Worth More Dead

the swirls. To isolate fingerprints, Chan suggested that they use Super Glue to enhance any ridges but only after the inside of Cheryl’s car was photographed to preserve blood spatter patterns.
    If Roland Pitre should emerge as the prime suspect, finding his fingerprints in blood would be tremendously valuable, absolutely irrefutable evidence that he had been present when Cheryl was dying. That would place him at the murder as it happened. Merely finding his fingerprints in Cheryl’s car wouldn’t help much. Intrafamily murders—when a family member kills another—are extremely difficult to prove. Obviously, their blood, sweat, hair, fibers, etc., will be found in their homes and their cars, and there is little a criminalist can do to mark the time this potential evidence was deposited. Historically, the best physical evidence to be found is a clear fingerprint with numerous matching points pressed into the life’s blood of a victim.
    A button found in the trunk with Cheryl’s body might have been important, but it turned out to be from her own jacket. The detectives bagged possible evidence from the car. With a vacuum, Gruber carefully recovered hair, dirt, and fibers from the driver’s seat and floor, the passenger seat, the trunk liner, and the bed liner beneath it.
    They removed a length of nylon rope, an orange throw rug, and miscellaneous items in a plastic bag near where the victim’s feet had rested: a first aid kit, a window scraper, paper towels.
    When they removed the bottom liner of the trunk they found something interesting. The wire that led to the taillights on the driver’s side was completely free of its socket. Disconnected, neither the taillights nor the brake lights would have worked. Somehow, Cheryl Pitre might have either kicked the wire loose or managed to rip it free before her hands were taped behind her, probably in the vain hope that a police officer would pull her car over for a “no taillights” violation.
    Sadly, on the Saturday night she disappeared, there hadn’t been a cop around to notice.
     
    George Chan and Don McDowell began assessing the blood spatter patterns on the silver Topaz early the next morning. Chan noted two small indentations on the trunk’s opening frame between the hinges. He remarked that they appeared to have been made by a tire iron but could not say for sure. Mikrosil castings were made of the marks, and paint samples were removed from that area, too.
    The rear bumper and the exterior of the trunk deck had been wiped clean, but a spray with leucomalachite green proved that a thin sheen of blood, invisible to the naked eye, remained, as it later proved to be in many areas inside the car.
    The next morning, Hank Gruber assisted ID Technician Donna West in preparing Cheryl’s car for the Super Glue method. First, she dusted the exterior doors and the trunk lid with black fingerprint powder to ensure they wouldn’t accidentally destroy any prints as they moved in and out of the car.
    Would they find any unidentified prints, perhaps unknowingly left by a stranger who had killed her? Even if they did, it might be several days before Donna West could have those prints transferred to a card and even longer to have prints of the victim and any suspects for comparison.
    The Super Glue fumer was sealed into the Topaz at two PM on October 25. The fumes would make fingerprints appear as if they were stenciled on the car’s interior. Hank Gruber returned three hours later to remove it. Next, Donna West would do her part in lifting the prints that had surfaced.
    They desperately needed either prints that matched known suspects’ prints or an eyewitness.
    Still no one came forward with a story about seeing a woman struggling with someone, not in Kitsap County, not in Seattle. As unlikely as it seemed, whoever abducted Cheryl Pitre had done it without so much as raising any suspicion, silently and swiftly in the dark near midnight.
    Chan turned to Hank Gruber to say what he believed had occurred. “I would say that the attack positively took place while the victim was actually inside the trunk,” he said. “Her head must have been above the height of the trunk opening when the blows were struck. She was probably in a semi-seated position with her feet extended to the driver’s side.”
    But the driver’s seat had been in a far-forward position when the vehicle was found. Was it possible that Cheryl herself might have been forced to drive her car to the