Nearly Found (9 page)

What if the evidence against Lonny was more than circumstantial? What if I had misjudged him the same way I had misjudged Reece? What if
I
was the one who was only seeing what I wanted to see?

I took a step back from the bars. “I’ll find out as much as I can on Tuesday after school when I go back to the lab.” If he really was innocent, he’d be released by then anyway.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Lonny said, as if he could read my thoughts.

“Five minutes are up,” Alex said.

I said good-bye, and had almost turned away when Lonny spoke.

“’Petrenko’s right, you know. Reece is an asshole. But he’s no idiot. He has to know how lucky he is to have you.”

My eyes burned and the room became watery. I turned for the door. “I know what I saw.”

He grabbed my arm through the bars. Waited until I looked him in the eyes. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if you put your trust in the wrong person. If you’re a bad judge of character. I’m just asking . . . just . . . please . . .” Under all his bitterness and fear, I tasted one last sweet drop of hope. Like maybe I could save him. “Don’t believe everything you see.”

I
SNAPPED OPEN MY LOCKER
on Monday morning, bleary-eyed and only half-awake.

It snapped shut in my face, loud and jarring. A hand pressed against it. Reece’s hand. I followed the thistle tattoo up the length of his arm and turned to find him standing over me, his brother’s ring hanging from the silver chain around his neck. He looked down at me with weary blue eyes, looking sullen and as sleepless as I felt. “You’re supposed to be in school.”

“I am in school.”

“You’re not supposed to be in this one!” I snapped. Girls at the end of the hall stopped to stare. They whispered behind their hands.

“Does it matter? I’ll probably be in a different one next week.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“I don’t need to listen.”

Jeremy stood staring at the end of my locker row and I felt my face grow hot.

“Please,” Reece said quietly. “About last week. What you saw at the club . . . I told Kurt I didn’t want to go. I tried to get him to go someplace else. I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to put you in that position. I don’t want Butch or your mother to think—”

“To think what?” I dropped my voice low, hoping no one else could hear it. “That you’re a drunk and a creep who sneaks into strip clubs? That you like lying to your girlfriend and tricking girls into falling in love with you?”

He made a face like he’d been punched. “So that’s it? So that’s what you think of me?”

“I’m trying not to think of you at all.” When I did, it hurt too much. And made me question who I was for wanting him so badly. “You should have told me about her.”

Reece put his hands on his hips and rocked his jaw back and forth. “There was nothing to tell.”

“Is she the same one who called your cell phone?”

“I told you. She’s nobody.”

I turned and walked away.

Reece stepped in front of me. “Is that why you changed your locks? Because of me?”

I froze. “How do you know I changed my locks?”

“What did you expect me to do? You’re not answering my calls. I came by your trailer and Butch was there. He wouldn’t let me in to see you.”

“So you tried to break in to my house?”

“No!” he said, taken aback. “I just wanted to leave you a note. I wanted a chance to explain.”

“I promise,” I said, disgusted by the very thought of finding another note in my bedroom. “It wouldn’t have gone over well.”

“Is this loser bothering you, Boswell?” Vince stood beside me in a freshly pressed button-down and a varsity jacket, smiling crookedly at Reece.

“Back off,” Reece said. “This is none of your business.”

“You’re trespassing on school grounds. You don’t belong here, Whelan. When Principal Romero finds out —”

“Principal Romero can kiss my ass,” Reece fired back.

“Looks like Boswell doesn’t want you here either.” Vince put a hand on my shoulder, and Reece let loose with a hard, fast punch to his face.

They flew at each other, grappling and slamming against the lockers.

“Reece!” I shouted as people gathered around to watch. “Stop it! Just go!” All I wanted was for him to leave before anyone got in trouble.

Security arrived, pulling them apart and holding them at opposite ends of the hall. Reece’s ear was bleeding, and Vince’s lip. Reece wouldn’t look at me. He jerked out of the security guard’s grasp and stormed out the front door.

Principal Romero showed up, just in time to see Reece straddle his bike through the windows.

“Should we go after him?” the guard asked.

“No,” he said, turning toward me. “I know who he belongs to. And I know exactly who to call to report it.”

He walked toward his office, with security and Vince in tow. No doubt, Lieutenant Nicholson would be Principal Romero’s next call.

I watched Reece’s bike disappear, wishing he’d never come.

Then I opened my locker and restarted my day, trying to imagine he’d never been in it.

O
N
T
UESDAY AFTERNOON
, the door to the Latent Prints lab was closed. I stood on tiptoes to look in the window, but it was covered with a sheet of black paper. I cracked the door. The room was dark inside, and I flipped on the light.

“Hey!” Raj shouted. He sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, squinting and covering his eyes. “Turn that off, will you?”

“Sorry.” I turned off the overheads. Raj switched on a flashlight. The only light in the room was the beam it cast across the floor. He set it gently on the tile. I blinked, letting my eyes adjust.

“What are you looking for?”

