“Hold on — oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”
“Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”
I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light source. “So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.
“Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both, knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before grabbing hold of it.
“Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your fingers.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny.”
If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art. Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe.
Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala. One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing. She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school three times in the days before her disappearance.
I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.
“You getting anything?”
“Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His, they’re all over the place. Not surprising — it’s his car — but it’s killing me that we missed hers.”
“Missed ’em? Sounds like you think they’re in there somewhere.”
“Were in there; aren’t anymore. Hell, she was in there — three witnesses saw her. We just didn’t move fast enough. By the time we got the warrant and got the car, the prints were gone. Vanished into thin air.”
He wasn’t speaking figuratively. It was a phenomenon he had told me about before, one that had baffled investigators in child abductions for many years: why were children’s fingerprints so elusive, so fleeting? It had baffled Art, too, but the second or third time he found himself coming up empty-handed, he had vowed to figure it out. He’d enlisted the brain trust over at Oak Ridge National Lab — he pulled together a team of organic and analytical chemists — plus some parents and kids from a local elementary school. This cobbled-together team had done a research project to ferret out the differences between adult fingerprints and children’s prints. Once Art had gotten the ball rolling, it didn’t take the chemists long to figure out what was going on. Adult prints are oil-based, they found; kids’ prints, on the other hand — before puberty kicks in and activates all those acne-producing oil glands — are water-based. And water evaporates, taking the prints with it. The explanation was simple; the ramifications could be simply heartbreaking.
“How long did it take y’all to get the car?”
“Two days. Which was one day too many. Twenty-four hours sooner, her prints would’ve been there. Her prints were there.”
“Witnesses slow to come forward?”
“No. Lawyer quick to tie our hands. Claimed we were harassing his client.”
I had a bad feeling inside. I didn’t want to ask, but something in his face dared me to. “Who’s the lawyer?”
“Three guesses.”
I didn’t need three. “DeVriess.”
“Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.
“Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do. Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him, furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.
He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect you—hell, you know that. It’s this little girl — it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”
“I don’t blame you for that.”
“Sorry I jumped on you.”
“Forget it.”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”
I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and handed it to him. “This.”
“What’s the story?”
“It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”
He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”
“Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”
“What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“And whose is it?”
“That, too.”
“And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”
“Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”
“Gack — is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh — you don’t ask much, do you?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without removing the print. If there’s even a print under there. Which I very much doubt.”
“How come?”
“The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t corrode, the gack — adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it — will have either absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”
I nodded glumly. “So what you’re saying is…”
“…not a snowball’s chance.” I’d pretty much expected him to say something like that — he was a criminalist, after all, not a wizard — but until he actually said it, I’d held out some hope. “But still, let’s see what we can see.”
He laid the bag on a lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves, then slid the ziplock open and extricated the waxy tag. After studying it awhile, he leaned toward a tray of tools and selected a pair of tongs, then rummaged under a counter and hauled up a small torch, the sort a chef might use to caramelize the sugar atop a dish of crème brûlée. Holding the tag by the slightly curved end — where the chain once threaded through — he began playing the torch gently over the adipocere. As it began to melt, the reek of dec
omp rapidly replaced the acrid fumes of superglue. “Dang, Bill, you might’ve warned me. Switch on that fan, will you?”