Brandon shook his head. 'We haven't really checked that yet,' he said. 'We called for a deputy before we went snooping around.'
Myers nodded. 'I see,' he said. 'Now, tell me,' he continued, 'have you two been having any trouble with your daughter recently?'
'Trouble?' Diana asked, interjecting herself into the conversation for the first time. 'What do you mean, trouble?'
'Boy trouble, for instance,' Myers said with a casual shrug of the shoulders. 'Hanging out with the wrong crowd. Problems with drugs or alcohol.'
Diana was shaking her head long before he finished. 'No,' she declared. 'Absolutely not! Nothing like that. Lani's a fine kid. An honors student. She's never given us a bit of trouble.'
Myers stuffed his notebook into his pocket and then glanced at Deputy Garrett. 'How about if I have the deputy here show me the damage in your office.'
Brandon's face was tight with suppressed anger. 'Sure,' he said. 'That'll be fine.'
As the two officers started out of the room, Diana made as if to follow them, but Brandon stopped her. 'We'll wait here,' he said.
As soon as Garrett and Myers were out of earshot, a furious Diana Walker turned on her husband. 'What the hell does he mean, hanging out with the wrong crowd?'
'Hush. Don't let him hear you,' Brandon said. 'You know where the SOB is going with all that, don't you? I do. I'll bet he's going to call this a family disturbance. He'll say Lani's a runaway. He's not going to lift a finger until he has to. He'll go by the book on this one, one hundred percent. Guaranteed.'
Diana was outraged. 'Not lift a finger? What do you mean?'
'Hide and watch,' Brandon told her. 'I've seen it before. Nobody plays the official rules game better than Ford Myers. I think maybe he invented it.'
They were sitting waiting in grim silence a few minutes later when Myers sauntered back into the room. 'If you have any jewelry or cash in the house, you might want to check it,' he suggested.
'We don't keep cash around,' Brandon said. 'And not that much jewelry. But I'm sure Diana will be glad to check.'
Wordlessly, Diana got up and walked into the bedroom. Nothing appeared to be out of place. Her jewelry box was where it belonged and nothing seemed to be missing. Fighting back tears, she walked on down the hall and checked Lani's bedroom. Jessica was right. The flowered cowboy shirt, Lani's Stetson, and Tony Lama boots were all gone from the closet. Diana returned to the living room just as Myers was getting ready to leave.
'I checked,' she said. 'Everything is here, except for the outfit Jessica said Lani was planning to wear. That one is gone.'
'Good enough, Mrs. Walker,' Myers said. 'Deputy Garrett and I will be shoving off for the time being. If you still haven't heard anything from Lani by tomorrow morning, call in after six and we'll go ahead with the Missing Persons report at that time.'
'I can tell you what clothes Lani was wearing when she left the house,' Diana said. 'In case you're interested, that is.'
'That information should go into the Missing Persons report when you make it.' Myers smiled. 'Chances are, though, it won't even be necessary. Most of the time, these kids turn up long before the twenty-four-hour deadline. I'm sure your husband can tell you how it works, Mrs. Walker. By allowing that day's worth of grace time, we can cut down on unnecessary paperwork. Right, Mr. Walker?'
'Right,' Brandon said.
'And as far as the gun theft and the vandalism is concerned, on a low-priority residential robbery like this, I won't be able to schedule someone to come out and lift prints until regular work hours next week. And besides, that may not prove necessary, either.'
'What do you mean?' Diana asked. 'Why wouldn't it be necessary?'
Myers shrugged. 'What if the whole thing turns out to be a family prank of some kind? If your daughter took the gun herself on a lark, just to do a little unauthorized target practice, it might be better not to have those prints on file, don't you think?'
'But Lani wouldn't-' Diana began.
'Sure,' Brandon said, urging Detective Myers and the deputy out the door. 'I see what you mean. Thanks for all your help.'
Diana was fuming when Brandon turned to face her. 'Why did you let him off the hook like that?' she demanded. 'Lani doesn't even like guns. She would never-'
'I let Detective Myers off the hook because he has no intention of doing anything, and I do.' With that, Brandon Walker stalked toward the kitchen, with Diana right on his heels.
'What?' she asked. 'What are you going to do?'
'I could lift prints myself, but that might screw up some prosecutor's chain of evidence,' Brandon said, picking up the phone. 'So instead, I'm going to make a few calls. There are some people in this world who owe me. It's time to call in a few of my markers.'
Fingerprints were Alvin Miller's life. From the time an ink pad showed up as a birthday present for his sixth birthday party, he had found fingerprints endlessly fascinating. He had left a trail of indelible red marks across the face of his mother's new Harvest Gold refrigerator and dishwasher. His mother had confiscated the damn thing after that and thrown it in the garbage.
By the time Alvin was sixteen, he had turned an Eagle Scout project into a volunteer position as an aide in the latent fingerprint lab for the Pima County Sheriff's Department. Upon high school graduation, he had transformed his volunteer work into a paying job. Now, at age thirty-four and without benefit of more than a few college credits, he was the youngest and least formally educated person in the country to be placed in charge of a fully automated fingerprint identification system.
The civil service protections former sheriff Brandon Walker had instituted over the years kept his successor from doing politically based wholesale firings, but Bill Forsythe wasn't above finding other ways of unloading what he considered deadwood. One of the people he wanted out most was Alvin Miller. To have some of the best, most up-to-date equipment in the Southwest in the hands of an 'uneducated kid' was more than Forsythe could stand. He wanted somebody in that position with the proper credentials-somebody people around the country could look up to, somebody about whom they would say, 'Now there's a guy who knows what he's doing.'
Since his election, Sheriff Forsythe had hit Alvin Miller where it hurt the worst-in the budget department, chopping both money and staff. The 'automated' part of AFIS sounds good, but the part that precedes the automation-enhancing the prints so the computer can actually scan and analyze them-is a labor-intensive, manual process. Forsythe had cut so far back on staffing the fingerprint lab that it should have been impossible for it to function-would have been impossible-had the lab been left in any hands less capable or dedicated than those of Alvin Miller.
He worked night and day. He put in his eight hours on the clock and another eight or so besides almost every day, Saturdays and Sundays included. Only forty hours a week went on the clock; a whole lot more than forty were freebies.
Because Alvin had so much hands-on practice, he was incredibly quick at manually enhancing those prints. He could read volumes into what looked like-to everyone else's untrained eyes-indecipherable circles and smudges. When it came to fingerprints, Alvin found each was as unique as he'd always heard snowflakes were supposed to be. And once he had dealt with a print, he remembered much of what he saw. Twice now, he had managed to make a hit-fingering a current resident in the Pima County Jail for another unrelated crime before feeding the information into the computer.
When Carley Fielding, Pima County's weekend lab tech, called earlier that evening to see what she should do with the three boxes of bones Detective Leggett wanted printed, Alvin Miller happened to be in and working. Lifting fingerprints off human bones was nothing Alvin had ever done before. The prospect was interesting enough to take him away from whatever he had been working on before.
It turned out that bones were easy to process. It didn't take long for Alvin to figure out that more than one person had handled the bones. Some had done so with gloves on, but only one had handled them bare-handed. Alvin sorted through one set of dusted prints after another until he was convinced that he had found the best possible one.
