“Well, well.” He picked up a stick from the ground and tried to lift the fabric away, but it stuck to the barb. It was good quality fabric, not unlike the shirt he’d been wearing the night before, only darker.
Olivia came closer.
“It looks like a man’s dress shirt. I mean, someone who could have come straight here from the meeting,” she said.
He made a sound of agreement. “Or it could be a woman, dressed in a man’s shirt. Do you remember what everyone was wearing?”
She gave him a quick look. “Women’s clothing is my job. I remember the women’s outfits. None of the men were dressed in anything memorable. I’m sorry.”
“As it turns out, I took pictures.”
“How?”
“With that pen I was using to take some notes during the strategy session.”
“Clever.”
“I wanted a record of the people there. I wasn’t really interested in the clothing.”
Now he took a plastic bag and some thin rubber gloves out of his pocket and carefully untangled the fabric from the barbed wire. The material was stiff in one place, and when he held it up to the light, he thought he saw blood.
“I think the bastard cut himself when he was getting the hell out of my way.”
She stared at the cloth. “If he cut himself, can you get his DNA from that?”
Chapter 11
Olivia watched Max consider the question. “The short answer is yes. But there are a lot of factors in play. I’m not officially in law enforcement, which makes a difference in how the analysis would have to be handled. A police department’s not going to work with me. Of course there are civilian labs, like the National Forensic Support Lab, but they’re expensive, and it might take weeks to get the results. And once we knew the individual, we’d still have to look for a match in the state or the FBI database. With Maryland, we’d only get people in the state system.”
She cleared her throat. “Don’t you have a friend in the police department that you could ask?”
“That’s a possibility. Maybe better than looking for someone with a nasty scratch on his arm.”
“Not very scientific.”
“It would be a clue.”
She followed him out of the woods and into the house, where he pulled out his cell phone and made a call—to his partners, she presumed, because he reported the barbed wire and the piece of shirt fabric.
“We might as well go ahead with an analysis,” he said, then listened for a few moments.
“Yeah, it may not pan out, but I’d like to at least see what we’ve got. I’ll mail it off as soon as I can.”
When he hung up, she gave him a questioning look. “I thought you said we might as well not bother.”
“We might get lucky. And maybe with those photos I took.”
He went to his computer and opened a file. She sat down next to him as he brought up one of the pictures he’d taken with his pen the night before. It showed Tommy Larson sitting across the table from Max. He was wearing a yellow polo shirt, nothing like the scrap of fabric Max had found on the barbed wire.
They went on to the next picture, which was of Tommy and his date. Even though Tommy’s shirt didn’t match the fabric, he was looking at Max with an annoyed expression on his face. Pictures of Brian and Troy showed shirts that were nothing like the fabric, but they revealed similar expressions.
She dragged in a little breath.
“What?”
“They don’t like you.”
“They could be remembering me as the school bad boy.”
Olivia put her hand on his arm. “You weren’t as bad as they thought.”
“Why not?”
“You came to my rescue at the pizza parlor. And if you did that, you probably did other stuff that damaged your bad-boy reputation.”
He snorted. “You mean like walking old ladies across the street?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Pressing him, she asked, “That night, would you have done it for anyone, or was it me specifically?”
He made a low sound. “What’s the better answer?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it better for me to have wanted to help you specifically—or any girl?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t know the answer.”
“You don’t remember what you were thinking that evening?” she probed.
“It was a long time ago.”
She was pretty sure he did remember but that he didn’t want to share the memory with her, because he was deliberately backing away from an opportunity to get closer to her.
He clicked to the next picture, and she took the opportunity to lean closer to him, as she looked at the group shot of several people at the food table. No one was wearing the shirt in question.