O’Connor was outraged that I hadn’t told him about that. I had the pleasure of hearing Lefebvre tell him to lay off.
Lefebvre said some objects had been found near the basement entrance of the tunnel. “Including a long- handled flashlight that looks as if it was used to hit Max.”
“Like the flashlight that might have been used to hit Katy Ducane?” I asked.
Lefebvre said, “The thought has occurred to me that it might be a familiar method for Max’s attacker.”
“But they wore gloves today, right?” O’Connor said. “Probably no fingerprints on it.”
“Probably not,” I said, then remembered my own flashlight. “Wait-the batteries! They might have worn gloves today, but I’ll bet they touched the batteries in their flashlight with bare fingers!”
“That would be the natural thing to do,” Lefebvre conceded. He called to one of the men from the lab and asked him to check for fingerprints on the batteries in the flashlight used to strike Max.
“And on the one left in the buried car,” I said.
The lab man looked from me to Lefebvre.
“It’s worth a try,” Lefebvre said.
Eventually, I was told I could go home. O’Connor walked me to the Karmann Ghia.
“I’ll pay for any damage I did to your car,” he said.
“Don’t be an idiot. There is no damage, and besides, I owe you big time.”
“I’ll follow you home,” he said.
I didn’t object. In fact, I thanked him.
50
E RIC AND IAN HAD BEEN CAUGHT TRYING TO FLEE THE COUNTRY WITH large amounts of cash and false passports in their possession. That gave the police enough reason to take them into custody, and later, it helped to ensure that bail was set astronomically high. Mitch Yeager paid it, but it took him a couple of days to do it.
Lefebvre’s case against them for their assault and kidnapping of Max and me began with fingerprints found on the batteries, but was supported by other evidence. They literally had a trunkful of it. The end of a roll of duct tape found in the trunk of the car was compared microscopically with the ends of the pieces of tape used to bind and gag us-they matched. There was blood matching Max’s blood type on gloves found in the trunk and on clothing stashed there as well. My flashlight, with my fingerprints on my new batteries, was also in the trunk of the BMW. And sensitive chemical tests showed traces of chloroform on one of Eric’s gloves.
The note about the doorbell being broken was found wadded up in their trunk. The questioned documents expert in the Las Piernas lab was also able to match the perforated edge of the note about Warren Ducane with the edges left behind in a spiral-bound notebook in the car, as well as handwriting characteristics in the printing, and the ink type in a fancy pen carried by Ian.
There was trace evidence as well-hair and fibers found in the room where we were attacked matched samples taken from Eric and Ian, and strands of our hair and fibers from our clothes were found on theirs. The photos Stephen Gerard took, and his testimony about the places and times he had seen the BMW, convinced the jury that Eric had planned my kidnapping for some time.
Together with testimony from Max and me, they were convicted.
Eric and Ian Yeager were each sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Max, O’Connor, and I went drinking with the boys from the newsroom. The events in the Baer mansion seemed to have moved my status on the staff from that of outsider to team member-they closed ranks when they heard that one of their own had been attacked. That didn’t stop several of them from asking me, from time to time, to take my blouse off and demonstrate how I had signaled for help, but their regard for me seemed to outlast the joke.
The Express had covered the story from one angle or another for almost a year by the time the Yeager brothers were sentenced, and nearly everyone on the news staff had worked on some related story. Time to celebrate.
The victory was bittersweet, though, because that was the Yeager brothers’ second trial.
The first one, for the murders of the Ducanes, ended in a mistrial, with a hung jury. Although Lefebvre was clearly a genius at interrogation, the confessions obtained were ruled as inadmissible in pretrial-the Yeager brothers’ lawyers claimed their clients were not properly Mirandized when taken into custody in Los Angeles. If there had been no other evidence, I suppose I would have understood the holdout juror’s reluctance, but there was plenty of other proof of their guilt.
Among the treasures found in Eric’s trunk, sewn into the lining of his suitcase, were seventy-nine diamonds. Diamonds that matched exactly the cut and style and size of those missing from the Vanderveer necklace. Also in the trunk was the lighter Jack had given Katy, monogrammed with her initial.
Eric claimed that he and Ian had found these items while scuba diving. The fact that the lighter worked and showed no sign of having been exposed to sea water was something he could not explain.
Ian swore that he knew nothing about any of these items. Lefebvre didn’t immediately challenge this. Instead he asked, “You like reading James Bond books?”
“Yes,” Ian said warily, apparently puzzled by the abrupt change of subject.
“I wondered. Maybe you liked the writer’s name. You know-Ian Fleming, Ian Yeager.”
“No, that’s not it. I just like them.”
“I thought you might. Is that why you’ve hung on to that old Walther PPK of yours? What caliber is that? A 7.65 millimeter, isn’t it? James Bond’s gun. Your gun.”
“You found…” But Ian’s voice trailed off.
“You look surprised,” Lefebvre said. “But you know, we look in all kinds of places when we have a search warrant, so it’s a little hard to hide things from us. That business of taping the gun to the toilet tank lid-that’s an old one.”
Silence.
“You probably won’t be surprised,” Lefebvre said, “if I tell you that the bullets that killed Katy and Todd Ducane were 7.65 millimeter. I’ll bet the rifling patterns and all those other little things we check when we match a weapon to a bullet just might tell an interesting story.”
But Ian was surprised. “That fuckwad Eric killed them with my gun!” he said, and immediately provided an alibi for himself: he couldn’t have been in the Buick-he had been invited to join Thelma and Barrett on the Sea Dreamer, and helplessly watched as they were swept overboard by a rogue wave.
“While you, on the other hand, could use your scuba tanks to breathe.”
“Yes! No!”
It was only a matter of time before Ian admitted that he and Eric had been involved in the murders of all four Ducanes. Asked whose plan it was, he claimed that Eric had been the mastermind.
“Why would Eric want to kill the Ducanes?”
“They always looked down on us, that’s why.”
“Why spare Warren, then?”
Ian’s voice took on a quality of recital as he answered. “If you kill your enemy, he’s dead. He’s not feeling another thing. But if you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies-you kidnap them and never let them be found- then you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead, if he’ll ever see them again. He starts to think about what might be happening to them. That way, your enemy suffers all his life. Nothing you could do to him is worse than that. Nothing.”
Like Lefebvre, I was certain Ian’s confession was a mixture of truth and lies, but those few minutes were the most disturbing. Ian had spoken with utter sincerity, as if this was his religious creed, rather than a declaration of his depravity.
Ian claimed complete ignorance about other events of that evening in 1958- the attack on Jack Corrigan, the kidnapping of the infant Max Ducane, the murder of Rose Hannon. His denials were convincing, and no further
