XIX
Jordan was on the other end of the spectrum. She felt that the solution to this crime was just out of reach. They ran out of the warehouse, Jordan on Matt's heels only to find that the obscure gun-toting man has deserted, however, leaving behind his footprints, which Jordan found incredibly helpful.
"Here, a left foot print, size 9 and a half, matching the bloody one left in the building. In fact, because of the mud here, there's something in the print."
Matt came to investigate the soft ground upon which Jordan poured over, ordering her to, "Take its picture, make a mold and test whatever that is. Blood?" He speculated.
"Could very well be," she said, going back to her vehicle to retrieve on of the kits she had brought.
Police and divers swarmed around. New information usually rekindled the flame in their hearts that made them want to catch the criminal and lock him up for good. Word of a gun tossed into the ocean was that very fuel.
Matt tried to contact Woody on the specs of the case but to no avail. "His damned cell phone must be off," he cursed, frustrated, "if he's so adamant about me calling him, every five minutes, then why does he turn off his phone?"
Much time passed, the sun began to set and the search was about to be called off. Perhaps the murder weapon had not been dropped into the water after all. Perhaps it was only their hope of catching the criminal that had led them to suspect in such a thing. Suddenly, one of the divers emerged from the blue with the very thing they had hoped.
"Finally!" Matt exclaimed retrieving the weapon and passing it off to Jordan.
Back in the lab, she set the new information and evidence in a line, according to when she received them and set to work. Bug and Nigel entered the lab to help her.
"What do we have here?" Nigel exclaimed, salivating from the site.
"Nothing a little more hard work couldn't produce." She reiterated what had occurred adding, with exuberance, "I'm willing to put a little extra overtime into this."
Bug and Nigel exchanged fervent looks behind her back before digging in. They each took an item, Nigel claimed the cloth, Bug took the shoe print, but Jordan reserved the gun for herself.
After nearly two hours of studying their projects, they communed once again with Matt and Garret heading the proceedings. "Jordan, why don't you start?"
"The 9mm gun's clean, as in no finger prints or DNA. Its tracking device, the register number on the side, has been scratched so that it's unreadable. The bullets it produces match those that were removed from both of the bodies," she said, disappointed that she could not produce more.
Bug continued down the line, "We have an interesting piece of evidence here. A twelve-inch square piece of cloth of a cotton material, with the insignia of a steaming clock and the words 'Gastown' underneath, covered in a combination of unspecified dirt, drinking alcohol of many different flavours, but predominately the blood matching the DNA of Jane Doe 1124. As well, we have latent prints," He pointed out on the screen the cloth was displayed on, indicating his marks with a pointer, "Here an index, here a thumb, and a pinky."
"Did you—"
"I'm searching the database for the prints as we speak. In addition, I did a little research on 'Gastown'. It's a part of Vancouver with stores, restaurants; it is a tourist trap really, a few blocks from Coal Harbor."
A grin crept upon Macy's face, "Nice work Bug."
Nigel glared, determined to show him up, knowing that, with all the evidence he uncovered, that was impossibility. "Well, the shoe print is a match to the bloody print found at the murder scene down to the wear on the heel and the blood embedded between some of the cracks. As well, I have found this simple piece of evidence. Good work, Jordan, uncovering this piece of foliage, it's the part of a simple leaf that is native to Independence Square Park, a Vietnam memorial," Nigel noticed the strange expressions he was receiving from his colleagues and said, "I know these things from past experience all right? Anyway, The Mellennium Bostonian Hotel is near there, and being the genius that I am called and asked if there was a man fitting the description of our number one suspect. They said that he'd checked in the night our mystery began and checked out this morning. The site is only a short one-mile drive away from our crime scene. And get this; the agent had given the name of our number one suspect, Tom Gearson."
He smiled, proudly, at Bug, slightly put off by the fact that Nigel had received a name.
Matt sighed, "It's an alias." The four medical examiners turned to him with looks of shock. "Woody called yesterday, seems Emma came out with a little more of her story. The reason that cloth has something from Vancouver on it is because our elusive criminal is from there. He's been stalking her for weeks and she came here to escape him."
"What?" Jordan exclaimed, furiously flushed.
"He's used many aliases," he continued, "she calls him Henry Mercer but he's also used Greg Indulta. Both of which do not appear to match his description."
"Well, if he's in this country and he arrived by plane, he's got to have a passport. And with that passport he's got to have fingerprints."
"Nigel you are a genius," Jordan said, rushing to the keyboard and brining up a screen listing international travelers from Canada to the United States and matched the prints Bug had uncovered to one Archie Theodore Dalton
"56 years old, shocking blue eyes, scarred visage from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; I don't know, but it looks like we've found our man…"