What about the witnesses, Ralph? Three teachers who knew him for years.
Never mind them. Think about the DNA. Solid evidence. The most solid there is.
In the movie, Montresor had been undone by a black cat he had inadvertently entombed with his victim. Its yowling had alerted visitors to the wine cellar. The cat, Ralph supposed, was just another metaphor: the voice of the killer’s own conscience. Only sometimes a cigar was just a smoke and a cat was just a cat. There was no reason to keep remembering Terry’s dying eyes, or Terry’s dying declaration. As Samuels had said, his wife had been kneeling there beside him when he went, holding his hand.
Ralph sat on his workbench, feeling very tired for a man who’d done nothing more than mow a modest patch of backyard lawn. The images of those final minutes leading up to the shooting would not leave him. The car alarm. The unlovely sneer of the blond anchor when she saw she had been bloodied—probably just a small cut, but good for ratings. The burned man with the tattoos on his hands. The boy with the cleft lip. The sun picking out complicated constellations of mica embedded in the sidewalk. The girl’s yellow bra strap, flipping up and down. That most of all. It seemed to want to lead somewhere else, but sometimes a bra strap was just a bra strap.
“And a man can’t be two places at the same time,” he muttered.
“Ralph? Are you talking to yourself?”
He started and looked up. It was Jeannie, standing in the doorway.
“I must be, because there’s no one else here.”
“I am,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Not really,” he said, and then told her about Fred Peterson. She sagged visibly.
“My God. That finishes that family. Unless he recovers.”
“They’re finished whether he recovers or not.” Ralph got to his feet. “I’ll go down to the station a little later, take a look at that scrap of paper. Menu or whatever it is.”
“Shower first. You smell like oil and grass.”
He made a smile and gave her a salute. “Yes, sir.”
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Ralph? You’ll get through this. You will. Trust me.”
8
There were plenty of things Ralph didn’t know about administrative leave, never having been on it before. One was whether or not he was even allowed in the cop shop. With that in mind he waited until mid-afternoon to go there, because the daily pulse of the station was slowest then. When he arrived, there was no one in the big main room except for Stephanie Gould, still in civvies, filling out reports on one of the old PCs the city council kept promising to replace, and Sandy McGill at the dispatch desk, reading People. Chief Geller’s office was empty.
“Hey, Detective,” Stephanie said, looking up. “What are you doing here? I heard you were on paid vacation.”
“Trying to stay occupied.”
“I could help you with that,” she said, and patted the stack of files beside her computer.
“Maybe another time.”
“I’m sorry about the way things went down. We all are.”
“Thanks.”
He went to the dispatch desk and asked Sandy for the key to the evidence room. She gave it to him without hesitation, hardly looking up from her magazine. Hanging from a hook beside the evidence room door was a clipboard and a ballpoint. Ralph thought about skipping the sign-in, then went ahead and entered name, date, and time: 1530 hours. No choice, really, when both Gould and McGill knew he was here and why he’d come. If anyone asked about what he’d wanted to look at, he would flat-out tell them. It was administrative leave he was on, after all, not a suspension.
The room, not much bigger than a closet, was hot and stuffy. The overhead fluorescent bars flickered. Like the ancient PCs, they needed to be replaced. Flint City, aided by federal dollars, made sure the PD had all the weaponry it needed, and more. So what if the infrastructure was falling apart?
Had Frank Peterson’s murder been committed back when Ralph first came on the force, there might have been four boxes of Maitland evidence, maybe even half a dozen, but the computer age had done wonders for compression, and today there were only two, plus the toolbox that had been in the back of the van. That had contained the standard array of wrenches, hammers, and screwdrivers. Terry’s prints had been on none of the tools, nor on the box itself. To Ralph that suggested that the toolbox had been in the van when it was stolen, and Terry had never examined the contents after stealing the van for his own purposes.
One of the evidence boxes was marked MAITLAND HOME. The second box was labeled VAN/SUBARU. This was the one Ralph wanted. He cut the tape. No reason not to, with Terry dead.
After a brief hunt, he came up with a plastic evidence bag containing the scrap of paper he remembered. It was blue, and roughly triangular. At the top, in bold black letters, was TOMMY AND TUP. Whatever came after TUP was gone. In the upper corner was a little drawing of a pie, with steam rising from its crust. Although Ralph hadn’t remembered that specifically, it must have been the reason he’d thought this scrap had been part of a take-out menu. What had Jeannie said when they were talking early this morning? I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of. If it was true, Ralph would have given a fair amount of money to get hold of the one lurking behind that yellow bra strap. Because there was one, he was almost sure of it.
Another thing he was almost sure of was how this scrap had happened to be lying on the van’s floor. Someone had put menus under the windshield wipers of all the vehicles in the area where the van had been parked. The driver—maybe the kid who’d stolen it in New York, maybe whoever had stolen it after the kid dumped it—had torn it off rather than just lifting the wiper, leaving that triangular corner. The driver hadn’t noticed then, but once he was rolling, he would have. Maybe he’d reached around and pulled it free, dropping it on the floor instead of just letting it fly away. Possibly because he wasn’t a litterbug by nature, just a thief. Possibly because there’d been a cop car behind him, and he hadn’t wanted to do anything, not even a little thing, that might attract attention. It was even possible that he’d tried to throw it out the window, and a vagary of wind had blown it right back into the cab. Ralph had investigated road accidents, one of them quite nasty, where that had happened with cigarette butts.
He took his notebook from his back pocket—carrying it was second nature, administrative leave or not—and printed TOMMY AND TUP on a blank sheet. He replaced the VAN/SUBARU box on the shelf it had come from, left the evidence room (not neglecting to jot down his out time), and re-locked the door. When he gave the key back to Sandy, he held his notebook open in front of her. She glanced up from the latest adventures of Jennifer Aniston to glance at it.
“Mean anything to you?”
“Nope.”
She went back to her mag. Ralph went to Officer Gould, who was still entering hard copy info into some database and swearing under her breath when she hit a wrong key, which seemed to be often. She glanced at his notebook.
“Tup is old-timey British slang for screwing, I think—as in ‘I tupped me girlfriend last night, mate’—but I can’t think of anything else. Is it important?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”