Once her coat and boots were off, she flicked on all the lights in her small apartment and got the gas fire cranked. She changed into warm leggings and pulled on a fleece sweater, thick socks, and her Ugg boots. Even so, cold seemed to linger inside her bones, as though a dank chill had crawled out of the shadows of her past at the hospital yesterday and burrowed into her very core, and it was not going to go away until she found answers.
After wiping down her dining room table with a bleach cleaner, Angie covered the surface with a shroud of heavy-duty plastic sheeting—she’d picked up the roll at the hardware store along with four-by-four-foot melamine sheets, a glue gun, and a pack of colored markers. Ideally, the case file boxes should be opened in a lab or in a similarly sterile environment in case they contained biological evidence that was still viable. Proper evidence-handling procedures should be followed. But chain of custody had long been broken. Arnold Voight, according to his widow, had opened the boxes on more than one occasion in his home. He or his surviving family members could have introduced any number of contaminants. The boxes had also been stored in a basement, which could have been damp. So whatever evidence these boxes might contain, it was unlikely to be admissible in court.
However, if she did discover evidence that could be retested, it might steer her toward new clues, something that could be used in court. And yeah, she was thinking like a cop here—not only did she want answers, but she also wanted legal retribution. A wrong had been done to that little Jane Doe—to herself. Men with guns had chased a young woman with long dark hair across the street in the snow—a woman who might be her mother. Jane Doe’s face had been sliced, blood all over the place, semen stains on a sweater left with the kid. Shots had been fired. Witnesses had heard tires screeching, possibly from a van that had fled the scene with the woman being held captive. Or dead.
If Angie could draw any consolation from what she’d learned so far, it appeared that the dark-haired young woman had been desperately trying to save the child. The woman had cared.
Angie had not been abandoned—she’d been protected from the bad men.
Once the plastic sheeting had been secured around the table legs, she stepped back and examined her work. Her incident room was taking shape. She hefted the boxes from their place at door and set them upon the prepped table surface. Boxes in place, she proceeded to denude one wall in her living room of framed photographs and a painting. Working carefully yet swiftly, Angie used the heated glue gun to affix the white melamine sheets to the bare wall, creating a giant dry-erase crime scene board. It might be a bugger to remove these sheets later, but she wasn’t thinking about later.
While the glue was drying, she shunted her desk and computer up against the adjoining wall. Firing up her desktop, she opened the file in which she’d saved the few online articles that she’d managed to locate on the angel’s cradle child from 1986. Her goal was to make more trips to the mainland, where she would start by visiting the Vancouver library archives in search of possible microfilm copies of all the newspapers from that period.
Those articles could yield potential leads, give her the names of photographers and journalists who’d covered the story, names of the publishers and editors of the time, possible witnesses. Also an option was approaching the television stations and newspapers directly in search of archived material, but she wanted to tread very carefully before approaching any journalist types. They’d smell a story on her. She was not ready to become the news. Again.
Especially not now that she was walking on thin career ice after the Spencer Addams shooting.
Angie connected her digital camera to her desktop and downloaded the photographs she’d shot outside the hospital and cathedral. She selected a couple and hit PRINT. She then clicked open an image that she’d saved from one of the online articles—the sketch artist’s rendering of Janie Doe. The caption beneath the image read, DO YOU KNOW THIS CHILD?
She hit PRINT.
While her printer hummed, Angie checked her whiteboard sheets. They felt secure—the glue was dry enough. At the top of her board, in bold black letters, she scrawled, ANGEL’S CRADLE CASE ’86. Under the header she copied the case ID that the VPD had used on Voight’s boxes: JANE DOE SAINT PETERS #930155697–2.
Beneath the case number she stuck the sketch artist’s image of Janie Doe. Beside the sketch, Angie pasted the fading Kodak print that Jenny Marsden had given her. Next she added the images she’d shot outside the hospital.
She took a step back and absorbed the visual effect, the case now feeling tangible. Real. It channeled her focus.
Her own bruised face from thirty-two years ago looked back at her. Angie touched the scar across her lip.
Who are you, Janie Doe? What did those eyes of yours see that was so bad that you can no longer remember?
Angie shook herself, snapped on a pair of crime scene gloves, and picked up her camera. She returned to the table and shot several angles of the sealed boxes, ensuring that she captured the file numbers. She was going to document every step of this very personal investigation.
The term cold case was controversial, Angie knew. It gave the impression that unsolved cases were unworkable. But a cold case was just a concept—there was no one standard definition. It was simply a case that had been reported to law enforcement and investigated, but either due to insufficient evidence or a lack of strong suspects, no one had been arrested and charged. And because of the passage of time, a lack of fresh leads, pressures on municipalities and police departments for higher solve rates, those cases were no longer being actively pursued by investigators.
But where time was your enemy . . . She set down her camera and reached for a box cutter. Time is now your friend.
Conventional wisdom held that if a homicide was not solved within the first twenty-four to seventy-two hours, then the chances of solving that case begin to diminish rapidly. The reasons for this were obvious: The opportunity to retrieve uncontaminated evidence was strongest at the outset. Witnesses were still centrally located, their recollection of events fresh. They were also less likely to have had opportunity to get stories and alibis straight among themselves.
However, over the years, as Jenny Marsden had noted, relationships between people involved in a crime could change considerably. Witnesses once afraid to come forward might no longer be reluctant to talk. And with the leaps that had been made in forensic science since the late eighties, minute amounts of trace that once might have yielded nothing could now be tested for DNA. The old hard-copy tenprint fingerprint card system had also been revolutionized with the advent of digitalized friction-ridge imaging systems—digital scans of prints were now stored in automated print identification databases to which new files were constantly being added.