Gayleen and Fanny surveyed the activity, their fears mounting when they glimpsed Rhonda down the hall in the bedroom talking to two men in suits taking notes. Something worse, much worse, than a burglary had happened.
“What’s going on?” Fanny asked.
“A police investigation. We need your sons to help us,” Grace said.
“Help with what?” Gayleen asked.
“We need to speak to them privately about what they may have seen in the park the other day. We need to do it as quickly as possible.”
“Why, what happened in the park? What does this concern?” Fanny said. “Why won’t you tell us? You are going to frighten our boys. Where’s Brady?”
Grace nodded to Officers Lloyd and Vossek.
“Mrs. Taylor, Mrs. Marshall,” Lloyd said. “If you’d please come with us, we’ll explain.”
Grace and Perelli took the boys to the backyard, where they sat at a picnic table.
“Guys, you’re not in trouble, okay? We need your help,” Grace said. “This is extremely important. Do you remember going to the park with Brady the other day?”
“We go every day,” Ryan said.
“Do you recall a time recently where Brady talked to anyone, like a stranger, or a man at the park?”
“A couple days ago, there was a guy, some stranger,” Ryan said.
“Do you know him?”
Head shakes.
“What did he look like? Black guy, white guy? Tall? Fat? Tattoos?”
“White guy.”
“Old? Young?”
“Maybe like him”-Justin pointed at Perelli-“only skinnier.”
“And we saw him hanging around and stuff before,” Ryan said.
“When before?”
“A couple of days ago, I guess.”
“Something bad happened, didn’t it?” Justin asked.
Grace glanced at Kay Cataldo working at the window.
“Guys, what was the stranger doing in the park?”
“Sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper,” Justin said.
“And drinking coffee,” Ryan said.
“Drinking coffee? Like in a take-out cup?”
“I think so.”
“Want to go for a short ride in a detective car?” Grace said.
A few minutes later, they stood before the park bench where the stranger had sat.
The trash basket beside it was half-filled. Grace squatted, concentrating on the dates she saw on the discarded newspapers. The trash had not been emptied for several days.
“Guys, you said he was drinking coffee from a take-out cup.”
“He was drinking from that one,” Ryan said.
“Come closer, show me without touching.”
Ryan pulled his face to the trash, pointing to the red, white, and blue take-out cup under the plastic take-out bag.
Perelli and Grace exchanged glances.
It was the only red, white, and blue take-out cup in the trash.
“Are you sure, Ryan?”
“Yes, I saw him crumple it before he left.”
Grace was making notes.
“Did you see if he got into a car, or where he went?”
Justin and Ryan shook their heads.
“Can you remember, Ryan, was the man wearing gloves?”
“No gloves.”
Dial tones sounded. Perelli had turned away to call Kay Cataldo to get to their location fast.
“Uhm,” Justin said, “what happened to Brady?”
Grace looked at the boys.
“We’re working on that.”
Grace turned back to the cup, pulling it out carefully and holding it as if it were the Holy Grail.
“And this cup may give us the answer.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
T his is it, baby.
At her table in the Seattle Police Crime Scene Investigation Unit near the airport, Kay Cataldo examined the take-out coffee cup plucked from the trash in the park near Brady Boland’s home.
She worked on it with near reverence because she knew, knew deep in her heart, that they had something. The cup was abundant with wonderfully clear latents.
Grace was bang-on. This was their Holy Grail.
It was the cup used by the Boland boy’s kidnapper, who wore the shoes worn by Sister Anne’s and Sharla May Forrest’s killer. He’d left a nice size-11 impression under the Bolands’ back window.
Thank you.
We are so on to you, you mother-
Cataldo had dusted and photographed the prints with an old reliable CU-5, before collecting them with lifting tape. She had a complete and crisp set of impressions from the right hand.
She studied the loops, whorls, and arches.
Very good.
Time was her enemy.
She worked quickly but with expert efficiency, beginning with the thumb, which in a standard ten-card is “number one.” Carefully, she coded its characteristics before moving on to the other fingers. Then she scanned the prints and entered the information into her computer.
Now she could submit them to the automated fingerprint-identification systems, AFIS, for a quick search through massive local, state, and nationwide data banks for a match.
After typing commands on her keyboard, Cataldo finished the last of her bagel and orange juice while her computer processed her data for possible matches. In less than two minutes, it came back with two hits from the Seattle PD’s local data bank.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
It was a start, she thought, waiting for results from the Washington State Patrol Identification and Criminal History Section (WASIS) and a range of other criminal history database systems.
Her submission was searched through the regional information-sharing systems, like the western states network and the FBI’s mother of all data banks, the IAFIS, which stored some seven hundred million impressions from law enforcement agencies across the country.
We’re coming for you.
When it was done, her search had yielded a total of five possibles that closely matched her submission from the cup.
Immediately, she began making a visual point-by-point comparison between each of the three candidates and her unidentified set from the cup. She zeroed in on the critical minutiae points, like the trail of ridges near the tip of the number-three finger. Too many dissimilarities there.
So long, candidate number one.
