David opened his briefcase. The snap of the latches sounded loud in the quiet room. He took out a folder, placed it on the coffee table, and opened it. Diane saw a chart of numbers with notes scribbled at the bottom. Frank reached for it, examining the page.

  ‘‘You remember the rash of burglaries we had last year? Remember how Jefferies made a big deal over the charge that the old mayor and his administration couldn’t do anything about crime, especially crimes against the average homeowner? He hammered over and over on the point that the old police chief wouldn’t even deal with home burglaries. How the police told victims they probably wouldn’t be able to get their property back.’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ said Diane. ‘‘I remember. Unfortunately, that’s what the police usually did say when a house was burgled.’’

  ‘‘And remember how the burglaries went down after Jefferies had been mayor for a while?’’ said David.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ said Diane.

  Frank studied David’s notes. ‘‘Where did you get these figures?’’ he asked, not looking up.

  ‘‘The police department, court records.’’ David gestured toward the paper Frank was holding. ‘‘I checked into the numbers. Total burglaries went down, but the arrest rate for burglaries stayed the same as it was under the old mayor. So did the conviction rate,’’ said David.

  ‘‘What are you saying?’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘He’s saying the whole thing was staged to win the election,’’ said Frank. ‘‘That the mayor or his supporters had to be behind the surge in burglaries. Okay, you have my attention. What else do you have, David?’’

  23

  ‘‘Is that what you are saying?’’ said Diane. ‘‘Jefferies was behind the rash of burglaries?’’

  She sat openmouthed, staring at David. With what she was finding out about Jefferies from Garnett and others, she didn’t know why she should be so surprised. But she was. What David was suggesting was beyond political control of jobs or lying to try and claim her lab. If it was true, this was serious criminal activity he was engaged in to get elected.

  ‘‘Yes, I think he was behind the burglaries,’’ said David.

  She took the sheet from Frank and looked at the numbers. ‘‘So, he got someone to burgle the homes, then had them stop a month after he came into office? That seems incredible.’’

  ‘‘It does,’’ said David, ‘‘but how else do you read the numbers? How would the burglaries decrease but the arrest rate stay the same? Maybe it could have been a burglary ring that just happened to move on a month after the election. Nice and convenient for Jefferies. I prefer my conspiracy theory.’’

  ‘‘What about the crime scenes?’’ began Diane. She paused a moment. ‘‘Were those the ones you and Neva were excluded from?’’

  ‘‘You got it,’’ said David. ‘‘The newspapers reported that the stolen items were recovered in several instances. Good stories. Jefferies wanted to make sure the voters knew they did the right thing by electing him. But why weren’t the perps arrested?’’

  ‘‘You have more?’’ asked Frank. ‘‘This investigation you’ve embarked upon—is that why you resigned?’’

  ‘‘Yes. I didn’t tell Neva about my suspicions. I wanted to collect more data and I didn’t want to involve anyone else, just in case it turned out I was completely bonkers after all. That’s why I didn’t say anything to you,’’ he said to Diane.

  ‘‘What else do you have?’’ Frank asked.

  ‘‘This next stuff is what I find really disturbing,’’ he said, pulling some photographs from his file. Diane saw photographs of fingerprints, of crime scenes, trace evidence, more notes. David had been busy.

  ‘‘Bryce should have just fired me,’’ said David. ‘‘I don’t know why the stupid son of a bitch thought restricting me to the lab would keep all his dirty little secrets hidden from me. The lab is where most of the work is done.’’

  David picked up a photograph of several fingerprints. ‘‘These are from the investigation of the murder of Judge Karen McNevin. Bryce worked this scene. Rikki hadn’t been hired then. He brought all the evidence back for me to process. The first thing I noticed on the lifting tape—besides the fingerprints— was a lot of trace.’’

  He pulled out another photograph taken through a microscope. It showed small particles with a cubic crystal habit. Diane recognized sodium chloride. There were other particles she didn’t recognize.

  ‘‘Salt,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘This salt was on all the trace lifts—some on the fingerprint lifts, and in fact, on all the trace from the crime scene,’’ said David.

