Free The Whole Truth by Nancy Pickard Page A

to him, not the size of the boat.
    Almost at once, he noticed a dark smudge on the otherwise pristine white fiberglass deck of the Overboard. Paul removed his own shoes and stepped onto the boat for a closer look.
    The smudge looked to him like a large cigarette ash, flattened by someone walking on it.
    If the killer had been smoking, maybe had a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he could have dropped an ash onto the deck without realizing it. If the crime happened at night, as Paul assumed, the killer might not have seen the fallen ash, even if the white deck was illuminated by the moon or by lights. The smallest shadow would hide an ash, or this smudge. Standing there in his stocking feet, Paul noticed something else that gave his heart an excited jolt.
    At the edge of the deck, right where someone boarding from another boat might have first set down a foot, there was the print of the toe of a shoe. Plain as day. With a distinctive V pattern sliced irregularly with the sort of individualistic "wear marks" that delight an investigator's soul, because they're so simple to match with the shoe that made them. If you can find the shoe, that is. If there was even a little water and dirt in the bottom of the killer's boat (this was still assuming the killer came by boat), and if the killer stepped into it before boarding the Overboard, then he would leave this imprint.
    Paul backed carefully away.
    He got off the yacht and pulled his shoes back on, before heading over to his colleagues to report his possibly important discoveries. They might be nothing, have no relationship to the crime. Or . . .
    Sometimes, it pays to take the long view.
    Paul Flanck's imaginings about a lone killer in a boat turned out to be almost exactly what had happened in the earliest hour of Tuesday morning.
    Detective Robyn Anschutz says she did only one useful thing that morning at the crime scene, and that was to cater to a couple of her own idiosyncratic convictions. Having been trained with a generation of young cops who were fed FBI statistics and psychological profiles along with more traditional training, Robyn firmly believes two weird but verifiable ideas:
    One: Murderers not only return to the scene of their crime, but they like to watch the investigation of it.
    And, two: Many killers are infatuated with police work.
    They like to hang around cops, in other words.
    And they really like to watch those cops work at the scene of the crime they committed. They like to be "helpful," and may volunteer in a search, for instance, and they enjoy the feelings of secret superiority they may experience while watching the "dumb" cops go down blind alleys or commit investigative errors.
    Because she believes in the likelihood of both of those implausible events, Robyn took a good long look at every face in the growing crowd that morning. Cops. Media. Citizens. Everybody.
    "I don't get to go to all that many murder scenes," she says, "which may surprise you. But I'm always bugging our still photographers and our video guys to include the spectators in their shots. I always want to see who was there."
    She admits that she had never yet been able to match a spectator's face with the eventual suspect's—or convicted killer's— face, but she kept thinking that one day she would. Robyn likes to look over "spectator pictures" early in a case, so that she may recognize a suspect if she comes across him (or her) later.
    "It was just this nutty hobby, you might say," she says, "until the Natalie Mae McCullen murder."
    At that scene, that morning, indulging her heretofore unproductive hobby, Robyn noticed a wealth of typical south Florida faces. There were tanned, elderly women turned out in Lilly Pulitzer pinks and greens, and there were guayabera-shirted men in summer shorts or slacks. She noticed women in swimming suits, sundresses, shorts, halter tops, or tees. She saw bare-chested men. It was the usual mix of tourists, retirees, and hard-working residents, plus