I muttered an expletive and turned my head away for a moment. I hated getting emotional in front of people, but that rarely stopped me from having all sorts of meltdowns on a regular basis. Dutch laid a supportive hand on my shoulder, and swallowing past the lump in my throat, I was able to focus on my companions again.
“Candice?” Dutch asked when he saw that I was okay.
“APD is going door-to-door asking neighbors for any surveillance footage of the road. Two doors in that direction,” she said, pointing to her right, “they hit pay dirt. There’s a camera pointed directly at the street. With any luck it’ll give us a glimpse of the killer or killers and what kind of vehicle they may have been driving.”
“APD thinks the whole thing went down sometime before six p.m. yesterday,” Brice said.
“So, after Dave had come and gone,” Candice said. I knew why she made that declaration. If Dave had been here, he would’ve been one of the bodies found inside. I wanted to feel relief that he’d escaped such a close call, but I could only feel an anxious sadness and worry in the pit of my stomach. We still didn’t know where Dave was, and that alone was troubling enough without the added note that he’d been in a home that’d later seen such unspeakable violence.
“That’s some relief at least,” Dutch said.
“Maybe that’s why the alarm had been disabled,” Brice said. “Maybe they turned it off to let Dave in and forgot to turn it back on again after he left.”
“That’d be tragic,” Candice said sadly.
We all nodded without comment and for a long moment the four of us were silent.
I glanced again at the security gate, which blocked off the driveway from the street. “How did they get past that gate? I mean, there’s a call box, right? If the Roswells were home, why would they let strangers through the gate without first being sure who they were?”
“Don’t know,” Brice said. I suddenly realized he looked pale and very troubled. Brice’s temperament was a lot like my husband’s: cool and collected, especially at crime scenes. But this scene had clearly rattled him. I thought it must be because the Roswells were clients and all the security measures Safe Chambers had put into place had so clearly failed.
“What about fingerprints?” I asked, still watching that same tech work carefully and methodically to document the bloody handprint before he’d attempt to remove it.
Brice glanced behind him toward the tech. “So far, that one handprint seems to be the only one we can link directly to the murders. It doesn’t already belong to anyone dead in there,” he said. “They’re taking their time pulling it before they do a search on IAFIS.”
IAFIS stood for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which was a national fingerprint database kept by the FBI but used by local law enforcement everywhere. It held something like a hundred million fingerprints, and once a new set of prints was uploaded, the system could search through all those records to find a match. Sometimes it found a match fairly quickly. Sometimes it took a while. Everything usually depended on the quality of the print recovered from a crime scene, which was why removing the prints from the Roswells’ security gate was so critical and needed to be done as perfectly as possible.
“Has anyone commented on known enemies of the Roswells?” Dutch asked Brice and Candice.
They both shook their heads. “Not yet,” Candice said. “I was going to work on that after we leave here.”
Brice glanced sideways at his wife. I knew that even though APD was willing to dole out a little information to us about the case, they sure weren’t going to feel warmly about sharing the actual investigation should Brice and Dutch decide to join the team in any official capacity.
“You’re going to investigate?” Brice asked Candice.
“I am,” she said, squaring her shoulders, as if she was anticipating an argument from her husband.
“Good,” he said. “Keep Dutch and me in the loop, okay?”
Candice offered him a soft smile. “Of course.”
“I’m in too, Candice,” I said.
It was Dutch’s turn to eye me sideways, his concern for my well-being after the trauma of witnessing the crime scene evident in his expression. “You sure that’s a good idea, babe?”
“No,” I confessed. “But I’m going to do it anyway. We can work this case and look for Dave, since one led to the other and I almost never think that’s a coincidence.”
Just then a man in a black dress shirt and tan slacks approached us. He was waving an electronic tablet as if he’d discovered a piece of evidence he wanted to share. “Harrison,” he said.
“Detective Vargas,” Brice said. “You find something?”
Vargas—a stout man I’d put in his midforties—turned to position his tablet directly in front of Brice. Dutch, Candice, and I moved to stand behind the two men and look over their shoulders. “I just pulled this off the security cam of the house down the street. The guy who owns it said he heard someone setting off a firecracker sometime in the early afternoon—he thinks it was sometime after noon but before three. He said it bothered him that one of his neighbors was ignoring the fireworks ban, and after stewing about it for a while, he sent an e-mail to the neighborhood association about it. The time stamp on the e-mail was three ten p.m.”
“You think he heard a gunshot, not a firework,” Dutch said.
Vargas nodded. “I just talked to the ME inside and asked him if it was possible that the murders went down earlier than between four and six. He’s a new guy and this is only his fourth scene on his own. He said that it was definitely possible, especially accounting for the different liver temps of all four vics and the varying temps of the areas where they were found.
“Anyway, after reviewing every car on the surveillance video that came down the road here between noon and three, the only one that stands out is this one of a truck taken at one oh six p.m.”
A jolt of alarm went through me, and judging by the expressions on Candice’s and Dutch’s faces, they were equally worried about the new revelation.
