Yune had a leather shoulder-bag, the sort of thing Ralph had heard Jack Hoskins refer to (slightingly) as a man-purse. From it he took an iPad Mini in a battered case that had seen a lot of hard traveling. Ralph had noticed more and more cops carrying these gadgets, and guessed that by 2020, 2025 at the latest, they might entirely replace the traditional cop’s notebook. Well, the world moved on. You either moved with it, or got left behind. On the whole, he would rather have one of those for his birthday than a Comfort Nine Iron.
Yune tapped a couple of buttons and brought up his notes. “Kid named Douglas Elfman found the discarded clothes late yesterday afternoon. Recognized the horse’s head belt buckle from a news report. Called his dad, who got in touch with the SP right away. I got there with the crime van around quarter to six. The jeans, who knows, bluejeans just about grow on trees, but I recognized the buckle right away. Look for yourself.”
He tapped the screen again, and a close-up of the buckle filled the screen. Ralph had no doubt it was the same one that Terry had been wearing in the security cam footage from the Vogel Transportation Center in Dubrow.
Talking to himself as well as to Yune, Ralph said, “Okay, one more link in the chain. He ditches the van behind Shorty’s Pub. Takes the Subaru. Ditches that near the Iron Bridge, puts on fresh clothes—”
“501 jeans, Jockey underpants, white athletic socks, and a pretty damn expensive pair of sneakers. Plus the belt with the fancy buckle.”
“Uh-huh. Once he’s dressed in clothes with no blood on them, he takes a cab from Gentlemen, Please to Dubrow. Only when he gets to the station, he doesn’t take the train. Why not?”
“Maybe he was trying to lay a false trail, in which case doubling back was always part of the plan. Or . . . I have a crazy idea. Want to hear?”
“Sure,” Ralph said.
“I think Maitland meant to run. Meant to take that train to Dallas–Fort Worth, then keep on going. Maybe to Mexico, maybe to California. Why would he want to stay in Flint City after killing the Peterson boy, when he knew people had seen him? Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“Only he couldn’t bear to leave with that big game on the line. He wanted to coach his kids to one more win. Get them to the finals.”
“That really is crazy.”
“Crazier than killing the boy in the first place?”
Yune had him there, but Ralph was spared the need to make a reply when their food came. As soon as the waitress left, Ralph said: “Fingerprints on the buckle?”
Yune swiped his Mini and showed Ralph another close-up of the horse’s head. In this shot, the buckle’s silver shine had been dulled by white fingerprint powder. Ralph could see an overlay of prints, like footprints in one of those old learn-to-dance diagrams.
“The Forensics Unit had Maitland’s dabs in their computer,” Yune said, “and the program matched them up right away. But here’s the first weird thing, Ralph. The lines and whorls in the buckle prints are faint, and entirely broken up in a few places. Enough for a match that would stand up in court, but the tech who did the work—and he’s done thousands of these—said they were like the prints of an old person. Like eighty or even ninety. I asked if it could have been because Maitland was moving fast, wanting to change to yet another set of clothes and just get the hell out of there. The tech said it was possible, but I could tell from his face that it didn’t really ring his bell.”
“Huh,” Ralph said, and dug into his scrambled eggs. His appetite, like his sudden burst of laughter over the dual-purpose golf club, was a welcome surprise. “That is weird, but probably not substantive.”
And just how long, he wondered, was he going to continue dismissing the anomalies that kept popping up in this business by calling them non-substantive?
“There was another set,” Yune said. “They were also blurred—too blurred for the computer tech to even bother sending them out to the FBI’s national database—but he had all the stray prints from the van, and those other prints on the buckle . . . see what you think.”
He passed the iPad to Ralph. Here were two sets of prints, one labeled VAN UNKNOWN SUB and the other BELT BUCKLE UNKNOWN SUB. They did look alike, but only sort of. No way would they stand up in court as proof of anything, especially if a bulldog defense attorney like Howie Gold challenged them. Ralph was not in court, however, and he thought the same unsub had made them both, because it fit with what he’d learned from Marcy Maitland the night before. Not a perfect fit, no, but close enough for a detective on administrative leave who didn’t have to run everything by his superiors . . . or by a district attorney hellbent for election.
While Yune ate his huevos rancheros, Ralph told him about his meeting with Marcy, holding back one thing for later.
“It’s all about the van,” he finished. “Forensics may find a few prints from the kid who originally stole it—”
“Already did. We had Merlin Cassidy’s prints from the El Paso police. Computer guy matched them to some of the stray prints in the van—mostly on the toolbox, which Cassidy must have opened to see if there was anything valuable inside. They’re clear, and they’re not these.” He swiped back to the blurry UNSUB prints, labeled VAN and BELT BUCKLE.
Ralph leaned forward, pushing his plate aside. “You see how it dovetails, don’t you? We know it wasn’t Terry who stole the van in Dayton, because the Maitlands flew home. But if the blurry prints from the van and those from the buckle really are the same . . .”
“You think he had an accomplice, after all. One who drove the van from Dayton to Flint City.”
“Must have,” Ralph said. “No other way to explain it.”
“One who looked just like him?”
“Back to that,” Ralph said, and sighed.
“And both sets of prints were on the buckle,” Yune pushed on. “Meaning Maitland and his double wore the same belt, maybe the whole set of clothes. Well, they’d fit, wouldn’t they? Twin brothers, separated at birth. Except the records say Terry Maitland was an only child.”
“What else have you got? Anything?”
“Yes. We have arrived at the really weird shit.” He brought his chair around and sat next to Ralph. The picture now on his iPad showed a close-up of the jeans, socks, underpants, and sneakers, all in an untidy pile, next to a plastic evidence-marker with a 1 on it. “See the stains?”
“Yes. What is that crap?”
“I don’t know,” Yune said. “And the forensics guys don’t, either, but one of them said it looked like jizz, and I sort of agree with that. You can’t see it in the picture very well, but—”
“Semen? Are you kidding?”
The waitress came back. Ralph turned the iPad screen side down.
“Either of you gents want a refill on the coffee?”
They both took one. When she left, Ralph went back to the photo of the clothes, spreading his fingers on the screen to enlarge the image.
“Yune, it’s on the crotch of the jeans, all down both legs, on the cuffs . . .”
“Also on the underpants and socks,” Yune said. “Not to mention the sneakers, both on em and in em, dried to a nice crack-glaze, like on pottery. Might be enough of the stuff, whatever it is, to fill a hollow nine iron.”
Ralph didn’t laugh. “It can’t be semen. Even John Holmes in his prime—”
“I know. And semen doesn’t do this.”
He swiped the screen. The new picture was a wide shot of the barn floor. Another evidence tab, this one marked 2, had been placed next to a pile of loose hay. At least Ralph thought it was hay. On the far left side of the photo, evidence tab 3 had been placed atop a softly collapsing bale that looked like it had been there for a long, long time. Much of it was black. The side of the bale was also black, as if some corrosive goo had run down it to the floor.
“Is it the same stuff?” Ralph asked. “You’re sure?”
“Ninety per cent. And there’s more in the loft. If it’s semen, that would be a nocturnal emission worthy of The Guinness Book of Records.”
“Can’t be,” Ralph said, low. “It’s something else. For one thing, semen wouldn’t turn hay black. It makes no sense.”
“Not to me, either, but of course I am just the son of a poor Mexican farming family.”
“Forensics is analyzing it, though.”
Yune nodded. “As we speak.”
“And you’ll let me know.”
“Yes. You see what I meant when I said this just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”