“It’s him, isn’t it?” Samuels said. “It’s Holmes. Watching them.”
Yune nodded. “That clerk was the last person to report seeing Amber and Jolene alive. But at least one more camera picked them up.”
He clicked, and another photo from another surveillance camera came up on the screen at the front of the conference room. This one had its electronic eye trained on an island of gas pumps. The time-code in the corner said 12:19 PM, April 23rd. Holly thought this must be the photo her nurse informant had mentioned. Candy Wilson had guessed that the vehicle in it was probably Holmes’s truck, a Chevy Tahoe that was “all fancied up,” but she had been wrong. The picture showed Heath Holmes in mid-stride, returning to a panel truck with DAYTON LANDSCAPING & POOLS printed on the side. His gas presumably paid for, he was returning to the vehicle with a soda in each hand. Leaning out the driver’s side window to take them was Amber, the older of the two Howard girls.
“When was that truck stolen?” Ralph asked.
“April 14th,” Yune said.
“He stashed it until he was ready. Which means this was a planned crime.”
“It would seem so, yes.”
Jeannie said, “And those girls just . . . got in with him?”
Yune shrugged. “Again, no victim-blaming—you can’t blame a couple of kids this young for making bad choices—but this picture does suggest they were with him willingly, at least to start with. Mrs. Howard told Sergeant Highsmith that the older girl made a habit of ‘hooking rides’ when she wanted to go someplace, even though she was told repeatedly it was dangerous behavior.”
Holly thought the two surveillance photos told a simple story. The outsider had seen the girls refused service at the beer-and-grocery, and offered to get them their sodas and candy a little bit further along, when he gassed up. After that, he might have told them he’d take them home or wherever else they might want to go. Just a nice guy helping out a couple of girls playing hooky—hell, he’d been young once himself.
“Holmes was next seen a little after six PM,” Yune resumed. “This was in a Waffle House on the outskirts of Dayton. He had blood on his face, hands, and shirt. He told the waitress and the short-order cook that he’d had a bloody nose, and washed up in the men’s. When he came out, he ordered some food to go. As he left, the cook and the waitress saw he also had spots of blood on the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants, which made his story seem a little less likely, being as how most people have their noses on in front. The waitress took down his plate number and called the police. They both later picked Holmes out of a six-pack. Hard to mistake that auburn hair.”
“Still driving the panel truck when he stopped at the Waffle House?” Ralph asked.
“Uh-huh. It was found abandoned in the Regis municipal parking lot shortly after the girls were found. There was a lot of blood in the back, his fingerprints and the girls’ fingerprints all over everything. Some in blood. Again, the resemblance to the Frank Peterson killing is very strong. Striking, in fact.”
“How close to his house in Regis was this panel truck found?” Holly asked.
“Less than half a mile. Police theorize he dumped it, strolled home, changed out of his bloody clothes, and cooked Mama a nice supper. The police got a hit on the fingerprints almost right away, but it took them a couple of days to cut through the red tape and get a name.”
“Because Holmes’s one bust, the joyriding thing, happened when he was still legally a minor,” Ralph said.
“Sí, se?or. On April 26th, Holmes went in to the Heisman Memory Unit. When the lady in charge—Mrs. June Kelly—asked him what he was doing there during his vacation, he said he had to get something out of his locker, and he thought he’d check on a couple of patients while he was there. This struck her a bit odd, because while the nurses do have lockers, the orderlies only have these plastic cubby things in the break room. Also, orderlies are told from the jump that the correct word when referring to the paying clientele is residents, and Holmes usually just called them his guys and gals. All friendly-like. Anyway, one of the guys he checked on that day was Terry Maitland’s father, and the police found blond hairs in the man’s bathroom. Hairs that forensics matched to Jolene Howard’s.”
“Pretty goddam convenient,” Ralph said. “Did nobody suggest it might be a plant?”
“The way the evidence kept stacking up, they just assumed he was careless or wanted to be caught,” Yune said. “The panel truck, the fingerprints, the surveillance photos . . . girls’ underpants found in the basement . . . and finally the icing on the cake, a DNA match. Cheek swabs taken in custody matched semen the perp left at the scene.”
“My God,” Bill Samuels said. “It really is déjà vu all over again.”
“With one big exception,” Yune said. “Heath Holmes wasn’t lucky enough to get filmed at a lecture that happened to be going on at the same time the Howard girls were being abducted and murdered. His mother swore he had been in Regis the whole time, said he’d never gone in to the Heisman, and he certainly hadn’t gone to Trotwood. ‘Why would he?’ she said. ‘It’s a shitty town full of shitty people.’?”
“Her testimony would have cut zero ice with a jury,” Samuels said. “Hey, if your mom won’t lie for you, who will?”
“Other people in the neighborhood saw him during his vacation week,” Yune went on. “He cut his mother’s grass, he fixed her gutters, he painted the stoop, and he helped the lady across the street plant some flowers. This was on the same day the Howard girls were taken. Also, that tricked-out truck of his was kind of hard to miss when he was driving around and doing errands.”
Howie asked, “The lady across the street, could she place him with her anywhere near the time those two girls were killed?”
“She said around ten in the morning. Close to an alibi, but no cigar. Regis is a lot nearer to Trotwood than Flint is to Cap City. Cops theorized that as soon as he finished helping the neighbor with her petunias or whatever, he drove to the municipal lot, swapped his Tahoe for the panel truck, and went hunting.”
“Terry was luckier than Mr. Holmes,” Marcy said, looking first at Ralph and then at Bill Samuels. Ralph met her gaze; Samuels either could not or would not. “Just not lucky enough.”
Yune said, “I’ve got one more thing—another piece of the puzzle, Ms. Gibney would say—but I’m going to save it until Ralph recaps the Maitland investigation, both pro and con.”
Ralph made short work of this, speaking in concise sentences, as if testifying in court. He made a point of telling them what Claude Bolton had told him—that Terry had nicked him with a fingernail while shaking his hand. After telling them about the discovery of the clothes out in Canning Township—pants, underwear, socks, sneakers, but no shirt—he circled back to the man he’d seen on the courthouse steps. He said he wasn’t certain that the man had been using the shirt Terry had been wearing at the Dubrow train station to cover his presumably scarred and hairless head, but he believed that it could have been.
“There must have been TV coverage at the courthouse,” Holly said. “Have you checked it?”
Ralph and Lieutenant Sablo exchanged a look.
“We did,” Ralph said, “but that man’s not there. Not in any of the footage.”
There was a general stirring, and Jeannie was holding his arm again—clutching it, really. Ralph gave her hand a reassuring pat, but he was looking at the woman who had flown here from Dayton. Holly didn’t look puzzled. She looked satisfied.
6