Free Death's Shadow by Jon Wells

that he couldn’t be seen to have tunnel vision in the investigation. The murder was a circumstantial case; in court the defence could point to several men who had been with Jackie that night. One of those suspects was Barry Lane. Barry’s footprint in blood had been found in the Sandbar apartment, but Barry had said he had only viewed the body. More importantly his DNA did not match the semen found on the victim. And then there was the man named Ken, who had also been seen arguing with Jackie that night. Place learned that Ken had died two weeks after the murder, of an Oxycodone overdose.
    Carl had got into trouble in Brantford in the days following his release from rehab in Simcoe. He had met a girl in rehab; they had hooked up for a while — all good, he reflected — but then he went and shot off his mouth to the local cops in Brantford. Not very smart, he reflected later. Got 45 days dead time on that one.
    After getting transferred from Brantford to Hamilton to be sentenced on the assault charge against Crystal, he was moved to a prison in Penetanguishene, an hour north of Barrie, to serve a five-month sentence. He figured: just do the time and get out. And as for other skeletons in his closet, Carl figured he was okay. The cops had shown no indication they had anything on him for the murders. In Penetang he told a couple of inmates that he was trying to lie low, avoid getting tagged for “a high-profile break and enter in Hamilton.”
    In jail he ripped off a thousand push-ups a day. At five foot eight, he bulked up to 225 pounds; bragged that his arms were 18 inches in diameter. He grew one fingernail very long and sharp, just in case he needed to eye-gouge. He imagined that he was building himself into a “hate machine.”
    On his ever-expanding chest, he had a tattoo of a shining cross, just like his dad had back east. His dad had always been tatted up. Young Carl once watched the old man carve an image of a snake on his own thigh using cork and a needle.
    No one was tough enough to fight him one-on-one in prison. In the Penetang jail, he knocked a guy out in a fight, got disciplined for it. One time six guys jumped him, packing cups — Styrofoam cups, stuffed with wet toilet paper until they are hard and heavy — that had been stuffed into a sock, which was swung like a club. But it wasn’t all bad. Carl got together with a couple of guys for parties. They drank homebrew: liquor made from crushed oranges, apples, bits of pineapple, and about 50 packets of sugar — all left to ferment in a garbage bag for a week. It was like pure alcohol. Carl got pretty wasted on it. Fruit schnapps with a kick, he called it.
    A new name appeared on Don Forgan’s radar in January, 2002: Carl Hall. The information had come through a circuitous route. An informant had passed the tip about Hall on to the RCMP. An RCMP officer out of their London, Ontario, branch had then contacted Warren Korol, Forgan’s old partner in homicide. Korol demanded more: What was the name of the informant? He pressed the RCMP to reveal the identity so that they could interview the person. It could assist the investigation. But the RCMP was treating the source as a confidential informant and would not divulge the name.
    Forgan had never heard the name Carl Hall in relation to the Clark/Del Sordo case. The name was now forwarded to ident officer Hank Thorne. He had been sending palm prints from the crime scene to Dave Sibley at the OPP lab to check against the palm print found on the rubber grip of the murder weapon: the baseball bat. Now Thorne checked Hamilton’s palm print manual card file, containing such things as all break-and-enters in the city, for Carl’s name. He found a card on file for Hall, Carl Ernest. Thorne called Sibley and told him he was sending a new palm print for comparison.
    Sibley had other work on the go, and after trying without success to match more than 25 palm prints already in the Clark-Del Sordo case over more than a