Fractured, page 10
part #2 of Will Trent Series
There was no gate for the parking lot, no booth with an attendant. Whoever owned the lot relied on the honesty of strangers. The honor box by the entrance had numbers corresponding to the spaces. Visitors were expected to fold four single dollar bills into a tight wad and shove them through tiny slits by way of payment. A slim, sharp piece of metal hung on a wire to help people cram in the money.
Amanda’s heels clicked across the concrete as they walked toward Kayla Alexander’s white Prius. A team had already surrounded the car. Cameras flashed, evidence was sifted, plastic bags were filled. The techs were all suited up, sweating from the unrelenting heat. The humidity made Will feel like he was breathing through a wet piece of cotton.
Amanda looked up, surveying the area. Will followed her gaze. There was one lone security camera up on the wall. The angle was more for catching people going into the building than watching cars parked in the lot.
“What have we got?” Amanda asked.
She spoke softly, but this was her team and they all had been waiting for her to ask the question.
Charlie Reed stepped forward, two plastic evidence bags in his hands. “Rope and duct tape,” he explained, indicating each. “We found these in the trunk.”
Will took the bag of rope, which appeared to be unused clothesline; there was a plastic tie around the neatly folded line. One side was faintly red where the fibers had wicked up blood. “Was it coiled up like this when you found it?”
Charlie gave him a look that asked if Will really thought he was that stupid. “Just like that,” he said. “No fingerprints on either one.”
Amanda surmised, “He came prepared.”
Will handed back the rope and Charlie continued, “There was a patch of blood in the trunk that matched Emma Campano’s blood type. We’ll have to check with a doc, but the injury doesn’t seem life threatening.” He pointed to a semicircle of dark blood in the trunk. Will guessed it was about the same size as a seventeen-year-old girl’s head. “Based on the volume of blood, I’d say it was a nasty cut. The head bleeds a lot. Oh—” He directed this toward Will. “We found microscopic sprays of blood in Emma Campano’s closet above the urine you found. My guess is she was either kicked or punched in the head, causing the spray. We cut out the Sheetrock, but I’m not sure there’s enough to test.” He added, “Maybe that’s why he didn’t need to use the rope and tape. He knocked her out before removing her from the closet.”
Amanda apparently already assumed this. “Next.”
Charlie walked around the car, pointing to different spots. “The steering wheel, door panels and trunk latch show faint streaks of the same blood we found in the trunk. This is classic glove transfer.” He meant the abductor had been wearing latex gloves. “As for the trash, we’re assuming it came from the owner.”
Will looked inside the car. The keys dangled from the ignition slot just beside what looked like a toggle knob that served as the gearshift. There were go-cups and empty fast-food bags and schoolbooks and papers and melted makeup and sticky spots of spilled soda and other items that indicated Kayla Alexander had been too lazy to find a trashcan, but nothing else that stuck out.
Charlie continued, “We got a positive on body fluids in the seats. Could be blood, urine, sperm, sweat, sputum. The seat material is dark and there’s not much, but it’s something. I’m going to cut out the patches and see if we can soak something out of them back at the lab.”
Will asked him, “The blood on the outside of the car was Emma’s only?”
“That’s right.”
“So he would’ve changed his gloves from the time he was in the Campano house?”
Charlie considered his answer. “That would make sense. If he was using the same gloves, then Adam and Kayla’s blood would also be on the car.”
Amanda asked, “Wouldn’t it have dried in the heat?”
“Possibly, but the new wet blood would release the dried blood. I would expect to see some cross-contamination.”
“How are you sure the blood is Emma’s?”
“I’m not, really,” Charlie admitted. He found a roll of paper towels and tore off a strip so he could wipe the sweat off his face. “All I can go by is type. The blood we found on the car is O-positive. Emma was the only one in the house that we know of who had that type.”
“Not to question your methods,” Will began, then did exactly that. “How do you know for sure that it’s only type O-positive?”
