Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)
Every Kind of Wicked: Chapter 10

Friday, 2:30 p. m.

Maggie, fortified by sandwiches and the calm that had descended on the unit once all the detectives left, wrote up her identification of the West Side Market victim as Raymond Winchester and set it aside for either Josh or Amy, both also trained in latent print analysis, to verify her conclusion. Now she had time to look at the tapings from Evan Harding’s clothing.

Tapings were akin to opening a book, an introduction to the person’s life and current situation, their backstory written in fur from their pets and paint crumbles from the worn walls of their apartment and a long, wavy hair with colored tips from their last date. But without those corresponding facts in hand, the lines she drew from the tiny trace evidence went nowhere, so tapings were more like an ancient tablet crammed with cuneiform: interesting to look at, but impossible to read.

She tried to make out what she could.

She quickly screened the tapings with a stereomicroscope. Its large lens functioned as a magnifying glass, lights aimed onto the surface from adjustable side bulbs. But the focus could waver with the not-perfectly-applied piece of tape, so to really get a good look at something she had to use xylene to dissolve the tape adhesive and transfer the hair or fiber or fragment item, very carefully, to a glass slide. There she could drop it into a tiny pool of mounting media and trap it forever between the slide and a cover slip, made of an incredibly thin slice of glass. Then the item could be viewed with transmitted light, and the hardened liquid media and the glass substrates worked with the optics of the microscopes instead of against it.

Evan Harding’s girlfriend, Maggie guessed, had longer hair than his, hence the single, undulating strand of jet black on the sheet from his jacket. He didn’t have a cat or a dog. He had the general conglomeration of random fibers that everyone had on their clothes—cottons, synthetics that glowed under fluorescent light, larger, thicker ones from a carpet or some other heavy-duty upholstery. Flat, brown fragments with desiccated veins running through them—dead winter leaves, no doubt from lying in the cemetery with its collection of graceful magnolias. There were many smaller ones, flakes of old leaves. Perhaps the groundskeepers had mulched them at some point. There were a lot of those, as if he’d been rolling around on the ground . . . while keeping his clothing remarkably clean at the same time, plus leaving the blood in one place at the scene.

After mounting some of these brittle items on a slide, she rotated the oculars until she could see the surface of the leaf fragment with as much magnification as possible. The lab lacked a scanning electron microscope, but that seemed a silly thought because even with one she still wouldn’t know what she was looking at. Aside from marijuana with its distinctive hairs and sticky surface, she could identify vegetation as vegetation and no more than that. There would be no determining a silver maple from a New Zealand Kauri, certainly not from a dead, barely two-millimeter square flake.

These flakes had hairs, she noticed, but they didn’t taper to an end like marijuana. They seemed to end in a stump or a ball-like shape.

Also among the flakes and the fibers she saw a number of frilly sticks, thin slivers with even thinner slivers branching on each side in a uniform pattern. More leaves, with the lamina overlay decomposed away, leaving only the ribs and veins? But veins in vegetation were randomly spaced. She rotated the oculars, increasing the magnification from 10x to 20x.

If this came from a leaf, it was the most obsessively uniform plant structure she’d ever seen. The main center rib had side ribs coming off it, each at a perfect forty-five-degree angle, each equidistant from the next like slats in Venetian blinds. At the higher magnification she could see a second set of ribs emitting from the entire length of the side ribs, also at forty-five-degree angles and also equidistant. This second set branched again, structures so tiny she could only see a suggestion of texture rather than the actual construction.

There were a great many of these fragments as well, but not all chopped to similar sizes like the leaves.

Maggie sat back, her neck beginning to ache from bending over the eyepiece, and considered. She knew what they were. But what were they doing all over Evan Harding?

* * *

Jack appeared at the door shortly afterward. “You texted?”

“I did.” She let him in, after he dutifully signed the entry log. He said nothing until sinking heavily into a spare swivel chair near her desk. Then he glanced around to see who might be in earshot.

“Rick didn’t say anything to me about his field trip,” he began. “But as I said before, if you try to convince him not to go, it will only make him more suspicious. I don’t care what he does, but even if there’s a worst-case scenario and I have to bail, then I have to bail. Nothing he would find could damage you anyway so . . .” His voice trailed off as he noticed her slightly perplexed expression. “That’s not what you texted about?”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Nope.”

“Okay . . . what, then?”

“This is going to sound a little crazy.”

He rubbed one temple. “The whole day so far has been a little crazy.”

“Did Evan Harding have any pets?”

He blinked, but it didn’t hold up his answer. “No.”

“Or his girlfriend?”

“It was a one-room apartment, and pretty bare. We would have found a puppy hiding under the bed.”

“What about a bird?”

He blinked again.

She told him about the tapings, the leaf fragments and the other type of fragments. “They’re feathers. The soft, downy feathers that keep birds warm and cushioned. And there are a lot of them. We’ve been to his workplace and Ralph didn’t have a cockatiel in the office or anything like that, so if he didn’t have a bird in his apartment, where are all these feathers coming from?”

“Pigeons?”

“If he’d been sleeping in a coop, or even on the street near a statue, maybe. But his clothes were clean. Of course he might have a mother who keeps parakeets and she does his laundry twice a week . . . that would explain it.”

