“So I just told you,” David replied with a laugh. “You need some more sleep, Evie.”
“It’s just awfully exciting. What floor?” She stepped ahead of him onto the elevator at the crime lab.
“Adam said fourth, room 419. He’ll meet us there.”
Detective Ben Jenkins was coming down the hall from the other direction as they exited the elevator. They waited for him to join them and then entered the door marked Imaging. Evie was expecting white counters and lab equipment, beakers and sinks. Instead, it turned out to be a conference room with several wall screens and an old-style overhead projector.
The wall clock said 4:18 p.m. She was so ready to have something tangible to tackle. She’d spent the day learning about the building where Saul’s remains were discovered and the businesses that had last occupied it. Her brain was spinning with tax filings and bankruptcy court accounting documents.
RB Electric had the smell of an organized crime family business front. The owner was the uncle of a man who’d been arrested on racketeering charges, who also had done jail time for money laundering. But RB Electric itself looked legit, paid its taxes, had twenty employees, had gone bankrupt only when clients stopped buying the equipment it manufactured. That filing had been in order. If they had been using the company as a front, they were taking advantage of the truck fleet, not laundering money through the business accounts themselves. Five trucks were sold during the bankruptcy, all with lift gates and more than a hundred thousand miles on each of them. It would have been easy enough to load contraband and make an extra stop on the way to a customer, use RB Electric for the resources and building it offered, but otherwise leave it a legal business.
Evie paced the room while David and Ben compared notes on the rest of the crime-scene recovery. The skull indicated Saul had taken a hit on the back of the head, probably with a baseball bat. The ribs showed a gunshot to the chest. Breaking up all the cat-litter chunks to see if the bullet had settled somewhere in the wall tomb would take another day. It was solid, steady progress. They knew how and where. She wanted something to point to who and why. The noon newscasts had led with the recovered remains, so anyone involved now knew their handiwork had been discovered. Another real unknown was how many other bodies might be found in the building.
David had decided they would talk with Saul’s sister in the morning, once the remains had been transported to the medical examiner’s office. They would tell Cynthia it likely was her brother while the medical examiner worked to make it official. It would be good to have that hard conversation behind them.
The door pushed open, and an older man carrying a thin box joined them. Evie was relieved to see the lab coat—she liked science guys when it was evidence she was looking for.
“Thanks for coming so quickly, detectives,” the man said. “I’m Adam Billings. I’ve been coordinating work on your retrieved evidence. I have good news and bad. The bad first. The notebook in the shirt pocket is a mass of pages bonded together. I doubt we’ll be able to separate them. The good news, the camera had been shooting film, and there was nearly a full roll of exposed frames in the protected well of the motor drive. What I have to show you now are the negatives we’ve since printed to ten-by-twelve.”
He opened the box he’d set on the table and took out an inch-thick stack of photo paper. “As these are time-stamped, I’m just going to lay them on the table so you can see the chronology. The last photo is Saturday, 10:16 p.m. The first ones begin on Wednesday.” Adam began to place the photos along the length of the table.
“Oh, wow. They survived really well,” Evie noted, surprised. She was looking at a crowd of young people, some with arms in the air, some dancing, mostly facing the same direction. Good compositions. She could tell Saul had been a photographer for a newspaper before changing careers. Many shots came from a slightly higher vantage point than the crowd. Probably stood on a chair, she thought, or maybe a bench.
“The concert Saul attended Wednesday night,” David said.
Evie nodded. “That makes sense. He must have started with a new roll of film after he left his sister.”
The concert photos went on for nearly forty shots—crowds, then a recurring face in the crowd, and finally ones that cropped in just the young man. He looked to be early twenties, had a neat haircut and wore a black T-shirt sporting some band’s logo. David picked up a photo to study it closer.
“Does he look familiar to you?” Evie wondered.
“Vaguely. These are six years old. I have a feeling I’ve seen a more recent photo of him. Maybe a union worker at one of the concert locations? I was searching the entire list of names in the DMV records.”