Raj smiled wide. “It’s not what I’m looking for. It’s what I’ve found. Check it out.” He pointed in the direction of the beam. “Look closely at the floor. What do you see?”

The smooth tiles in the path of the light glimmered with dust. A lot of dust. Footprints of differing shapes and sizes.

“Where’d all this come from?” I whispered, awestruck by the number of tread patterns that crisscrossed under the beam. The floors in the lab were always spotless. The custodians mopped every night. “Did you sprinkle something on it?”

“Nope.”

“Then how’d the floor get so dirty?”

“It always looks like this. You just can’t see it.”

“Why are we seeing it now?”

“It’s the oblique angle of the light. When we shine a light on something straight on, there’s not enough contrast to see the impressions. But when we lower the angle, casting the light from the side, the shadow effect increases the contrast, and voila! Footwear, hairs, fibers—latent evidence becomes visible.”

Raj crawled along the beam, looking hard at the impressions in the dust.

“Aha! I’ve got you, you bastard!” He pointed at a line of shoe marks, moving the flashlight to reveal their path from the door to a cabinet on the far wall. He leaped up, grabbing a small device from his lab coat pocket, some electrical wires, and a long sheet of black Mylar film from the counter behind him.

Raj placed the film gently over a set of footprints and clipped a wire to its edge. The device in his hand was a stun gun. My mother carried one just like it in her purse. I backed away.

“Um . . . Raj? What are you doing?” Playing with Super Glue and fingerprint powder was one thing. Playing with electricity was entirely another. “Whatever it is, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

“Someone’s been stealing luminol from my cabinet.”

“What’s luminol?”

“It’s a spray used to reveal latent blood evidence.”

“Why would someone want to steal that?”

“Because it’s fun to play with. Luminol has chemiluminescent properties. When it reacts with an oxidizing agent, it makes a seriously cool blue glow. I mean, I get it. We’ve all done it. But this bonehead’s screwed up my inventory three months in a row. He wants to play detective? Great, let’s show him how it’s done.”

He thumbed on the stun gun and I thought about taking another step back, when he touched it to the wire clipped to the film. I crept forward to watch over his shoulder. The sheet vibrated with a static charge, lifting a perfect dust impression from the floor. Raj flipped on the light and studied the prints. “Size ten Crocs? Pathetic. But they shouldn’t be too hard to find.” Raj tossed the film into the trash. As soon as it touched the plastic liner, the dust dispersed and the footprint disappeared.

Raj scratched the stubble on his jaw. “Hey, you okay? You look like you were up all night.”

My eyes felt puffy and raw under my glasses. I hadn’t been sleeping much. I couldn’t stop seeing the image of Reece with that girl. I spent my energy trying to resist the urge to return the handful of missed calls and text messages from him.

I shrugged it off. “Just a little insomnia. Nothing a few really boring gopher tasks can’t fix.”

Raj sat down in front of the computer. “Boring I can definitely help you with.” I watched Raj log himself into AFIS, typing a string of numbers into the password field, then working through a list of names. One by one, he deleted their prints from the system.

“What are you working on?”

“About once a month, I get a report with a list of records that need to be purged from the database. Usually dropped charges, or people who were found not guilty during an appeal. Sometimes minors whose charges were expunged by a judge. In those cases, we remove their prints from the system. After I’m done, I’ll get back to scanning the old prints. Gotta feed The Monster.” Raj patted the top of the monitor.

“The Monster?”

“It’s what we call AFIS. She’s an amazing beast. We have to keep feeding her if we want her to work for us. The more records we feed her, the bigger she grows, the more possible matches she can find for us. Kind of like you and donuts.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Raj smirked as he voided the last record in the pile. “I don’t need an electrostatic dust lifter to know you’re the one who’s been snarfing down all the chocolate frosted donut holes in the break room.”

“No one else was eating them,” I said defensively.

“No one else had a chance,” Raj laughed.

My cheeks warmed.

Raj sighed as he plucked a new stack of print cards from a box. I watched as he scanned them into the computer, waiting for him to tell me to go wash dishes or something equally mundane. But he seemed to like the company.

“Raj?” I asked. “Did CSI find any fingerprints in the Adrienne Wilkerson case?”

“A print was lifted from a cigarette lighter found at the dump site. It’s the only one that didn’t match the prints of the victim or the guy they arrested.”

Which meant the lighter could be the key to ruling out Lonny as a suspect.

“Are you going to run it through The Monster? Can I watch?”

Raj shook his head. “I’m only allowed to scan old print cards. A licensed fingerprint examiner is the only one qualified to handle prints collected from a crime scene. She’ll be the one to enter them into AFIS and determine the search criteria.”

“Then what happens?”

“AFIS’ll spit out a list of possible matches. The examiner will use a comparison microscope to identify the right one. Then she’ll have another licensed examiner verify her findings.” That sounded like it would take a while. Maybe days. Three had already passed since I’d gone to see Lonny. How many more would he spend behind bars until he could be eliminated as a suspect?

“I thought The Monster would just spit out a match. You know, like boom, here’s your guy.”

