"I checked," she said. "Everything is here, except for the outfit Jessica said Lani was planning to wear. That one is gone."
"Good enough, Mrs. Walker," Myers said. "Deputy Garrett and I will be shoving off for the time being. If you still haven't heard anything from Lani by tomorrow morning, call in after six and we'll go ahead with the Missing Persons report at that time."
"I can tell you what clothes Lani was wearing when she left the house," Diana said. "In case you're interested, that is."
"That information should go into the Missing Persons report when you make it." Myers smiled. "Chances are, though, it won't even be necessary. Most of the time, these kids turn up long before the twenty-four-hour deadline. I'm sure your husband can tell you how it works, Mrs. Walker. By allowing that day's worth of grace time, we can cut down on unnecessary paperwork. Right, Mr. Walker?"
"Right," Brandon said.
"And as far as the gun theft and the vandalism is concerned, on a low-priority residential robbery like this, I won't be able to schedule someone to come out and lift prints until regular work hours next week. And besides, that may not prove necessary, either."
"What do you mean?" Diana asked. "Why wouldn't it be necessary?"
Myers shrugged. "What if the whole thing turns out to be a family prank of some kind? If your daughter took the gun herself on a lark, just to do a little unauthorized target practice, it might be better not to have those prints on file, don't you think?"
"But Lani wouldn't-" Diana began.
"Sure," Brandon said, urging Detective Myers and the deputy out the door. "I see what you mean. Thanks for all your help."
Diana was fuming when Brandon turned to face her. "Why did you let him off the hook like that?" she demanded. "Lani doesn't even like guns. She would never-"
"I let Detective Myers off the hook because he has no intention of doing anything, and I do." With that, Brandon Walker stalked toward the kitchen, with Diana right on his heels.
"What?" she asked. "What are you going to do?"
"I could lift prints myself, but that might screw up some prosecutor's chain of evidence," Brandon said, picking up the phone. "So instead, I'm going to make a few calls. There are some people in this world who owe me. It's time to call in a few of my markers."
Fingerprints were Alvin Miller's life. From the time an ink pad showed up as a birthday present for his sixth birthday party, he had found fingerprints endlessly fascinating. He had left a trail of indelible red marks across the face of his mother's new Harvest Gold refrigerator and dishwasher. His mother had confiscated the damn thing after that and thrown it in the garbage.
By the time Alvin was sixteen, he had turned an Eagle Scout project into a volunteer position as an aide in the latent fingerprint lab for the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Upon high school graduation, he had transformed his volunteer work into a paying job. Now, at age thirty-four and without benefit of more than a few college credits, he was the youngest and least formally educated person in the country to be placed in charge of a fully automated fingerprint identification system.
The civil service protections former sheriff Brandon Walker had instituted over the years kept his successor from doing politically based wholesale firings, but Bill Forsythe wasn't above finding other ways of unloading what he considered deadwood. One of the people he wanted out most was Alvin Miller. To have some of the best, most up-to-date equipment in the Southwest in the hands of an "uneducated kid" was more than Forsythe could stand. He wanted somebody in that position with the proper credentials-somebody people around the country could look up to, somebody about whom they would say, "Now there's a guy who knows what he's doing."
Since his election, Sheriff Forsythe had hit Alvin Miller where it hurt the worst-in the budget department, chopping both money and staff. The "automated" part of AFIS sounds good, but the part that precedes the automation-enhancing the prints so the computer can actually scan and analyze them-is a labor-intensive, manual process. Forsythe had cut so far back on staffing the fingerprint lab that it should have been impossible for it to function-would have been impossible-had the lab been left in any hands less capable or dedicated than those of Alvin Miller.
He worked night and day. He put in his eight hours on the clock and another eight or so besides almost every day, Saturdays and Sundays included. Only forty hours a week went on the clock; a whole lot more than forty were freebies.
Because Alvin had so much hands-on practice, he was incredibly quick at manually enhancing those prints. He could read volumes into what looked like-to everyone else's untrained eyes-indecipherable circles and smudges. When it came to fingerprints, Alvin found each was as unique as he'd always heard snowflakes were supposed to be. And once he had dealt with a print, he remembered much of what he saw. Twice now, he had managed to make a hit-fingering a current resident in the Pima County Jail for another unrelated crime before feeding the information into the computer.
When Carley Fielding, Pima County's weekend lab tech, called earlier that evening to see what she should do with the three boxes of bones Detective Leggett wanted printed, Alvin Miller happened to be in and working. Lifting fingerprints off human bones was nothing Alvin had ever done before. The prospect was interesting enough to take him away from whatever he had been working on before.
It turned out that bones were easy to process. It didn't take long for Alvin to figure out that more than one person had handled the bones. Some had done so with gloves on, but only one had handled them bare-handed. Alvin sorted through one set of dusted prints after another until he was convinced that he had found the best possible one.
That was where he was when his phone rang. "Al?" a familiar voice asked. "What the hell are you still doing there working at this time of night?"
"Sheriff Walker!" Alvin Miller exclaimed. A pleased smile spread over his face as he recognized his former boss's voice. "How's it going?"
"Not all that good. I need some help."
"Hey, if there's something I can do," Al Miller told him, "you've got it."
"I know," Brandon Walker said. "And as it turns out, there is something you can do, Al, because I just happen to have a houseful of fingerprints that need to be lifted."
"What house?" Alvin Miller asked.
"Mine."
"The same one you lived in before? The one out in Gates Pass?"
"That's it. But I don't want to get you in trouble with your new boss by taking you away from something important."
"Don't worry about it," Alvin Miller said with a grin. "My new boss isn't going to say a word. As far as Bill Forsythe and his damned time clock are concerned, I'm not even working tonight. That being the case, I can come and go as I damned well please. See you in twenty minutes or so, give or take."
Once Brandon was off the phone with Alvin Miller, Diana took her turn and tried dialing the number Davy had left on his message. She was surprised when a faraway desk clerk told her that she had dialed the Ritz-Carlton. She was even more surprised when the voice of a sleep-dulled young woman answered the phone. Moments later Davy's voice came through the receiver as well.
"Hi, Mom," he said. "How's it going?"
Just hearing her son speak brought Diana close to tears. She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could answer. "Not all that well at the moment," she said. "Lani's missing."
"What?" Davy asked.
"Lani's gone," Diana said bleakly.
"What do you mean, gone?"
"I mean she's not here. She never showed for that concert with Jessica, and she didn't show up for work today, either."
"Maybe she went to visit somebody else. Have you checked with her other friends?"