Cruel and Unusual - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 26

“Wherein her house?” I asked.

“From a dining room chair. At first I wondered if there was some mistake. But apparently not.”

Vander continued staring at the screen, then resumed typing as he talked. “The print comes back to Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“That's impossible,” I said, shocked.

“You would think so,” Vander replied abstractedly.

“Did you find anything in Jennifer Deighton's house that might indicate she and Waddell were acquainted?”

I asked Marino as I opened Waddell's case file.

“No.”

“If you've got Waddell's prints from the morgue,” Vander said to me, “we'll see how they compare to what's in AFIS.”

I pulled out two manila envelopes, and it struck me wrong immediately that both weren't heavy and thick. I felt my face get hot as I opened each and found the expected photographs inside and nothing else. There was no envelope containing Waddell's ten print cards. When I looked up, everybody was looking at me.

“I don't understand this,” I said, conscious of Lucy's uneasy stare.

“You don't have his prints?” Marino asked in disbelief.

I rifled through the file again. “They're not here.”

“Susan usually does it, right?” he said.

“Yes. Always. She was supposed to make two sets. One for Corrections and one for us. Maybe she gave them to Fielding and he forgot to give them to me.”

I got out my address book and reached for the phone. Fielding was home and knew nothing about the fingerprint cards.

“No, I didn't notice her printing him, but I don't notice half of what other people are doing down there,” he said. “I just assumed she'd given the cards to you.”

Dialing Susan's number next, I tried to remember seeing her get out the spoon and print cards, or rolling Waddell's fingers on the ink pad.

“Do you remember seeing Susan print Waddell?” I asked Marino as Susan's phone continued to ring.

“She didn't do it while I was there. I would have offered to help if she had.”

“No answer.”

I hung up.

“Waddell was cremated,” Vander said.

“Yes,” I said.

We were silent for a moment.

Then Marino said to Lucy with unnecessary brusqueness, “You mind? We need to talk alone for a minute.”

“You can sit in my office,” Vander said to her. “Down the hall, last one on the right.”

When she was gone, Marino said, “Waddell's supposedly been locked up ten years, and there's no way the print we got from Jennifer Deighton's chair was left ten years ago. She didn't even move into her house on Southside until a few months ago, and the dining room furniture looks brand-new. Plus, there were indentations on the carpet in the living room that make it appear a dining room chair was carried in there, maybe on the night she died. That's why I wanted the chairs dusted to begin with.”

“An uncanny possibility,” Vander said. “At this moment, we can't prove that the man who was executed last week was Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“Perhaps there is some other explanation for how Waddell's print ended up on a chair in Jennifer Deighton's house,” I said. “For example, the penitentiary has a wood shop that makes furniture.”

“Unlikely as hell,” Marino said. “For one thing, they don't do woodworking or make license plates on death row. And even if they did, most civilians don't end up with prison-made furniture in their house.”

“All the same,” Vander said to Marino, “it would be interesting if you could track down who and where she bought her dining room set from.”

“Don't worry. It's a top priority.”

“Waddell's complete past arrest record, including his prints, should all be in one file at the FBI,” Vander added. “I'll get a copy of their print card and retrieve the photograph of the thumbprint from Robyn Naismith's case. Where else was Waddell arrested?”

“Nowhere else,” Marino said. “The only jurisdiction that will have his records should be Richmond.”

“And this print found on a dining room chair is the only one you've identified?”

I asked Vander.

“Of course, a number of those lifted came back to Jennifer DOW” he said. “Particularly on the books by her bed and the folded sheet of paper - the poem. And a couple of unknown partials from her car, as you might expect, maybe left by whoever loaded groceries into her trunk or filled her tank with gas. That's all for now.”

“And no luck with Eddie Heath?”

I asked.

“There wasn't much to examine. The paper bag, can of soup, candy bar. I tried the Luma-Lite on his shoes and clothes. No luck.”

Later, he walked us out through the bay, where locked freezers stored the blood of enough convicted felons to fill a small city, the samples awaiting entry into the Commonwealth's DNA data bank. Parked in front of the door was Jennifer Deighton's car, and it looked more pathetic than I remembered, as if it had gone into a dramatic decline since the murder of its owner. Metal along the sides was creased and dented from being repeatedly struck by other car doors. Paint was rusting in spots and Scraped and gouged in others, and the vinyl top was peeling. Lucy paused to peer inside a sooty window.

“Hey, don't touch nothing,” Marino said to her.

She looked levelly at him without a word, and all of us went outside.

Lucy drove off in my car and went straight to the house without waiting for Marino or me. When we walked in, she was already in my study with the door shut.

“I can see she's still Miss Congeniality,” Marino said.

“You don't win any prizes tonight, either.”

I opened the fireplace screen and added several logs.

“She'll keep her mouth shut about what we were talking about?”

“Yes,” I said wearily. “Of course.”

“Yeah, well, I know you trust her, since you're her aunt. But I'm not sure it was a good idea for her to hear all that, Doc.”

“I do trust Lucy. She means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. I hope the two of you will become friends. The bar is open, or I'll be glad to put on a pot of coffee.”

“Coffee would be good.”

He sat on the edge of the hearth and got out his Swiss Army knee. While I made coffee, he trimmed his nails and tossed the shavings into the fire. I tried Susan's number again, but there was no answer.

“I don't think Susan took his prints,” Marino said when I set the coffee tray on the butler's table.”

I've been thinking while you were in the kitchen. I know she didn't do it while I was at the morgue that night, and I was there most of the time. So unless it was done right when the body was brought in, forget it.”

“It wasn't done then,” I said, getting more unnerved. “Corrections was out of there in minutes. The entire scene was very distracting. It was late and everybody was tired. Susan forgot, and I was too busy with what I was doing to notice.”

“You hope she forgot.”

I reached for my coffee.

“Something's going on with her, based on what you've been telling me. I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her,” he said.

Right now I didn't.

“We need to talk to Benton,” he said.

“You saw Waddell on the table, Marino. You saw him executed. I can't believe we can't say it was him.”

“We can't say it. We could compare mug shots and your morgue photos and still not say it. I hadn't seen him since he got popped more than ten years ago. The guy they walked out to the chair was about eighty pounds heavier. His beard, mustache, and head had been shaved. Sure, there was enough resemblance that I just assumed. But I can't swear it was him.”

I recalled Lucy's walking off the plane the other night. She was my niece. I had seen her but a year ago, and still I almost had not recognized her. I knew all too well how unreliable visual identifications can be.

“If someone switched inmates,” I said. “And if Waddell is free and someone else was put to death, please tell me why.”

Marino spooned more sugar into his coffee.