Identification Division flew in the Latent Fingerprints section chief, Paul Collins, to assist the Phoenix P.D. crime lab in the tedious procedure.
Collins, an East Coast native who thought of Arizona as cow country and the local constabulary as rubes, was pleasantly astonished to find an argon laser at his disposal, along with cyanoacrylate fuming cabinets, iodine fume guns, and gentian violet baths. By the end of the assignment, he was humming “My Darling Clementine” and considering retirement in the Grand Canyon State.
One hundred forty-six latents were recovered. It took three days to run cold searches on them all, using a modem link between the Phoenix P.D. computer and the FBI’s FINDER system, a database of eighty-three million prints. FINDER did the gross preliminary work, but the final, subtle matching had to be done by visual comparison, a time-consuming process.
Lovejoy and Moore stayed busy while the print searches progressed. Lovejoy flew home to brief the Denver SAC and wound up in a conference call with a deputy director and the Behavioral Science section chief. He appeased the media with a thirty-minute briefing in which he conveyed the impression of speaking substantively while actually saying nothing at all. He made no mention of the massive fingerprinting procedure already well underway.
Moore read a transcript of the news conference and felt a familiar blend of irritation and bemusement. She knew that Peter was good at what he did, a competent agent and a decent man, but he was too willing to play the game on others’ terms, to stifle his own personality in a numbing quest for blandness. Fundamentally he was weak, crippled by insecurity; and a hard life had taught her to despise softness of any kind.
In Phoenix she kept the other members of the task force updated by phone, fax, and e-mail. She was dealing with police departments in three cities, sheriff’s offices in three counties, and the FBI field office in each of the states where a killing had occurred. The logistics were maddening.
Most of the effort was wasted anyhow. So far there was little news to report, as she informed Lovejoy when he called. “Ashe’s people interviewed the two waitresses at the bar; they don’t remember Veronica or her date. Her car has been dusted. Smooth glove prints on the passenger-side door handle.”
“Evidently he wore gloves, as usual.” Exhaustion dragged Lovejoy’s voice down.
“Of course he did. There were some viable latents in the car that don’t belong to the deceased. For elimination purposes Phoenix P.D. is printing Veronica’s friends, neighbors, coworkers, anyone who might have ridden with her. But we both know he doesn’t leave prints.”
“How about the autopsy protocols?”
“Just delivered. No sign of anal or oral intercourse, but penile-vaginal contact is certain. Penetration was postmortem and rough. No semen was found; he’s careful, used a condom.”
“As usual,” Lovejoy said again. “He doesn’t seem to give us much to go on, does he?”
“You got that right.”
“Well”-Lovejoy tried to sound hopeful-“possibly the bar angle will pan out.”
“Speaking of which, Wally Stargill spent two hours with an Identikit artist and gave us a vague but not totally useless sketch.”
“I know. I received the fax. But Drury wants to keep it out of the media for now. If the prints don’t come through, we’ll probably have to release it. Until then, the policy is to indicate no hint of any progress,
nothing to make him cut and run. Have to go, my other line’s buzzing. I expect to be back in Phoenix tomorrow, first thing in the A.M.”
“Stay healthy.”
Lovejoy sneezed. “Easy for you to say.”
Each night Tamara caught a few hours of troubled sleep in her hotel room. When bad dreams woke her- dreams of a man with a honey-smooth voice and a vial of poison in his pocket-she would stand on the balcony, gazing at the downtown skyline under a canopy of stars.
There had been no stars above the Oakland slums where she was raised. No men with poison either-at least not Mister Twister’s kind of poison. Other varieties were easy enough to come by. She saw friends try some and get hooked, saw conscientious students become burnouts and bums. Every day meant running a gauntlet of proffered drugs. It took a heroic effort just to stay clean.
Her looks didn’t help. The other girls envied her, called her Miss America and Charlie’s Angel; but Tamara passed many angry hours wishing she had been born plain. Her face and figure made her an irresistible object of seduction for every strutting gangbanger, every pimp or aspiring pimp plying fantasies of a modeling career, and every one of her mother’s boyfriends-men who could barely wait for Doreen Moore to leave the room before hitting on her daughter.
At night, through the cellophane-thin bedroom wall, she would hear her mom and her current paramour shaking the mattress springs and grunting; and she would wonder if the man was thinking of sweet little Tamara as he did it, if it was her breasts he imagined himself kissing, her legs that were spread for him in invitation. Even the thought of it would leave her dizzy with nausea.
She survived, though. Fought off the pushers and pimps and priapic older men, graduated as class valedictorian, attended U.C. Irvine on a full scholarship, and ended up somehow at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, learning to be a G-man or a G-woman or whatever the hell she was.
Tamara sighed. The dry, balmy night air brushed her cheeks and reminded her of how far she’d come from Oakland. No chill morning fog creeping in off the bay to carpet the littered streets in a shimmering ground cover, not here. This was the desert, an environment alien to her, a Martian waste of leafless plants and chalk-dry riverbeds, flat and arid and brutally hot. Not her sort of place, but there were some who loved it.
Had Ronni Tyler been one of them? Had she awakened at night to study the stars, or risen before dawn to watch the pink glow of sunrise brighten the encircling mountains?
Ronni’s roommate, interviewed by the police and FBI on the day of her return from Santa Fe, had said something funny about her friend. “Ronni-cripes, she was just a small-town girl at heart, but she didn’t know it. She kept looking for something more, something bigger, better, than what she had. That was the thing with her. There always had to be something better… somewhere.”
Tamara had known the same need. Huddled under her blankets in her mom’s apartment in the projects, listening to the rattle and squeak of the bed next door, she had made herself believe that there was something better somewhere. That there had to be.
She had found it, too. An exciting life, a job that challenged and satisfied.
But Ronni Tyler hadn’t made it that far. Now she never would.
Alone on the balcony, unseen in the dark, Tamara cried a little, in memory of a woman she had never met, in mourning for a stranger.
She cried, and the thirsty air licked the dampness from her cheeks.
“Collins just called,” Lovejoy reported as Moore walked into their borrowed office on the morning of the fourth day. They were encamped in a hastily furnished storage room in the FBI’s Phoenix field office. Photos of the President and the Director gazed down on them, one smiling, the other stern.
She tossed her purse on the chipped Formica desk top and tried her best to be calm. “Search over?”
“As of approximately an hour ago.”
“Results?”
“Thirteen hits.” Lovejoy consulted his scrawled notes. “Four are women. Of the nine men, six would seem to be disqualified because of age, race, or body build. In all probability, the bartender’s description rules them out.”
“The remaining three?” She heard the excitement in her voice, straining against the short leash of her self- control.
“Michael Benjamin Garrett, resident of Scottsdale, one arrest for reckless driving.”
She shook her head. “Unlikely, since he’s a local. Our man travels.”
“Noted. Paul Thomas Squire, Chicago, two arrests on battery charges.”
“Interesting.”
Could it be him? Could Paul Thomas Squire be Mister Twister? Could the nightmare have ended at last?
“They were bar fights,” Lovejoy said slowly. “He would appear to be a brawler.”
