The apartment door looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in years. The reinforced steel peephole was as clear a statement of urban decline as the stink of urine in the stairwell. As planned, the door was unlocked. If there had been crime-scene tape across it, it had been removed.
The interior layout—a small foyer leading into a large room with a kitchenette and bathroom on the right—was as he remembered it from the video, except that the large window was now closed. The faint tripod marks were still visible on the dusty floor.
Standing in the center of the triangle formed by the three marks and gazing out through the streaky windowpanes, he could see in the distance the spot at the edge of Willard Park where John Steele had been struck down. Looking around the empty room, his gaze fell on the ancient steam radiator under which the brass casing had been found. The bottom of the radiator was at least four inches from the floor, leaving the space beneath it easily visible.
He went into the small kitchen and saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond the residue of fingerprint powder left by the evidence tech on various handles, cabinets, and drawers.
Next he went into the bathroom, the room that most interested him—especially the toilet, and the flushing lever in particular. He inspected it carefully, then opened the water tank and examined the inner workings. His eyes widened. What he was looking at suggested an explanation for Payne’s prints being found on the flushing mechanism, on a greasy food wrapper in the toilet bowl, on the brass casing in the living room, and nowhere else in the apartment.
It had bothered him from the beginning that no fresh prints had been found on any of the doors or on the open window sash. Now he thought he knew why, but he wanted an additional piece of evidence to corroborate the explanation before he shared it with Torres.
He took several photos of the toilet tank with his phone, then took a quick look around the apartment to be sure he was leaving everything as he found it. He hurried down the four flights of stairs, breathing in as little as possible of the sour smell, went out through the lobby onto Bridge Street, and drove to the address Torres had given him for Payne’s apartment.
It was located on the far side of Willard Park. The neighborhood was run down but had not yet been visited by the sporadic fires and looting that had pockmarked the rest of the Grinton section. The air, however, had the ashy odor that seemed to have penetrated every corner of the city.
The building was a narrow three-story brick structure with a weedy vacant lot on either side. There were two apartment floors above a storefront. Steel security shades were pulled down over the store windows. A hand-printed sign on the door said Closed. A more professional sign over the barricaded window said Computer Repairs. The building had two front entrances, one to the store, the other to a stairwell providing access to the apartments.
Payne’s was on the second floor. The door, unlocked as promised, opened into a dark foyer that led to a living room with a partial view of the forested area of the park. There was a faint sewer-like smell in the room. The furniture was disarranged. The rug had been rolled back to one side of the room, the couch and chair pillows heaped on the floor. Chairs had been turned over, desk drawers removed, bookcase shelves emptied. A power strip and a tangle of wires on the floor indicated the former presence of a computer. Light fixtures had been opened, blinds taken down from the windows. The place had evidently been subjected to a thorough police search.
A doorway on the left side of the living room led to a bedroom, with what appeared to be the apartment’s only closet. The bureau drawers had been removed and emptied. The mattress had been removed from the box spring and the clothes from the closet. In the corners of the room there were random piles of underwear, socks, shirts, pants.
If Gurney had more time he would have gone through all of it, but he had a more urgent interest. He left the bedroom and crossed the living room to a pair of open doorways. One led to the kitchen, where he found fingerprint dust everywhere, ransacked cabinets and drawers, an open refrigerator. The sewer-like odor was stronger here than in the living room.
The doorway next to the kitchen led to a hallway at the end of which he could see the bathroom, the room he was most interested in—and the source of the foul odor. The drainage trap under the sink had been removed, opening the room to the effluvia of the building’s sewer lines. The medicine cabinet was empty. There were no towels. The toilet seat had been removed.
Gurney lifted the top off the toilet tank and peered down at the flushing mechanism and at the flushing lever on the outside of the tank. With a feeling of satisfaction, he took out his phone and photographed both.
He checked the time. There were still fifteen minutes remaining of the hour Torres had given him. His initial thought was to use every minute of it sifting through whatever the police had left behind. His second thought was to be satisfied with what he’d discovered and get the hell out of there.
That was the thought he acted on. He was out of the building, in his car, and heading for Walnut Crossing with thirteen minutes to spare. He didn’t stop until he reached the interstate rest area where he’d had his initial conversation with Torres. It seemed an appropriate place to pull over, thank him for his assistance, and fill him in on the progress it had made possible.
As he placed the call, he wrestled with the question of how much to reveal—not only about his new view of the fingerprint issue but about his shifting sense of the whole case.
He opted to be fairly open, omitting only his direct contact with Payne.
Torres answered on the first ring. “How’d it go?”
“Smoothly,” said Gurney. “I hope you didn’t run into any problems on your end.”
“None. I just finished relocking the apartment doors. Did you discover anything useful?”
“I think so. If I’m right, it raises some major questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like how sure are you that Payne is the shooter?”
“As sure as I could be without a confession.”
“Sell it to me.”
“Okay. Number one, we know he was in the right places at the right times. We have time-coded videos to prove it. Number two, we have his fingerprints on the side door at Poulter Street and on the toilet and a fast-food wrapper in the Bridge Street apartment. Number three, we have his fingerprints on the cartridge casings found at both shooting sites. We know the prints are his because they match almost all the prints found in his apartment. Number four, a box of thirty-aught-six cartridges—with two missing—was found hidden under some shirts in his bedroom closet. Number five, we just got a DNA report showing a match between the Band-Aid recovered from the toilet at the Bridge Street apartment and hair follicles recovered from the sink drain in Payne’s apartment. Number six, we have a confidential tip from a BDA informant naming him as the shooter. Number seven, his own public statements reveal an obsessive hatred for the police. So there it is. A hate-filled kid, aided and abetted by an organization with some hate-filled members. It’s a convincing case with a ton of incriminating evidence—a lot more than we usually have.”
“That’s part of the problem.”
The confident tone of Torres’s summation dissolved. “What do you mean?”
“There does seem to be a ton of evidence. Almost too much of it. But no single piece of it is solid.”