Sticks and Stones Page 21

  “Thank you, boys,” he said. “I appreciate you bringin’ this to my attention.”

  Dewey grinned. “You’re very welcome.”

  I let out a big breath and we started for the door when Mr. Harrison called out, “Oh, and boys?”

  Both of us turned around.

  “Congratulations on the great detective work.”

  That brought big smiles to both of us. We left the store and got back on our bikes knowing we’d done something good.

  Dewey said, “You know, Abe, today we made the world a little safer for common folk.”

  I thought about this for just long enough to realize how idiotic it sounded.

  But I didn’t care. Mr. Harrison had called us “detectives.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Leah had driven straight home from Talladega yesterday after she and Carmichael cut the deal with Duck. When she finally made it back to Alvin, it was past quitting time anyway. Now it was near on eleven, and she’d just made it in on account of she spent the morning cooking eggs and bacon for Abe, Caroline, and Dan. Dan had gotten up long enough to eat and then went straight back to the sofa, complaining that he was up until five reading through the Cahaba River Strangler files. Didn’t sound like he was discovering any breakthroughs in the case, but, Leah noticed, he did manage to polish off yet another bottle of Jim Beam.

  Thankfully, he didn’t seem drunk at breakfast.

  Setting the fax from Grell Memorial beside her keyboard, Leah poured herself a coffee from the half-filled pot on the table and took a seat at her desk. For once, Chris was typing away on his computer and, Leah realized, he had been the last few times she’d seen him. Normally, the man spent his time with his boots up on his desk doing crossword puzzles. She had no idea what he was working on. It wasn’t like he was doing data entry, since he wasn’t consulting any data.

  She hoped Ethan hadn’t given him a special project to keep him busy, since she needed his help narrowing down the thirty-nine potential suspects she suddenly had.

  “Whatcha doin’?” she asked him.

  “Somethin’ for Ethan,” he said, his eyes riveted to his computer screen.

  Leah bit her bottom lip. Damn. A series of characters scrolled up his monitor too quickly for Leah to make them out. “What’re all those?”

  “Hang on,” he said, pointing his darkly creased index finger at the list’s bottom as it began slowing down. “I think we’re ... almost ...”

  The data stopped scrolling, and Leah noticed it was a bunch of names followed by numbers. She rolled her chair in closer to Chris’s. “What is all that?”

  “That ...” Chris said, his attention still on his screen. “... is the result of three solid days of work.”

  “And? What is it?”

  “One sec.” He looked over his shoulder to Ethan’s office. The door was closed. “Hey, Ethan!” Chris hollered. Leah almost told him to damn well stifle himself. It was one thing for her to be cavalier with Ethan—he and her pa had been friends—it was quite another for Chris to be disrespectful, and quite out of character. Leah sat there shocked.

  She heard Ethan’s chair squeak right through his closed door as he got off of it and opened his door. Sitting there, she patiently braced herself to hear Chris get yelled at, only that never happened. Instead, Ethan walked over and stood behind Chris, looking at his monitor, his face breaking into a smile. “Please,” he said to Chris, “tell me you’re finally done.”

  Chris was all smiles. “I reckon so, yes.”

  Ethan rubbed his large hands together. Leah noticed age in his forearms and wrists. “So? What’s the verdict?”

  “Well, if I’m right—and if all the data you gave me is correct—”

  “It’s correct,” Ethan said, cutting him off. “Don’t even start with that.”

  “All right.” Chris turned back to his screen. “Then, as of yesterday, I’ve got Texas at nine to one.”

  Ethan’s hand-rubbing stopped, and his palms came together in a loud clap. “That’s what I wanted to hear!” He grasped Chris’s shoulder. Leah had absolutely no idea what was going on. “I can’t believe those suckers could be so far off,” Ethan said. “But I knew they were, though. What did I tell you? Huh?”

  Still smiling, Chris gazed up at him.

  Leah’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What are you two talkin’ about?”

