She didn’t know what Gant had been searching for. But whatever it was, it probably got him killed.…
Lena scooped up Johnny Bosco’s keys, slipped the chain-of-evidence form into her briefcase and left the building. While Vaughan had been anxious to get back to his analysis of the trial, she had spent the past two hours screening additional security videos pulled from Club 3 AM with a forensic analyst from the Photographic Unit. The analyst, Henry Rollins, had examined every image recorded that night.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed.
Tim Hight, a man who made his living working with cameras, had managed to avoid every lens in the building. The fire escape on the north side of the structure remained a blind spot and the most likely point of entry.
But Rollins had also given Lena an update on the street cam photo that captured Hight driving away from the club that night. The resolution of the image had improved significantly. To Lena, the shadow on the passenger seat was beginning to take on definition and look more like a gun than a flashlight. While Rollins agreed, he wasn’t ready to commit and said that the enhancement process would give them a definitive answer soon.
After reviewing Jacob Gant’s fingerprints for another hour with an analyst from the Latent Print Section, Lena was out of time and had to move on.
There could be no doubt that Gant had been in Lily Hight’s bedroom within the past two weeks, and that he had entered and exited the room through the window. Lena remembered the tree outside, and wondered how often Gant made the climb while Lily had been alive. How many nights he’d spent in her bed.
For reasons she couldn’t explain or even support, Lena’s first thought upon hearing the news from Orth had been that Gant was looking for the girl’s cell phone. But hiding a phone was different than hiding a photograph in a memory box. If the phone had been in the bedroom, she didn’t think it could have remained hidden for so long. Too many people had been looking for it. An entire year had gone by. But even more, how could the victim have even managed to hide it? The killer had delivered a mortal blow. Once the screwdriver was driven into her back, nothing else could have occurred but death.
Yet, Gant had to have been looking for something. Something important enough to risk breaking into the house.
Tim Hight’s house. Lily Hight’s bedroom.
Lena crossed the street to the garage and got into her car. She hadn’t had a chance to load the CD player or deal with her cell phone so she flipped on the radio and toggled down to 88.1 FM, a jazz station out of Long Beach. After adjusting the volume, she realized that she had dialed in at just the right moment and that the audio system in the car was worth the price of admission. She could see the playlist on the video display-the FM station was dedicating the next hour to Coleman Hawkins. Even better, the first cut was something she hadn’t heard since her last case.
“Mighty Like a Rose.”
As she pulled out of the garage, she let her thoughts drift down the road with Hawkins’s sax and wished that Paladino’s office was more than a twelve-block ride.