We are done for the day, finished in court. Harry and I are milling around in the office after hours, collecting our messages and trying to get a grip on what may happen tomorrow. Harry comes into my office.
“News from Herman,” he says. Herman is back in D.C. trying to chase down or get a lead on the whereabouts of Arthur Ginnis.
Harry is holding a telephone slip stapled to a page of typed notes, information I assume Herman dictated over the phone to one of the secretaries while we were in court.
“Has he found Ginnis?”
“No. Not yet.” Harry is reading as he settles into one of the two client chairs on the other side of my desk. He looks at the telephone slip. “It came in just after noon,” he says. “He has gotten the information from the investigators we hired back there, though.
“Interesting stuff,” says Harry, “but no surprises. What I expected. Aranda, full name Alberto Aranda, age thirty-two, Yale Law grad. It doesn’t say here, but I’m guessing Mr. Aranda would be at or near the top of his class,” says Harry.
“Why?”
“Because he was selected last year to become a Supreme Court clerk by Associate Justice Arthur Ginnis.” Harry looks up from the paper. “I told you so.”
What Harry means is that the e-mail from the Court to Scarborough telling him to take his inquiries away from the Court’s official e-mail domain to a numbered snail-mail box was not dealt out by some obscure tech guarding the Court’s electronic access points.
“The mailbox, the box number sent to Scarborough in the e-mail for the pursuit of private business. What we thought,” says Harry. “An address of convenience. Says here it’s one of those private parcel-and-post places that small businesses use. The box number is registered-oh, this is interesting,” says Harry, “-to ‘A. Aranda.’” He looks up again.
“So it’s not registered in Ginnis’s name?” I say.
Harry shakes his head. “Get the sense we’re dealing with a very careful man here? Now here’s something else.”
“What’s that?”
“One of the investigators Herman hired was able to glance into the postal box through the little glass window in the front. He told Herman it looked like there were a couple of items inside, but he could only read the one on top. It was addressed to Aranda.”
“Well, he owns the box,” I say. “I think we need to talk to Mr. Aranda.”
“It had a funny stamp on it.”
“What had a funny stamp on it?”
“The item in the postal box the investigator was reading,” says Harry. “According to the note, the stamp was something foreign, overseas. He couldn’t make out the entire return address, but he said the street name was very long and appeared to be more than one word. The investigator told Herman that it looked like the address was written in German.”
We regard each other with quizzical expressions.
Harry reads on. “The street named ended in the word ‘straat.’ But the man did get the country-‘Curacao.’ Where the hell is Curacao?” says Harry.
As he’s saying the word, I am already turning in my chair to the computer behind me. I do a Google search on the name. Harry spells it out. What pops up at the top of the screen are three small thumbnail photos, pictures of two small maps on the right and the left, what looks like the shape of the same island in each. In the center is a picture of a sugar-white sand beach lapped by azure waters, a woman in a bikini lying with her lover at the ocean’s edge.
I can see enough on the site lines below the pictures to pick out the word “Caribbean.” I tell Harry.
“Trisha Scott told me that according to the Court staff she talked to, Ginnis was down in the Caribbean.”
By now Harry is out of the chair, leaning over my shoulder looking at the center thumbnail photo, the picture of the beach and the bikini. “Yeah. Recovering from surgery, as I recall,” he says.
I open the first site on the page and try to read. It’s in Spanish. I try the second site, Wikipedia.
A few lines in, I have one answer. “That explains the street address,” I say.
“What does?” asks Harry.
“It wasn’t German. It was Dutch. It’s part of the old Dutch West Indies, the ABC islands-Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao.”
“I’ve heard of Aruba,” says Harry. “Vacation island.”
“Yeah, and a young American girl disappeared down there a while back. It was all over the news.”
“That’s right.”
I have opened up a larger map. Harry is still looking over my shoulder.
“What the hell?” he says. “Is that it?”
I nod.
“That’s as far away as you can get and still be on an island,” says Harry.
He’s right. Curacao is just off the coast of Venezuela, the absolute tail end of the Antilles.
Next morning, early court call, neither Harry nor I have time to be looking at maps. Tuchio is beginning his run for the finish, bringing out the big guns.
He starts with his fingerprint expert. For the better part of a day, using charts, magnified photographs of the full set of Carl’s fingerprints taken at the time he was booked after his arrest, and comparing them to the partial prints lifted from the entry-hall floor of Scarborough’s hotel room, the witness explains the art of fingerprint identification to the jury.
He tells them that based on studies of the millions upon millions of fingerprints classified over the last nearly one hundred years, no two sets of prints from different individuals have ever been found to be identical. In addition to being unique, they are immutable. Except in the event of physical injury, fingerprint patterns do not change over a person’s lifetime.
The witness explains that comparison between known fingerprints taken from a known individual and those found at a crime scene turn on the analysis of ridge characteristics, known as minutiae, as well as the location and proximity of these characteristics one to another.
The testimony, questions and answers, drones on for hours. Tuchio risks putting the jury to sleep with evidence of what everyone in the courtroom already knows to be fact: The fingerprints at the murder scene belong to Carl.
Asked how the small pinkie print landed on the handle of the hammer, the witness testifies that based upon photographs taken by police of the hammer’s location on the floor, it appeared that the fingerprint in question was made at the same time as the other prints on the floor. According to the testimony, the defendant’s contact with the handle caused it to move several inches away, accounting for the later gap between the print of the third finger of Carl’s right hand on the floor and the fourth finger, the pinkie print on the handle. Nonetheless, the fingerprint in question, the one on the hammer’s handle, is sufficiently clear to identify it conclusively as belonging to the defendant.
Tuchio turns the witness over to me. I pass on him without a single question. It is, after all, exactly what Carl told the police when they questioned him, the same story he told Harry and me the first time we met him.
The judge looks up at the clock on the wall. It’s approaching four. Friday afternoon, and Quinn decides that’s it for the week. He cuts some slack and allows the jury to go home early. Monday will be a big day, the intimate details of death. The state is scheduled to bring on its medical examiner.
On the way to the parking lot, Harry and I shake the last two reporters about two blocks out. By now they know we’re not going to say anything, so they take a few file shots of our backsides and retreat toward the courthouse.
Harry is holding a note delivered to us in court by one of our secretaries. It’s an e-mail from Herman back in D.C. While we don’t have a street or an address, we are now pretty sure of the general whereabouts of Arthur Ginnis.
