I sat in my car considering what my next move should be. One remaining piece of evidence I wanted to follow up on was the bag of plant parts that I had dug out of my backpack. I just wished that I still had the pictures I’d taken on Monarch Trail to compare against. But the Willow Run police had erased those pictures from my cell phone.
I considered going to one of those places where computer whizzes can retrieve data and pictures from electronic memory devices. In the TV police shows, the crime lab tech breaks the case wide open by miraculously retrieving all the critical data from a memory device that has been blown up and charred to a crisp. My cell phone memory wasn’t damaged. Mine was just erased. Getting back my pictures of the scene on Monarch Trail should be relatively easy, though likely expensive. It was also clear that I would need a city larger than Willow Run to locate a geek crew that could do the job.
Then another thought occurred to me. My cell phone had many features, most of which I never used nor was even aware of. I had long ago lost the instruction manual, which was at least twice as big as the phone itself. Most of it I never read, which of course meant I really didn’t know all the functions and tools available to me. Regardless, in most phones, as far as I knew, deleting an item eliminated it from easy retrieval.
Perhaps my phone was one of those where deleting an item did not permanently erase it, but rather simply moved it to trash, which then needed to be emptied. So I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the menus. It took a couple of minutes, but I finally located a trash option buried deep in one of the menus. I clicked it, and there were the pictures, all the pictures, of the scene from Sunday. The body, the close-up shots of the face, the blood on the ground, the folded paper under the hand, and the fresh plant parts nearby.
I pulled out the photocopy of the brown paper I had made at the Post Office before mailing it to Ed. I compared it to the picture of the brown paper on my cell phone. They looked similar, maybe even identical. So sending the paper I found on the trail to Ed for fingerprint analysis had been a good move.
I then pulled out the bag of plant parts from the back of my car and spread them out. I compared them with the pictures on my cell phone. The pictures were slightly out of focus since I hadn’t focused on them. I had been taking a picture of the brown paper. The plant parts just happened to be in the shot. While there were similarities, I needed a plant expert.
I decided that my next destination was the University of Montana in Missoula. It was the nearest large campus I was aware of, less than two hours away. They would likely have a botany department where an expert could be found.