“The woman who runs the newsstand would beg to disagree. She says that one just sat up there, month in and month out.”
“Makes no difference.” Howie didn’t sound worried, which left Alec free to worry for both of them. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A small flaw in a case that had been shaping up as pretty as a painting in a museum. A possible flaw, he reminded himself, and Howie could easily work around it; juries didn’t care much about what wasn’t there.
“Just wanted you to know, boss. It’s what you pay me for.”
“Okay, now I know. You’ll be there for the arraignment tomorrow, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Alec said. “Did you talk to Samuels about bail?”
“I did. The conversation was brief. He said he would fight it with every fiber of his being. His very words.”
“Jesus, does the guy have an off button?”
“A good question.”
“Will you get it anyway?”
“I have a good chance. Nothing’s a sure thing, but I’m almost positive.”
“If you do, tell Maitland not to take any neighborhood strolls. Lots of people keep a home protection weapon handy, and right now he’s the least popular guy in Flint City.”
“He’ll be restricted to his home, and you can be sure the cops will be keeping the house under surveillance.” Howie sighed. “A shame about that book.”
Alec ended the call and jumped back in his car. He wanted to be home in plenty of time to make popcorn before Game of Thrones.
18
Ralph Anderson and State Police Detective Yunel Sablo met with the Flint County DA that evening in the den of Bill Samuels’s home on the city’s north side, an almost-posh neighborhood of large houses that aspired to McMansion status and didn’t quite make it. Outside, Samuels’s two girls were chasing each other through the backyard sprinkler as dusk slowly dissolved into dark. Samuels’s ex-wife had stayed around to cook dinner for them. Samuels had been in fine fettle all through the meal, often patting his ex’s hand and even holding it for brief periods, to which she did not seem to object. Pretty chummy for a couple living in splitsville, Ralph thought, and good for them. But now dinner was finished, the ex was packing up the girls’ things, and Ralph had an idea that DA Samuels’s good mood would soon be finished, too.
A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township sat on the den’s coffee table. It was in a clear plastic Baggie, taken from one of Ralph’s kitchen drawers and slipped carefully over the book. The funeral cortege now looked blurry, because the shrink-wrap had been dusted with fingerprint powder. A single print—a thumb—stood out on the book’s front cover, near the spine. It was as clear as the date on a new penny.
“There are four more good ones on the back,” Ralph said. “It’s how you pick up a heavy book—thumb in front, fingers on the back, slightly splayed, to support. I would have printed it right there in Cap City, but I didn’t have Terry’s prints for comparison purposes. So I grabbed what I needed at the station and did it at home.”
Samuels elevated his brows. “You took his print-card out of evidence?”
“Nah, photocopied it.”
“Don’t keep us in suspense,” Sablo said.
“I won’t,” Ralph said. “They match. The prints on this book belong to Terry Maitland.”
The Mr. Sunshine who’d sat beside his ex at the dinner table disappeared. Mr. Gonna Rain A Bitch took his place. “You can’t be sure of that without a computer match.”
“Bill, I was doing this before there was such a thing.” Back in the days when you were still trying to look up girls’ skirts in high school study hall. “They’re Maitland’s prints, and computer comparison will confirm it. Look at these.”
He took a small bundle of cards from the inner pocket of his sportcoat and laid them out in two rows on the coffee table. “Here are Terry’s prints from his booking last night. And here are Terry’s prints from the shrink-wrap. Now you tell me.”
Samuels and Sablo leaned forward, looking from the row of cards on the left to the ones on the right. Sablo sat back first. “I buy it.”
“I won’t without a computer comparison,” Samuels said. The words came out sounding stilted because his jaw was jutting. Under other circumstances, that might have been funny.
Ralph made no immediate reply. He was curious about Bill Samuels, and hopeful (he was hopeful by nature) that his earlier judgement about the man—that he might cut and run if faced with a really spirited counterattack—had been wrong. Samuels’s ex-wife still held him in some regard, that had been obvious, and the little girls loved him bigtime, but such evidence only spoke to one facet of a man’s character. A guy at home wasn’t necessarily the same guy at work, especially when the fellow in question was ambitious and faced with a sudden obstacle that might nip all his big plans in the bud. These things mattered to Ralph. They mattered a great deal, because he and Samuels were bound together by this case, win or lose.
“It’s impossible,” Samuels said, one hand going to brush down the cowlick, but tonight the cowlick wasn’t there. Tonight it was behaving. “He can’t have been in two places at the same time.”
“Yet so it appears,” Sablo said. “Until today, there was no forensic evidence in Cap City. Now there is.”
Samuels brightened momentarily. “Maybe he handled the book at some prior date. Preparing his alibi. All part of the set-up.” Apparently forgetting his previous assessment that the murder of Frank Peterson had been the impulse act of a man who could no longer control his urges.
“The idea can’t be discounted,” Ralph said, “but I’ve seen a lot of prints, and these look fairly fresh. The quality of the friction ridge detail is very good. That wouldn’t be the case if these had been made weeks or months ago.”
Speaking almost too softly to hear, Sablo said, “ ’Mano, it’s like you took a hit on twelve and got a face-card.”
“What?” Samuels snapped his head around.
“Blackjack,” Ralph said. “He’s saying it would have been better if we hadn’t found it. If we’d just stood pat.”
They considered this. When Samuels spoke, he sounded almost pleasant—a man just passing the time. “Here’s a hypothetical for you. What if you had dusted down that shrink-wrap and found nothing? Or just a few unidentifiable blurs?”
“We wouldn’t be better off,” Sablo said, “but we wouldn’t be worse off.”
Samuels nodded. “In that case—hypothetically speaking—Ralph would just be a guy who’d bought a fairly expensive book. He wouldn’t throw it away, he’d call it a good idea that didn’t pan out and put it on his shelf. After stripping off the shrink-wrap and throwing it away, of course.”
Sablo looked from Samuels to Ralph, his face giving nothing away.
“And these fingerprint cards?” Ralph asked. “What about them?”
“What cards?” Samuels asked. “I don’t see any cards. Do you, Yune?”
“I don’t know if I do or not,” Sablo said.
“You’re talking about destroying evidence,” Ralph said.
“Not at all. This is all just hypothetical.” Samuels again raised his hand to brush at the cowlick that wasn’t there. “But here’s something to think about, Ralph. You went to the station first, but did the comparison at your home. Was your wife there?”