Look For Me (Detective D.D. Warren #9)(97)

D.D. nodded.

“So, the one thing that stood out from the crime scene: no cell phone. Not on the body, not in the dressing room, not in his bedroom. But of course the kid had to have had a phone, given the accounts from school.”

“Someone took his phone before you got there,” D.D. filled in.

“I’m guessing the girlfriend, probably to protect him if there were questionable photos involved. She let us search her and her belongings while we were there. We didn’t discover Roberto’s phone, but that’s hardly a surprise. The theater building is an old church overstuffed with props, costumes, you name it. There’s a million places she could’ve stashed the phone before we arrived.”

“Follow up with the cell phone carrier?” D.D. asked.

“Sure. Got a transcript of Roberto’s final texts, phone messages. Mostly exchanges with Anya, and yeah, he didn’t like all the attention theater director Doug de Vries was paying to her. Roberto definitely felt threatened. Which, again, led to his suicide.”

“Did Roberto own a computer? A laptop, anything?” D.D. asked.

“No. Used the computer lab at school. That is, when he bothered to attend.”

D.D. pursed her lips, considering. “We have allegations he had abused some of the girls in foster care,” she said.

Detective Swetonic nodded. “Other than distraught girlfriend Anya, who swore Roberto was the great love of her life—theater director Doug notwithstanding—we couldn’t find anyone with a good thing to say about the teen.”

“Given the reports of the photo he posted, I was wondering if there were more pictures where that came from. That maybe, in addition to abuse, Roberto was also engaged in selling porn, that kind of thing.”

The detective shrugged. “We didn’t find any evidence, though I’ll be the first to say we didn’t see a need to go full bore on a suicide. But the lack of a computer . . . What kind of porn distributor doesn’t have his own computer?”

D.D. nodded. It was a major weakness in her argument. “What about a gaming system?” she asked, which could be used to hide inappropriate photos.

But the detective shook his head.

“He could’ve been using his phone,” she tried again. “Working off photos stashed in the cloud, that sort of thing.”

Another shrug. “You can review the transcripts from the cell phone carrier, but we didn’t find any hint of those kinds of transactions. Not to mention, where’s the money trail? Kid had ten bucks in his pocket. That’s it.”

“Where’d he get that money?”

“Worked part-time at a deli across from the school. Not an inspired worker, according to his boss, any more than he was an inspired student. But he earned a couple hundred a month. Most of which, I’m guessing, he blew on his girlfriend and beer.”

“Don’t suppose you kept the gun?” D.D. asked.

The detective shook his head; the captain, as well. She’d known it was a long shot. If the police kept all evidence from all cases, there wouldn’t be enough storage in Boston. Instead, protocol was to photograph, photograph, photograph. Which, with today’s high-resolution cameras, captured more information than people might think.

She returned to the close-up image of the near-empty whiskey bottle. “Did you run the print on the glass?” she asked, studying the picture more closely.

“No. Didn’t see the need.”

“Looks like there might be one that’s usable,” she said, holding out the photo. The bottle had been dusted in situ. She could just make out a faint ridge pattern, captured by the high-res image. Given the difficulty of lifting prints off of certain surfaces, latent prints had moved to working more and more off photos. Recovered fingerprints were basically turned into digital images to be loaded into databases anyway. Working straight off close-ups from the crime scene basically eliminated the middle man, which also led to faster processing time.

Detective Swetonic took the photo from her, then held it out to the captain. They both nodded.

“What about the gun?” she asked now, flipping through more photos.

“His prints were on it,” Detective Swetonic supplied immediately.

“And the recovered brass?”

The detective and captain exchanged a glance again. D.D. understood the look: The detective was busy. He’d followed basic investigative steps, and when the results continued to point at the same conclusion . . .

She found the photo she wanted, a high-res close-up of the recovered shell casing, also dusted and documented at the scene. Like the whiskey bottle, it bore a distinct ridge pattern. D.D. pulled the image, placed it next to the one of the fifth of whiskey.

“Advantage of the Amber Alert,” D.D. stated now. “I have the city’s full investigative and forensic resources at my disposal.” Meaning she could demand a rush job on the print identification in both photos and it would come out of her budget, not the captain’s.

As she suspected, Captain Wallace liked those terms. “We’ll send in the digital copies of both the bottle and shell casing ASAP. Mind us asking what you hope to find, though?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “But the family that was murdered yesterday, their daughter, Lola, was allegedly one of Roberto’s victims. While Anya Seton swears Lola had something to do with Roberto’s death. Which means the Boyd-Baez shootings might be connected to whatever happened to Roberto four months ago.”