At the Scene of the Crime Read online

  Byers has been listening to our conversation. Her eyes snap from McDuff to the three uniforms approaching. Rather than turn myself, I watch her. Emotions flash across her face like a fast-forward slide show: disbelief, denial, frustration. She catches me watching her and her expression morphs instantly into polite curiosity.

  Too late. I saw what I needed to.

  I join McDuff in the middle of the room. One of the uniforms is holding a bundle, a heavy bundle by the way he’s hefting it. It’s large and square and covered by a blanket stained with coal dust. He lays it on the desk and starts unwrapping.

  “Found it in the bottom of the boiler in the old furnace room.”

  Under the blanket is an oilskin tarp. Under the tarp are the books.

  Simmons rushes to join us. “My God. You found them. They were here all the time? How did you know?”

  McDuff is looking at me. I’m looking at Byers.

  She joins us, too. “So,” she says. “You found the books. I guess you weren’t as clever as you thought you were, Simmons. What were you planning to do? Produce the books later to collect the reward?”

  Simmons stares at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh come on. You know the university would offer a reward. A substantial one, I’d bet. That’s why you weren’t worried about finding another job.”

  Simmons turns to me. “You don’t believe her, do you? I swear I had nothing to do with stealing the books. I didn’t even know there was a furnace room, let alone how to find it.”

  I gesture to one of the uniforms. “Take her outside.”

  The officer takes her arm and steers her away. McDuff hasn’t said a word, but his expression as he looks down at me is questioning.

  “Why don’t you go with them?” I say, jabbing a thumb toward Simmons and the uniform as they head for the door. “I’ve got a few questions for Ms. Byers to wrap things up.”

  He nods, his eyes narrowing as he tries to fathom where I’m headed with this. He knows if I was convinced Simmons was the thief, I’d have told the uniform to read her her rights. After a moment, he gives up.

  “Okay, Fitzgerald, see you outside.”

  Byers watches him cross the room. “That was good work, Detective.” Her tone is calm, confident. “Do you solve all your cases this fast?”

  I laugh. “I wish. I do have a couple more questions for you, though, if you don’t mind.” There is a stone bench beside the library entrance. I point at it. “Shall we have a seat?”

  She lets me lead her to the bench and we both sit. I lean in toward her. “There are just one or two things I’d like you to clear up for me. You know, I’ve seen a lot of crime scenes and I must admit, I’ve never come across one as clean as this one. That cabinet in the vault? What do you do, wipe it down every night?”

  She smiles, relaxed, cat-like. “Actually, yes. The former librarian insisted on it and I do it now out of habit.”

  “And the security room, too? The forensic people tell me there wasn’t a print on that console. Strange, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know about that. I never go in there. Simmons probably wiped it down after she doctored the tape.”

  “Well, that’s another strange thing. The tape doesn’t appear to be doctored. Doesn’t make sense, does it? She tells me she erased forty minutes of the tape and yet, it’s all there. In fact, the only doctoring seems to have occurred after she and her partner finished their sex game. There’s ten minutes of dead time and then the camera shows an empty bookcase. How could she have made a mistake like that?”

  Byers shakes her head. “You’ll have to ask her. Besides, don’t criminals make dumb mistakes all the time? Isn’t that how you catch them?”

  “Yes, it is. In fact, I have a hunch that I’m about to catch another criminal right now. Want to know how?”

  The tone of my voice, suddenly harsher and accusatory, makes Byers’ eyes widen. “What criminal?”

  “Well, let’s see. You know when I mentioned the cabinet had been wiped down? Well, you didn’t do such a thorough job this time. Our investigators found prints. Yours. Above the lock on the cabinet door.”

  “How do you know it’s mine?”

  “Good question. All employees of school systems are fingerprinted when hired. Yours was on file. Not tough to match.”

  “But that means nothing. I told you I wipe down the cabinets every night. I just missed a spot last night.”

  “But there were particles found in these prints.”

  “Particles?”

