Giannini had called them down to the lab fifteen minutes after Mr. Shultz’s call. They had found something at the scene and he wanted them to see it.

“First, the small stuff. We found no prints in or on the car. The car had been wiped pretty thoroughly. We found a man’s sock under the car when we moved it and another man’s sock near the area where the dirt road enters the meadow. There were some fibers that we have matched with the socks that were found under the windshield wipers. It’s my guess that the killer used the socks like gloves and wiped the prints off of the car.”

“Is there any way of tracing a person through the socks?”

“Oh, we know where the socks came from. Walters was barefoot. I already had someone check with the family. They’re his socks.”

Giannini glanced down at a sheet of paper he was holding.

“Next, it looks like the motive wasn’t robbery. There was thirty dollars in his wallet and twenty in the purse. There was also an expensive camera in the back seat.”

“You said that you had something important for us,” Shindler prodded.

“Right.”

Giannini walked over to a filing cabinet and rummaged in one of the steel drawers.

“One of my men came across this stuff in some bushes near the base of the hill that leads down from the meadow to the paved road.”

Shindler had a rough picture of the place. The dirt road wound upward from the paved road for a while, then straightened out into the meadow. If you did not use the dirt road, a straight line would take you down an embankment that had several steep sections. The embankment was covered with underbrush.

Giannini pulled three items out of a manila envelope and set them on a table. There was a cigarette lighter, a blue rat-tail comb and a pair of feminine glasses. The glasses were constructed out of plastic and metal. The temples were made of yellow gold wire. The frames were reddish plastic on top and yellow gold on the bottom. The top piece curled up at the ends and was harlequin-shaped with rhinestone trim at the tips.

“Dr. Webber?” Marcus inquired.

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Marcus. I called you from my office an hour ago.”

The optometrist had been unlocking his door when Marcus approached him in the hallway of his office building.

“I apologize for asking you to work on your day off, but this is very important.”

“Of course. Come in. I wasn’t doing anything anyway and this makes for an exciting break in my routine.”

The doctor turned on the lights and led Marcus through a small waiting room into a large office lined with medical books. The doctor sat behind a paper-covered desk and motioned Marcus into an easy chair.

“Greg Heller told me that you helped him out in a burglary case a few years ago.”

“Oh, that.” The doctor smiled. “Yes. He needed to trace a person through a pair of glasses and I showed him how to do it.”

“I have the same problem that Greg had, but our situation is more urgent. Have you read the morning papers? The story about the boy who was murdered in Lookout Park?”

“The Walters boy. Terrible. His family belongs to my church. I don’t know them well, but the boy was thought of very highly.”

That was the general picture so far, Marcus thought. Nobody with a bad word about Richie Walters.

“What I am going to tell you is just between us. We are going to let the story break soon enough, because we don’t think that we can keep it quiet for too long, but I want your word that you won’t leak what I tell you.”

“Certainly.”

“There was a girl with Walters and she’s missing. We are searching the woods and we didn’t want thrill seekers out messing up the investigation. We also wanted to give the people who have her, if she is still alive, a chance to make contact, if this is a kidnapping.

“So far, we have only one clue to the identity of the people involved: a pair of woman’s glasses. I was hoping that you could tell me how to find the owner.”

“Did Greg tell you what was involved the last time?”

“No. He just said that you knew how to do it.”

“I know, but it’s not easy and it’s not fast. Did you bring the glasses?”

Marcus fished an envelope out of his overcoat pocket. He handed the glasses to the doctor.

“Prescriptions are a lot like fingerprints,” Dr. Webber said as he rotated the glasses in his hands. “It is highly unlikely that you would find two people with identical prescriptions and identical frames.

“We have four numbers to work with for comparison. When someone comes to me for glasses, I determine what his prescription should be. I don’t grind the lenses myself, so I send written instructions to the people who construct the lenses. When they receive my instructions, they take an unfinished lens. One that has not been worked on. The curvature of the surface of that lens is called the basic curve.

“I instruct the workmen to alter the entire curvature of the lens surface to form a new curve. This new curve is called the sphere.

“Next, I instruct the workmen to alter the curve of the sphere at the point where the pupil is centered. The area of the lens that the wearer looks out of. This means that the lens will have two different adjustments on its surface: the sphere, which covers the whole lens, and the new curve, ground on the sphere, where the line of vision is. The smaller curve is called the cylinder.

“Finally, I will instruct the workmen to grind the cylinder at a particular angle. It could be 45 degrees, 30 degrees, etc. This angle is called the axis.

“The four numbers for comparison, then, are the basic curve, the sphere, the cylinder curve and the axis. I have a machine in my examining room that looks like a microscope. It’s called a Lensometer and I can put these glasses under it and find the prescription for you.”

“And no two people will have the same prescription?”

“They shouldn’t. Of course, you also have the frames. This is made by American Optical. The name is stamped on the inside of the temple. It’s a Gay Mount. That is the style. The size of this frame is 46-20 and that varies from person to person also. So you have another figure for comparison.”

“That’s just great. I’d appreciate it if you could get that prescription for me.”

Dr. Webber left for five minutes. When he returned, he handed Marcus a sheet of paper with a series of numbers on it.

“This has the information you need. It will make sense to any optometrist. You will have to circulate this and get them to check their files. That is going to take some time, I’m afraid. I wish there was some quicker way.”

“So do I, Doctor, but, right now, we have no choice.”

3

Three days after Richie Walters died, winter began with a vengeance. Temperatures dropped near zero. People started staying indoors and snow and wind made the price of firewood soar. And through it all the searchers went out daily hunting for Elaine Murray.

The fact of Miss Murray’s disappearance and the police search was revealed in the Monday morning papers. The Marine, Navy and Coast Guard Reserve volunteered 125 men and the Boy Scouts rounded up forty more. During the first few days of the search the weather was still mild and the area around the meadow was cluttered with thrill seekers.

The story dominated the headlines in the Portsmouth Herald and several of the eastern papers picked up on the “Lover’s Lane” murder and the hunt for the missing girl. The investigation turned up no new clues and the only real lead, the glasses, was kept from the public.

On December 28, 1960, the search for Elaine Murray was officially called off. Then 1960 became 1961. A new President of the United States was sworn in and more current events took hold of the public imagination and the Murray-Walters case drifted farther back in the pages of the Herald until it disappeared.