No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [82]
“I don’t know,” Cynthia said. “I’m scared to say.”
“There appear to be the remains of two people in there,” she said. “But as you can understand, after twenty-five years…”
One could only imagine.
“Two?” Cynthia said. “Not three?”
“It’s early yet,” Wedmore said. “Like I said, we have a lot of work before us.” She paused. “And we’d like to take a buccal swab from you.”
Cynthia did a kind of double take. “A what?”
“I’m sorry. It’s Latin, for ‘cheek.’ We’d like to get a DNA sample from you. We take a sample from your mouth. It doesn’t hurt or anything.”
“Because?”
“If we’re fortunate enough to be able to recover any DNA from…what we find in the car, we’ll be able to compare it to yours. If, for example, if one of those bodies is your mother, they can do a kind of reverse maternity test. It’ll confirm if she is, in fact, your mother. Same for the other members of your family.”
Cynthia looked at me, tears forming in her eyes. “For twenty-five years I’ve waited for some answers, and now that I’m about to get some, I’m terrified.”
I held her. “How long?” I asked Wedmore.
“Normally, weeks. But this is a more high-profile case, especially since there was the TV show about it. A few days, maybe just a couple. You might as well go home. I’ll have someone come by later today for the sample.”
Heading back seemed the only logical thing to do. As we turned to walk back to our car, Wedmore called out, “And you’ll need to be available in the meantime, even before the test results come back. I’m going to have more questions.”
There was something ominous about the way she said it.
28
As promised, Rona Wedmore showed up to ask questions. There were things about this case she did not like.
That was certainly something we all had in common, although Cynthia and I didn’t feel that Wedmore was an ally.
She did confirm one thing I already knew, however. The letter that had directed us to the quarry had been written on my typewriter. Cynthia and I had both been requested—as if there were any option—to come down to headquarters and be fingerprinted. Cynthia’s fingerprints apparently were on file. She’d provided them twenty-five years ago when police were combing her house, looking for clues to her family’s disappearance. But the police wanted them again, and I’d never been asked to provide mine before.
They compared our prints against those on the typewriter. They found a few of Cynthia’s on the body of the machine. But the actual keys were covered with mine.
Of course, there wasn’t much to make of that. But it didn’t support our contention, that someone had broken in to our house and written the letter on my typewriter, someone who could have been wearing gloves and left no prints behind.
“And why would someone do that?” asked Wedmore, her hands made into fists and resting on her considerable hips. “Come into your house and use your typewriter to write that note?”
That was a good question.
“Maybe,” Cynthia said, very slowly, kind of thinking out loud, “whoever did it knew the note would most likely be traced back to Terry’s typewriter. They wanted it traced back to him, they wanted you to think he’d written it.”
I thought Cynthia was on to something, with one small change. “Or you,” I said to her.
She looked at me for a moment, not accusingly, but thinking. “Or me,” she said.
“Again, why would anyone do that?” Wedmore, still unconvinced, asked.
“I have no idea,” Cynthia said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. But you know someone was here. You must have a record of it. We called the police and they came out here, they must have made a report.”
“The hat,” Wedmore said, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice.
“That’s right. I can get it for you if you’d like,” Cynthia offered. “Would you like to see it?”
“No,” Wedmore said. “I’ve seen hats before.”
“The police thought we were nuts,” Cynthia said.
Wedmore let that one go. It must have taken some effort on her part.
“Mrs. Archer,” she said, “have you ever been up to the Fell’s Quarry before?”
“No, never.”
“Not as a girl? Not even when you were a teenager?