  “Coal dust.” I glance behind me to the desk where the books were still laid out. “I’ll bet we match it to the stuff on that blanket. And I’ll also bet when we search your house, we find shoes with the same dust on them. You’ve been here long enough to know this building. Simmons hasn’t. If someone were going to hide stolen property, what better place than an unused furnace room. No one ever goes down there, right? The books would be safe and you could produce them to collect that reward you were sure Dr. Nichols would offer when the time was right. In the meantime, Simmons would be in jail.”

  Byers’ gaze slides away. Her jaws are clamped so tight the muscles at the corners of her mouth twitch.

  “I think Simmons underestimated your resourcefulness, didn’t she? It was pretty smart of you to keep her in the dark about your knowledge of the security system. What was it at first? A way to get out of an irksome housekeeping chore? She didn’t think you knew anything at all about a computer surveillance system, let alone how to dub and substitute tapes. But that’s what you did, isn’t it? You waited until Simmons and her boyfriend were getting their clothes back on, then you snatched the tape before they left the vault.”

  She shifts on the bench, squeezes her hands together. She still doesn’t say a word or look at me.

  I sigh. “You got a lucky break when she didn’t look at the tape before erasing it. Our forensic people are examining the tape you left now. I’m sure they’ll find something to link you with it. By the way, did you film your little celebratory masturbation act? Was that a way of thumbing your nose at Simmons?”

  She sits up straight, her eyes dark with anger. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. You left evidence on the chair seat.”

  “What evidence?”

  “Come on. You must know. Bodily fluids are detectable. We found your DNA.”

  “How do you know it’s mine and not hers?”

  “We matched it.”

  “How did you get a sample of my DNA?”

  “From your water bottle.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “You bet.”

  She gets quiet again.

  “You know, you have an opportunity here to help yourself. We have the books. We can work something out with the DA. Make it easy on yourself. No trial. No messy publicity.”

  She looks at me a long moment, then smiles. “How did I get into the vault? I don’t have the combination.”

  I’ve been waiting for that. It’s the one thing I don’t know. “I can’t answer that. Yet. But if I ask Simmons, what are the chances she’ll say you could have been looking over her shoulder any of a dozen times she’s opened the vault in your presence? Or when we contact the former librarian, will she tell us she trusted you with it for one reason or another? I don’t think that’s going to be a problem for us. I think it’s far more likely to be a problem for you.”

  Another long minute of silence. Then she says, “I want a lawyer.”

  McDuff is waiting with Simmons when the uniform leads a handcuffed Byers down the steps and to a waiting cruiser. I hang behind a minute to order a search warrant for Byers’ home. I’m hoping we’ll find more than coal dust. I’m hoping we’ll find the missing tape.

  When I join them, Simmons’s face is pale with shock. “She stole the books? How—”

  I shake my head. “We’ll fill you in downtown. We’re going to need to get a statement from you. This offic
er will take you now and we’ll be along in a few minutes.”

  McDuff stands beside me, watches the cars pull away.

  “Good guess, Fitzgerald,” he says. “It’s just like I always say. Better to be lucky than good.”

  I think about fingerprints and DNA and a computer team poring over evidence in a lab downtown.

  “No, McDuff,” I reply. “It’s better to be both.”

  THE HIGH LIFE

  A HEARTLAND HOMICIDE STORY

  BY MAX ALLAN COLLINS AND MATTHEW V. CLEMENS

  SUMMER INVADED IOWA IN JUNE LIKE A HORDE OF HUNS, and kept up the looting and pillaging on through July and most of August. With each week the heat grew more intense, the crops suffering in the rural areas, everybody in the cities turning sour, then angry, then just plain pissed.

  Now, with Labor Day only a couple of weeks away, the nighttime temperatures in the high eighties and equal humidity made for heat indexes over ninety and a crime rate that rose exponentially with the temperature. The city’s crime lab was so overtaxed that the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation just up the road in Ankeny had been forced to pitch in most nights.