Unaware of our reaction, Vargas tapped the screen with one fat finger, and a short clip of video began to play. The time-stamped video was grainy and in black and white, but a truck could be seen moving slowly down the street, quite obviously under the speed limit, as if the driver was searching for an address. It made one slow pass by the camera, then reappeared, moving on the opposite side of the street before making a U-turn and heading back again toward the Roswells’ home. It reminded me of a shark circling its prey, but really appeared to be someone casing the street, looking for any signs of trouble before striking.
The truck was a light-colored—probably silver—Ford F-150 with an extended cab. No other truck is as plentiful on Texas roads as the F-150. It’s everywhere, and easy to identify. But this particular truck was distinctive for another reason even beyond the extended cab. There was a black truck box at the front of the bed that was usually a common aftermarket purchase for those folks who worked in the construction industry. There was too little detail to make out the driver, but the truck looked a lot like the one Dave drove. Still, the last time I’d seen Dave’s truck, it’d been absent the dent in the right front bumper, but maybe that’d been the result of an unexpected off-road slip down a steep embankment.
And although the video showed no clear image of the driver, it was obvious to me that it was Dave’s truck. Especially since he’d been set to arrive at the Roswells’ home right around one p.m. And if I was right and it was Dave’s truck, then the path he drove on that video was even more suspicious, because Dave had been out to this house many, many times, and there was no way he would’ve needed to make two passes to find the house. He would’ve gone straight there, so that pattern of easing up and down the street slowly had another, perhaps sinister purpose.
I took my gaze off the video to glance at my companions and judging
by the set to everyone else’s shoulders, they were thinking the same thing I was. Only Detective Vargas was clueless to our worries. “There’s no view of the license plate,” he said, “but that damage to the front bumper might help us find this truck on some traffic cams and maybe even one of the tollways.”
We’d been planning on using that very tactic to track down Dave, and although I still very much wanted to find my friend, I wasn’t so sure that I wanted to find out what he’d been involved in.
At that moment, Candice moved away from us, and my gaze followed her as she walked over to the tech working on the bloody handprint on the gate. It appeared he was getting ready to lift the print.
Candice sidled up quietly next to him and used her phone to take several close-up photos of the handprint. The tech didn’t look thrilled to have her crowd his space, but she carried herself with such authority that he didn’t verbally protest.
She then rejoined us a moment later, sliding her phone into her purse and offering us a serious look.
I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking the same thing. And I hated both of us for it.
I glanced back at that bloody handprint. To my knowledge, Dave had never committed a crime, but he had been fingerprinted about seven years earlier when he’d saved me from a guy who’d tried to kill me. He’d tossed that asshole down a set of basement stairs, killing the man but saving my life.
It’d been a routine thing when the local Michigan police had shown up to take our statements and fingerprint Dave, placing him into temporary custody until he was cleared of all charges just a few days later.
The probability that his fingerprints had then been uploaded into IAFIS was around a hundred percent; it was simply protocol for the Royal Oak PD, and I knew that because Dutch had been a detective there before he got a job with the FBI.
In other words, Dave was in the system. And if that was his bloody handprint on the security gate, then APD would also know it before too long.
Candice would want our team to know it first, though, so it was time to get the hell out of there and hurry to analyze some loops and whorls.
A glance at Dutch and Brice told us they were each thinking what I was, and they’d also both seen Candice slide over to the handprint and snap the pic.
Behind Vargas’s back, I motioned to Candice and myself, then pointed to the bloody handprint on the gate. Dutch nodded, but Brice seemed reluctant to give his assent.
Candice reached over and squeezed his hand and he finally shrugged his okay.
“Do you need Candice and me for anything else, Detective?” I asked Vargas. Another detective had taken my statement a few hours earlier, but I remembered that Vargas had taken Candice’s statement and had talked to her at length about what she’d seen when we first entered the home.
He looked over his shoulder at me as if he was having trouble placing me at first, but then he seemed to remember. “No, you can go,” he said. “I’ll call if I have any follow-up questions.”
“Thanks,” Candice and I said before we each turned to our husbands for a quick kiss on the cheek and ducked away back to Candice’s car, which was now parked well down the street.
Neither of us spoke until we’d driven about a half mile away from the Roswells’ home. “Maybe it’s not his bloody hand on that gate,” Candice said.
I didn’t reply. That terrible, worried knot in the pit of my stomach felt heavier and harder to bear.
“We’ll get back to the office, upload the photo of the handprint, and compare it to Dave’s, and then we’ll see. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him, Abs. Not our Dave. He couldn’t be mixed up in something like this. Right?”
I turned my head toward the window and closed my eyes.
“Hey,” Candice said after a moment, reaching for my hand to squeeze it.
I turned back to her. There were tears in my eyes that I couldn’t hold back.
She took one look at my anguished face and her expression fell. “Fuck.”
I went back to staring out the window.