  Ethan clapped again and then went back to rubbing his hands together. “We’re talkin’ ’bout making a fortune because them guys settin’ up the odds don’t know half as much as we do, ain’t that right, Chris?”

  “Actually, this is all you. You gave me the data, the only thing I did was compile it. I’m not takin’ any responsibility for—”

  “Don’t be such a candy ass. You know as well as I do that—”

  Leah interrupted. “Are . . .” she started then decided to keep going. “Are you talkin’ about betting? On baseball?”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. “Is it still called ‘betting’ when it’s a sure thing?”

  “Last time I checked, there was no such thing as ‘sure things,’ ” she said. “Not only that, but who are you making bets with?”

  Absently waving her question away, Ethan said, “I got a telephone number from a friend. Doesn’t matter who. What matters is they’ve got the Texas Rangers at fourteen to one. Five points too high. And I figured as much, that’s why I got Chris to prove it. Five points high makes Ethan Montgomery a wealthy man.”

  “You’re talkin’ about some bookie?” Leah asked. “Isn’t that against the law?”

  Ethan scrunched up his face. “When was the last time you took somebody in for running a sports book? It’s . . . you know. One of them gray areas. ’Sides, I’ll call him from home, not from here.”

  She tried not to laugh. “Last time I checked, making bets with bookies was illegal, from home or anywhere, Ethan. There ain’t no gray area about it.”

  He cast her a sideways glance. “And I’m betting you’d cite someone with an open container for havin’ a beer up at Cornflower Lake in the dog days of summer.”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve done precisely that. Well . . . maybe not anyone. But last year I busted a half-dozen schoolkids with two cases of Bud.”

  “But you didn’t arrest ’em, you just took away their beer.”

  “So, you’re saying we don’t arrest bookies, we just take their money?”

  Ethan didn’t bite. “You wouldn’t even have taken all that beer if they hadn’t been under age,” Chris said. “Admit it.”

  She scratched her neck where a mosquito had got her. “I’m not so sure. I find anyone in public with two cases, I reckon I—”

  “Just go rain on someone else’s parade, would you?” Ethan asked. “We don’t come down on bookies because of it bein’ a victimless crime.”

  This time, Leah couldn’t hold back her laugh.

  “What?” Ethan asked. Both he and Chris watched her expectantly.

  “You’re goin’ to be the only victim—when you lose everything you put down on the Texas Rangers. Texas Rangers ain’t winning shit this year.”

  Ethan shook his head slowly. “It’s so sad. You have no idea what you’re talkin’ about. Nolan Ryan’s taking them all the way through the World Series to the grand finale.”

  Leah rolled her eyes. “You mean this comin’ October?” she asked.

  “That very one.”

  “How can you possibly have enough data at this point to figure out who’s goin’ to win a game come October?”

  Ethan tapped the side of his head. “That’s where my smarts come in.”

  Leah laughed again.

  “What?”

  Smiling, she slowly shook her head. “Just . . . I can’t believe it.”

  “What?” Ethan asked again.

  “How much cow shit you two are actually tossin’ ’round right now.”

  It was Ethan’s time to squint. Something was going on behind those eyes. “You have no idea
what you’re talkin’ about,” he said after a spell.

  “Yeah? Remember, my daddy was right into baseball, too. He’d never tell you to bet on the Rangers. Maybe if he was drunk, but that’s it. And he knew baseball. You just sort of watch it.”

  Ethan held up his palm. “Now, I’d never say anythin’ bad about your daddy, God rest his soul, but the one thing I knew ’bout more in this world than that man did was baseball. He was just—”

  “What were you just thinkin’ before you tried to convince yourself my daddy didn’t know shit from a shine box?”

  A smile came back to Ethan’s face. “Just rememberin’ him goin’ on ’bout the A’s. Every year it was ‘Oakland this,’ or ‘Oakland that.’ There ain’t no way Oakland’ll even get near the pennant this year. The Series? Forget ’bout it.”

