remained silent, not wanting to encourage too much speculation in someone outside the department. But I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t hit on something. In our naïveté, we’d really focused on Fuller only as a bank robber.
Schimke stood up suddenly, struck by something in the file. “I’ll be damned; I missed this before.” He punched the columns of figures with his fingertip for emphasis. “This might nail down the exact date all this money was collected. Look—while all the older notes are 1963 issues or earlier, only the mint ones are ’69s…”
“Implying that they were taken out of the bank that year.”
“Right. I mean, sometimes you can get mint bills from a smaller, low-volume bank up to a year or so after issue, but everyone of these is crisp, no matter which bank they came from.”
“What percentage of the total is mint in that list?”
He was positively gleeful by now. “That’s the whole point; it’s very high, like thirty percent or so. That would never happen unless the Fed had just released a new printing to be distributed throughout the system. And the fact that the mint samples come from several banks in different states clinches it. I can’t tell you what happened, but it was definitely in 1969.”
I thanked Richard Schimke profusely, vowed him to silence concerning our conversation, and encouraged him to hang tough on his office decor.
· · ·
When I returned to the station, Harriet was looking pleased with herself. “One down, one to go. The state police dropped off their metal detector ten minutes ago, and the rental place said theirs would be available in an hour, guaranteed. I’ve already told most of the squad to be here by then. Ron, of course, won’t be available.”
I thanked her, then turned, to find J. P. Tyler standing by my office door, a thick file in his hand. “What’s up?”
He handed me the file. “It’s a preliminary report on our forensics search. It doesn’t have any of the state crime lab results yet, but it lists what we found and where we found it. The photographs are arranged from start of search to end, and they’re indexed to the report and the map of the place. I’m afraid you won’t find much.”
I took the file to my desk and opened it before me. I didn’t doubt Tyler’s opinion. I’d been through Fuller’s place twice by now and was pretty sure it was almost as bare as a clean motel room. Nevertheless, I always valued the search report, since it organized a place according to its tiniest details, ignoring the distracting environmental influences that could make your eye skim over a small but important item.
So it was with a cautious curiosity that I pored over the results of yesterday’s hours of crawling with tweezers, sticky tape, and a magnifying glass, seeing for the first time all of our separate findings organized in a logical manner.
I quickly understood what Tyler had meant. Even microscopically, Fuller’s place had been pretty sterile. Hair, dirt, and fingerprint samples were all consistent with a house that had sheltered only one person for a long time, and a lot of intruders just recently. Tyler had even gone the extra yard by determining the hair colors of the search team, the ambulance crew, and Fred Coyner, so that any stray samples could be properly accounted for.
Nothing stood out until I got to the wood stove.
Tyler had been the one nearest the stove. I remembered him opening it, checking its contents with a flashlight, and scribbling in his notebook. Now, in the report’s terse language, I read: “L-18: cast-iron wood-fired heating stove, found with door slightly open. Contents: small quantity cold wood ash, one partially burned wooden kitchen match.”
I began flipping through both the photographs and the rest of the report, looking for any mention of either a candle or a kerosene lamp. I found both eventually, but as stored items, far from the stove, and obviously not in current use.
I sat back and thought
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