Fractured, page 27
part #2 of Will Trent Series
Will opened his desk drawer and reached his hand all the way to the back. “I’ve got this,” he said, pulling out a test stick. “I found it in the trash. Do you know what this signifies?”
Faith stopped herself before touching the stick, remembering at the last minute that someone had actually urinated on it. She looked at the result panel. There was a single blue line. “I have no idea.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I got all these so I can figure out which brand it is and get the results.”
The obvious question hung in the back of her throat—why don’t you just ask her?—but Faith figured the fact that Angie Polaski hadn’t mentioned the test to Will in the first place was proof enough that there was a serious breakdown in communications.
She said, “Let’s go through them now.”
He was obviously surprised by the suggestion. “No, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”
“We can’t do anything until Bernard calls. Come on.”
Will only made a show of resisting. He emptied the bags onto his desk. They started opening the boxes, breaking the plastic seals, finding the test sticks, comparing them to the one on Will’s desk calendar. They were nearly to the last one when Will said, “This looks like it.”
Faith looked at the plastic-wrapped tester in his hand and compared it to the used one on his desk. “Yep,” she agreed.
He unfolded the directions that came with the test, skimming them to find the right section. He glanced up at Faith nervously, then looked back at the directions.
“Let me,” she finally said, putting him out of his misery. There was a drawing on the back side. “One line,” she said. “That means it’s negative.”
He sat back in his chair, hands gripping the arms. She couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed. “Thank you for helping me with that.”
Faith nodded, sticking the directions back in the box.
“Spell-check.”
“What?”
“Yesterday, Bernard said that computers make it easier for dyslexics to hide their problem.” He shrugged. “It would make sense that someone who was functionally illiterate would do the same thing.”
Faith closed her eyes, remembering the threatening notes. “The way the words were jumbled together—they were spelled correctly, right? Is l-e-v a word?” She pointed to his computer. “Type it in.”
Will didn’t move. “It’s a word.”
“What does it mean?”
His phone rang. He didn’t move to answer it.
Faith had seen him acting strangely, but this took the cake. The phone rang again. “Do you want me to get that?”
He reached over and pressed the speakerphone button. “Will Trent.”
“It’s Beckey in the lab,” a woman with a pronounced Yankee accent said. “Gordon Chew is here.”
Will pressed the off button on his computer monitor. He stood up, straightening his jacket. “Let’s go.”
THE FORENSICS LAB took up the entire second floor of City Hall East. Unlike the rest of the building, which was likely filled with mice and asbestos, the lab was clean and well lit. The air-conditioning actually worked. There were no cracked tiles on the floor or jagged pieces of metal sticking out from the desks. Everything was either white or stainless steel. Faith would’ve eaten her gun if she’d had to work here day in and day out. Even the windows were clean, missing the great swaths of grime that covered the rest of the building.
At least two dozen people buzzed around the room, all of them wearing white coats, most of them in goggles and surgical gloves as they handled evidence or worked on their computers. There was music playing, something classical that Faith did not recognize. Other than this and the hum of electronics, there was no other noise. She supposed processing blood and combing through carpet fibers didn’t call for much conversation.
“Over here,” a slim Asian man called across the room. He was sitting on a stool beside one of the lab tables. Several trays were laid out in front of him and a large black briefcase that she was used to seeing lawyers carry was on the floor at his feet. Faith wondered if he’d brought the white lab coat he was wearing or if someone had let him borrow it.
“Gordon,” Will said, then introduced Faith.
He offered her his hand. “Nice meeting you, ma’am.”
“Likewise,” Faith said, thinking she hadn’t heard such a lovely, soft drawl since her grandmother had died. She wondered where Gordon had picked it up. He was probably a few years older than Faith, but he had the manners and bearing of a much older man.
Will indicated the notes on the table. Gordon had taken them out of their plastic bags. “What do you think?”
“I’m thinking it’s a good thing you called me. This paper is in terrible condition. I’m not going to even try iodine fuming.”
“What about DFO?”
“I already put them under the light. It’s a mess, man.”
“Is there anything special about the brand or the watermark or—”
“Generic as a pair of loafers.”
Faith decided that hiding her ignorance was only punishing herself. “I’m not really familiar with chemical processing. Why can’t we just dust the paper for prints?”
He smiled, obviously pleased at the question. “I bet you dusted a cigarette butt for prints at the academy, right?” He laughed at her expression. “They’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember.” He leaned back on the stool behind him. “Paper’s porous. The natural oil in your fingertips leaves a good, readable print on a hard surface, but when you’re dealing with fibers, the oil penetrates and migrates. Dusting it with powder is not going to bring out any latents. You use something like ninhydrin, which reacts with the amino acids in fingerprint residue, and hopefully, you get a pretty little print and we bring home your little girl.”
The mood turned decidedly somber as they all considered how important these next few minutes would be.
Will said, “Let’s get started.”