“Blood types don’t get along well,” Charlie explained. “If you put O-pos with any type A or B, then you get a violent reaction. It’s why they type you at the hospital before they give you a transfusion. It’s a simple test—takes only a few minutes.”
Amanda piped in. “I thought O-positive was universal?”
“That’s O-negative,” Charlie told her. “It has to do with antigens. If the blood types aren’t compatible, then red blood cells clump together. In the body, this can cause clots that block vessels and bring about death.”
Amanda’s impatience was clear. “I don’t need a science lesson, Charlie, just the facts. What else have you found?”
He looked back at the car, the team collecting evidence and putting it into bags, the photographer documenting each empty McDonald’s cup and candy wrapper. “Not much,” he admitted.
“What about the building?”
“The top two floors are empty. We cleared them first thing. I’d guess no one’s stepped foot up there in six months, maybe a year. Same with the parking area upstairs. The concrete barricade has been there for a while. My guess is that this place is so old, it wasn’t built to handle newer, larger cars so they closed it off to prevent collapse.”
Amanda nodded. “Find me if anything else comes up.”
She headed toward the building, Will trailing behind her. “Barry didn’t find any discarded gloves,” she told him, referring to the chief of the canine unit. “This afternoon, the dogs were able to find a trail from the Campano house to the woods at the end of their street, but there were too many scents and they lost the trail.” She pointed to an area directly behind the garage. “There’s another path back there that goes into those same woods. It would take ten minutes to get to the Campanos from here if you knew what you were doing.”
Will remembered what Leo had told him earlier. “The girls were skipping last year until the neighbor across the street told Abigail that Emma’s car was in the driveway. They could’ve started parking here to avoid being told on.”
“But Kayla’s car was parked in the driveway today,” Amanda pointed out.
“Should we recanvass the neighbors, see if they remember anything?”
“You mean for a third time?” She didn’t say no, but reminded him, “It’s all over the news now. I’m surprised no one has talked themselves into seeing something.”
Will knew that was often a problem with eyewitness testimony, especially when the crime involved children. People wanted to help so much that their brains often came up with scenarios that didn’t actually happen. “What’s the kid’s name—the one who called in the Prius?”
“Lionel Petty.” She pressed a red button by the door. A few seconds passed, then there was a buzz and click.
Will opened the door for her and followed Amanda down a long hallway that led to the Copy Right. The air-conditioning was a welcome relief from the stagnant heat in the garage. Inside the store, signs hung from the ceiling with cartoon smiling pens writing out helpful directions. The front counter was covered with reams of paper. Machines whirred in the background, swirling out sheets of paper at incredible speeds. Will glanced around, but couldn’t see anyone. There was a bell on the counter and he rang it.
A kid poked up his head from behind one of the machines. His hair was a mess, as if he’d just rolled out of bed, though his goatee was neatly trimmed. “Are you the cops?” He walked toward them, and Will saw that he wasn’t really a kid. Will would have put him in his late twenties, but he was dressed like a teen and he had the round, open face of a child. Except for the receding hairline, he could have passed for fifteen. He repeated his question. “Are you guys with the cops?”
Will spoke first because he knew from experience that Amanda’s style of rattling off questions and demanding quick answers didn’t exactly lend itself to eliciting information from strangers. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the machines. “You’re Lionel Petty?”
“Yeah,” he answered, smiling nervously at Amanda. “Is this going to crack the case?” The slow cadence of his voice had a slight lilt to it, and Will couldn’t tell if the man was just that laid-back or had smoked a little too much weed. “I’ve been watching it on the news all day, and they’ve been showing the car, like, every five minutes. I couldn’t believe when I checked out for a smoke and looked up and there it was. I thought maybe my brain was making it up because what’re the odds, right?”
“Petty,” a disembodied voice called. Will moved down the counter. He saw the lower half of a body sticking out from a copy machine. “Did you clock out like I told you?”
