I shook my head. “I’ve already circulated the basics to surrounding departments. J.P., if you could translate what you just told us into something for them to check against-and send it out in a second bulletin-it might help. Then we can cross our fingers this bastard didn’t come from California.”
I looked at the rope nooses still hanging from the bed frame and felt the familiar twinge in the pit of my stomach. “What else was left behind?”
The contented gleam burned brighter in Tyler’s eyes. “A few things, actually, some of which won’t be his-like your fingerprints, hair, and-” He suddenly stopped, realizing his blunder.
I got him off the hook. “Semen.”
His face, for the first time to my knowledge, flushed bright red. “Right. Anyway, barring those, I still think we have a couple of hair samples, the tool marks, the vegetable matter I found downstairs. And this… ” He pulled a white envelope out of his jacket pocket and held it open to the light.
“What is it?” Tony asked.
“Looks like a fiber,” I answered, squinting at a tiny comma of red material suspended in the middle of the envelope like a microscopic goldfish in a bowl. “Where’d you find it?”
“Right here.” J.P. pointed to the door frame opening onto the bathroom, catty-corner to the door in which we were all standing. There was a thin sliver protruding from the rough, natural-wood frame, about half a foot up from the floor.
“I’ll be damned,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Gail said he was naked when he attacked her, but that she could hear him putting his clothes on afterwards by the door-right here.”
“You or she have any red-wool shirts?” J.P. asked.
I scratched my head. “Sure. Christ, those are common as dirt around here-at least shirts with red in them. You probably have one, too.”
Tyler carefully crossed the room to the closet and lifted the corner of a dress that had been tossed on the floor. Beneath it was the sleeve of a red-plaid shirt. “Like this?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head happily. “Not the same. When was the last time you wore your shirt in this room?”
“I don’t know; a long time ago, if ever.”
He shoved the envelope back into his pocket, a pleased expression on his face. “Then this may be where he screwed up. Find the shirt in his possession, and this little baby,” he patted his pocket, “will place him at the scene.”
“Maybe,” Tony cautioned. “Even if we do find the shirt, he might have sixteen different explanations for how a piece of it wound up here.”
Tyler’s smile was undiminished. That was a legal problem, and not his department. And I had to admit, I shared his pleasure. Regardless of how far it led-and despite my own skepticism-it was a step, and that’s what these cases were built on.
I gave Tyler a thumbs-up. “Here’s to that being the first nail.”
He nodded confidently. “There’ll be more. By the way, when we get back to the office, I’m going to need some fingerprints and hair samples from you, to rule some of this out.”
For the first time, I didn’t mind being intimately involved.
Tony and I left Tyler to do a final sweep of the place and were almost back to the car when I saw Dennis DeFlorio’s grimy sedan, dust-covered and blotched with rust, nose into the driveway and grind up the hill to join us.
I waited for him, one arm crooked on the open door, my foot perched on the rocker panel, while Tony took advantage of the pause to fire up his ever-ready companion once again.
Dennis pulled alongside and heaved himself out-a round man, unhealthy in appearance, who even in a coat and tie looked somehow untucked and disheveled, an effect heightened by his pants being stuffed into the tops of a pair of laceless, ancient hunting boots. I saw Tony examining the entire package like a slightly dismayed anthropologist.
After he’d led the search of the grounds, Dennis had coordinated the neighborhood canvass, but he hadn’t actually come face-to-face with me since the start of all this and was the least successful at hiding his discomfort at my personal connection to the victim. He scratched his ear, looked at the house, the ground, the cars, and everywhere else but at me, and aside from an undirected half wave of the hand, accompanied by a muttered, “Hi, Joe,” he finally ended up addressing Brandt exclusively.
“Hi, Chief. Dispatch said you were here, so I thought I’d give you what we got so far.”
Brandt smiled and nodded, transparently amused with Dennis’s anguished pantomime. “Shoot.”
DeFlorio pulled a battered notebook from his pocket and flipped it open. “It’s not a great neighborhood for this-not too many houses, and they’re pretty far apart-but so far I got a jogger goin’ by around ten, a dog barking maybe an hour later. The hottest lead is a car leaving this driveway a half hour after that-”
“That was me,” I interrupted.
Dennis pursed his lips, obviously taken aback, but then carried on, his eyes glued to the page, still ignoring my existence. His voice, however, was just a shade flatter, “-another vehicle a few hours later, and then two male voices talking in the road about half an hour before dawn.”
“Explain that last one,” Brandt said.
“It’s a little vague. I think it might’ve been two guys walking-for exercise, you know? The person who heard it said there was no sound of an engine-just two voices going by slowly, talking normally.”
“You find out who they might’ve been?”
Dennis shook his head. “But not everybody’s home. At work, you know? And if they were exercising, they could’ve come from a mile away or more. I just did the local area. I didn’t mention it, but Ms. Zigman’s car was also seen leaving her place at a little before four.”
“Anything more on the second car you mentioned?” I asked.
He finally gave me a furtive glance, as if checking to see that I hadn’t fallen to pieces. “Not too much-it might’ve been a truck, though, and technically, counting Ms. Zigman’s, it was actually the third vehicle seen. The only one who heard it was an old guy who lives about three houses down. He was going to the bathroom when it went by; saw the lights through the window. Said he could tell by the way they jiggled and were high off the road that it was either a truck with a cap on the back, or something like a Bronco, with a squared-off look to it. It was a dark color anyway-like dark blue or green, maybe.”
“He’d never seen one like it in the area before?”
Dennis was becoming more relaxed with my presence. “He might have. He said he’d have to think about it a little and get back to me. Maybe he’s got something and maybe he just likes the attention. I guess we’ll find out.”
Brandt checked his watch impatiently. “So basically, except for someone seeing Joe’s car leaving this driveway, we don’t really have anything yet.”
Dennis pursed his lips again, obviously put out. “It’s a little early-and nobody told me Joe’d been here last night. I thought I had something.”
Tony backed down. “No-you’re right-we screwed up there. Should’ve told you.”
“Dennis,” I asked him, “what time was the truck or Bronco spotted?”
He checked his notes. “About 4:15.”
That was disappointing. Gail had remembered 3:37 as the time she’d finally freed herself. “What about anything before last night? Did anyone see anything unusual over the past week or so?”
DeFlorio shook his head. “No. I asked, but all I got was the usuaclass="underline" postman, UPS trucks, yard men, garbage truck, normal traffic… Stuff like that.”
“The ten o’clock jogger?” Tony asked.
“Nope. There are a few regulars, but nobody running that late.”
“You know that from the runners themselves, or from people watching them?”
“Mostly people watching. I talked to one woman who jogs, but she goes out in the morning, around eight. Everyone else I interviewed was pretty old-retired. I’ll have to come back later to check on the ones who work. They’re probably the health freaks.” He made the last statement with understandable scorn, given his own physique.