She started mixing the ingredients for the pancakes. As the griddle was heating up, she walked back to the bedroom to see if Frank was waking up. He was in the shower.
‘‘I’m making pancakes,’’ she said and heard him mumble something like, ‘‘Great... won’t be long.’’
She poured batter on the griddle—always a messy operation for her. As the pancakes were cooking, she opened a drawer to dig for a spatula. Frank kept all his kitchen utensils in one big drawer. Diane kept meaning to straighten it out but had never gotten around to it. She searched for the particular spatula she liked to use. She pulled out a pair of ice tongs and put them down on the counter. She saw the spat ula she wanted, pulled it out, and flipped the pancakes.
She looked down at the tongs. Great. She had laid them in pancake batter she had dribbled on the counter. She picked them up and stared at the pattern the batter made on the counter. She had seen a similar pattern before, and she knew why she had dreamed about lightbulbs all night.
Chapter 39
After breakfast, and after explaining her epiphanybad-dream idea to Frank, and after she downloaded crime scene and autopsy photos, and after Frank drove her to the museum to get her SUV, Diane went to the police shooting range and asked to see the logbook.
The sergeant on duty was reluctant, even with Di ane’s freshly minted ID. He was torn, she could see. He liked Garnett and he knew that even though Diane was back at the crime lab and officially neutral, she was working in Garnett’s favor. But he also had liked Harve Delamore.
Diane smiled in the friendliest manner she could muster and said if he needed it for his paperwork, she could call the chief of police for authorization. Grudgingly, he showed her the book. Diane wanted to ask him why he and others who felt the way he did thought it was all right for Delamore to try to kill her. Why was that okay with them? She didn’t understand it, even accounting for the male-bonding thing. Surely morality should kick in and tell their conscience that Delamore was wrong to try to do what he did. Obvi ously it wasn’t rational. It was just their feelings. They liked Delamore and now he was dead and Diane had something to do with it.
Diane examined the logbook and found something, though it was not exactly what she was looking for. It only added another link in the chain, but at least it didn’t destroy it. She had to do a little rethinking of the sequence of events. Obviously, if she was right, there had been a change in plan along the way, a change in the intended target. Who could it have been?
Diane thanked the sergeant sincerely and drove to the city jail, where they were keeping Garnett. She didn’t have any trouble seeing him. Odd, thought Diane, one would think he would be better guarded than a logbook at the gun range.
Garnett didn’t look good. There were dark circles under his eyes and his whole body seemed to sag under the weight of his situation. Then again, he prob ably looked better than she did.
‘‘There’s something wrong.’’ He began talking be fore Diane could say what she came for. His reticence with Janice apparently didn’t roll over to Diane. His feelings poured out of him.
‘‘Something’s wrong. I didn’t kill Edgar Peeks. I don’t know who to trust. These are people I’ve known for a long time, and I can’t believe they would be part of a conspiracy. But they have to be. I didn’t shoot him. Not even my own lawyer believes me. Even my family is doubting me. This is a nightmare.’’
‘‘I know,’’ said Diane. ‘‘I believe you and I’m work ing on proving it. Let me tell you what I think happened.’’
There was more surprise on Garnett’s face than re lief. He stared at Diane, not speaking.
‘‘I shouldn’t be speaking to you, but just in case you may be able to remember something that will help, you need to know what’s going on. You also need to have some hope. It must be like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone, or fell into a Kafka novel.’’
‘‘You can explain this?’’ he said after a moment.
‘‘I think so,’’ said Diane. ‘‘The main problem you have is that a bullet from your gun was in Peeks’ head. Janice and Izzy, both good, reliable witnesses, saw Shane Eastling remove it from Peeks’ brain. And when they ar rested you, you had your gun with you,’’ said Diane.
‘‘In a nutshell, yes, that’s my problem. But they’ve made a mistake—’’
Diane held up a hand. She wasn’t sure where to start. She couldn’t really tell him that she got the idea from fiddling with a loose rock in her fountain, or changing a lightbulb. But that was what triggered her idea: taking something out and putting something back in.
‘‘I think someone got hold of one of your spent bullets when you were qualifying at the gun range. They killed Peeks with their gun, dug out their bullet with a pair of forceps, and replaced it with your bullet.’’
Garnett looked surprised and disbelieving, even though this would show him to be innocent. It was too far- fetched, he was probably thinking. And it was far-fetched. But he said nothing. He just waited for Diane to explain herself.
‘‘I wondered why your bullet wasn’t a through-and through. Your gun has enough power to shoot a bullet all the way through the head at the close distance from which Peeks was shot. It didn’t—but that can happen. Then I thought, what if he was really shot with a much smaller-caliber gun—something like a .22 would be powerful enough to pass through the skull bone and lodge in the brain, but would not be strong enough to break through the bone on the other side of the head. And there was the question of why there was so much damage to the brain tissue. There was no ricocheting of the bullet inside the skull cavity, just one straight path, with more damage to the brain tis sue than you would expect. That can happen too.
‘‘But all that got me to thinking. I began with the assumption that everyone around here is telling the truth. If that’s the case, what happened?’’
‘‘Do you have any evidence?’’ said Garnett.
The wistfulness in his voice was pitiful, thought Diane.
‘‘Jin and David found a bloodstain on the floor under the chest in the foyer where Peeks’ body was found. It had a pattern in it. I think the pattern was made by a pair of bloody forceps.’’
She didn’t mention that ice tongs and pancake bat ter make a similar pattern.
‘‘Pendleton told me he saw Rikki Gillinick pocket something shiny at the crime scene. I think she found the forceps. Either she killed Peeks and was re claiming evidence she left behind, or Bryce did it and she collected the forceps for him, or perhaps to keep and hold over him. If that’s the case, the forceps are somewhere and we can find them. The forceps in our crime scene kits have a nice solid, shiny, flat place at the top that is great for fingerprints. And they would leave a pattern like the one Jin and David found in the blood.’’
Garnett looked a little less skeptical. In fact, he seemed to be warming up to the idea.
