“Then an expert would catch it every time?”
“No, unfortunately. I remember they did a test once to check that very thing. About half the time the forensics folks thought a forgery was a real print and a real print was a forgery. I don’t like those odds.”
“Gee, that’s a little unsettling, particularly for someone like me who got wrongly convicted. Was there anything dicey about Hawkins’s print at the crime scene?”
Decker shook his head. “And I checked it very closely. And we had another expert who I trusted come in at the time and do the same thing. He could find nothing that would lead him to believe it was forged.”
“Then Hawkins had to be there.”
“It seems so. But if he was, how could he be innocent? And if he was there and didn’t kill them, he would know who did, presumably. Why didn’t he finger that person after he was arrested?”
“I give,” said Mars.
“He could have come upon the bodies after they were dead. He could have been the one to call 911 at nine-thirty-five and then gotten the hell out of Dodge, although that leaves open the question of why we couldn’t trace the call.”
“So how did the murder weapon turn up at his house behind the wall?”
“Someone planted it there to frame him.”
“Okay.”
Decker shook his head. “No, it’s not okay. If he happened upon the bodies after the real killer had left, how did the killer know to frame Hawkins?”
“Maybe he knew Hawkins was going to break into the house that night. Maybe that’s why he killed them that night, because he knew Hawkins was planning to be there later. So he planted the DNA on the girl and then Hawkins hit that light switch himself, adding even more evidence against him.” After he finished speaking, Mars smiled. “How’s that theory?”
“You make some good points, Melvin. It doesn’t explain everything, but it’s still an interesting theory we have to explore.”
“And it would explain the time discrepancy too,” noted Mars as he sipped his coffee. “And Hawkins would have to describe something weird going on to get the cops to come out. He knew the people had been shot and had probably screamed when they were, so that’s what he told the police dispatcher he heard, even though he couldn’t have.”
Decker nodded and forked some eggs into his mouth. The memories of his discovering his murdered family had finally stopped unspooling in his head at around four in the morning. He had come back to the room and gone right to the bathroom and stripped off his soaked clothes. That’s when Mars had heard him retching in there, but he’d lied and told him he was fine.
But will it happen again?
He said, “So how did Hawkins get those scratches on his arms? He had to realize that the DNA taken from his arms was planted under Abigail’s nails. Yet he never raised that as a defense. He never said a person had scratched him and presumably gotten his DNA that way. He maintained that he had slipped and injured himself. Even though naming the person might have raised reasonable doubt in the jury’s minds.”
“You think he was protecting somebody?”
“Possibly.”
“You have anybody in mind?”
“Yes, I do.”
Chapter 35
SHE DID NOT LOOK REMOTELY PLEASED to see him again.
“I’m going out now,” Mitzi Gardiner said from the partially open front door of her beautiful home.
She was dressed immaculately in a pleated skirt, nylons, and low-heeled pumps. Her white blouse had an open collar. Around her neck was a string of small pearls. She had a dark, short-waisted jacket on over the blouse. Her hair had not a strand out of place. Her makeup and lipstick looked professionally applied. She could be presiding over a board meeting at a Fortune 500 company.
“We can wait then or come back another time,” said Decker, who was once more struck by her transformation from an emaciated and perpetually strung-out drug addict. “But it won’t take long if you can make the time now.”
She eyed him and then Mars, who smiled pleasantly back at her.
She frowned and looked at her watch. “I can give you five minutes.”
She led them through the house and into a book-lined library. She closed the doors behind them and indicated seats. They quickly sat down on a small couch.
She sat down across from them.
“Well?” she said, staring at him.
He said, “Thanks for agreeing to see us now.”
“Five minutes,” she said. “Then I have a meeting I need to get to. An important one.”
Decker cleared his throat. The questioning would have to be delicate. It was hard because his preferred approach was to figuratively grab a suspect by the neck with a line of queries.
“We’re running down some leads and it occurred to us that your father might have been framed.”
Gardiner sat back and looked coolly at him. “So you intimated on your last visit. And I told you that you were barking up the wrong tree, if you remember.”
“By the way, when I left here to drive back to Burlington after speaking with you before, someone tried to kill me.”
She sat up, looking genuinely shocked. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.”
“No, not at all. I just wanted you to know because you may want to be on your guard.”
“Thank you for your warning. But I carry a gun with me when I’m out.”
“Really, why is that?”
“Because I’m wealthy, Agent Decker. And people who aren’t want to take things away from you. I know that better than most, having once been on the other side of the glass looking in.”
“Have you had problems with that in the past?”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with your investigation.” She tapped her watch. “And the clock is running on your time to question me.”
Decker plunged in. “There is a substantial time discrepancy in what happened thirteen years ago. That has changed my understanding of the case.”
“What time discrepancy? And why didn’t someone see it back then?”
“It was just overlooked. But the time of the victims’ deaths and the 911 call to police? It doesn’t make sense.”
She sat back. “All right. I guess I’ll take your word for that. But why would that cause you to come to see me?”
“Your father had scratches on his arms. The police concluded that those scratches were caused by Abigail Richards fighting for her life while your father strangled her.”
“Do we really have to go through this?” she said irritably.
“When your father was arrested, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket over it.”
“So what?”
“If he was wearing that while attacking Abigail some hours earlier, how could she have scratched his arms and gotten his DNA under her skin? Her nails wouldn’t have penetrated his clothing, even if she did manage to somehow break the skin. There would have been no transfer of DNA.”
“I’m not a detective, so I don’t know. Maybe he changed clothes between the time of the attack and when he was picked up.”
“But he hadn’t been home.”