Drago #6: And the City Burned. Art Spinella
stood still with his feet 24 inches or so apart.”
Moving the pen to a second set, “The other man, though, kept only one foot still as he worked. This print shows his left foot was planted in one place. But the other! Ah, he moved it quite a bit. That’s why the right print appears to be smudged and scuffed.”
Standing, “Bunions are pretty painful. Here, look.” He reached into the briefcase and pulled out a small brochure from a stack of pamphlets, opened it to a page and turned it so I could see the pictures.
“The length of the foot doesn’t change, but people with bunions or who have had bunion surgery wear wider shoes.” Aiming the pen to the second print in the dirt, “That’s what we’re looking at here. The guy was in pain and to relieve the pain he wore a wide shoe and moved his foot quite a bit in order to relieve the pressure.”
“Can you tell how big these guys were?”
“You mean, by measuring the stride patterns?”
“Yeah.”
“Not very precisely. That’s good in the movies and for Sherlock Holmes, but stride only gives you a very loose approximation.” He turned and tipped his head to the prints Sal, he and I made in the dirt from the doorway.
“See the stride patterns for the three of us? All about the same yet you’re 6-foot-five or so, Sal is about six-feet and I’m 5-foot-10. We all walked to this spot together so we moved almost like a unit. That meant I took a bit longer stride than I normally would to keep up. Sal a bit longer or you a bit shorter than normal. Very imprecise, to say the least. That said, I’d suggest that the guy with the bunion would take a shorter stride just to favor his bad foot.”
Again leaning over his briefcase and pulling out a tape measure, he pulled the metal tape and put it from heel to heel of one set of prints. “About 27 inches. Adjusting for the bunion, shoe size and all, maybe 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-10. The other guy,” again laying the tape measure on the prints, “Anywhere from 5-foot-10 to 6-foot-one.”
He spun on his heels and walked to the prints in the far corner where the propane tanks were stored before being moved to the workbench.
“Here, though, we can tell something else.” He measured the stride pattern for the shorter man. “That’s about 23 inches compared to 27 inches before he attached the timer and dynamite. Again, either he’s not a strong man and the bomb’s extra weight made him take shorter strides in order to maintain balance or the bunion was hurting or he was afraid of the bomb he was carrying and being extraordinarily careful when carrying it.”
“And the other guy?” Sal asked.
A few measurements, and, “The extra weight didn’t change a thing for the bigger guy. Either he’s strong – a full propane tanks weights what, 20-something pounds? – or turning it into a bomb didn’t scare him in the least.”
Lots of info, but of what use I wasn’t sure.
“Can you tell anything from the shoe-tread pattern?”
DiMaggio took his iPhone from his pocket, clicked a few close-up photos of all the prints.
“I’ll send these to a friend of mine who used to be with the Las Vegas’ CSI lab. He’ll jump on it right away so we won’t have to wait forever, like we would if we sent them to the FBI. Grissom will tell me if the pattern is in the data base.”
“Thanks, doc. You’ve been a huge help.”
The dapper doc hoisted the briefcase and returned to his Impala.
I looked over the room and at the footprints.
“Forensic podiatry. Who would’ve thunk it.”
1936
The large two-story 13-room house in southeast Bandon exploded. In less than 10 minutes, it melted into the earth. The heat so intense, apples in the large orchard cooked in the trees. Irish gorse, a dreaded import, oily and thick as a weed infested cornfield, took the flames and transformed them into a million blowtorches.
The home’s owner, Mr. Hunt, elderly and expecting the roaring blaze to engulf his home, wanted to return to the building that was his life, slide into his own bed and die within the inferno. Only the efforts of his tenants, the Panter family, saved his life by carrying the trembling, anguished man to their truck.
Walls of flames on both sides of the gravel roadways – tunnels of death. Choking smoke, acrid and thick; eye-burning and bitter to the tongue. Livestock severely burned and dying where they stood. The crippled and elderly’s only hope, the good will of neighbors to extract them from wood houses in the path of the blaze.
Fear. Palpable, all-consuming fear.
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