Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

He looked back over his shoulder as he began climbing the stairs. “Of course, the guy could’ve used one of them and washed up afterward, but I didn’t see any evidence of that. As for the rope, there’s none in the house that matches what he used. Joe, did Gail have a sports knife or a pocket knife tucked away anywhere? Something he might have found easily and used?”

I thought about that for a moment. “She has a Swiss Army knife she carries in her purse, or on her belt when she goes camping. She didn’t say it was missing.”

“You might double-check, and ask her about the rope and the window lock, too, just to see if something comes to mind. Maybe some visitor made a comment she’d remember about the lock.”

Tony, by now trailing an aromatic cloud of smoke, spoke up. “How long ago did she have the newer windows put in?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know-maybe a year. I’ll ask her for the name of whoever installed them.”

We arrived at the top of the stairs, where J.P. stopped us at the threshold, looking directly at Tony. “I want to preserve this room at least another twenty-four hours-even put a guard on it so we can guarantee its legal integrity, if you’ll let me.”

Brandt nodded. “I think we can do that-sure.” He removed his pipe and cradled it protectively in his palm.

Satisfied, Tyler turned to the room like a lecturer to his blackboard. “I’ll have to compare my notes with Gail’s statement to nail down the sequence of some of this-I can’t tell if he trashed the place first and then raped her, or vice versa-but I have a pretty good idea of how he moved around the room.”

He took a couple of steps forward, being careful not to disturb anything. “In a way, it’s like an archaeological dig-you know that, generally speaking, whatever’s at the bottom was put there first. So all I had to do was link various articles on the floor-and how they were layered-to similar items still left in the drawers and the closet. That way, I could roughly trace his progress around the room, figuring out which drawers he’d emptied first and last.”

“Which told you what?” Tony asked.

Tyler pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Here’s the crime-scene sketch I did of the room. I left out a lot of the clutter to clarify what was where, but you can see the guy’s progression-very methodical. He toured the room in a clockwise direction, Wiping out things as he went.”

“Telling you he’s repressed, compulsive, and angry as hell?”

Tyler looked at me and tilted the flat of his hand back and forth in an equivocal gesture. “Maybe; I don’t have the psychology training to take this too far. The best I can do is establish a pattern-something we might find in somebody else’s files.”

Brandt coughed gently and cleared his throat. “Yeah-not ours. This doesn’t ring any bells with you, does it, Joe?”

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-”