  “Ah,” Leah said. “So you do remember my pa’s thoughts on the sport.”

  “Like I said, no offense to him. He was a marvelous man. Normally, chock-full of good ideas, too. He only became misguided when it came to the A’s.”

  “Tell you what,” Leah said, “how about you and I make a little side bet?”

  Ethan mulled this over before holding out his hand. “You’re on. A sawbuck?”

  “Only a sawbuck?” Leah asked. “So you’re really not that confident, are you?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Make it twenty.”

  Leah shook his waiting hand. “You’re a fool, but I’ll take your money.”

  “Silly, silly girl,” Ethan said and crossed his arms.

  Chris sat back in his chair with a satisfied smirk. “Anything else you need?”

  “Actually,” Leah said, “before you answer that, Ethan, I have somethin’ I really need Chris’s help on. And mine has to do with upholding the law, not breakin’ it.”

  “That’s fine,” Ethan said. “I got what I wanted. I’ll be in my office.” He walked back, closing his door behind him. Leah heard a loud squeak as he returned to his chair.

  Chris lifted a dubious eyebrow her way. “What do you want me to do? Utilize more of my special powers?”

  Grabbing the fax from her desk, Leah showed him the list of thirty-nine suspects who were admitted to Grell Memorial in Montgomery around the time Duck said he’d met Jimmy McNimmy. “I want you to find out which of these people have priors. I reckon that’s the first step to narrowing things down. They’d be more likely to fit the Stickman profile than the rest.”

  “How the hell am I goin’ to find anything with just this? Are these addresses and phone numbers even current?”

  “Probably not. Some’ll be in the same place, though. And most of them are listed with their Social Security number, surely that’ll help.”

  Chris counted off some names. “What ’bout the nine who have no address or SSN listed?”

  “Yeah,” Leah said. “Those ones will be a mite tougher. Just see what you can do, all right?”

  He glanced over the three pages that Leah had stapled together before leaving the correctional institute in Talladega. “Thirty-nine people? Are you serious?” He looked crestfallen.

  “What’s wrong?” Leah asked.

  “It’s just . . . This isn’t as fun as the usual stuff you get me to do.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I was on page 120 of Understanding Forensics, at the beginning of a new part called “Analyzing Evidence.” A subheading beneath that read: “Ballistics: After the Bullet Leaves the Gun,” and was all about figuring stuff out from any used bullets discovered at a crime scene.

  The first thing you did was measure the bullet’s size, which is called its caliber. Knowing that is the first step toward figuring out what kind of gun it came from. Some guns ejected shell casings, and if the assailant didn’t clean them up, police found them, too. With the casings, police could learn even more.

  Most guns were made so that the bullet comes out spinning. This made it more accurate, but it also cut grooves into the bullet. These grooves created a “rifling pattern,” which could also be measured, along with “lands,” “striations,” and “twists.” By measuring all of these, forensics experts could actually match a used bullet to a certain gun. The book had an example of one specific firearm having five “lands,” or high marks, and five grooves with a left (or counterclockwise) twist.

  Along with all these marks, there were other smaller marks that were unique between every single gun, just like a fingerprint. With careful measurement, police could tell whether or not the bullet came from a specific gun.

  Turning the page, I came to the next part, which was all about handwriting analysis. No two people wrote alike. How a person wrote was personal and unique, involving unconscious and automatic actions that were uncontrollable.

  To investigate handwriting, you needed several samples before you could fully understand a person’s style. Some things forensics experts looked at were the spacing between words, the slants between lines, and the amount of pressure the writer applied to the pen or pencil. Also, the size, shape, and proportions of the letters were all important.

  The next part was called “Serology: Blood and Other Fluids.” It said blood was the most common bodily fluid found at crime scenes, and by analyzing it, police could match up a suspect.

