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“What gizmo?”
Matt walked to the door leading from the kitchen to the living room and motioned to one of the uniforms in the living room.
“Don’t let anybody come in here until I tell you, okay?”
The uniform nodded and stood in the center of the doorjamb. Matt closed the door.
“Who’s in the bedroom?” he asked.
“Harry, making the sketch,” D’Amata said. “A uniform’s keeping people out of there, too. What are you doing?”
Matt went back to the kitchen table and took out his laptop, then a small plastic object with a connecting cord. He plugged
it into the laptop, then turned it on.
“You can look at them here?” Joe asked.
“And store them in the laptop,” Matt said.
D’Amata handed him the evidence bag. Matt took the flash memory cartridge from it and saw that D’Amata had initialed it. If there were evidentiary photos in the camera, a defense attorney could not raise doubts in the jurors’ minds that the pictures they were being shown had actually come from this camera.
He put the memory card into the transfer device, then copied the JPG images from it to the laptop’s hard disk.
“There’s eight images,” Matt said. “Let’s see what they are.”
The first picture was obviously evidentiary. It showed Cheryl tied to the bed, staring with horror at the camera.
D’Amata went to the door and called Harry Slayberg.
Matt waited until Slayberg came, then displayed the other seven pictures.
“This critter is a real psychopath,” Slayberg said, softly.
“You can see, in the first one,” D’Amata said, “that the phone’s still on the bedside table.”
“And both of her wrists-run the last couple back again, please, Matt, so I’m sure-are still tied to the headboard,” Slayberg said.
Matt displayed the entire series of pictures again.
“So what might have happened was that she got one wrist free… ” Slayberg said.
“And he struggled with her… ” D’Amata picked up. “And that’s when the camera got knocked under the bed.”
“Or,” Matt offered, “he went into the bathroom to take a leak, or clean himself up, and while he was in there, she got the hand loose, and tried to call 911…”
“And Dudley Do-Right came out and caught her,” Slayberg picked up, “hit her-probably harder than he intended-and jerked the phone out of the wall and threw it at the mirror.”
“He was probably scared or in a rage or both,” D’Amata said, “and didn’t think that throwing the phone at the mirror was going to make a lot of noise.”
Matt picked up the camera.
“It’s an expensive camera,” he said. “Kodak. I gave one almost like it to my sister for her birthday. Which triggers a couple of thoughts.”
“Dudley Do-Right is either well-heeled or he stole the camera,” Slayberg said.
“They are serially numbered,” Matt said. “And come with a program that if it won’t work, or you break it, you call them and they FedEx you a new one overnight. I think we should be able to find out who bought this. With a lot of luck, it will be the doer. But even if he stole it, he might have stolen it while doing another rape. That might tell us something.”
“I don’t think so, Matt,” D’Amata said. “Dudley’s a very careful guy, and, I suspect, smart. Smart enough not to take anything that could tie him to one of his escapades.”
