They spent the morning watching, careful not to be seen themselves. At one point after daylight, Carlos nosed around in the building and noticed a sizeable but inconspicuous brown stain on the coarse concrete floor, pale from washing. Basically the stain existed in the pits in the concrete, and it could have been anything. Including old blood. He also noticed a mop in the restroom and, checking it out, found the mop strings stained pale brown. With his pocketknife, he trimmed about half an inch off the strings, and bagged the trimmings.
All they learned from watching the shed and equipment was that the four men there didn't have much to do, that day at least. A resonance scanner, aimed at a window of the shed's office, found them playing cards most of the morning. A skyvan came in at 10:25, carrying two men who left for town after giving instructions about a skytruck they'd be taking out that evening.
Back in town that afternoon, Carlos called his connection in Mexicali, and Miguel was able to pick up a kit from the PEF's Ensenada office for collecting samples of bloodstains—in this case from the pits in the concrete. He drove out again at dawn the next day and collected his sample as soon as it was light enough.
Between he and Miguel, they also got telephoto footage of people arriving at and leaving the SVI offices over two-plus days. And eavesdropped on conversations in Kelly Masters' office. Mostly what they heard didn't mean much to them because it lacked context. But they did hear Masters' half of a phone conversation with "Dave." Masters was interested in "Seppanen," with whom Dave worked. There was no doubt at all now that Steinhorn was part of SVI.
Carlos didn't get any explicit information on the Christman case, but he arrived back tentatively pleased. We screened his video footage and compared the faces with the pictures Charles Tomasic had given us. And found matches for two of the three faces in Charles' pictures. Carlos had also left the mop trimmings with Skip at the lab, along with the putative blood residue from the pottery floor. Charles' pictures had no value as courtroom evidence, but if—if—the blood could be identified as Christman's . . . Assuming it was blood.
I was just getting up to leave when Skip came into Carlos' office. "It's human blood," he said. "They seem to have mopped before the blood dried, and didn't use any cleaning compound. If you can get me some blood, tissue—maybe hair from a presumed victim, I can hire a DNA match made at UCLA."
* * *
The only possibility I could see was that Winifred Sproule just might have a keepsake of some kind. Or know of one. I couldn't imagine her keeping a lock of anyone's hair. My office being bugged, I called her on Carlos' phone. She said to come out and we'd talk; she'd treat me to lunch.
Come out. She'd treat me to lunch. It gave me an erection. I was glad Tuuli was coming home the next day.
Sproule, though she still came across sexy, didn't make a move on me, and to my dismay, I found myself disappointed. And while she had no keepsakes, she did have some information. Christman had had a vasectomy—"the better to tom-cat around"—as she put it, and before the operation he'd had a sperm sample stored. She also gave me the name and maiden name of Christman's ex-wife, along with the street she'd lived on in Phoenix, twenty years earlier.
* * *
Back at the office that afternoon, Carlos sicced an investigative assistant, Bridges, onto tracing down Christman's ex-wife, who hopefully would know the name of the sperm bank. Where hopefully Christman's sperm were still happily hibernating. Even though he'd sent Steinhorn off with Rossi again, Carlos made sure that Bridges knew damned well not to mention the assignment to anyone, in or out of the firm.
Meanwhile there was the question of getting access to the sperm. Needless to say, while some of our own people have law degrees, Prudential has a high-powered law firm on retainer, so Carlos called them. There was, it turned out, a legal precedent. If we had a contract with some law enforcement agency to investigate Christman's disappearance, and assuming no one contested it, we should be able to get a court order for a microscopic sample. Enough to test for a DNA match.
Unfortunately—so we thought—none of this fell within the jurisdiction of the City of Los Angeles. Or the county, or the State of California, as far as that's concerned. And at that time the feds rarely contracted investigations. So Carlos got on the phone and called the Lane County Sheriff's Department in Oregon. The receptionist said that Sheriff Savola was on another line, if we cared to wait. I told Carlos that Savola was a Finnish name—Americanized Finnish, shortened from Savolainen. I went to school with some Savolas in Hemlock Harbor.
Unless he was totally divorced from his roots, Savola would recognize my name as Finnish too. So when he came on the screen, Carlos introduced both of us to him, and told him I was the investigator. And that I had evidence which might lead to an indictment for an assault on Ray Christman, assault leading to kidnaping. We believed it might have taken place on the church's estate in Lane County, and we'd like a contingency contract for the case, to give us access to information we couldn't get otherwise.
Savola pointed out that interstate kidnaping was a federal offense, and as such an FBI responsibility. Which of course was why I'd talked in terms of the assault. It was the junior of the two felonies, but it came under the sheriff's jurisdiction. I told him I'd run onto the evidence while carrying out two other investigations, one private, the other for the City of Los Angeles. If the feebs, the FBI, started an investigation of the Christman disappearance, they'd pull the rug out from under me and the firm on both of them. But if we could present major evidence that certain persons had abducted Christman, the government would have to pay us our costs and a reasonable fee, which could be substantial.
I watched Savola while he thought it over. Not every county sheriff feels friendly to contract investigation firms, but most of them feel even less friendly to the feebs, who can be really arrogant and overbearing toward local agencies when their interests overlap. Besides, Joe Keneely has carefully nurtured Prudential's good name, and this wouldn't need to cost Lane County much if any money.
"Seppanen, eh? I've read about you." It had to be the twice-killed astronomer again. As Joe likes to say: "The best promotion is outstanding work properly publicized." Savola ended up saying okay, if our terms were suitable. Carlos transferred the call to Joe, and twenty minutes later we had another contract we could use, registered in the National Law Enforcement Network. It didn't mention kidnaping.
As Joe put it: "Ah, the marvels of electronics, the Network, and a good reputation."
* * *
While we waited, I got a bright idea for my next action. My office was still bugged, and I needed to use the National Law Enforcement Network, which meant I couldn't do it from home. So I sat down, called up the army's CID headquarters in the Pentagon, and instead of telling them orally what I wanted, I wrote it. Including: "My office is bugged, and I need to pretend I don't know it. So I'm writing this." I figured a little drama might help get me what I wanted. Then, still writing, I identified my firm, myself, and the contract, and indicated that at least two of our suspects were ex-Rangers. What I needed, I told the guy, was a printout, with photos and certain other particulars, of all Rangers who'd served in the same company as Captain Aquilo Reyes, and who'd resigned or failed to reenlist between 2007:1:1 and 2008:12:31.
He checked me out on the Network first, then agreed. It turned out there were sixteen of them, including Steinhorn. Eight had been unmarried, and three had Hispanic names. Two of the sixteen photos matched faces in Carlos' videotapes from Ensenada. A third matched a face in Charles' photos. Of those three, all had been single at the time of discharge.