working on the Gainesville stuff, it got mixed up. I don’t see how we can use any of it now.”
“No, Boss, I’ve been trying to tell him,” said Jin. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I worked on the Dance evidence in my lab. You know that.”
Jin stood with his arms crossed, glaring at David, who glared back.
“Let me see,” said Diane.
She read the Stacy Dance evidence report, flipping through the pages, looking at the photographs Jin had taken of the evidence.
“What’s the problem?” said Diane.
David tapped the paper in her hand. “The evidence Neva and Izzy collected from Marcella’s is mixed in with the Dance evidence. Jin must have been working here when we were, and he grabbed the wrong evidence.”
Diane had collected much of the evidence from the Stacy Dance crime scene, and she recognized it in Jin’s report and photos.
“Are you saying this is the evidence collected at Marcella’s? Have you looked in Marcella’s container?” said Diane.
“I was about to get it to see what kind of damage has been done,” said David.
Diane looked at the jumble of shoe prints Jin had separated out using the computer software. “The shoe prints too?”
“Yes,” said David, “especially the shoe prints.”
“You’re saying this is the boot print collected at Marcella’s?” Diane asked David again, pointing to a photo.
“I had to work on it to get it clear,” offered Jin. “There was a jumble of shoes on the electrostatic lifting film. I had the software separate out some of the prints from one another.”
David pointed at the photograph. “This is the hiking boot print from Marcella’s. Yes.”
“In that one, the heel was showing good,” said Jin. “I tried to filter out the other overlapping shoes from the rest of the print, but the heel is really clear.”
“The heel is all you need for an identification,” said David. “That’s how I know it’s the same. See these two chips in the heel? . . . Wait. Are you saying this isn’t a mistake?”
“I don’t see how it could be,” said Diane. “You think Jin took the evidence out of the bags and relabeled them?”
“No,” said David, “but I thought he was here when we were processing Marcella’s, and—”
“You had already processed Marcella’s evidence before we collected the Stacy Dance evidence,” said Diane. “I collected these shoe prints at the Stacy Dance scene. David, you owe Jin an apology. It’s the same print as the one from Marcella’s because the same boot was at both places.”
“What?” at least three of them said in unison.
All four of them looked at Diane as if she had said Kendel had just returned from her trip and had brought them a unicorn skeleton.
“What are you saying?” said David.
“She’s saying you need to apologize,” said Jin. “Hey, you mean it’s the same guy, don’t you? Jeez, Boss, that’s weird.”
It had taken a few seconds for it to dawn on all of them.
“But this would connect with the Lassiter crime scene too,” said David. “The same boot print was there. I don’t understand it. The MO is too different. They don’t look anything like crimes done by the same perp. Wasn’t there a lot of postmortem staging and cleanup in the Dance murder? Didn’t it have a definite sexual aspect to it?”
“Yes,” said Diane. “So it appeared. That’s what drew the Gainesville detective to the wrong conclusion.”
“Well, the attack on Marcella and the murder of the Lassiter woman had no sexual component. And not much evidence of planning at all. They look like crimes by an amateur looking for loot.”
“They would appear that way,” said Diane.
“Do you think the Gainesville guy may have thrown away the boots by the side of the road or something and the Rosewood guy found them?” said Jin.
“This makes no sense,” said David.
“I agree,” said Diane. “It doesn’t seem to. We also collected evidence of rope and other fibers in the Stacy Dance murder. The rope is the same too?”
“According to Jin’s report, it’s made of the same material,” said David.
Diane again read through portions of Jin’s evidence report on the Stacy Dance crime scene.
“I’ve read Marcella’s evidence report,” said Diane. “I’ve seen the blowup photographs of the fibers and read the chemical analysis of them. These fibers from the Stacy Dance scene are the same—the same dyed black wool and Manila hemp fibers. Granted, there are lots of ski masks like that and lots of rope. But you said, David, it was as if the masks and the rope were stored together.