‘‘Couldn’t it be transfer?’’ said Frank.
‘‘On the lifts, the salt residue covers the entire square from corner to corner. If it was transfer, it wouldn’t have covered the tape that thoroughly and evenly. Bryce lifted the fingerprint and trace from Donovan’s house and was rather sloppy about it. Also look at the autopsy report. There is no evidence in the pictures or mention by the ME of an allergic reac tion. She would have had a serious skin reaction if Donovan had touched her throat with peanut residue all over his hands.’’ David let out a breath. ‘‘This evi dence is why I quit.’’
‘‘You’re saying Donovan was framed,’’ said Frank. He said it more like a statement than a question.
‘‘Evan Donovan was made to be a fall guy. He was raised in an abusive home. Both he and his brother Bobby have low-normal IQs. Evan has a temper. He threatened Judge McNevin when his brother Bobby was sentenced.’’
‘‘Why was she killed?’’ asked Frank.
‘‘If you wanted to take over a town, what would you do?’’ said David. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘‘Get elected as mayor, start appointing friends to powerful positions, get yourself a crime lab, a bone lab, a DNA lab, and get your own judge appointed. But there was a little hitch. There was no vacancy on the bench. So one of the current judges had to go.’’
‘‘This is some conspiracy theory. If the mayor had been successful in all this, what was the point? What was he going to do with it?’’ said Frank.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ said David. ‘‘But if he was into criminal activities, like drugs, for instance, it’s good to have the crime lab on your side. If you want to control who goes to jail and who goes free, it would be a nice thing to have a DNA lab. And what a good place to have all three of those—a small town where all three labs are housed in a museum. These kinds of labs are usually in big cities, which are harder to get control of. Rosewood probably looked like easy pickings, es pecially since Jefferies once had family here.’’ David stopped and steepled his hands. ‘‘If we want to find out who killed the mayor and the chief of police, we need to do a little victimology. I think we need to find out exactly who Spence Jefferies and Edgar Peeks really are and what they were into.’’
Chapter 24
Diane and Frank studied and tried to digest David’s collection of information, discussing the permutations and possibilities that would explain the evidence. Diane was finding it mentally exhausting. She spotted another folder in David’s briefcase and pulled it out.
‘‘What’s this?’’ she asked.
‘‘Oh, that’s my sociological research,’’ he said. He took the folder from Diane and opened it. ‘‘This is interesting.’’
The first page was a map. On closer examination, Diane recognized it as a map of the voting districts in Rosewood.
‘‘The red dots are burglaries,’’ said David. ‘‘Notice that they cluster in areas where voting is traditionally the heaviest.’’
‘‘The mayor was that organized?’’ Diane was in credulous.
‘‘It’s better than that,’’ said David. ‘‘I analyzed the homes that were burgled. It was always a prominent member of some group—church, Lions Club, Rotary— and usually at least two members of the organization were victims. These are people with lots of connec tions and social networks who would talk about it at their club meetings and with their friends and acquain tances, thereby making the problem look even bigger. Having at least two members as victims just increased the perception that crime was rising at an alarming rate. Our late mayor was a clever devil.’’
Frank noticed that his neighborhood was one of those David had marked.
‘‘I do recall some folks down the street had a prob lem,’’ said Frank.
‘‘I think one reason you weren’t hit,’’ said David, ‘‘is that you work in Atlanta. You’d talk to fewer peo ple in Rosewood about being a victim. And you are a detective, so you might just take it upon yourself to go after the perps.’’
‘‘I would have,’’ said Frank.
‘‘How would he get this much information?’’ said Diane.
‘‘Easy. One good graduate student could gather it for him. Besides, these days almost everything is online. And there’s the good old-fashioned way: join the local chamber of commerce and they’ll give you a truckload of information on their members, on businesses, demo graphic profiles, neighborhood maps—you name it, they’ve got it. Jefferies had to live in Rosewood for at least a year before he ran for mayor. I think he used that time to gather information. Remember, he had Rosewood connections too. His grandparents lived here.’’
‘‘I didn’t know that. What else do you know about him?’’ asked Diane. ‘‘I know he moved here from Atlanta, but I don’t know much more than that.’’
David pulled several pages from his folder. ‘‘More sociology,’’ he said, smiling.
Diane recognized the pattern of information. It was a social network diagram. When she worked for World Accord International, her team would do a social net work analysis of the villages they were going into. That let them know who the community leaders were and what their range of influence was.
‘‘The diagram starts with Spence Jefferies and lists the people he went to college with—Edgar Peeks and Lloyd Bryce.’’
‘‘Didn’t Jefferies go to the University of Pennsylva nia? You aren’t telling me that Lloyd Bryce graduated from Penn?’’ said Diane.
‘‘Diane,’’ said David, ‘‘you know very well that a person can be both smart and stupid at the same time.’’
‘‘I’m just amazed that he had scores good enough to get in,’’ she said.
‘‘He did,’’ said David. ‘‘They all went to the Whar ton School of Business.’’
‘‘Really? I hardly know what to say. That’s a hard place to get into. But what qualified Bryce to run a crime
