“I’m sure the husband has never been arrested,” Gabriel says. “So we’re not going to have his fingerprints in the system or his DNA on file. Which leaves us with surveillance footage.”

He’s saying that even if Stuart left evidence linking him to the crime scene, we wouldn’t be able to prove it because his fingerprints and DNA aren’t in the database. Normally you’d get a court order to compel him to give samples, but doing that now would destroy the case against Dana, so that’s a nonstarter. Which leaves our only other option: hoping that he turns up on surveillance footage so we can put him at the scene of the crime.

Gabriel and his team reviewed thousands of frames of video to see if Dana had made the trip from Astoria to Central Park the night of the murder. Footage from the bank and the bodega around the corner from their home, hoping to catch her walking to whatever mode of transportation she might have taken; from the N-train and Lexington-line subway platforms, in case she had decided to come to Manhattan via public transportation; from the cameras at the tollbooths at the bridges and tunnels, in case she traveled by taxi. Her image never appeared. And they knew she hadn’t driven the family car into the city because they’d run the license plates, which hadn’t shown up at any of the Manhattan entry points that night.

It took more than a hundred man-hours to comb through the various tapes the first time through. Back then, Gabriel had the manpower to put five uniforms on it. There’s no way anyone is going to authorize overtime again. Not to pursue what’s little more than the fact that Stuart Goodwin gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“I’ll help,” I say. “And we should also track Stuart’s phone.”

Gabriel nods at my suggestion. Richard Trofino’s cell phone was on at the time of the murder, and the pings indicated it was in the general vicinity of the duck pond. That wasn’t much evidence, because his phone would have pinged the same way if it was sitting on his night table, given the proximity of their apartment to the same cell tower. But if Stuart’s phone pinged in the vicinity, we could show he was there on the night of the murder.

Of course, it’s a safe bet that Stuart knows this too. If he was smart enough to turn off Dana’s cell phone, I’m certain he knew enough to turn off his own phone. Or he would have left it on in Astoria so that it looked like he stayed at home.