  He picked up another photograph. This one showed a close-up of some trace fibers supposedly lifted from the crime scene. There was something else stuck to the cellophane, some kind of red-brown flakes. Diane didn’t recognize them.

  ‘‘The flakes are peanut skins; the other tan particles are pieces of peanuts,’’ said David. ‘‘They are also pervasive in the trace from the judge’s crime scene, including the dog hair that was lifted from her body. It was consistent with the accused’s dog. Bryce lifted the hair with the fingerprint tape, and it has the salt and peanut parts all over it.’’

  David stopped and looked up from the pictures. ‘‘Let me tell you something about the murder,’’ he said. He took out the crime scene photographs and laid them on the table. Frank’s coffee table was now covered in photographic evidence.

  ‘‘Judge McNevin was shot at home,’’ said David. ‘‘It was on a Saturday. Saturdays her husband took their two kids to a movie, or someplace equally entertaining. Saturday was Karen’s day to stay home and catch up on her law journals. People who knew her knew she would be alone in the house on a Saturday afternoon. Her husband said she liked to soak in the tub while she read. She had a tub tray she used to keep her journals on and a glass of wine. She’d gotten out of the tub, put on a robe, and was in the bedroom when she was confronted by her killer and strangled to death.’’

  Diane and Frank listened as David spoke, not interrupting. Diane wasn’t sure where this was going, but she was developing a hard knot in the pit of her stomach. Frank’s living room was lit only by task lighting, and in the growing darkness the recesses were fading into shadows. Diane got up abruptly and turned on the overhead chandelier, and suddenly everything in the room was made visible again.

  ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she said, looking at Frank and David staring at her. ‘‘I just needed light.’’

  David hadn’t taken a drink of his coffee for a while, and it was probably growing cold. One reason he said he liked putting chocolate in it was that it tasted better when it got cold. Diane thought she should warm it for him. But then she wondered if she was just trying to delay hearing what he had to say, delay the dreaded thing to come, whatever it was. She mentally shook herself. This is just stupid, she thought. It’s the time of year. It always does this to me, keeps me off balance. As it does David.

  ‘‘Go on,’’ she said.

  David pulled out the autopsy photos.

  ‘‘Where did you get the autopsy photographs?’’ asked Diane. ‘‘I had to camp out in Shane’s lab practically to get him to give me anything.’’

  ‘‘I hacked into his computer,’’ said David.

  Diane and Frank both raised their eyebrows.

  David raised his palms and shrugged. ‘‘What do you do when it’s the people in authority you suspect of being criminals? I collected most of this stuff before I resigned, so technically I was authorized to see it.’’

  ‘‘Go on,’’ said Frank. From the deep crease in his forehead and the frown on his face, Diane could see he was worried too. She wasn’t sure whether he was concerned about David or about what David was saying.

  ‘‘Lloyd Bryce worked the crime scene. He wouldn’t allow either me or Neva to come with him. Got rather sharp about it, as I recall. He came back with the evidence for me to process. I found all this trace.

  ‘‘Now, I happened to know Judge Karen McNevin and her husband. They were friends. Karen was deathly allergic to peanuts. She had a very fast reaction when she came in contact with them and always carried an EpiPen. She couldn’t even touch them. At parties she stood far away from anyplace where there were mixed nuts. She wouldn’t have any in her home.

  ‘‘On the other hand,’’ continued David, ‘‘Evan Donovan, the man accused of strangling her to death, is an avid peanut eater. I spoke with his friends. He even does that thing where he puts them in his Coke. His house is littered with salted peanut parts. I know, because I broke in and looked. The trace evidence came from his house and not the crime scene.’’

  David sat back and waited.

  ‘‘Couldn’t it be transfer?’’ said Frank.

  ‘‘On the lifts, the salt residue covers the entire square from corner to corner. If it was transfer, it wouldn’t have covered the tape that thoroughly and evenly. Bryce lifted the fingerprint and trace from Donovan’s house and was rather sloppy about it. Also look at the autopsy report. There is no evidence in the pictures or mention by the ME of an allergic reaction. She would have had a serious skin reaction if Donovan had touched her throat with peanut residue all over his hands.’’ David let out a breath. ‘‘This evidence is why I quit.’’

