Lena hadn’t been out to the lab since the verdict. As she followed Vaughan into the building, she sensed something was wrong before they got through security and reached the elevators. It was the same odd feeling she had experienced yesterday morning as she entered Parker Center. When they found Martin Orth in his office and he looked up from his desk, she could see the concern in his eyes. He glanced at the evidence box she was carrying, then looked back at her. Was it concern? Or was it fear?
“What’s going on, Marty?” she said.
He grimaced, pushing his chair away from his desk as he stood up. “Take a look across the hall,” he said.
Lena turned with Vaughan and gazed through the glass window at the two men in the conference room. Howard Kendrick, the chief administrator of the crime lab, was seated at the table watching the second man pace along the far wall while talking to someone on his cell phone. Lena didn’t recognize him. Although he appeared to be somewhere in his late fifties, it was obvious that he still worked out. He was sturdy and tall with wiry hair that had been dyed an unnatural reddish brown and looked like it might be a piece. His face appeared frozen, his rough skin stitched so tight across his cheeks, she couldn’t get a read on him.
“Who is he?” she said.
Vaughan answered for Orth. “Jerry Spadell,” he said in a quiet voice. “A former investigator with the DA’s office. A shadow from Higgins’s past. A goon.”
Orth gave Spadell a last look, then shut the door and returned to his desk. “He might be with Higgins, but Bennett sent him over.”
“What is it?” Lena said. “What’s going on?”
“That story in The Times. They want us to go through the lab again and see if we can find those DNA samples that went missing. It’s all for show.”
Vaughan leaned against the windowsill. “Kendrick agreed?”
Orth nodded. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never thought that we actually lost them. Just that someone mislabeled them. That’s why it’s a waste of time. The samples are invisible. You could be staring right at them and still not see them.”
Lena pushed the evidence box across the desk. “We need a favor.”
Orth read the label on the carton-his eyes changing as they passed over Lily Hight’s name. When he opened the box, Lena started to say something but he waved her off.
“I already know what you want, Lena. The timing’s not so good right now.”
“It’s a big favor,” she said. “An important favor.”
He met her gaze, mulling it over. “Let me ask you a question first,” he said finally.
“Anything.”
“Yesterday you had one of our guys dust Lily Hight’s bedroom for prints. I’d like to know why.”
She paused a moment, worried that she might have misread Orth. It was possible that he might not be the ally she thought he was. That he was about to repeat everything Barrera had said to her last night-that she was scaring the shit out of everyone. That her request to dust the room bordered on the ridiculous-and in the end, Steven Bennett was right. Just do the job you were asked to do. Get Hight for the double murders at Club 3 AM, and let go of the past.
She glanced at Vaughan, then back at Orth. “We had time to kill,” she said. “Paladino was doing a press conference on the front lawn. We couldn’t get out.”
“But the crime scene was at Club 3 AM, not the house.”
Lena shook her head. “There’s something about the girl’s room that’s not right. I found things that shouldn’t have been there. And there’s something wrong with her father that has nothing to do with what happened the other night. If I wasted everybody’s time, I won’t apologize because I’d do it again, Marty. If someone has a problem with that-if someone complained-they should have called me, or even Barrera, not bothered you.”
“No one complained,” he said. “But you might want to stop by the Latent Print Section when you get a chance. I just got a call. They finished up this morning. Your reports should be ready in another hour.”
Lena studied Orth’s face, suddenly aware that she had missed something important. It wasn’t criticism that the SID supervisor had in mind. Instead, she sensed an undercurrent of support. For some unknown reason, Orth was on their side and had every intention of-
“What did they find?” she asked.
Orth glanced at the door, then turned back to her and lowered his voice. “Jacob Gant’s fingerprints,” he said. “All over the room. The closet, the dresser, every handle on every drawer. And they’re fresh prints, Lena. They’re exceedingly clean. No doubt about it-Gant was in that room within the last two weeks of his life. And he was looking for something. You got any idea what it might have been?”
29
She didn’t know what Gant had been searching for. But whatever it was, it probably got him killed.…
Lena scooped up Johnny Bosco’s keys, slipped the chain-of-evidence form into her briefcase and left the building. While Vaughan had been anxious to get back to his analysis of the trial, she had spent the past two hours screening additional security videos pulled from Club 3 AM with a forensic analyst from the Photographic Unit. The analyst, Henry Rollins, had examined every image recorded that night.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed.
Tim Hight, a man who made his living working with cameras, had managed to avoid every lens in the building. The fire escape on the north side of the structure remained a blind spot and the most likely point of entry.
But Rollins had also given Lena an update on the street cam photo that captured Hight driving away from the club that night. The resolution of the image had improved significantly. To Lena, the shadow on the passenger seat was beginning to take on definition and look more like a gun than a flashlight. While Rollins agreed, he wasn’t ready to commit and said that the enhancement process would give them a definitive answer soon.
After reviewing Jacob Gant’s fingerprints for another hour with an analyst from the Latent Print Section, Lena was out of time and had to move on.
There could be no doubt that Gant had been in Lily Hight’s bedroom within the past two weeks, and that he had entered and exited the room through the window. Lena remembered the tree outside, and wondered how often Gant made the climb while Lily had been alive. How many nights he’d spent in her bed.
For reasons she couldn’t explain or even support, Lena’s first thought upon hearing the news from Orth had been that Gant was looking for the girl’s cell phone. But hiding a phone was different than hiding a photograph in a memory box. If the phone had been in the bedroom, she didn’t think it could have remained hidden for so long. Too many people had been looking for it. An entire year had gone by. But even more, how could the victim have even managed to hide it? The killer had delivered a mortal blow. Once the screwdriver was driven into her back, nothing else could have occurred but death.
Yet, Gant had to have been looking for something. Something important enough to risk breaking into the house.
Tim Hight’s house. Lily Hight’s bedroom.
Lena crossed the street to the garage and got into her car. She hadn’t had a chance to load the CD player or deal with her cell phone so she flipped on the radio and toggled down to 88.1 FM, a jazz station out of Long Beach. After adjusting the volume, she realized that she had dialed in at just the right moment and that the audio system in the car was worth the price of admission. She could see the playlist on the video display-the FM station was dedicating the next hour to Coleman Hawkins. Even better, the first cut was something she hadn’t heard since her last case.
“Mighty Like a Rose.”
As she pulled out of the garage, she let her thoughts drift down the road with Hawkins’s sax and wished that Paladino’s office was more than a twelve-block ride.