Page 126 of Random in Death
“Can you bring up the whole thing?”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re keeping me from doing the work you’re bitching at me to do.”
“Just bring it up, prints illuminated.”
When he did, she felt the air deflate in her lungs. She’d have rated it two craploads of prints.
“Can you concentrate on this area? Say from the edge of the door to about a foot in, and factoring his height, below six feet. He could’ve slapped at it above his own head, but where are you going to shove at a door you want open fast?”
“Where it cracks open,” Peabody finished. “Close to the opening.”
“Prints on top of prints,” Eve muttered. “Look, Berenski, I can see this is a bitch of a job, but I know he’s going to be there. If he follows pattern, he’ll go after another kid tonight, and she may not be as lucky as the last one.”
“Prints on top of prints,” he repeated. “Smeared, blurred, partials, fingers, palms, side of the hand. I’ll shift to this section, but you gotta understand we need to separate, clean up, match, ID, eliminate. Unless we get lucky, it won’t be fast.”
You’re there, she thought, studying the image on-screen.
“Let’s all get lucky,” she said, and left him to it.
“It could be faster than he thinks.” Outside, Peabody climbed into the car. “They have all the staff prints now, that cuts some of the ID time.”
“He was right. Nobody’s wiped that damn door down for weeks. Maybe longer. But he was running, knocking people over. No way in hell he didn’t put a hand on that door. We just have to hope he left an identifiable print.
“Plug in Haven Funeral Home, Peabody. Why do they call them homes? Nobody lives there.”
“For comfort, I guess. Free-Agers bury their dead. I mean it’s a choice, because choice rules, but mostly that’s the way. Back to the earth. The Harboughs went with cremation. I guess that’s natural, too.”
“Death’s natural. Murder’s not.”
“Which way do you want it? I mean a hundred years from now when you die peacefully in your sleep.”
“What do I care? I’ll be dead. All this stuff isn’t for the dead anyway. It’s for the living. A stone in the ground, ashes tossed in the air or kept in an urn. And that one’s creepy. It’s just creepy. It’s all for the living. And they’re entitled to it.”
“I don’t know how anyone gets over burying their child.”
“They don’t. They just get through it.”
When they arrived, the room was filled with people sitting in long pews, and more standing behind them. The summer light streamed in windows, beamed on flower displays.
A woman in a black dress stood at a podium while the screen behind her showed photos of Jenna.
The baby, the toddler, the little girl. She recognized the music that played, as Peabody had played it in Jenna’s room. So her own voice accompanied the moments of her short life.
When the music stopped, when the screen froze on a photo of Jenna, a pretty, smiling teenager, the woman invited others to step up and relate a memory.
Eve tuned it out, had to, and studied the room.
She saw Louise and Charles, seated together just behind the family. She saw Nadine and Jake near the back, and not surprisingly, she realized, his bandmates, along with the very pregnant wife of one, the longtime cohab of another.
Jenna’s friends, their parents, ranged between.
A lot of people, and plenty of them in Jenna’s age group. More friends, schoolmates, neighbors.
She spotted a couple of males with what she now thought of as boarder hair, but one was mixed race, and even though he remained seated, she judged him at around six feet.
The other sat in the family area. Blond hair and closer to twenty than sixteen.
A few short, more military-style cuts, but none of them fit. Just didn’t fit.