Second Glance (40 page)

“Relax, Maylene. All I need is a Sterno and matches. They must stock them for the folks who don’t have electricity yet.”

Shelby took a combative step forward. She couldn’t stand city folk who came to Comtosook expecting archetypal Vermonters to wear overalls and go barefoot, or possess only seven teeth, or raise Holsteins in their living rooms. “Excuse me,” she began, but Eli grabbed her hand and every single word flew out of her head.

“She wanted to say that you’ll find the Sternos on the third aisle on the right,” he finished smoothly. The couple nodded at them, surprised, no doubt, to find someone in town with an IQ in the double digits, and entered the general store. “That’s Curtis Warburton,” Eli said, the moment they were out of sight. “He hosts a paranormal cable show about hauntings.”

“I know. My brother worked for him.” Shelby hesitated. “But that doesn’t make him any less of a moron.”

“A famous moron, though. And one who probably came to Comtosook for a reason. Watson!” The dog raised his massive head. “Go keep tabs on them.”

To Shelby’s amazement, Watson padded into the store. “Do I pay taxes for his salary?”

“He comes cheap. A good steak every now and then.”

“He can’t possibly tell you what the Warburtons do in there . . .”

“Of course not,” Eli said. “But how else was I going to get a minute alone with you?”

Shelby felt the blush start at her throat and spread upward. She took another sip from her coffee cup, and realized it was empty. “I should walk back home. Ethan’s there with Ross, and you, uh, probably have a lot to do with the Pike case . . .”

“Your brother told you?” Shelby nodded. “Then you also know it’s not a priority for the department.”

His eyes did not leave her face. Even when Shelby tried to turn away, he pulled her back, a moon beholden to gravity. “What does that mean?”

Eli smiled slowly. “That I’ve got all the time in the world.”

WITNESS STATEMENT
Date: September 19, 1932
Time: 11:36 PM
INTERVIEW OF: John “Gray Wolf” Delacour
INTERVIEW BY: Officer Duley Wiggs and Detective F.
Olivette of the Comtosook Police Department
LOCATION: Comtosook PD
SUBJECT:

1. Q. Can you state your name for the record, and your date of birth?

   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.”

Ross 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.”