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Corde completed the card and looked up. "I -"
"Look, I can't help you. I have nothing more to say." Sayles stood and his grim surliness was at a high pitch now.
This anger seemed out of proportion to the circumstances of the questioning. At first this reinforced Corde's suspicion of the man. But one look into Sayles's face told another story. The source of the professor's indignation was contempt. Contempt at himself for loving Je
And here was Randolph Sayles, PhD, just blistered with humiliation for the love he'd spent on this common girl.
So Corde released him. And like a squirming cat escaping at last from his master's arms the professor stalked out of Room 121 neither dallying nor fast, absorbed with forgetting the prior moments of troubling captivity.
Returning to the office Corde found on Slocum's desk the stack of fliers from Fast-Copy, which were supposed to be tacked up thick as litter along Route 116. Slocum was out, he learned, looking into reports of missing goats.
The difficult night at home had now caught up with him – the second photo, his guilt at missing another of Jamie's wrestling matches tonight, a tempestuous dream that woke him at one. Unable to sleep he had sat for two hours in the back bathroom with the shotgun on his lap, sca
He'd turned to walk back into the house and Sarah had scared the utter hell out of him, bounding forward from the stairs. They stared at each other – Corde, shocked, the girl more disappointed than anything. She was headed for the back door and he'd thought for an instant that she was sleepwalking. But, no, she was only after a glass of water. "What's wrong with your bathroom?" Corde asked as his heart's gallop slowed. She had drunk the water, staring out the window, until he impatiently shooed her off to bed.
He did not get to sleep till five.
Then there'd been a fight at breakfast. Sarah had shrilly refused her mother's demand that she study before going to school. Corde had had to both comfort his wife and calm his daughter. He tried not to take sides and they both ended up mad at him.
Now, in his office, the door closed, Corde sat at his desk for ten minutes, arranging and rearranging the tall stacks of his three-by-five cards, fat and limber from all the shuffling. He spread them out until they covered his desk.
A dull bicente
Corde pictures Je
Lance Miller's report on the phones shows that during the hours Je
At about six-fifteen Je
The next time Je
At the site of her death: Nineteen shoe and boot prints around the body, most of them men's or teenage boys' sizes. The Ford pickup, covered with 530 partial and 140 full fingerprints. Scraps of standard, virtually untraceable typing paper. Cellophane wrappers from several snack foods sold by Wise and Frito-Lay and Nabisco. Cigarette butts, beer and soda bottles and cans, a condom, the semen in which doesn't match that found in the victim.
And the knife (whose source even the FBI has not been able to identify, despite the assistance of the Seoul Prefecture of Police and faxed inquiries to twelve professors of religion, criminology and parapsychology around the country).
None of the fingerprints found at the crime scene matches those on file in Harrison County. The prints are now in Higgins and in Washington, D.C., for similar cross-checking in state and federal files. Fingerprinting the dorm room netted 184 partial and whole prints, sixty-two of which belonged to Je
After reporting the theft of Je
Corde has looked carefully through the file on the Biagotti case – the case that introduced him to Je
The burnt scraps found in the oil drum behind Je
The printing on the computer paper is of dollar amounts ranging from $2,670 to $6,800. The printer was a nine-pin dot matrix. The extreme faintness of the type suggests it was printed in the machine's highspeed mode or that the ribbon was old. Both county and State Bureau of Investigation technicians report that the papers and ink are too common to provide further leads unless matching samples are recovered.