The overlay again showed a perfect match.
“Next, Maitland. One print from the van—one of many, I might add—and the other from his intake at the Flint City PD.”
He brought them together, and again the match was perfect. Marcy made a sighing sound.
“Okay, now prepare to have your mind boggled. On the left, an unsub print from the van; on the right, a Heath Holmes print from his intake in Montgomery County, Ohio.”
He brought them together. This time the fit was not perfect, but it was very close. Holly believed a jury would have accepted it as a match. She certainly did.
“You’ll notice a few minor differences,” Yune said. “That’s because the Holmes print from the van is a bit degraded, maybe from the passage of time. But there are enough points of identity to satisfy me. Heath Holmes was in that van at some point. This is new information.”
The room was silent.
Yune put up two more prints. The one on the left was sharp and clear. Holly realized they had already seen it. Ralph did, too. “Terry’s,” he said. “From the van.”
“Correct. And on the right, here’s one from the buckle left in the barn.”
The whorls were the same, but oddly faded in places. When Yune brought them together, the van print filled in the blanks on the buckle print.
“No doubt they’re the same,” Yune said. “Both Terry Maitland’s. Only the one on the buckle looks like it came from a much older finger.”
“How is that possible?” Jeannie asked.
“It’s not,” Samuels said. “I saw a set of Maitland’s prints on his intake card . . . which were made days after he last touched that buckle. They were firm and clear. Every line and whorl intact.”
“We also took an unsub print from that buckle,” Yune said. “Here it is.”
This one no jury would accept; there were a few lines and whorls, but they were faint, barely there at all. Most of the print was no more than a blur.
Yune said, “It’s impossible to be sure, given the poor quality, but I don’t believe that’s Mr. Maitland’s fingerprint, and it can’t be Holmes’s, because he was dead long before that buckle first showed up in the train station video. And yet . . . Heath Holmes was in the van that was used to abduct the Peterson boy. I’m at a loss to explain the when, the how, or the why, but I’m not exaggerating when I say I’d give a thousand dollars to know who left that blurry fingerprint on the belt buckle, and at least five hundred to know how come the Maitland fingerprint on it looks so old.”
He unplugged his laptop and sat down.
“Plenty of pieces on the table,” Howie said, “but I’ll be damned if they make a picture. Does anyone have any more?”
Ralph turned to his wife. “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them who you dreamed was in our house.”
“It was no dream,” she said. “Dreams fade. Reality doesn’t.”
Speaking slowly at first, but picking up speed, she told them about seeing the light on downstairs, and finding the man sitting beyond the archway, on one of the chairs from their kitchen table. She finished with the warning he had given her, emphasizing it with the fading blue letters inked on his fingers. You MUST tell him to stop. “I fainted. I’ve never done that before in my life.”
“She woke up in bed,” Ralph said. “No sign of entry. Burglar alarm was set.”
“A dream,” Samuels said flatly.
Jeannie shook her head hard enough to make her hair fly. “He was there.”
“Something happened,” Ralph said. “That much I’m sure of. The man with the burned face had tats on his fingers—”
“The man who wasn’t there in the films,” Howie said.
“I know how it sounds—crazy. But someone else in this case had finger-tats, and I finally remembered who it was. I had Yune send me a picture, and Jeannie ID’d it. The man Jeannie saw in her dream—or in our house—is Claude Bolton, the bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. The one who got a cut while shaking Maitland’s hand.”
“The way Terry got cut when he bumped into the orderly,” Marcy said. “That orderly was Heath Holmes, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, sure,” Holly said, almost absently. She was looking at one of the pictures on the wall. “Who else would it be?”
Alec Pelley spoke up. “Have either of you checked on Bolton’s whereabouts?”
“I did,” Ralph said, and explained. “He’s in a west Texas town called Marysville, four hundred miles from here, and unless he had a private jet stashed somewhere, he was there at the time Jeannie saw him in our house.”