Raj laughed. “Contrary to the gross exaggerations propagated by Hollywood screenwriters, fingerprint identification is still a manual process. And if the right suspect hasn’t been fingerprinted and put in the system before, we may not find a match at all. Hence the importance of the cheap manual labor you and I are so generously donating to the State of Virginia.” He cocked his head and looked at me sideways. Then he glanced at the door. It was still shut, the window still blacked out. He pushed the computer mouse toward me. “You want to drive?”

“Who, me? I thought you said—”

“You’ve been watching, right? I mean, it’s not rocket science or anything. Here.” He gave me his seat and stood over my shoulder while I scanned the first few records. “See. Piece of cake. If you get through that stack of records before the end of our shift, donuts are on me.” Raj playfully patted my head. The saccharine sweetness of opportunity left a curious tingle on my tongue. Like maybe this wasn’t the only mundane task he was looking forward to delegating off his plate.

“Very funny,” I muttered, sinking back into the chair. At least this was more interesting than washing beakers.

Raj snuck across the hall to pick up some toxicology reports to be delivered to Doc Benoit’s office, leaving me with firm instructions to tackle at least half the card stack before he returned. I stared at the mouth of The Monster, wondering who I might be feeding to it.

I picked at the edge of the card on top. Then set it back down.

Instead, I typed a name into the search field.

Reece’s name. His record appeared, every one of his fingerprints. Anything he touched for the rest of his life would bear the latent print of who he used to be. And even though I was still pissed at him, I wanted to kick in the screen. Because this was the reason he had been in lockup holding hands with another girl. A girl he shouldn’t be with. This was the piece of himself he was trying to expunge.

I cleared the screen of Reece’s record before I did something permanent. Something wrong. The cursor blinked at me from the search field.

I typed another name.

Boswell, David.

No fingerprint records returned. Which only meant my father had never been arrested for his crimes. And while part of me was relieved to see an empty screen beside his name, a deeper part of me recognized that it shouldn’t have been empty at all.

Curious, I typed in Lonny’s name. Johnson, Leonard.

Lonny’s prints were already there, connected to a series of crimes dating back to 2007. According to The Monster, Lonny was twelve when he’d committed his first B&E on record. Then came the drugs, the larcenies, the assaults. It all spoke to Alex’s point. That Lonny had been consumed, he was too deep in the belly of The Monster. All it would take was a partial print to dredge up every crime he’d ever committed. To a jury, he’d look guilty. They’d never think to see him in a different light.

Don’t believe everything you see.

I stared at The Monster. There was no changing the past. Lonny was already inside the system. But maybe that would work in his favor. Raj had said it himself. They’d found one print that
wasn’t
Lonny’s. The real killer was still out there, but maybe his print was in here.

• • •

When I got home that night, the trailer was locked and dark. The baseball bat stood propped in the corner behind the door. And yet, no matter how many lights I turned on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone. My mind wandered to the stranger at Lonny’s trailer when he was arrested on Saturday morning. To the man under the light post who’d been reading Lonny’s flyer. Everywhere I went, I had the shadowy feeling that someone was following me.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. Five missed calls and two voice mails from Reece. My finger hovered over his number. Everything inside me ached to call him, but would the sound of his voice just make me feel worse? I stuffed it back in my pocket and checked the locks again, leaving the chain unfastened so my mother could get in when her shift ended at four.

I made myself a sandwich and brought it into my bedroom. I took the baseball bat with me and sat cross-legged on my mattress with the bat across my lap, picking at the bread crusts. Gena had to be wrong. Reggie’s parole officer must have made a mistake. It had to be Reggie Wiles who broke in to my trailer. The notes had all started showing up after his release. And he was the only person I knew of with a reason to want to find my father. Gena might not believe me, but I just needed more proof.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

I looked around my room. If Raj could figure out who’d been stealing from his cabinets in the lab, there had to be a way to identify the person who’d broken in to my trailer. I set aside my sandwich. The only smooth surface the intruder would have walked on was the square of linoleum by the front door. I grabbed a flashlight from the junk drawer in the kitchen and switched off the lights. Squatting beside the foyer, I held the flashlight low to the floor. It was dusty all right. And there were footprints. Lots of them. The three-by-three sheet of flooring contained days of prints since I’d last bothered to mop. Mine, my mother’s, Butch’s, Reece’s, and even Mr. Fowler’s. All of them jumbled together, a scramble of random shimmers, no one print clear enough to make anything useful of.

I turned on the lights, thinking about what Raj said, about how oblique lighting can reveal hidden things. I returned to my room, trying to see it from a different angle. What about fingerprints? Only where would I look to find them if I still wasn’t sure exactly how the intruder had gotten in?

As far as I knew, the intruder had only touched one thing in my room that no one else had. No one but me.

I stood beside my bed and lifted the edge of the mattress, plucking out the plastic bag. If Reggie Wiles had been here, inside my trailer—if he’d put that article inside my bag—then there was only one way to prove it.