Who's sorry now?

had discovered in the library, nobody demurred about being paid.
    ”I for one have enjoyed having you here,” Lily said. ”You discovered such interesting things. We seldom have guests as knowledgeable as you are.”
    On that note, Dr. Toller put the moccasins aside and began his dinner as the others finished theirs.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Thursday, April 27
     
    DR. TOLLER had asked the Harbinger boys to make him a sturdy crate to ship the girl’s bones, beads, and moccasins to the pathologist and then to a museum. He called a freighting company he was familiar with in these cases. ”Do you mind if I leave her in your garage next to your car, Mr. Brewster?”
    ”Not at all. But let me know when they’re coming so I can move the Duesie out of their way.” What he really meant, of course, was that he didn’t want anybody bashing his precious automobile with a rough wooden crate.
    While Dr. Toller and Robert were working this out, Howard Walker sat at his desk at the jail, his feet up on the desk, eating a jelly doughnut he’d bought at Mabel’s Cafe. He was thinking about the skeleton of the young Indian girl. He wondered if she, like him, was all or partly of the Munsee subtribe of the Delaware tribe, from which he, too, was descended—in a sense. His great-grandfather, a full-blood Munsee Indian, had married into a Dutch family, needless to say, to the Dutch family’s disgrace. Walker was a name many of the tribe shared.
    The old tribes had all had their fill of the Dutch settlers infringing on their land and way of life. They’d packed up and gone West, taking everything they owned in a wagon or on their backs. Only a few families remained. Those families who emigrated wrote letters home saying they’d changed their names to Walker because they’d walked hundreds of miles to find other tribes to join up with.
    When Howard was about eight years old, his grandmother, as Dutch-looking as anyone could be, told him that when she was born, the third of six children, all of them fair-haired and with pale complexions, her own mother, when eventually widowed, decided they’d change their name from whatever their Indian name had been to Walker. Howard’s grandmother told him he was her favorite grandchild because he looked so much like her own father—dark-haired with a proud handsome face, though his coloring was paler than her father’s.
    He’d hated his looks in grade school. The other kids called him names, making fun of him for having Indian features. The boys made jokes about where he hid his tomahawk. And was he a good shot with a bow and an arrow? As he grew older, however, he realized that girls liked him better than the other boys. He was taller, darker-haired than most of the Dutch boys, and more handsome.
    That was when he came to terms with himself. He was only one-eighth Indian but had overridden those powerful Dutch genes the whole rest of his family had acquired from his tough, practical great-grandmother.
    Still, he felt oddly sad about the poor little Indian girl, buried under what would eventually become huge dead bushes. What kind of life had she had? Lily had told him about Dr. Toller’s theory that she’d possibly lived in a cave. At least her family had buried her properly laid out in her best clothing with all the beading on her clothes and shoes. They made sure her feet didn’t get cold and wet in the winter.
    As he took a bite of the doughnut, his phone rang. It was the fingerprint expert.
    ”Have you identified it?” Howard asked.
    ”No record of anything like it in the records. It’s distinct, though I didn’t notice it until I used the magnifying glass. It’s a thumbprint, of course. But it also has a long-healed cut right up through the middle of it. Quite distinct if you look closely.”
    ”If I happen to figure out who painted the swastika on the tailor’s shop, we’ll know he’s the perp from his thumbprint then? Which thumb?”
    ”The left. He was probably right-handed and handled the can with his left hand and rested it at some point on the window.”
    ”It was stupid of him not to notice and clean it up,” Howard commented.
    ”Not necessarily. Maybe he didn’t have cleaning rags handy and didn’t want to wipe it off on his clothes—if he even realized he’d left a fingerprint.”
    ”Thanks for letting me know,” Howard said.
    The moment he’d hung up the phone, it rang again. It was Harry Harbinger. ”Chief, Edwin McBride has been murdered in that