Gordon took a pair of goggles out of his bag and a pair of green gloves. He told Will and Faith, “Y’all may want to step back. This is pretty toxic stuff.” They both did as he advised, but Gordon still handed them paper masks to cover their mouths and noses.
He leaned down and took a small, unmarked metal container out of his bag. He unscrewed the cap and poured some of the contents into one of the pans, careful not to splash. Even through the mask, the fumes hit Faith like a flash of gunpowder. She had never smelled anything so blatantly chemical.
Gordon explained, “Ninhydrin and heptane. I mixed it up last night before I headed down.” He capped the metal container. “We used to use Freon, but they outlawed that a few years back.” He told Will, “I used the last of my stash two months ago. Hated to see it go.”
Gordon used a pair of tweezers to pick up the first sheet of paper. “The ink’s going to run a little bit,” he warned.
“We already took pictures and made copies,” Will told him.
Gordon dropped the paper into the chemical solution. Faith thought it was a lot like the old-fashioned way people used to develop photographs. She watched as he gently agitated the page in the solution. The type print shook, and Faith read the words over and over again as she waited for something to happen.
SHE BE LONGS TOME!!!
Whoever had written that note felt a closeness to Emma Campano. He had seen her, coveted her. Faith looked at the other note.
LEV HER ALONG!!!
Did the kidnapper feel like he needed to protect her from Adam?
“Here we go,” Gordon said. She saw stray marks start to develop, forensic proof that the paper had been handled many times by different people. The creases of the folds came up first in a dark orange that quickly turned red. Other stray marks showed smeared thumbprints. A series of swirls came into relief, their color reminiscent of the purple from ditto machines that they used to use when Faith was in school. Thanks to the chemicals, she could see where the paper had been touched over and over again.
Gordon murmured, “That’s kind of strange.”
Will leaned over, keeping the mask on his face. “I’ve never seen it turn that dark before.”
“Me, neither,” Gordon said. “Where’d you find this?”
“A dorm room at Georgia Tech.”
“Was it sitting near anything unusual?”
“It was in the pocket of a student. All of them were.”
“Was he a chemistry major?”
Faith shrugged. “He worked with adhesives.”
Gordon leaned over the pan, staring at the dark print, the distinctive swirls. “This is a left thumbprint. I would say that whoever made it was exposed to some kind of chemical that is reacting to the acetate in my solution.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a magnifying glass. Faith held her breath as she watched him lean over the toxic-smelling pan. He studied all the different fingerprints the chemicals had brought out. “Based on the latents, we’ve got three different people touching this paper.” He looked at the black print again. “I’d say the thumbprint is the only time the third person touched this page.” He indicated the position. “It’s in the bottom left corner. He was being careful when he handled it.”
Will said, “He might have put his thumb there because he was trying not to touch it as he slid it under the door.”
“He might very well,” Gordon agreed. “I need to dry this, then I can look at the back. Why don’t y’all give me a few hours to see what I can come up with? Do you have comparisons of the two people you believe touched this?”
Faith said, “Adam’s will be on file. We took Gabe Cohen’s to rule him out before we searched Adam’s room.”
“What about Tommy Albertson’s?”
She nodded. Albertson had been an ass about it, but she had managed to get prints off him.
“Well,” Gordon began, “get me the comparisons. This is a pretty excellent print, coloring aside. I’ll run it through AFIS,” he said, referencing the automated fingerprint identification system. “The system’s been running slow lately. You know the best way to go about this. Give me the right suspect and I can give you a solid match.”
“Will?” A tall woman with spiky blond hair and the requisite white lab coat walked over. “Amanda told me to find you. We got a hit on the sperm from the crime scene.”
Will’s shock registered on his face. He shook his head, insisting, “No, it can’t be the father.”
“The father? No, Will, I’m telling you we got a hit from the sex-offender database.” She held up a Post-it note.
Faith read the name, hissing, “Jesus, he was right under our nose.”
Will seemed just as shocked as she felt. He asked the woman, “Do you have an address?”
Faith told him, “We know where he is.”
“His house,” Will said. “We need to check his house.”
He was right. Faith took out her cell phone and dialed the switchboard. After giving her badge number, she told the operator, “I need ten-twenty-eight on a code forty-four.” She read the name from the Post-it note. “Patrick Evander Bernard.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WILL SLOWED AT a red light, looking both ways and blowing through the intersection in front of an angry driver.
Amanda’s voice was clipped on the phone. “Bernard was picked up in Savannah two years ago for sex with a minor. She was fifteen. He roughed her up pretty badly—bite marks, tearing, bruising. The skin on her palms and knees was ripped open. He pretty much did what he wanted to her.”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“He pleaded it down to reckless endangerment and paid the fine.”
Will sped up, passing a truck. “That’s a slap on the wrist. Why didn’t he go to trial?”
“He met her in a bar. He claimed he took that as proof that she was twenty-one. The prosecutor was scared the jury would equate her sneaking into the bar with asking for trouble.”
