The four of them stepped up to the laser printer, where a piece of paper was being slowly ejected, upside down so that only the white of the paper showed. Dart wanted to grab it and flip it over, but he waited for it to finish printing. Templeton picked it up and turned it over.
The image was that of a face. It looked so much like a photograph that Dart briefly forgot that it was not. Lifelike and human. Dart reached out and touched the sheet of paper, feeling an incredible sense of relief.
The face was jowly, the brow strong. The high cheekbones reminded him of an Irishman. Try as he did, he could no longer make the face into that of Walter Zeller. Even the eyes looked different. He felt giddy. He felt high, as if he’d been drinking.
“There’s your man,” Templeton said, handing Dart the image.
“That’s him,” Lewellan Page confirmed.
Dart felt both confusion and happiness. It was one time he felt thrilled to be wrong about the identification of a suspect.
But his stomach rolled and his bowels loosened when, at the door, saying good-bye, Tommy Templeton leaned in close to him and whispered, “I’d like to play with this image, Joe. I’ll fax you a copy if I get anything.”
“But I thought-” Dart complained. His euphoria popped like a balloon, his objection interrupted by Templeton.
“Inside every face, there’s another face,” Templeton cautioned in a sinister tone of voice. “Call it instinct, call it a hunch … This isn’t the face that I expected.”
Abby saw the two men whispering and caught eyes with Dart, her face a knot of concern. Lewellan Page ran out to the car and opened the back door and petted the dog.
“Let me work with it,” Templeton told the detective. “I’ll give you a call.”
Leave it alone, Dart wanted to say. But he nodded, wishing that secrets could stay hidden, and that a person’s face could never change.
CHAPTER 16
“There’s no question in my mind that the rug in Payne’s study was vacuumed sometime just before the suicide, but not being a detective,” Bragg said sarcastically, “I don’t see how that might bear upon the investigation.” Teddy Bragg looked better today, more color to his face, less to his eyes. He smelled like cigarettes. The file for the Halloween suicide, Harold Payne, lay open on his desk. The small office was cluttered with paperwork. A Lucite microscope, a forensic science award, sat in the corner gathering dust alongside a canning jar containing a pancreas suspended in a clear fluid. Dart had never asked about the pancreas, but he’d seen it there for years. Lights glowed on a small FM clock radio, indicating it was switched on, but the volume was evidently turned down.
“Before the suicide?” Dart asked curiously.
“Definitely prior to the shooting, yes. We’ve lifted blood splatter from the surface of the rug.”
“What’s the point?” Kowalski asked irritably.
Bragg answered, “The point, detective, is who vacuumed that rug, when, and why? We checked with the wife, who explained that the housecleaner had been there the same day; but for reasons that I’ll get into, that doesn’t cut it.”
“She was in there-the wife,” Dart reminded, “ahead of our arrival.”
“Yes, so she could be lying.”
Kowalski glanced over at Dart with a look that penetrated. Perhaps, Dart thought, he too understood that this might lead back to Zeller.
Bragg cautioned, “We know by the vacuum pattern-the width of the swath-that it wasn’t any of the machines in the house. Furthermore, we’ve checked the bags of the two machines and IDed wool fibers with the proper dye lot to match the study rug-and that tells us two things: one, the rug was vacuumed, possibly that same day; two, someone else using a different machine vacuumed the rug after the housecleaner but before the suicide.
“The upstairs canister vacuum,” he continued, “would appear to have resided upstairs and only worked the upstairs.” To Dart he said, “You know how I hate inconsistencies like this. It’s petty bullshit, I know. But it bugs the crap out of me.”
Kowalski complained, “It doesn’t matter.” He added, “Not to me. Does it affect your ruling in any way?”
“Roman, great minds think alike,” Bragg said. “I asked myself the same question: Does any of this matter? The kill is by his own hand, it’s clean-in a manner of speaking-and convincing. So what do we care?”
“Exactly.”
“But we do care,” Bragg contradicted. “All because of one tiny piece of evidence.”
Kowalski’s brow knitted. “What’s that?”
“You see,” Bragg said to Dart, “these portable battery-charged vacuums don’t get up much horsepower. These Dustbuster things. Oh, they’re fine for crumbs on the counter, or spilled sugar, but you put them to work on an Oriental wool rug like we find in Payne’s study, and they just don’t measure up-not when measured against our industrial-strength twenty-amp variety. It’s like one of those cheap television ads on cable: You vacuum an area with yours, and we’ll go over the top of the same area with ours and lift a good amount of material that your vacuum missed. And that’s just what happened.” He met eyes with both men-in Bragg’s Dart could see a contained but eager excitement. Scientists have to get their kicks somewhere, he thought.
Ted Bragg motioned for them to sit tight and went off in search of something. He returned a moment later with two wax paper bags. He placed them down on a light table and set a ruler between them. He then carefully opened each bag and drew the contents out onto the light table with a set of plastic chopsticks. He was careful and exact with his actions. “On the left is what we vacuumed from the study. On the right is what came from the door mat outside the kitchen door in the garage.”
Seeing the evidence before him, Dart began to piece together Bragg’s evidence. The pile from the study included dust, crumbs, hairs, and an abundance of fibers, mostly wool by their curled appearance. The doormat in the garage had netted some sticks, dust, and what appeared to be a small blob of oil and dirt. But both groups shared similar items: small elliptically shaped pieces of vegetation.
“Pine needles?” Dart asked.
“You see?” Bragg encouraged. “I told you it’s interesting.”
“You call that interesting?” Kowalski challenged.
“We haven’t divined the species,” the lab man reported, maintaining his attention on Dart. “But, as you can see, a similar vegetation was found both in the study rug and on the garage doormat.”
“So what?” Kowalski complained irritably.
“On the very top of the garage doormat,” Bragg clarified. “Determining a person’s actions-what a person may or may not have done-is a responsibility we both share-you, from a wide variety of evidence and witnesses; me from the translation of the physical sciences. I can tell you a couple of interesting facts, Roman, and maybe you can make sense of them for me.”
Kowalski looked like a kid in the schoolyard who didn’t want to play; he pursed his lips and looked around nervously for somewhere to steal a smoke.
“That rug in the study had been vacuumed-it’s not something I can necessarily prove but it’s something I know to be a fact. Our examination of the machine used to vacuum that rug earlier in the day came up negative for any such organics. And yet our subsequent vacuuming of the same area produced this as-yet-unidentified organic matter, most likely some kind of conifer needle. We also picked up a trace amount of phosphorus and nitrogen compounds-common potting soil, Detective. Similar organic matter and soil was discovered atop the garage doormat, suggesting someone had wiped his or her feet on the way into the house. I questioned the wife; it was not she. A little tough to question the victim, but there was nothing on the soles of his slippers to suggest a similar organic matter. We returned to the home and inspected eleven pairs of boots and shoes: all negative.”