  ‘‘You’re saying Donovan was framed,’’ said Frank. He said it more like a statement than a question.

  ‘‘Evan Donovan was made to be a fall guy. He was raised in an abusive home. Both he and his brother Bobby have low-normal IQs. Evan has a temper. He threatened Judge McNevin when his brother Bobby was sentenced.’’

  ‘‘Why was she killed?’’ asked Frank.

  ‘‘If you wanted to take over a town, what would you do?’’ said David. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘‘Get elected as mayor, start appointing friends to powerful positions, get yourself a crime lab, a bone lab, a DNA lab, and get your own judge appointed. But there was a little hitch. There was no vacancy on the bench. So one of the current judges had to go.’’

  ‘‘This is some conspiracy theory. If the mayor had been successful in all this, what was the point? What was he going to do with it?’’ said Frank.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ said David. ‘‘But if he was into criminal activities, like drugs, for instance, it’s good to have the crime lab on your side. If you want to control who goes to jail and who goes free, it would be a nice thing to have a DNA lab. And what a good place to have all three of those—a small town where all three labs are housed in a museum. These kinds of labs are usually in big cities, which are harder to get control of. Rosewood probably looked like easy pickings, especially since Jefferies once had family here.’’ David stopped and steepled his hands. ‘‘If we want to find out who killed the mayor and the chief of police, we need to do a little victimology. I think we need to find out exactly who Spence Jefferies and Edgar Peeks really are and what they were into.’’

  24

  Diane and Frank studied and tried to digest David’s collection of information, discussing the permutations and possibilities that would explain the evidence. Diane was finding it mentally exhausting. She spotted another folder in David’s briefcase and pulled it out.

  ‘‘What’s this?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Oh, that’s my sociological research,’’ he said. He took the folder from Diane and opened it. ‘‘This is interesting.’’

  The first page was a map. On closer examination, Diane recognized it as a map of the voting districts in Rosewood.

  ‘‘The red dots are burglaries,’’ said David. ‘‘Notice that they cluster in areas where voting is traditionally the heaviest.’’

  ‘‘The mayor was that organized?’’ Diane was incredulous.

  ‘‘It’s better than that,’’ said David. ‘‘I analyzed the homes that were burgled. It was always a prominent member of some group—church, Lions Club, Rotary— and usually at least two members of the organization were victims. These are people with lots of connections and social networks who would talk about it at their club meetings and with their friends and acquaintances, thereby making the problem look even bigger. Having at least two members as victims just increased the perception that crime was rising at an alarming rate. Our late mayor was a clever devil.’’

  Frank noticed that his neighborhood was one of those David had marked.

  ‘‘I do recall some folks down the street had a problem,’’ said Frank.

  ‘‘I think one reason you weren’t hit,’’ said David, ‘‘is that you work in Atlanta. You’d talk to fewer people in Rosewood about being a victim. And you are a detective, so you might just take it upon yourself to go after the perps.’’

  ‘‘I would have,’’ said Frank.

  ‘‘How would he get this much information?’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Easy. One good graduate student could gather it for him. Besides, these days almost everything is online. And there’s the good old-fashioned way: join the local chamber of commerce and they’ll give you a truckload of information on their members, on businesses, demographic profiles, neighborhood maps—you name it, they’ve got it. Jefferies had to live in Rosewood for at least a year before he ran for mayor. I think he used that time to gather information. Remember, he had Rosewood connections too. His grandparents lived here.’’

  ‘‘I didn’t know that. What else do you know about him?’’ asked Diane. ‘‘I know he moved here from Atlanta, but I don’t know much more than that.’’

  David pulled several pages from his folder. ‘‘More sociology,’’ he said, smiling.

  Diane recognized the pattern of information. It was a social network diagram. When she worked for World Accord International, her team would do a social network analysis of the villages they were going into. That let them know who the community leaders were and what their range of influence was.

