So far, so good. Someone, probably Ronald Gray, had taken very good care of the scrap over the years: he had kept it in paper, not plastic, and had not handled it a great deal. Maybe he knew that paper would preserve it better; maybe he didn’t. Sorensen didn’t care. Like an archeologist standing at the edge of an ancient tomb, she was merely grateful for the find.
On the wall, light against the gloom around it, David Quinn in his middle-school yearbook photo. Sorensen’s sharp blue eyes swept the firmament of tiny dots and imperfections in the photocopy paper; they followed the contours of the fragment: it was from the top right-hand corner of the page, and it had been torn to make a triangular shape that included the Quinn picture. Torn, she noted, not cut: the edge was neat, because someone had folded down the corner, pressed, and then carefully ripped off that piece. If the person had used scissors or any kind of blade, the edge would have been more than neat; it would have been nearly perfect.
Sorensen picked up a small yellow bottle of chocolate milk she had filched from her daughter’s stock and took a long swig. Perfect was no good to her; her whole life was about the individual, the unique, the anomaly in the pattern. This was what she was looking for now.
One of her crew put his head around the door. “I’ll fume it for prints once you’re done,” he said.
“Yes, thanks,” she replied without looking away from the projected image.
“When do you think . . . ?”
“Not sure.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“Not really.”
“Would you prefer it if I—”
“Left? Yes, thanks, Nick. I’m better at this on my own.”
“Sure thing.”
Sorensen focused her attention back on the bright image. There were ways and means to identify a printer and a copier, and they used those methods on a regular basis to track down alleged terrorists, counterfeiters, and all kinds of felons. However, modern techniques that exploited a printer’s individual intrinsic and extrinsic signatures were pointless when the image was twenty-five years old and the machine that had created it was, in all probability, lying splintered on a heap of garbage somewhere. The notion that a piece of plastic and ink from the 1980s was still churning out copies was ridiculous when anybody could buy a new one for $59.99.
Although there was a point to getting the latent prints off the paper as soon as possible, Sorensen wanted to track the origin of the page. Who had held the yearbook down on the copier and pressed the Start button? If the picture had been used to identify one of the boys, it was certainly something worth pursuing.
The Quinn picture was not complete: the angle at which the corner had been torn meant that a little had been lost—a bit of his right shoulder. It also meant that a very small portion of the top of the photograph below Quinn’s had been caught. Sorensen sat forward in her chair.
The pencil line around Quinn had obviously been drawn on the photocopied page, the depression still visible on the other side after all these years. And yet . . .
“Oh, my . . .” she said to herself as she grabbed her head magnifier and slipped it into place.
They were small, but they were definitely there, and Sorensen thought of her own yearbooks and what she used to do as soon as she had her own copy in her hands: you got them signed. You wrote on the glossy photos and in the margins; you forever and irreversibly altered the pristine beauty of the book with adolescent scrawls. That was the point of a yearbook.
Sorensen reached for her cell.
Madison was driving back into the precinct from Bellevue. Paula Wilson Kruger had asked her about Warren Lee’s death, and she had tried to be truthful without giving her too many details—the tabloid press and the Internet had done enough scavenging around it. The traffic on the bridge was moving at the usual rush-hour speed, and she was about to hit the tunnel, when her cell phone beeped. She pressed the speaker button and left it next to her on the passenger seat.
“Madison.”
“It’s Sorensen. I’ve been looking at the paper with David Quinn’s picture on it. I think we have something.”
“Go on.”
“You know there’s the pencil mark around the boy, and it was made on the scrap of paper we have?”
“Yes, made before it was torn off from the rest of the page.”
“Right. Well, there are two further identifiable marks that are clearly not dust on the copier or a paper imperfection.”
“Pencil marks?”
“No, it’s pen. I’m thinking ballpoint, pen-type marks . . . but they’re not on our scrap,” Sorensen said, her voice crackling through in spite of the bad reception. “They’re on the original.”