Will slammed on his brakes, nearly rear-ending a car that was stopped for another red light. “She deserves to be raped for having a fake ID?”
“The parents didn’t pursue it. They didn’t want their daughter raped again by the court system and the media.”
Will could understand their fear. Fewer and fewer rape cases were making it to trial for this very reason. The light changed and he pressed the gas pedal to the floor. “Why was his DNA in the system?”
“It was processed through the rape kit when he was arrested.”
“We need to get a copy of his fingerprints to Gordon Chew to match them against the thumbprint on the letter.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Part of his deal with the district attorney was that his record be expunged if he kept his nose clean for a year.”
“But his DNA was still in the sex-offender database.”
She mumbled a curse. “That’s our fuckup. He should have never ended up in there. He’s not a convicted sex offender. Legally, we have no right to use Evan Bernard’s DNA or his fingerprints as evidence.”
“But if we get a match—”
“Then a judge will throw it out before we even make it to trial.”
Will felt the bottom drop out of his case. Unless the teacher was feeling particularly generous—or stupid—they could not get a sample of Evan Bernard’s DNA without a court order. A judge would not sign off on the order without probable cause that Bernard had committed a crime. Illegally obtained DNA was not probable cause.
Will stated the obvious. “If we can’t use the DNA, we can’t link him to Kayla Alexander.” He saw the possibilities fall like dominoes. No Kayla, no crime scene. No probable cause, no arrest.
No hope for Emma Campano.
“Faith’s waiting outside Bernard’s apartment right now. His unit is on the first floor. All the blinds are open. She can see straight into the rooms. There’s a garage, but the car is gone. Without the DNA, we can’t do anything. She needs legal cause to go inside. I need you to link Bernard to one of these crimes, Will. Get me into that apartment.”
Will jerked the steering wheel, swerving the car into the school’s parking lot. It felt like a lifetime since he’d been here, though only a day had passed. He thought of Emma Campano again, how a day could be an eternity for her, every second the difference between life and death. Bernard would know that they would come to Emma’s school. He would know that they would eventually find out about the arrest, just as he would know that the apartment was the first place they would look. He had to be keeping her somewhere remote—somewhere no one would hear Emma scream.
Two cruisers were parked on the street, away from the school’s security cameras. Will jogged toward the front door, directing one team to go around the back of the building and the other to wait at the front. The rent-a-cops on the front steps seemed confused for a moment, but they knew better than to interfere.
Will glanced across the street. The photographers were still there. CNN was doing a live news feed, the reporter’s back to the school as she gave absolutely no new information on the case. She would have some information soon enough. This would probably be the scoop of her career.
Will told the security guard, “Get some more of your men around here. Keep the press off school property.”
“Yes, sir,” the man replied, taking his walkie-talkie out of his pocket.
Will took the steps up to the main building two at a time. He had already debated with Amanda about how to approach this. Emma Campano was in danger, but Evan Bernard could not hurt her while he was at school. Surprise was the only element they had in their favor. The fact that the ransom call was supposed to be made within the next half hour had sealed the deal. If they could catch him on the phone, that would be all the proof they would need.
Will reached out to press the intercom button, but he was already buzzed in. Olivia McFaden waited for him on the other side of the door.
She didn’t mince words. “There are two officers with guns in front of my school.”
“There are two more in the back,” Will informed her, ushering her down the hallway by her arm. He led her into the same conference room they had used the day before. “I’m going to tell you some things and I need you to remain calm.”
She jerked her arm away. “I run a high school, Mr. Trent. There’s not much you can say that would shock me.”
Will did not feel the need to go into the fact that they had found Bernard’s sperm inside one of his dead students. Instead, he told the woman, “We have reason to believe that Evan Bernard was having a sexual affair with Kayla Alexander.”
Apparently, she could be shocked. She sunk into one of the chairs. “My God.” She stood up just as quickly, her mind leaping to the next conclusion. Kayla had been murdered, but Emma was still missing. “He’s got students—” She was heading toward the door, but Will stopped her.
“Is there a camera in his room?”
She was still trying to absorb the news, but McFaden snapped out of her surprise quickly enough. “This way,” she said, leading him back into the hallway and to the main office. “Colleen,” she told the woman behind the desk. “Pull up Mr. Bernard’s classroom.”
The woman turned to the bank of monitors and tapped some keys. There were six screens in all, each partitioned into smaller images from various cameras around the school. They were all in color, all showing crisp, clear images. Colleen pressed another key and Evan Bernard’s classroom filled the middle screen.
There he was in his rumpled jacket and patchy beard, walking up and down the rows of desks, surrounded by teenagers. The class was a small one, maybe a dozen kids in all. They were mostly young girls, their knees clenched together under their desks, pens scribbling nimbly as they recorded Mr. Bernard’s every word. No one had their heads down on their desks. They seemed enraptured. Had the fifteen-year-old whom Evan Bernard met in Savannah looked at him the same way? Maybe she did until he raped her.
