“Means nothing,” Samuels protested. “People said the same things about Ted Bundy.”
Yune continued. “Holmes told co-workers he planned to spend his one-week vacation with his mother in Regis, a small town thirty miles north of Dayton and Trotwood. Midway through his vacation week, the bodies of the Howard girls were discovered by a postman on his delivery rounds. The guy saw a huge flock of crows congregated at a ravine about a mile from the Howard home, and stopped to investigate. Given what he found, he probably wishes he hadn’t.”
He clicked, and two little blond girls replaced Heath Holmes’s squint and stubble. The photo had been taken at a carnival or an amusement park; Holly could see a Tilt-a-Whirl in the background. Amber and Jolene were smiling and holding up cones of cotton candy like prizes.
“No victim-blaming here, but the Howard girls were a handful. Alcoholic mother, father not in the picture, low-income home in a lousy neighborhood. The school had them tabbed as ‘at-risk students,’ and they had skipped out on several occasions. Which they did on Monday, April 23rd, at about ten in the morning. It was Amber’s free period, and Jolene said she had to use the bathroom, so they probably planned it in advance.”
“Escape from Alcatraz,” Bill Samuels said.
Nobody laughed.
Yune continued. “They were seen shortly before noon in a little beer-and-grocery about five blocks from the school. This is a still, taken from the store’s surveillance camera.”
The black-and-white image was crisp and clear—like something out of an old film noir, Holly thought. She stared at the two towheads, one with a couple of sodas and the other with a couple of candybars. They were dressed in jeans and tees. Neither looked pleased; the girl with the candybars was pointing, her mouth wide open and her brow furrowed.
“The clerk knew they were supposed to be in school and wouldn’t sell to them,” Yune said.
“No kidding,” Howie said. “You can almost hear the older one giving him hell.”
“True,” Yune said, “but that’s not the interesting part. Check out the upper right corner of the picture. On the sidewalk and looking in the window. Here, I’ll zoom it a little.”
Marcy murmured something very softly. It might have been Christ.
“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, señor. 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.’ ”