Jerry Catten's car was a beat up Ford Taurus and looked every one of its 136,000 miles. The omnipresent white powder that coated dark cars in winter from the road salt was in abundance and rendered the color a dark gray instead of the black it had originally been.

Sara circled it for a few seconds, suited in gray Forensics coveralls, and decided to start with the trunk first. She popped the lock out in a practiced gesture, and held her breath - no baby. Sending a silent prayer, she checked for the evidence of blood and was doubly relieved when the test came back negative. Leaning in, she covered every inch of the trunk with no luck.

The back seat, however, was a different story. There were indentations in the beige fabric that suggested a baby's car carrier had recently been nestled there, and when Sara rolled the seat, she found an abundance of pink fiber - she bagged and tagged it with directions for Trace to match it to the examplar of a pink girl's baby blanket they'd taken from Boston General.

Car phone, with a hands-free ear jack - she bagged that, as well. They would trace the number, and it might give them some hint of where Catten had passed the baby on to. One thing was for sure, they were not going to find Andrea Whitten in Catten's custody. They had been too late.

Sara shoved that thought out of her head as she printed the door handles, steering wheel, and dashboard. The glove compartment yielded the car's registration, and maps of Masachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine - as well as one of Quebec.

"You were going to Canada," she said aloud to the empty car, and bagged the maps. Nothing further in the glove compartment; the cup holder had a half-empty McDonald's cup full of what looked like Sprite, and the ash tray was almost full, which would explain the smokey scent to the car.

But not to the apartment. Sara frowned, remembering. There hadn't been any ash trays in Catten's apartment, or any smell of smoke. She sincerely doubted he would take the care not to smoke in his apartment and then smoke in his car, an even more enclosed area.

Carefully, she pulled the lighter out of its holder and bagged it to send down to fingerprinting. She also lifted a clear thumbprint from the froont of the fold-out ash tray, and a cigarette butt from the inside.

The between seats compartment held a handful of sticky change, crumpled gas receipts, and half of a very stale bagel. Sara wrinkled her nose in disgust, but bagged it all.

And that was all for the car, besides a great deal of sand and some crumpled straw wrappers underneath the seats.

For some reason, he'd been fleeing to Canada without even any baggage. Which didn't make much sense, but then...perhaps he'd been planning on coming back when the frenzy over Andrea Whitten's disappearance had died down, and had figured that his fat new bank account could cover any interim expenses. Maybe he'd had to leave in a hurry when McGeary had been brought in for questioning.

She wasn't going to get the answers in his car. Sara picked up a double armful of evidence bags and left the garage.

~*~

"One more time," Alec said, his voice deceptively pleasant. "Why did Helen McGeary transfer fifty thousand dollars into your checking account three days ago?"

"She owed me money. Look, how many times do I have to tell you this? Don't I get a lawyer or something?"

Sara crossed her arms from where she stood behind the two way mirror. Thomas was standing next to her.

"How long has he been singing this song?"

"Two hours," Thomas replied, his gaze intent on Catten.

"You are entitled to a court-appointed lawyer, but requesting one would be tantamount to an admission of guilt," Alec informed him.

It wouldn't. Perfectly innocent people brought their lawyers with them to questioning all the time. Catten didn't know that.

"Would you care to explain why your fingerprint was found on this bag?" Alec pushed a crime scene photo of Gregory's body across the table.

"You said Helen was in up to her neck in this thing, right?" Catten snorted. "Those are the same trash bags I use. She probably took one from my kitchen."

"Good answer," Thomas grunted.

"He's going to walk, isn't he?" Sara whispered in horror. He'd just used an easy way out to explain both of their pieces of evidence. His apartment had been clean. The fibers in his car would match to the baby blanket, but they didn't constitute beyond reasonable doubt.

"You and Ms. McGeary were involved?" Alec asked, trying a different tack.

"Yeah. I broke it off a few days ago. She was boring in the sack, if you know what I mean." He waggled his eyebrows, and Alec simply returned his lascivious gesture with a cool stare.

"That's funny, because she's implicated you in this scheme."

"Woman has enough bitter to last her three lifetimes," Catten said without even hesitating. "It doesn't surprise me that she'd try to pin something like this on me."

"And why did you transfer the fifty thousand dollars back out of your bank account to a Swiss account?"

"I've got debts, too," Catten snapped.

"Care to tell us about them?"

"No, I would not."

"He isn't getting anywhere," Sara said desperately. Her pager sounded - Tim, on a 911. Music to her ears. "That's Tim. I'll be back, hopefully with good news."

~*~

"How many miracles is the Church asking for, these days?" Tim asked her when she entered the lab.

"Two," she supplied instantly. "Only one, if you're martyred."

"If you promise to submit the paperwork after I die, I think I'm a shoe-in." He handed her a printed sheet.

"Evan Carmichael," she read. "This isn't an AFIS match."

"Nope," he said with a grin. "You remember about five years back, when they were doing that kindergarden fingerprinting initiative? Actually...no, you probably wouldn't. You weren't here. Anyway, all the local political types got their prints done in this big ceremony. It was a community building thing."

Tim tapped a computer monitor, where the Boston Globe article on the ceremony was displayed.

"State Senator Evan Carmichael helps six year old Francine Andrews to give her fingerprint card to Boston Crime Lab fingerprint technician Timothy Matthews as part of a statewide fingerprinting initiative," Sara read from a caption. Evan Carmichael was a tall, dark-haired man with a politician's smile. She shook her head in utter disbelief. "I wonder if he smokes."

"Like a chimney," Tim answered, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "He kept disappearing out the back door and coming back reeking of smoke."

"I'll petition the Vatican for early entry."

"I wonder if there's ever been a Saint Timothy before," Tim mused, but Sara was already out the door.