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A second call flashed on the screen—Lacey Bernard. Jo declined the call and made a mental note to call her back later.
“We didn’t find anything in our grid search. However, thanks to your suggestion that the killer may have taken the murder weapon from one of the rock sculptures, we checked all the ones in the garden for footprints and found an impression in the gravel of one.”
Jo grimaced—gravel could be finicky when it came to preserving any sort of impression. “How good?”
“Useless for our purposes. It appears to be a depression from the front side of a right foot, but doesn’t show any tread or anything to help us get an accurate read on shoe size or type.”
“And it could have been left by anybody at any time, even the night before,” Jo said.
“Correct. But people don’t usually walk on those spaces, so I thought you’d want to know.”
“I appreciate it,” Jo said.
“I’m heading back to the lab while the team wraps up to compare the fabric on Sakurai’s head to the fabric on Sandra’s,” Marzillo said.
Jo glanced down at the GPS. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes, and we have some guns from the Hauptmanns we need tested. Any chance we can come take a look when you do the comparison? Something about the blindfold seems strangely familiar and I wouldn’t mind a closer look.”
“Sounds like we’ll be back right about the same time. Head on over.”
* * *
Marzillo was typing notes in at top speed when they arrived at the lab, but otherwise looked as cool as a frozen cucumber despite the crushing workload.
“Amazing,” Jo said. “No matter how much you have going on, your desks are always pristine, with everything in clear, functional stacks.”
“She’s the second coming of Adrian Monk,” Lopez said without looking up from her computer screen.
“It’s not OCD, it’s organization.” Marzillo cast a withering glare at Lopez’s desk. “You should try it sometime.”
Lopez waved both arms over her area like she was conducting an orchestra. “I also have a system. It’s called controlled chaos.”
“Uh-oh,” Arnett said. “We interrupted Felix and Oscar in the middle of a spat.”
“Yes, very funny.” Marzillo grabbed the evidence bags with the guns and set them on a cleared table. “I was just lining up the blindfolds if you want to see.”
“Very much.” Jo made a warning face at Arnett as they followed her to another table.
“The cloth on this side is from Sandra Ashville, and that one is from Judge Sakurai, hence the identifying pictures.”
Jo peered over. Marzillo had placed a picture of each victim next to the cloth in question as a reminder to show how they’d been originally placed. She bent for a closer look, her stomach flipping at the sight of the blood patterns over each.
Marzillo pointed from one to the other. “I want to see if their edges line up. I’m not ready to risk cross contamination yet, so I can’t let them touch each other. But I took a picture of the edges, and Lopez is matching them up virtually.” She pointed toward a nearby monitor.
Lopez jumped up, eyes gleaming. “I got a new toy, and it’s the wave of the future. You know how careful we have to be about rulers at crime scenes, making sure they don’t cross contaminate? Well, check this out. It’s called a FreeRef, and it’s new technology out of the Netherlands, and it’s completely badass. They just started field testing it, and I know a guy who knows one of the guys on the team, so I was able to convince them to let us help test it.”
“What’s FreeRef?” Jo asked.
Lopez picked up a camera. “Short version is it’s a laser projector you put on the lens of your camera that accurately measures size so you don’t need a ruler. The software figures out all the relevant measurements for you. From there it’s easy for me to calibrate these two to be the same scale.” She pointed to the pictures on the monitor. “And, hey presto, you can see these two edges match perfectly.”
Jo examined the monitor. The line Lopez had matched up seemed deceptively straight until she magnified the images; then slight warping became visible. “So this was one piece of cloth cut into two.”
“Yeppers.” Lopez beamed down at the camera lovingly. “Now I just have to convince Upstate Ursula to snap us up a few more of these babies.”
“The cloth is muslin.” Marzillo pointedly ignored her. “There are four grades of muslin, and this is sheeting. Turns out, there are nineteen muslin suppliers in this country, so I’m going to see if I can figure out where this muslin originates and where it’s sourced to. But I have to be honest with you, I’m not optimistic. If we had the selvage edge, it might contain some identifying information. But muslin itself is incredibly common.”
Jo glanced over the fabric again, then at the pictures. One shot was taken from the waist-up only, focusing on the torso and face, and the other was a shot of the whole body. As she glanced back and forth between them, she realized with a gasp what was so familiar about the poses.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe I didn’t see it before now,” she said.