Petty smiled, and Will saw the crookedest set of teeth he’d ever seen on a man. “So, not to be crass or anything, but is there a reward? ‘We can’t say no at Campano.’ They live in Ansley Park. The family must be loaded.”
“No,” Amanda answered. She had figured out who was in charge. She asked the kid under the copier, “Where’s the tape for the security cameras?”
He crawled out of the machine. There was a splotch of ink on his forehead, but his hair was neatly combed, his face clean-shaven. He was about the same age as Petty, but he lacked the other man’s boyish features and stoner charm. He wiped his hands on his pants, leaving a faint trail of ink. “I’m sorry, we’ve got a ten-thousand-booklet run due first thing in the morning and my machine just jammed up.”
Will glanced at the guts of the copier, thinking that its gears and cogs reminded him of a wristwatch.
“I’m Warren Grier,” the man offered. “I pulled the tape as soon as your guys got here. You’re lucky. We swap out the same two cassettes every day. If you’d shown up tomorrow, it probably would’ve been recorded over.”
Will asked, “Do you have a problem with theft around here?”
“Not really. The construction makes it hard to get in and out of the building. About ninety percent of our clients never see us. We deliver out to them.”
“Why the security camera?”
“Mostly to see who’s at the door and to keep out the homeless people. We don’t keep a lot of cash here, but the junkies don’t need a lot, you know? Twenty bucks is a score for them.”
“Is it just you and Lionel?”
“There’s a girl who works mornings. Monique. She’s seven to noon. We use a courier for deliveries. They’re in and out all day.” He leaned his hand on the counter. “Sandy and Frieda should be in soon. They work the evening shift.”
“Who uses the offices upstairs?”
“There used to be some lawyers, but they cleared out maybe a year ago?” He was asking Petty, and the other man nodded confirmation. “They were immigration lawyers. I think they were running some kind of scam.”
“Lots of shifty people,” Petty provided.
“Here.” Warren dug a set of keys out of his pants pocket and handed them to Petty. “Take them to my office. I stopped the tapes when your guys got here. The one on the top is from today. It hasn’t been rewound yet, so you can probably find the time frame you need pretty easily.” He apologized to Will. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get this machine back up. Just holler if you have any problems and I’ll come back and help you.”
“Thank you,” Will told him. “Can I ask—have you noticed someone using the parking garage a lot lately? Maybe not the Prius, but another car?”
Warren shook his head as he walked back to the machine. “I’m usually chained to the store. The only time I go back through that door is usually when it’s time to go home.”
Will stopped him before he ducked into the copier. “Have you seen any suspicious characters in the area?”
Warren shrugged. “This is Peachtree Street. It’s kind of hard not to.”
Petty said, “I keep a lookout, you know?” He motioned for them to follow him to the back of the store. “It’s not just like with the car. I called the cops on some homeless people who were crashing in the alley.”
Amanda asked, “When was this?”
“Year, maybe two years ago?”
Will waited for her to say something sarcastic, but she held her tongue.
He asked Petty, “Have you ever seen the Prius parked back there before?”
He shook his head.
“What about any other cars?” Will pressed. “Is there one in particular that you’ve seen back there a lot?”
“Not that I remember, but I’m usually inside to catch the phones.”
“What about your cigarette breaks?”
“Stupid, huh?” He blushed slightly. “I quit, like, two years ago, but then I met this girl at the Yacht Club a couple of days ago, and she smokes like freakin’ Cruella de Vil. I picked it back up like—”He snapped his fingers.
The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club was a dive in Little Five Points. It was just the kind of place you expected to find a twenty-something-year-old copy store worker with the ambition of a snail.
Will asked, “What about the construction workers outside?”
“They’ve been there off and on for about six months. At first, they were trying to use the garage during lunch. You know, for shade and all. But Warren got mad because they were leaving all kinds of trash back there—cigarette butts, coffee cups, all kinds of shit. He had a talk with the foreman, all cool about it, just, like, ‘show some common courtesy, man. Put litter in its place.’ The next day, we get here, and there’s fucking steel plates all over the road and they haven’t been back since.”
