CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Iknow Myles Walston is one of the good guys. He is helping me from his father’s influence on law enforcement. I wonder if he knows everything and attempting to cover his steps in this situation. For now, I’ll trust him because I need him. If he didn’t sport such golden long locks, he would be for me, but he is not my type. Although, Katelyn says his man bun is ‘so cute’. With a little more muscle, he could be a cover model for romance novels in the nineties.
Alan York’s assistant’s cell phone rings out and he rushes out of the room to talk in private. Thank you, Myles, for excusing Mrs. Casillas because I’m going to take advantage of my time here.
I whisper to him. “Alan York was five foot eleven according to his statistics on his driver's license.”
We stare at the bed.
“A man over six feet tall could have slept comfortably against the wall in this bed,” I whisper.
“What are you suggesting?” Myles ask.
“I want to make our investigation more exciting, so show me some appreciation or enthusiasm for my creativity.”
“I don’t see why it would matter.”
“Matter? Everything matters in this investigation. You should know by now, I look at everything from every conceivable angle if there is one.”
“Everything should matter, I guess you’re right. I just don’t want to waste my time thinking about things that don’t matter.”
“Let it matter, Myles,” I say pulling out my cell phone to take pictures of the pillows and the bed from several angles. “The bed may be made, but we may still have something to look at even a few days later.”
I zoom in on the pillowcases and then pull out a tweezer from my backpack.
“What do you have there?” asks Myles.
“It looks like a hair,” I whisper squinting to look at it closer.
“Oh wow, we have to find the hat he may have worn last, I guess.”
I look for the closet, open it, and waved my hand over an array of a baseball hat with several professional team mascots on them. “Jackpot.”
“All of these hats belonged to only him?”
“You don’t think his wife ever wore any of these or his kids?”
“I don’t know, pick one quick.”
“Let’s say try this one,” I say pointing to a blue hat sitting next to the wall on a shelf.
“Yes, I agree,” whispers Myles as he takes a strip of tape and puts it in the rim of the hat to gather any loose hairs. “This will help a lot, you’re about ready to wrap this up, Aleta?”
I look around the room with a serious look and clasped my hands together.
“I’m pleased, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
As we’re leaving the mansion in Myle’s black jeep when he gets a call and puts it on speaker.
“Keep this shit to yourself, Aleta. My insider has something for us.”
I nod my head in agreement ready to listen.
“Go ahead,” Myles says.
“The fingerprints we picked up in Alan York’s bedroom are very interesting. In the book he was reading, we found one set of fingerprints, he had a small burn on his left thumb which showed up on almost all of the fingerprints. The brush he used for his hair has that same set. I believe he was left-handed too because he used the same hand with his toothbrush, mouthwash, and the sneakers at the foot of the bed. However, we also saw a set of prints on top of those, it appears the person may have at one point had on rubber gloves. We saw some barefoot prints on the tile of the bathroom a double set. One set is larger than the other, plus we saw the sneakers too.
I and Myles turn to look at each other in silence.
“Are you still there, guys?” asks the female voice on the other end.
“You’re telling us somebody made a mistake,” Myles states. “A small mistake, but it’s still a mistake. Mrs. Casillas didn’t have time to wash the tile floor of his bathroom.”
“Right, she wouldn’t be thinking about that yet, plus, I’m sure she would have mentioned it to us the detectives by now,” says the female voice.
“She seemed pretty helpful with us today,” states Myles.
I bob my head in affirmation. “I told you, Myles. The size of the person does matter. We’re seeing this in the footprints on the floor, but this person was smart enough to not use the hairbrush.”
“Hey, we also found a hair strand and hair from the baseball hat for you to test.”
“Great, you two should think of working in forensics,” she laughs.
“Maybe,” Myles chuckles. “This person thinks they are so smart. They remembered the brush but forgot all about checking the hat and then thought about putting on gloves. They got careless when they walked on the tile. Thinking they fooled us with the bed and the pillow, but different hair strands, it’s too simple. Let me know when you have DNA results back,”
“Sure thing, Myles,” she says.
“When you do,” I chime in. “We will know it was not Alan York who walked in the house the night before he vanished. It was not Alan York, Mrs. Casillas thought she saw before going to bed for the night. It was another person, a man wearing Alan’s clothes and used Alan’s key to open the door. He was not a shy person, he was confident as hell. He wore Alan York’s sneakers and everything Alan was wearing when he left the house on that day. He wanted everyone to believe that Alan slept in his bed for the night. He gambled on having the upper hand to get away with it and it worked. He walked up those winding stairs, took off of his clothes, brushed his teeth, can you believe he would do that. Use somebody else’s toothbrush?”
“That’s just nasty,” says Myles.
“The extremes some of these