Jack said, “It’s going to be difficult to find family with the girlfriend in the wind—and according to her he didn’t have any. So far, ‘Evan Harding’ doesn’t really exist. No credit history, no record, no social media, no phone records, no prior addresses have turned up. Social Security said the number he listed on his employment application isn’t fake, but they’re running it down now.”

So a bunch of feathers on the victim’s coat and pants seemed unimportant . . . but with such a lack of available information, every little bit might help. Besides, Maggie loved coming up with theories, answers to the puzzle. It was why she had become a forensic specialist in the first place. “Then there’s the leaves, or flakes of leaves. I think they’re tobacco. I can’t be a hundred percent sure because there are a number of leaves that have sort of spiky stalks on their surface—”

Jack seemed even less impressed by leaves than he did by feathers. She spoke more hastily. “But the victim wasn’t a smoker, I didn’t get a whiff off his clothes. Did the girlfriend—?”

“No.”

“And Ralph’s workplace, bless his heart, smelled of curry and week-old coffee but not smoke. So I started to think, I’ve got feathers and maybe tobacco, leaf tobacco, not the tinier, twistier cured tobacco that’s in cigarettes. So I called up my friend Quesha at the Historical Society—”

“The what?”

“The Cleveland Historical Society,” she explained, not patiently. She had told him many months ago that she was on the board . . . but at that moment they’d been caught between a murderer and her dying victims so perhaps he could be forgiven if her choice of extracurricular activity had slipped his mind. “Quesha looked up past and current cigar manufacturers. Cigars are usually rolled from the whole leaf. Tobacco used in cigarettes is minced up before its rolled . . . though of course this debris could be from precut leaves. . . .” She paused, feeling how absurd this theory must be, but unwilling to forget it now that she’d put the work in.

“Go on,” he told her. “Evan Harding had tobacco and feathers on his clothing.”

“Exactly. Two things that don’t normally go together. After she found a long list of defunct cigar manufacturers, I asked her to check if any of those buildings had also housed down factories.”

“Down—”

“Down pillows, cushions, etc.”

“Feathers.”

“Exactly,” she said again.

Jack’s expression shifted to one of more interest. “I’m assuming you found one, or you wouldn’t have brought this up.”

“You assume correctly.” If she hadn’t been successful, she never would have breathed such a crazy idea to him. “I found two.”

“Two?”

“One we’re not so sure of. It was a cigar factory in the mid-1800s and a mattress company in the early 1900s.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“I think so, too. But the other is a bit more promising. It’s actually an interesting story—”

“Maggie—”

“I’ll talk fast. A twenty-year-old Hungarian immigrant named Julius Caeser Newman started a cigar-making operation in 1895 with one employee—himself. Everything goes great until the advent of cigarettes, until there’s only him and one other cigar maker in town, Grover Mendelsohn. They merge to form M & N Cigar Manufacturers, expand to a building across from what’s now Jacobs Field. He eventually bought out Grover.”

“You mean Progressive Field,” Jack said, trusting there to be a payoff from this history lesson.

“Whatever. Times stayed tight for cigars, though, and all the premium makers had moved to Florida. So in 1954 he moved the whole operation to Tampa, where they still operate today. J.C. Newman is actually the oldest cigar manufacturer in the country.”

“And you think the tobacco on Evan Harding’s clothes has been hanging around for nearly seventy years?”

“It sounds a bit far-fetched when you put it that way. But yes, it’s there on his clothes, and there’s no feathers or cigars at A to Z Check Cashing or, according to you, his apartment. The building stayed empty for many years during one of Cleveland’s downturns. Then the Ohio Feather Company—yes, that’s the real name—expanded into the old cigar factory. They left it for Cincinnati to specialize in custom-made down products for luxury stores and hotels.”

“And they moved out in—?”

“2005. Right before the financial crash melted down the mortgage and rental market for both homeowners and businesses. Not to mention that business startup and expansion ground to a halt, so the building stayed empty for a long time.”

“With abandoned feathers still inside.”

“Theoretically. I know this is a long shot, but—”

“I’ll take it.”

She didn’t hide her surprise. “Really? It’s—this theory assumes that large factory buildings aren’t scrubbed and vacuumed like an office suite or a house would be, which, yeah, they’re not graded on looks, but still that’s a lot of debris hanging around for a really long time.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got nothing else, and I’m not ready to write Evan Harding off as a random robbery-homicide until I can clear up at least a few of these details.” He paused as if mentally flipping through his thin pile of facts. “You said that building is across from Progressive Field?”

“East Ninth and Bolivar.” Literally up the street from A to Z and on the next corner from the Erie Street Cemetery. That was why she had shared her crazy theory. The building’s location was one more coincidence in a growing pile of coincidences. “That could be where he went after work last night, why he turned left instead of right after leaving Ralph’s, why he wound up in the cemetery instead of on a direct route home.”

Jack rubbed his eyes with the long fingers of one hand. “Time for a field trip. Thanks—that’s . . . good work.”

“The beauty of trace evidence. It may be tiny, but it’s real.”

He leaned forward, preparing to leave, and his gaze intensified. “And about Rick,” he began, then faltered.

“I’m not worried,” she said, making her voice sound firm and calm and truthful. Lies, in other words, because she felt very worried indeed.

“Nothing can come back to you,” he said.

As if that were her only concern.

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