Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [92]
The plates and silverware were a gold mine by comparison. Working carefully and humming under his breath, Alvin dusted and retrieved what appeared to him to be two relatively perfect sets of prints. Once he had the prints lifted, he spent the better part of two hours going over each print and enhancing by hand the lines and whorls he found there so that the image fed into the machine would be as clear as possible.
“Do we have anything to compare these to?” Alvin asked when Sally peered at his work over his shoulder. He spoke without ever looking away from the print he was working on.
“The suspect’s been booked,” Sally told her boss.
“That means his prints are already in the system,” Alvin said. “What about the victim’s?”
“The autopsy’s tomorrow sometime. We won’t have her prints until after that.”
“Some things can’t be rushed,” Alvin said. “When you entered the suspect’s prints, did you get a hit?”
“No.”
“Well,” Alvin said. “Run me off a copy of his prints, and I’ll take a look.”
In a matter of minutes Sally returned. Alvin peered at the paper for only a matter of seconds before making up his mind. “Yup,” he said. “The suspect’s prints are on both sets of dishes. He probably served the meal and cleared up afterward. We’ll put those aside for the time being. The ones we should concentrate on are the unknowns. If they belong to the victim and she’s in the system, we may make a positive ID before the ME does. That would be a huge help to the detectives. The sooner they know who’s dead, the sooner they find out who did it.”
That was Alvin Miller’s style—work, talk, and teach all at the same time. That was why people who moved on from his lab were always in demand.
It was almost noon before Alvin was finally satisfied enough with the second set of prints to put them into the machine for copying and transmitting. While the computer did its stuff, he walked back to his desk to retrieve a now-dead-cold cup of coffee. He had taken a single sip when Sally called him back.
“Hey, Mr. Miller,” she called. “Come look at this.”
Being referred to as Mr. Miller made Alvin feel old, but the excitement in Sally’s voice was unmistakable. “Must be a hit, then,” he said. “Whose is it?”
Wordlessly Carol handed him the printout. Alvin read it through.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “We’d better get Detective Fellows on the horn right away.”
Delia Chavez stood outside, patting balls of dough into tortillas and then tossing them onto a wood-fire-heated griddle. Her sister-in-law waited while the dough cooked, then turned them deftly with her fingers, let them cook on the other side, and then tossed them onto a waxed-paper-covered table to cool. Delia’s tortilla-making deficit had been corrected first by her aunt Julia and later by her mother-in-law after Delia’s return to the reservation.
She had come home grateful to have a job that allowed her to leave D.C. and Philip’s betrayal far behind. But coming back to Arizona did something else—it brought her face-to-face with her father and his betrayal of her mother all those years earlier.
As far as Delia could see, Eddie was nothing but a worthless drunk; so was her father. Still bristling with anger at Philip, Delia had been more than ready to write both of them off. Then, when a seriously injured Manny was sent home from Tucson a virtually helpless cripple, Delia had no choice but to take charge of her father’s life. She looked after him because she had to—because she was his daughter and there was no one else to do it.
“You shouldn’t be so angry with him, you know,” Aunt Julia said one day. She had come into Sells from Little Tucson and was patiently instructing Delia’s clumsy computer-savvy fingers in the fine art of patting popover dough while Manny Chavez, visiting on his paid caregiver’s day off, dozed