab. Bring the other one.”

The rooms of the Cleveland Police Department lab, while as worn and cramped as the ME’s office, had been built from the start for a larger staff with a larger case volume. Rows of lab benches with sinks and compressed-gas nozzles made it resemble a high school chem-istry class. Evelyn greeted the drug analysts and DNA techs as Taylor snaked his way to a place in the back.

There, he wiped the black counter in front of a stereomicroscope with antibacterial spray and a disposable, lint-free cotton cloth. Then he placed the two pictures side by side.

For the first time, Evelyn could see how similar they were. The width of the paper from the non-torn ends seemed identical. The child liked to leave himself, or herself, an inch of margin all the way around. The colors varied, but the same shades of peach and magenta seemed to be used in both. It gave her a chill—a killer’s calling card left in innocent loops of colored wax.

Don’t jump to conclusions, she told herself. Grace and Frances knew each other and had friends in common. They might have been acquainted with the same child.

Though the police interviews had not turned up any such child, and also, what about the crayon on the victims’ clothing?

Henry Taylor first used a handheld UV light—Evelyn had the same model—over the front and back of both pieces of paper.

Nothing fluoresced, except the already fluorescent crayon marks.

Then he busied himself with the stereomicroscope, placing the Duarte picture and the intact edges of the Markham picture close together, though not touching, under the lens. Then he tried the other two edges. Finally, he straightened.

“We don’t have a jigsaw match. I can’t say they came from the same roll. That’s what makes me different from Fred Viancourt, by the way—I’m not afraid to say I don’t know. Did you read his article in the newsletter last month?”

“Henry, about these pictures—”

“The paper appears consistent, and very unusual. It must be almost completely softwood.”

“What does that mean?”

“Paper is made out of wood fibers. Specialty papers might have some synthetic elements, and fancy writing paper has cotton or linen, but most paper is originally wood. Hardwood fibers are short, so the paper is smoother but weaker. Softwood fibers are longer, so the paper is stronger but rougher—not paper at all, more or less.”

That puzzled her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s paper, but it’s not meant for writing. It’s too thick

and easily compressed—see how the crayon strokes sink in a little?

And it’s so brittle. You couldn’t fold it and put it in an envelope, because that quickly weakens the surface until it breaks.”

“So what is this stuff?”

“It could be specialty paper for some artistic or aesthetic purpose—say a company makes replicas of Egyptian papyrus. They start with this, then break it up and glue it back together to look more ancient, stamp the design on the top. But more likely, it has some industrial purpose.”

“Such as?”

“I’ve only run into this once, but machinists use stuff like this to make gaskets and pads between connections. They call it fiche paper—you can use it between nonmoving machine parts when you need to shim them, because you can use more than one layer until they fit. You place the paper in the spot you need and knock the ex-cess off with a knife—kind of like trimming a piecrust.”

“But it’s just paper. Wouldn’t it disintegrate in a short time?”

“No, as long as it didn’t get wet. Oil won’t bother it.”

Machinery. The killer had left a smear of oil. The bodies had been held with mesh straps.

She had gotten sidetracked with children and charities and now came full circle back to an industrial setting. Somewhere in that circle rested her killer.

William Markham had access to heavy industry, whereas Mark Sargeant, on the face of it, did not.

Henry Taylor watched her face. “Does that get you closer to your killer?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s interesting, Henry. Thanks a lot.”

He slid each picture back into its designated bag. “No problem.

Just don’t forget to vote.”

C H A P T E R

24

WOO-EEE.” TONY HELD HIS NOSE AS EVELYN

deposited her bags on the large examination table. “You smell bad.”

“At least I have an excuse,” she muttered.

“What was that?”

“Nothing. I found both pictures, and Henry Taylor says the paper is consistent. Now I have to examine the crayons used in the drawings and see if their FTIR spectra coincide with what’s on the victims’ clothing.”

“And then what?”

“Then I’m back to trying to find a particular set of crayons in a major metropolitan area.”

“Good luck with that. Two OSHA guys are on their way over here—that cute little lady inspector and another guy. They need to see the photographs and the victims’ clothing.”

“Great.” She moved the pictures to her FTIR table and filled the liquid nitrogen container.

Tony watched. Finally his silence made her suspicious enough to say: “What?”

“You have to show them the photos and the clothing.”

“Yeah, no problem. I’ll put it in the amphitheater for them, give them some gloves. Don’t worry, I’ll make nice.”

“You’re not getting it. You have to stay with them every second they are in this building. They are not ME personnel, which means they don’t wander around here unescorted or view our evidence un-supervised.”

“Why? It’s their case, for all practical purposes.”

“Because it’s evidence in what could be a series of multimillion-dollar lawsuits. And because my lab doesn’t leave evidence lying around for anyone to alter, pilfer, or contaminate.”