  Des Moines had become so testy that two citizens had been shot to death at the scenes of separate fender-benders in the last two days—one not even involved in the crash, merely an onlooker who’d spoken up at the wrong time. The sprawling but usually welcoming city had this summer morphed into an unfriendly, hotheaded place where suspicious glances took the place of ready smiles, paranoia pushed out hospitality, and violence had its way with tolerance.

  As the hateful cauldron simmered, the concrete buildings of downtown worked like a giant oven. One such downtown building, the Crossroads Towers—a new high-rise apartment complex—had been open less than a year, “paradise in the heart of the city,” the brochures said, complete with a full-service mini-mall on the ground floor, including grocery store, sparing its well-heeled residents from ever having to re-enter the real world, if they could work from home, anyway.

  Tonight, though, with heat lightning cracking the sky, the real world had entered the Crossroads Towers, where even the twenty-fifth floor didn’t seem high enough to avoid the rage that gripped the city.

  Pulling up to the guard shack at the entrance to the building’s underground parking facility, BCI crime scene supervisor Dale Hawkins—”Hawk” to friends and subordinates alike—was loathe to roll down the window to speak to the guard, and sacrifice air-conditioning for the blast of heat. Fiftyish, with dark hair graying at the temples, Hawkins wore a black shortsleeved shirt with BCI-CSA embroidered inside a badge over the left pocket, the word “SUPERVISOR” embroidered beneath the emblem. Black slacks and black Rocky oxfords completed the outfit.

  Cops only wore two brands of shoes, Rockys or Bates. Hawkins had always been a Rocky man. His only accessory was a Glock 21 .45 automatic that dug into his right hip under the seat belt. Slim, rectangular black-framed glasses perched on a nose that might just as easily have been the source of Hawkins’s nickname as his surname.

  In the passenger seat, willowy brunette Krysti Raines tried not to look as nervous as Hawkins knew she must feel. Porcelain-skinned with wide-set brown eyes almost as dark as the chestnut locks clipped into a short bob, Raines was riding into her first crime scene as a CSA. After four years on patrol with the Des Moines PD, and presumably on the road to detective, Raines had gotten gridlocked by the seemingly endless supply of gold shields in front of her who never retired or took better jobs. Hawkins, seeing the young woman’s potential wasting away as she became more and more frustrated, had lured her away to the BCI.

  He had practically watched her grow up with the PD. Hell, he’d even instructed her fingerprint class. She’d excelled in several other classes, too, and Hawkins knew she had the skills to handle the tough, demanding job of Crime Scene Analyst.

  Now, they would both find out if he was right.

  Reluctantly, Hawkins pushed the button on the electric window. The glass hummed down, the heat pouring in like an oven door opening. The guard stepped closer, his thin mouth a straight-line frown that told Hawkins he didn’t want to be out in the heat any more than the CSA supervisor. Pushing sixty, the guard could easily be a retired cop, but Hawkins didn’t recognize him. His name tag read STUART, and Hawkins, displaying his credentials, briefly wondered if that was a first or a last name.

  “What about her?” Stuart asked, his voice obviously ravaged by years of cigarettes.

  “She’s with me,” Hawkins said.

  Raines held her own credentials toward the driver’s side so the guard could lean in for a better look.

  Finally, Stuart nodded them through. “Take the elevator to the twenty-fifth. . . .”

  Hawkins pulled away before the guard finished. He knew where the crime scene was and the guard knew he knew. This had just been Stuart trying to exercise his minimal authority. Hawkins hoped the guard had been this diligent all evening, and would make sure the detectives questioned the man about people coming in and out.

  As Hawkins wound the SUV through the aisles of the parking garage, Raines remained conspicuously silent.

  At this hour, nearly two in the morning, no parking places presented themselves anywhere near the elevator doors. Hawkins turned into a parking place clear across the garage diagonally from the elevators. The two CSAs climbed out of the black Chevy Suburban and marched to the back to unload.

