“Pretty goddam convenient,” Ralph said. “Did nobody suggest it might be a plant?”
“The way the evidence kept stacking up, they just assumed he was careless or wanted to be caught,” Yune said. “The panel truck, the fingerprints, the surveillance photos . . . girls’ underpants found in the basement . . . and finally the icing on the cake, a DNA match. Cheek swabs taken in custody matched semen the perp left at the scene.”
“My God,” Bill Samuels said. “It really is déjà vu all over again.”
“With one big exception,” Yune said. “Heath Holmes wasn’t lucky enough to get filmed at a lecture that happened to be going on at the same time the Howard girls were being abducted and murdered. His mother swore he had been in Regis the whole time, said he’d never gone in to the Heisman, and he certainly hadn’t gone to Trotwood. ‘Why would he?’ she said. ‘It’s a shitty town full of shitty people.’？”
“Her testimony would have cut zero ice with a jury,” Samuels said. “Hey, if your mom won’t lie for you, who will?”
“Other people in the neighborhood saw him during his vacation week,” Yune went on. “He cut his mother’s grass, he fixed her gutters, he painted the stoop, and he helped the lady across the street plant some flowers. This was on the same day the Howard girls were taken. Also, that tricked-out truck of his was kind of hard to miss when he was driving around and doing errands.”
Howie asked, “The lady across the street, could she place him with her anywhere near the time those two girls were killed?”
“She said around ten in the morning. Close to an alibi, but no cigar. Regis is a lot nearer to Trotwood than Flint is to Cap City. Cops theorized that as soon as he finished helping the neighbor with her petunias or whatever, he drove to the municipal lot, swapped his Tahoe for the panel truck, and went hunting.”
“Terry was luckier than Mr. Holmes,” Marcy said, looking first at Ralph and then at Bill Samuels. Ralph met her gaze; Samuels either could not or would not. “Just not lucky enough.”
Yune said, “I’ve got one more thing—another piece of the puzzle, Ms. Gibney would say—but I’m going to save it until Ralph recaps the Maitland investigation, both pro and con.”
Ralph made short work of this, speaking in concise sentences, as if testifying in court. He made a point of telling them what Claude Bolton had told him—that Terry had nicked him with a fingernail while shaking his hand. After telling them about the discovery of the clothes out in Canning Township—pants, underwear, socks, sneakers, but no shirt—he circled back to the man he’d seen on the courthouse steps. He said he wasn’t certain that the man had been using the shirt Terry had been wearing at the Dubrow train station to cover his presumably scarred and hairless head, but he believed that it could have been.
“There must have been TV coverage at the courthouse,” Holly said. “Have you checked it?”
Ralph and Lieutenant Sablo exchanged a look.
“We did,” Ralph said, “but that man’s not there. Not in any of the footage.”
There was a general stirring, and Jeannie was holding his arm again—clutching it, really. Ralph gave her hand a reassuring pat, but he was looking at the woman who had flown here from Dayton. Holly didn’t look puzzled. She looked satisfied.
6
“The man who killed the Howard girls used a panel truck,” Yune said, “and when he was done with it, he dumped it in an easily discoverable location. The man who killed Frank Peterson did the same with the van he used to abduct the boy; actually drew attention to it by leaving it behind Shorty’s Pub and speaking to a couple of witnesses—the way Holmes spoke to the cook and the waitress in the Waffle House. The Ohio cops found plenty of fingerprints in the panel truck, both the killer’s and his victims’; we found plenty in the van. But the van prints included at least one set that went unidentified. Until late today, that is.”
Ralph leaned forward, intent.
“Let me show you some stuff.” Yune fiddled with his laptop. Two fingerprints appeared on the screen. “These are from the kid who stole the van in upstate New York. One from the van, one from his intake when he was arrested in El Paso. Now check this out.”
He fiddled some more, and the two prints came together perfectly.
“That takes care of Merlin Cassidy. Now here’s Frank Peterson—one print from the ME, and one from the van.”