  You needed a good-size sample of blood to properly test it, and it was vital that it was uncontaminated when the forensics team got it. Therefore, how you packaged it at the scene was important. The book also said detecting blood could sometimes be tricky. This was where some of those vials of liquid that came with my kit were used. For instance, with the phenolphthalein, you could perform something called a Kastle-Meyer Color Test by mixing it with the blood and hydrogen peroxide. If it really was blood, the liquid would turn dark pink.

  You could even find blood in places that had been cleaned up or on walls where somebody had painted over top by using a tiny drop of the vial called luminol. The luminol test was good because it didn’t affect the sample as much as other tests did, so that more tests could still be done on the same sample.

  The book got pretty complicated after that, when it discussed how to match a blood sample to a specific person. You first needed to find out the ABO type of the blood—whether it was O, A, B, or AB. Then you looked at things like enzymes, proteins, and antigens. I flipped past some stuff I couldn’t understand about how to genetically map certain aspects of the blood to a person.

  I went on to read about other bodily fluids, but quickly realized I probably didn’t need to know so much about those, either, so I just skimmed all that.

  Just before I was about to turn over the corner of the page and close the book, I came to the next subheading: “DNA: Life’s Building Blocks.” We had studied DNA in science this last school year, and I found it fascinating. I decided to keep reading.

  DNA was a molecule of smaller units arranged in a double-helix formation that was made up of long strands of chromosomes. My science teacher last year, Mr. Garson, had a 3D model of a DNA double helix that stretched up from his desk in a twisted spiral.

  Each strand of DNA was made up of millions of molecules called nucleotides, and those had four kinds of nitrogen bases, designated by the letters G, C, T, or A. These codes could join together in tons of different ways, making a unique instruction for different parts of the human body.

  Every person’s body had around six billion codes in their DNA, that could all go together in different ways, allowing for a huge number of potential sequences. Except for the case of identical twins, everybody’s DNA was different from everybody else’s. In fact, the book said DNA was even more unique than a fingerprint or an individual snowflake.

  To analyze DNA, first it must be lifted from the material containing it. This was done by breaking down proteins and releasing the DNA.

  After that, using a recently discovered technique, the sample of DNA could be amplified by causing a polymerase—a word I could barely sound out and that wasn’t in my dictionary—chain reaction, often referred to as just PCR. Thro
ugh PCR, technicians could re-create as much of the DNA as they liked, something called short tandem repeats, or STRs. I didn’t quite understand it all.

  Then, by comparing “markers” between a sample of DNA and a potential suspect, forensic experts could calculate the likelihood of whether the suspect was the one who had left the DNA behind at the crime scene.

  It sort of made sense, but it also made my head feel like the Liberty Bell was being rung inside it. I turned over the corner of the next page and closed the book, setting it on my nightstand. The end was coming up soon. I doubted I’d finish it today, though, since I also wanted to read more of my mother’s Stickman case files before she got home. I didn’t want her to find me reading them. I figured she’d probably get mad if she did, but I wasn’t worried too much about that. Now that I’d learned all this stuff about police work, those files gripped me like nothing else I could remember.

  Excitement pooled in my stomach and rippled through my skin. I checked the time. My mother wouldn’t be home from work for at least an hour, probably even two. That gave me plenty of time to read more files. I had a goal now, too. Ever since seeing my mother’s note about my grandpa Joe maybe killing an innocent man, I’d been trying to find evidence in all them papers proving that he didn’t. So far I hadn’t been able to, but I still had a lot of that stack to get through.

  I had read a bunch of stuff about some suspects, and also the report of what happened the night my grandpa Joe shot a man named Harry Stork, who, at the time, my grandpa thought was the Stickman even though it turned out Harry Stork’s gun didn’t have any bullets in it. Now, after carefully making a sketch in my notebook about how my mother had left the stack of files with the pen on top, I took everything I’d already read from the top and started in on the next file, which was all about the very first time the Stickman ever killed anyone. His first victim was a black man named Waylon Ferris who had been unemployed at the time, but previously worked for Built-Right Tool and Die in Alvin, a shop I couldn’t remember ever seeing myself. Maybe it wasn’t around anymore.