  Raines’s attire mirrored Hawkins’s: black Rockys, black slacks, and black Polo with the embroidered BCI badge on the breast pocket, but her shirt was a Small where his was Extra Large. She gave up six or seven inches to his six-foot-two and weighed half his two-twenty. His new assistant was roughly the age of his oldest daughter, and he figured he was allowed paternal feelings for his recruit.

  They each grabbed a silver metallic crime scene valise out of the back, Hawkins chivalrous enough to also lug the camera case.

  “Hey, I can get that,” Raines said, hand snaking toward the case.

  “I’ll get it. If you’re as good at this job as I think you’ll be, you’ll have twenty-five more years to lug this stuff around.”

  “Something to look forward to,” Raines said, as Hawkins closed and locked the Suburban’s rear doors.

  “Long hours, low pay, no gratitude from the bosses or the clients, and on top of all that, if you make a mistake, you lose your certification and your job. What’s not to love?”

  He was referring to the position Raines strove for: Certified Latent Print Examiner. In the state of Iowa, only a dozen people, including Hawkins, held that certification, and only a couple of hundred nationwide had attained the status conferred by the International Association for Identification.

  The price for a single error was indeed the loss of certification. Every member of the small fraternity knew the price of a mistake, and it wasn’t just their job at stake. Their screwup could mean an innocent person went to prison, or in some states, on a homicide, to death—chiefly based on an ident they’d made.

  “You left some of that out of your recruitment pitch,” Raines said as they crossed the garage, their footsteps echoing off cement walls.

  Hawkins grinned at her. “Maybe I’m just teaching you not to accept anything at face value.”

  They got to the elevators and Raines touched the UP button. They had to wait for only a moment before the doors whispered open. The pair got in with their gear and Hawkins hit 25.

  “The penthouse?” she asked.

  “One of them,” Hawkins said. “My understanding is there’s four, two on each of the top two floors.”

  “That must cost a pretty penny.”

  “A lot of them—those pads are a cool one-point-five million a piece.”

  “Money’s always a good murder motive,” Raines said.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Hawkins said.

  The twenty-fifth floor bustled with people and noise. The small foyer shared by the two apartments was jammed with two uniformed officer
s, two EMTs, a guy from the coroner’s office, two civilians, a man and woman who might be neighbors, and Detective Ron Stark, a short, skinny guy with longish, dark hair parted on the left. In his early thirties, Stark wore a dark suit too big for him and had inquisitive gray eyes and a straight, thin nose that bisected his face like a sun dial.

  “Been a while, Hawk,” Stark said, his voice quiet but friendly.

  Hawkins nodded. “What was it, the gang thing over by Drake in April?”

  “Yeah,” Stark said, and shook his head. “That was a rough one.” He looked to Raines. “Hey, Krysti, how’s the new job treating you?”

  She smiled at the detective. “We’ll find out.”

  Hawkins asked, “So what’s up, Ron?”

  Stark nodded toward the open door on the right. “You might as well just ask Yack. Ain’t no point in you hearing the same spiel twice.”

  “Yack’s here?” Hawkins asked. “Middle of the night?”

  Stark nodded. “High-profile crime, high-profile detective. These rich people start killing each other, you just know Chief Anderson’s going to demand his best man. And you also know Yack can’t hardly wait to tell you CSAs how he’s already solved the case.”

  Yack—Phil Yackowski—was, by his own admission, Des Moines’ top crime-solving detective. He had the stats and the scrapbooks to prove it. Hawkins had known Yackowski for the better part of twenty years and, unlike the general public, knew the detective had made his bones by stealing the credit on a murder case from a beat cop who had turned up the vital clue.

  Gesturing vaguely toward the man and woman huddled in front of the door at left, Stark said, “Roger and Angela Triplett. They’re the tenants across the hall.”

  Hawkins, who made the husband and wife as both in their early forties, was struck by the incongruity of their attire. Mrs. Triplett, an auburn-haired beauty with piercing green eyes in a heart-shaped face, wore a gold evening gown cut just low enough to create an interest in what lay beneath the flimsy fabric.