“When was this?”
“A week ago? I don’t remember. Warren will know.”
“Did you have any other trouble with them before this?”
“Nah, they weren’t on the job long enough to give a shit. They come and go all the time, usually different crews, different bosses.” Petty stopped in front of a closed door. He kept talking as he slipped the key into the lock. “I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of greedy bastard asking about a reward.”
“Of course not,” Will said, glancing around the office. The space was small but well organized, with what must have been thousands of CDs neatly stacked on metal shelves from floor to ceiling. A battered chair sat beside a metal desk, papers stacked on the top. The time clock ticked loudly. A shelf on the opposite wall held a tiny black-and-white television. Hooked up to the front jacks was an array of cables leading to two VCRs.
Petty said, “It’s pretty crappy. Warren’s right about the tapes being recorded over. I’ve been working here seven years and he’s bought new ones maybe twice.”
“What about all these CDs?”
“Customer files, artwork and stuff,” he explained, tracing his fingers along the multicolored jewel cases. “Most of the projects are e-mailed now, but sometimes, we get repeats and have to pull them.”
Will stared at the television, spotting the top of Charlie’s head as he cut a patch of material from the passenger seat of the Prius. Two tapes were beside the set, numbers labeling them one and two. Will checked one of the VCRs, which looked pretty straightforward. The big button was always play. The smaller ones on either side would be rewind and fast-forward.
He told Petty, “I think we’ve got this.”
“I can—”
“Thank you,” Amanda said, practically pushing him out the door.
Will went to work, sliding the top tape into the player. The television screen blinked, and the image of the parking garage came up.
Amanda said, “They turned it off two hours ago.”
“I can see that,” he mumbled, holding down the rewind key, watching the date and time code count backward. Will stopped the tape and hit rewind again, knowing the machine would go faster without having to show the image. The VCR whirred. The clock ticked.
“Try now,” Amanda told him.
Will pressed the play button, and the garage flipped back up again. They saw the Prius again, parked in the same space. The time code read 1:24:33.
“Close,” she said. Because of her husband’s 9-1-1 call, they knew Abigail Campano had arrived at her home sometime around twelve-thirty.
Will kept the VCR in play mode and held down the rewind button with his thumb. The scene was pretty static, just the Prius and the empty garage. The quality of the tape was exactly as you would expect, and Will doubted he would have guessed the car’s make from the film alone. Because the camera was angled more toward the door, the parking garage was only captured in a pie-shaped section. Everything on the tape played in reverse, so when the Prius backed out at 12:21:03, that meant that the car had actually arrived at that time. This was good information to have, but what really caught their attention was the second car the Prius had been blocking from the camera’s eye.
“What make is that?” Amanda asked.
The grainy film showed the generic front side panel and partial front wheel of a red or blue or black sedan pulling into a parking space. Will could see part of the windshield, the slope of the hood, a side blinker light, but nothing more. Toyota? Ford? Chevy?
He finally admitted, “I can’t tell.”
“So,” Amanda said, “we know that the Prius entered the garage at 12:21. Go back to when the second car first showed up.”
Will did as he was told, going back almost an hour, stopping at eleven-fifteen that morning. He pressed play, and the footage slowly played out. The dark-colored car pulled into the space. The image of the driver revealed nothing more than that he was of average build. As he got out of the car, you could see that he had dark hair and wore a dark shirt and jeans. Having the benefit of comparison, Will surmised this was Adam Humphrey. Adam closed the car door, then tossed something—the keys?—across the roof of the car to the passenger, who was out of the camera’s eye but for a hand and the upper part of a forearm as the second person caught the keys. The passenger wore no watch. There were no tattoos or other identifying marks. Both driver and passenger left the scene, and Will fast-forwarded the tape until Kayla Alexander’s car showed up.
