Randy shook his head. Mark said, ‘I know he was here this morning. I haven’t seen him since.’
Darby wondered if Coop was working at the bomb site. She checked in with the lab’s secretary.
‘He took a personal day,’ the secretary said.
‘Did he say why?’
‘Not to me he didn’t. Maybe he left you a message.’
Darby went to her office. No message from Coop, but there was one from Madeira James.
‘Miss McCormick, I’m calling to follow up on our conversation yesterday regarding the microstamped bullet you found. The company president has the form I signed to release all information regarding the test ammo and the demonstration. He’s currently reviewing it with legal. As soon as I know anything, I’ll call or email.’
The message had come in this morning shortly before ten. It was now a quarter to four.
The second message was from Rob Litzow, the desk sergeant in charge of the evidence trailers. He had been unable to find the evidence and murder books associated with the Sheppard murder in April of 1983.
Darby called Litzow. ‘What happened to the evidence?’
‘Don’t know. It could’ve been mislabelled or lost. This happens a lot with older stuff. We’ll find it, I’m sure, but it’ll take some time.’
She recalled what Ezekiel had said about Sullivan having inside help within the police departments. You can’t trust anyone, especially people inside the Boston police department. Sullivan had plenty of your people on his payroll.
She turned to her computer and said, ‘I need a list of people who’ve checked out the Sheppard case.’
‘Nobody’s asked for it for the last five years, I can tell you that.’
‘What do you do with the old logs?’
‘They’re in storage.’
‘Find them and fax them over to me. And while I have you on the phone, I want you to pull everything you’ve got on the murder of Thomas McCormick.’ She read out the evidence and case file numbers.
Darby hung up and checked her email. Nothing from Madeira James. Randy had emailed her a copy of the evidence report he had filled out on the items he recovered from the woods. She printed out a copy, then picked up the phone and dialled James’s direct number at Reynolds Engineering Systems. She got the woman’s voicemail. Darby left a message asking her to call with an update.
Next, she tried calling the owner of the Belham house, Dr Wexler, in France. No answer. She left another message.
Now Coop. He didn’t answer his mobile. She tried his home number. No answer.
Why are you avoiding me, Coop?
Darby went to the printer. Her head throbbed separately from the wounds on her face. Thump-thump, like a heartbeat. She sat back in her chair and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The Percocet the doctor had prescribed for her would take care of the pain. It would make her feel sluggish and stupid. She grabbed some Advil tablets from her desk drawer and dry-swallowed them as she picked up the evidence report.
No prints or blood were recovered from the smoke canisters. Randy had given the serial numbers to the bomb squad. Good move. They would know where to look to see if they had been stolen. Running down the serial numbers, though, had taken a back seat for the moment now that the entire bomb squad was busy in Charlestown.
Darby flipped through the sheets and read through Randy’s notes. The Wonder Twins had done an exhaustive job processing the evidence.
Something about the binoculars bothered her. She thought about Randy’s grid map and carried the evidence report with her to the conference room.
52
Darby stood in front of the whiteboard. The binoculars had been found in the upper-left-hand quadrant of the woods, a good distance away from the incline leading up to the road. Randy had recovered sneaker prints near the binoculars. These same prints matched the ones on the back deck steps, and so belonged to the person who had shot their way inside the house. This person had been far away from the others. It was possible this person was acting independently of the other men – had no connection to them. Okay, so why did the binoculars bother her?
She flipped back through the pages. Here. Smooth glove prints and a couple of smudged latent prints Mark had tried to enhance without any luck.
She read the specs on the binoculars. They were made by Nikon. Inexpensive. Not the sort of thing a tactical person would use. The bald guy with the tactical vest had had night-vision goggles. The Fed, Alan, had used some sort of HERF device to fry the circuitry inside the hospital’s security cameras. The TV cameraman she’d seen watching the house had had a camera with a laser mike. High-tech equipment. These binoculars were small, meant to be folded and tucked into a back pocket. You used them to watch birds, maybe a sporting event or a concert. They weren’t used for surveillance.
She turned the binoculars over in her mind’s eye. Saw the cracked plastic and the screws, the screw had –
Darby left the conference room and checked the binoculars out of the evidence locker.
The screws had been stripped. Someone had taken apart the binoculars to fix them. Someone had touched the inside of the binoculars. Mark had only fumed the outside.
She carried the evidence bag back to serology. She told Mark about the binoculars.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I never… It didn’t even occur to me.’
He took them to the exam room across the hall.
Randy said, ‘The fingerprints came back on the Belham house. No matches except for those belonging to Kendra Sheppard and her son. The ones that we couldn’t identify I’m guessing belong to the people who own the house.’
‘Wexler,’ Darby said, wondering why neither the man nor his wife had returned her call.
She turned her attention to the bloody clothes spread out across the bench.
Kendra found out who Sullivan really was, Ezekiel had said, and she also found out about the Boston Feds setting up local witnesses and informants… Kendra told me she’d kept the tapes, notes, all of it. I don’t know where they are; she didn’t tell me.
Audio tapes and notes are bulky things. She couldn’t have carried them with her all the time. That meant she must have locked them away somewhere safe. Where? A safety deposit box?
No, Darby thought. You have to fill out a form for that, you need to show a licence. Whatever identity she was using would have to have been logged on the bank’s computer system. Kendra didn’t trust computers. She wouldn’t have wanted to give these men a way to trace her.
So where had she stored these tapes?
‘The clothes are pretty much dreck,’ Randy said. ‘Lots of blood, yes, but most likely it’s the vic’s. We’re using…’
Randy’s voice trailed off in her mind. Darby was thinking about an airport locker. That was anonymous. Stuff your items in the locker and pay a fee – you could use cash. Problem: you couldn’t use an airport locker indefinitely. The fee covered you for a day or two, depending on the airport. An airport was anonymous but not convenient. Kendra would have wanted to keep the evidence she had close to her – within arm’s reach. She’d need access to it quickly in case she had to run. She had been running for a long time.
‘… just what they’re reporting on the radio and TV about the bomb site,’ Randy was saying. ‘Dr Edgar and his grads students are still unaccounted for, along with Jennings. Lots of injuries but no names given, lots of witnesses…’
Running, Darby thought. Kendra had been on the run for twenty plus years, changing identities for her and her son. Ezekiel had said something about Wisconsin. Kendra working at an insurance company, Kendra seeing Peter Alan heading inside the building and Jack King sitting behind the wheel of a car parked right out front.