Chapter 26

We walked from the lab straight to Sarge’s office. Finally, we had something worth telling him. I was still in shock over what Skip told us, but DNA doesn’t lie. But the biggest shock was how he surmised the blood getting on the bottom of Effridge’s shoes. A-fucking-mazing!

When we walked out of the office after an hour of discussion, we were told to get the Assistant District Attorney involved to make sure we had enough evidence to prosecute. We all thought we did, but we needed to make sure any charges were going to stick, and that no defender could deny what we had. We also needed the prosecutor to figure out the appropriate charges.

The ADA come over right away, and during our meeting we laid out everything we had. She thought we had a pretty strong case, with one exception.

“No gun? You know that’s the clincher, right?” Carmen Wallace, the ADA, said.

“No gun. We need a search warrant to see if we can find it,” I said.

“Go get it. Let me know what you find, if anything,” Ms. Wallace said. “The gun makes this a pretty open and shut case. It would be really nice to know who the shooter was. Without it, it’s a lot of speculation at least about that.”

An hour later, with warrants in hand, we made our way to our first stop. A petite blonde answered the door.

“Police, miss.” I flashed my badge. “We have a warrant to search the premises.”

“Oh. My. God. Why?”

“We’re looking for critical evidence for a case we’re working. Please open the door; we don’t want to knock it off the hinges.”

She quickly scrambled to remove the chain lock and then let us in.

“Which side is yours?” Without a peep, she pointed at the messy bed. We began our search on the opposite side of the room and made our way through the closet. We dug under the bed, under the mattress, and through the drawers. We tried not to disrupt too much, but that was relative to what we were tasked with doing. At least it looked better than a prison toss. When we finished, we thanked the terrified girl and left.

Johnson made the phone call to the ADA, then we proceeded to our next stop. Within a half hour, we left there and made our way back to see Skip. We’d found what we were looking for. We had the gun. We just needed to get ballistics to do their magic to confirm it was indeed the weapon and get it checked for fingerprints to confirm who shot Effridge.

While we waited, we called Carmen to fill her in on what was happening, and to let her know we thought she should come back over.

Carmen arrived, and shortly after we got settled in Sarge’s office my phone rang. I put it on speaker so everyone could hear the news we’d been sitting on the edge of our seats for.

“Are you sitting down?” Skip asked.

“Yeah, man. And I’m in Sarge’s office with Johnson, and ADA Wallace. Go ahead, you’re on speaker.”

“Wow, I guess I’d better behave.” He chuckled. “I have our ballistics analysis and my fingerprint information for you. The gun is definitely the one used to kill Effridge. Ballistics said with nearly one hundred percent certainty that it’s the weapon that was used to shoot him. There were two sets of prints on the gun, too. One set of prints belonged to our victim. That wasn’t a surprise, because I ran the serial number and saw he bought it and had it registered to himself.” We all looked at each other. Skip continued to speak. “The other prints on the gun surprised me quite a bit. I expected to have them match the person who also was the stabber, but they aren’t. They’re not a match to the person who owns the DNA on the knife. Are you still there, Brad?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I think we’re all a little stunned right now, that’s all.”

“What you have is two people responsible for this guy’s death. As we’d discussed, I think he was shot in the torso, which shocked him and he spun around. Once he was facing his murderess-wannabe, another shot was fired, striking him in the head. He collapsed, but couldn’t have died. I’m not sure how he didn’t, but if the stab wounds came after the shots like I think they did, at the very least he had to still be barely alive. There was too much blood on him to have been dead before he was stabbed. And the stabber is a lefty, without a doubt. The wounds were too deep to be cross-body. The combination of stab wounds and the shot to the head killed him.”

Johnson rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Skip, it’s Johnson.”

“Hey. What’s up?”

“Do you think the evidence you’ve found could be tainted in any way? Is it possible that the gun was just handled by the person whose set of prints were on there, but another set could have been rubbed off?”

“No way. Trying to rub off a set of prints would have wiped the gun completely clean or left some smudged prints. There were partial prints, but when they were laid on top of the two sets I lifted, they matched perfectly. Only two people touched that gun. There was no indication of anyone trying to wipe it off.”

“Any questions, Ms. Wallace?” I asked.

“No. Great job, Skip. Detectives, I think you know what’s next on the agenda. And you can make a call to the widow and let her know you’re making arrests in the case. Great job, everyone.”

“I second that. Fantastic work, Skip. And thanks for the quick turnaround. Detectives, excellent,” Sarge said.

We disconnected the call, then Johnson and I stood up to leave. We had a couple of arrests to make.