“Thanks, Dan.” He hung up the phone. “Fritz, you’re doing me a very great favor.”
“Glad to be of service. Lieutenant, running those prints was a very great favor to us. I’d love to clear this case.”
“I hope you clear it before the weekend,” Stone said.
“Why the weekend?”
“Because there’s going to be a big wedding here, and Mr. Manning might just try to crash the party.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Parker said. He stood up and shook Stone’s and Dino’s hands. “Thanks for your help. I’ll let you know if we find the guy.” He turned to leave.
“Fritz,” Stone said, “what was your victim’s name?”
“Winston Harding,” Parker replied.
59
STONE WATCHED THAD SHAMES LEAVE THE HOUSE AND walk through the gardens toward the yacht. “Maybe I should talk to him alone,” Stone said.
Dino got up. “I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.”
Dino got up. “I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.” and
As Dino departed, Thad came up the gangplank and walked to the afterdeck, where Stone waited for him. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Thad. Have a seat.” Stone wasn’t going to enjoy this.
“What’s up? Why did you
want to see me alone?”
“Because what I have to tell you is for your ears only. You must not share this with Liz, or even Callie.”
“You sound very serious,” Thad said.
“This is very serious.”
“Tell me.”
“Today, Dino and I have had visits from two FBI agents and a detective from the Houston, Texas, police department.”
“About Liz?”
“No, about Paul Manning.”
“What about Manning?”
“One of the problems with finding Manning was that, for a long time, he had never been fingerprinted. Lots of people haven’t. If you have never been arrested, applied for a security clearance or served in the armed forces, then you’ve probably not been fingerprinted. The Bureau maintains a huge database of everyone who has ever been fingerprinted, and it can be accessed by authorized law enforcement agencies.”
“I understand. And Manning has never been fingerprinted?”
“He has, once. After the business on St. Marks, Manning paid me a visit in New York. He wanted money. Fortunately, I had been expecting him, and Dino showed up shortly after his arrival and arrested him on charges of insurance fraud. Since he was wanted in St. Marks on three murder charges, and since the insurance company had no hope of retrieving any funds from him, they waived their claim on Manning and allowed him to be extradited to St. Marks. But first, he was taken to Dino’s precinct, the Nineteenth, in Manhattan, and routinely fingerprinted.”
“And then his prints went into the FBI computer?”
“No. Whoever handled the fingerprinting at the Nineteenth considered Manning’s arrest as a foreign matter and didn’t forward his prints to the FBI. But they remained on file at the precinct, and earlier this week, I remembered that Manning had been printed.
“The FBI also maintains a database of fingerprints that are associated with unsolved crimes. If a perpetrator leaves a print at a crime scene, it’s run against all known prints, and if there’s no match, it goes into the unsolved crimes database under a file number that relates to the case. I asked Dino to run a match of Manning’s prints against that database, and it turned up a match with a bank robbery in Arlington, Virginia, four years ago. That crime was also matched by modus operandi and description of the perpetrator to three other bank robberies in Maryland. All the robberies took place near Washington, D.C., where Manning kept an apartment under the name of William Charles Danforth.”