  ‘‘The diagram starts with Spence Jefferies and lists the people he went to college with—Edgar Peeks and Lloyd Bryce.’’

  ‘‘Didn’t Jefferies go to the University of Pennsylvania? You aren’t telling me that Lloyd Bryce graduated from Penn?’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Diane,’’ said David, ‘‘you know very well that a person can be both smart and stupid at the same time.’’

  ‘‘I’m just amazed that he had scores good enough to get in,’’ she said.

  ‘‘He did,’’ said David. ‘‘They all went to the Wharton School of Business.’’

  ‘‘Really? I hardly know what to say. That’s a hard place to get into. But what qualified Bryce to run a crime scene unit?’’ asked Diane.

  ‘‘Nothing,’’ said David. ‘‘Was that not obvious?’’

  ‘‘He really got into Wharton on his own?’’ said Diane. She was having a hard time wrapping her brain around Bryce having any intelligence whatsoever.

  David laughed. ‘‘Bryce’s scores were the highest of any of them.’’

  Diane shook her head. ‘‘Who knew?’’

  ‘‘Exactly how do you know?’’ asked Frank. ‘‘How were you able to get such personal information?’’

  ‘‘Part of the information I got from Bryce himself. He likes to brag,’’ said David.

  ‘‘And the other parts?’’ asked Frank.

  ‘‘Through investigation,’’ said David.

  He and Frank held eye contact for several moments.

  ‘‘You’re a good investigator,’’ said Frank.

  ‘‘Yes, I am,’’ said David.

  Diane could see Frank wanted to ask more questions. And he probably realized he would get no satisfactory answers. David was very secretive about how he did things.

  She looked at the diagram. It showed circles with the names of Lloyd Bryce, Edgar Peeks, and Spence Jefferies, with lines connecting all of them to one another. Edgar Peeks was also connected to several policemen he had hired. Lloyd Bryce was connected to the guard at the overlook, to the DNA tech/detective he wanted Jin to hire, to Rikki Gillinick, and to Jennifer Jeffcote-Smith. Jennifer was also connected to Shane Eastling, the new medical examiner.

  ‘‘Do you think Shane Eastling was a member of Jefferies’ little cabal?’’ asked Diane.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ said David. ‘‘It could be that he simply knew Jennifer and recommended her. But he would have had to know Bryce was looking for a forensic anthropologist—ergo he would have to know Bryce in some capacity. However, it could have occurred in passing—at a crime scene Bryce mentioned he was looking and Shane knew somebody. I haven’t done full research on Shane yet. Nor do I know where Bryce found Rikki or Curtis, or where Peeks found the policemen he hired. There’s a lot I don’t know.’’

  ‘‘It’s hard to fathom,’’ commented Frank. ‘‘Where did Shane Eastling go to school, do you know?’’

  ‘‘Cal State and the University of Chicago,’’ said David. ‘‘He grew up outside of Los Angeles, as did Jennifer.’’

  ‘‘You know,’’ said Frank, ‘‘you should just turn this over to Janice Warrick and let the police take over from here. Now that the principals at the center of this are dead, they’re no longer a problem. That is, except to discover what they were up to and who killed them. But it’s not your problem to solve. With the things Diane discovered about how Bryce mishandled the crime scene, Garnett should be in the clear.’’ He paused and smiled. ‘‘The detectives are probably now looking for the shadowy figure,’’ he added.

  David winced. ‘‘Look, I suppose I need to talk about that,’’ he said.

  Diane didn’t say anything. Neither did Frank. The three of them sat in the light of the chandelier staring at one another.

  ‘‘I pulled the LUDs on all their phones,’’ said David. ‘‘There was nothing that wasn’t expected. That surprised me. Then I happened to remember seeing Bryce talking on a cell that was different from the one he normally uses. And I realized—they used prepaid cells for their activities.’’

  ‘‘What exactly were their activities?’’ asked Frank. ‘‘You’ve made a convincing case that they were up to something, but do you have any idea exactly what that was?’’

 

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