“In cases this old, the paper records have been reduced to microfilm, the printouts of which are in the file you’ve got. The original documents are destroyed, but we keep the original photos. They go to Archives.”

“Which is what? A room in your building?”

“No, Benton. A warehouse near the state library - the same warehouse where the Bureau of Forensic Science stores evidence from its old cases.”

“Vander still hasn’t found the photograph of the bloody thumbprint Waddell left inside Robyn Naismith’s house?”

“No,” I said as Wesley met my eyes. We both knew that Vander was never going to find it.

“Christ,” he said. “Who retrieved Robyn Naismith’s photos for you?”

“My administrator,” I replied. “Ben Stevens. He made a trip to Archives a week or so before Waddell’s execution.”

“Why?”

“During the final stages of the appeals process, there are always a lot of questions asked and I like to have ready, access to the case or cases involved. So a trip to Archives is routine. What’s a little different in the instance we’re talking about is I didn’t have to ask Stevens to get the photos from Archives. He volunteered.”

“And that’s unusual?”

“In retrospect, I must admit that it is.”

“The implication,” Wesley said, “is that your administrator may have volunteered because what he was really interested in was Waddell’s file - or more specifically, the photograph of the bloody thumbprint that’s supposed to be inside it.”

“All I can say with certainty is if Stevens wanted to tamper with a file in Archives, he couldn’t do so unless he had legitimate reason for visiting Archives. If, for example, it came back to me that he had been there when none of the medical examiners had made a request, it would look odd.”

I went on to tell Wesley about the breach of security in my office computer, explaining that the two terminals involved were assigned to me and Stevens. While I talked, Wesley took notes. When I fell silent he looked up at me.

“It doesn’t sound as if they found what they were looking for,” he said.

“My suspicion is that they didn’t.”

“That brings us around to the obvious question. What were they looking for?”

I slowly swirled my cognac. In the candlelight it was liquid amber, and each sip deliciously burned going down. “Maybe something pertaining to Eddie Heath’s death. I was looking for any other cases in which victims may have had bite marks or cannibalistic-type injuries, and had a file in my directory. Beyond that, I can’t imagine what anyone might have been looking for.”

“Do you ever keep intradepartmental memos in your directory?”

“In word processing, a subdirectory.”

“Same password to access those documents?”

“Yes.”

“And in word processing you would store autopsy reports and other documents pertaining to cases?”