• • •
It wasn’t until we got back to the office that we realized we didn’t have anything handy that might have Dave’s fingerprints on it. He hadn’t done any work at my house in quite some time, and to my knowledge he’d never been to my office. So the only way to get something with his prints on it was to call Gwen and nonchalantly ask her about it.
Candice made the call. “Hi, Gwen,” she said while I listened. “We haven’t found Dave yet, but we’re not giving up until we do. I think what might help is to have a set of his fingerprints to keep on file here, just in case we suspect he’s been somewhere and we can compare any prints we find to his.” There was a pause, then, “Yeah, it’s a new thing we do in investigations. I know it sounds weird, but when there’s no surveillance footage, it can be the next best thing for finding out where someone’s actually been. What I need is for a clear set of Dave’s prints.”
There was another pause, then, “Well, anything that he uses a lot. Like his hairbrush might be perfect if he has one.”
Dave had very long hair, which he kept in a braid while he worked. He looked like an aging hippie, and in fact, he was. There was no way he used a comb given the amount and length of his hair. I had to give Candice props for thinking of his hairbrush.
“Awesome,” Candice said as she gave me a thumbs-up. “No, you stay put. Abby and I can come over and pick it up. Just shoot me your address via text and we’ll see you in about half an hour.”
Once she’d hung up, Candice said, “Let me upload the photo from the crime scene to my computer. Then we’ll head over to get Dave’s hairbrush.”
“Okay,” I said softly, before I followed with, “How long do you think it’ll take APD to run those prints?”
“Not long. But the techs are going to be at that crime scene for several more hours at least. There’s a lot to catalog and process. With any luck we’ll be finished with our comparison well before they start theirs.”
My phone pinged with an incoming text as Candice and I made our way back down to her car. “It’s Dutch,” I said. “He wants to know if we have anything yet.”
“Tell him it’ll be at least two hours or so from now.”
I sent Dutch the note and Candice and I didn’t really talk again until we pulled into Gwen and Dave’s driveway twenty minutes later. I’d never been to Dave’s house before. It was surprising in some ways, not surprising in others.
He and Gwen lived in a single-level ranch with an attached garage, a brown brick facade, and chocolate-colored shutters.
His front door was like a piece of art, carved wood with intricate relief and a small glass window at eye level. Candice rang the bell and we heard the clicking of heels on a wood floor approaching.
When Gwen pulled the door open, I was struck by how pretty and petite she was.
Much like her husband, Gwen had long blond hair with streaks of white, pulled back away from her face and braided down her back. Her eyes were a gorgeous ice blue, and her nose was delicate. She was thin, and shorter than me by a few inches, making her appear almost doll-like. But there was something about the set to her eyes that embodied strength.
Dressed in torn jeans and what looked like one of Dave’s white T-shirts (given the fit on her), she sighed with either fatigue or relief when she saw us. “I’ve got it right here,” she said, waving us forward into the home.
Candice and I stepped over the threshold and looked around. The place was neat as a pin, and the fresh scent of lemon and pine wafted up to us. Down the hall I could see that a vacuum was still plugged into the wall socket, and I thought that Gwen had probably been trying to deal with her frayed nerves by cleaning.
We followed her down the hall to a room just off the central hallway. It appeared to be a den, containing shelves and shelves of books and a big leather chair that had seen a
lot of use, given the rounded dent in the cushion. Dave’s hairbrush was resting on the side table next to the chair. I was relieved to see it was an older brush with a big round back and a large handle. There’d be plenty of prints on it.
Candice pulled a Baggie out of her pocket. “Did you handle the brush much?” she asked. I hoped that Gwen hadn’t smeared any of Dave’s prints.
“No,” Gwen said. “I was very careful. I used my rubber gloves to bring it in here.”
“Perfect,” Candice said, picking up the brush only after placing her hand inside the bag and then turning it inside out. “We’ll get this back to either you or Dave in the next day or two.”
“Don’t lose it,” Gwen said as she wrung her hands together. “That brush was a present from Dave’s mom. She left us last year, and I’d hate for anything to happen to it.”
I remembered hearing about Dave’s mom passing away the previous December. Dutch and I had sent flowers and a card. “We’ll be extra careful, then,” Candice assured her.
Gwen attempted to offer us a smile, but she really couldn’t get one to form. Her eyes misted and she wrung her hands some more. “I’m just so worried about him,” she said.
“Us too,” I told her.
“I can’t understand why he doesn’t call or come home,” she said next.
Us either, I thought but didn’t say.
Gwen sighed and stared around as if she were lost in her own home. “I have an early meeting tomorrow with several staff members that I normally would never miss, but right now I can’t imagine going in and being able to focus.”
“What do you do?” Candice asked.
“I work for a health insurance company. I’m a registered nurse and I oversee compliance protocols for our entire company. Tomorrow I’m supposed to lecture my staff about several key changes in the health-care code, but I can’t even think about what I want for dinner or even if I want dinner, much less speak coherently to a dozen staff members about the recent changes.”