Worst Case (Michael Bennett 3)

Parker scribbled it down. Why wouldn’t this guy wear a mask or something if he was going to let her go? she thought. Was it sloppiness? Another trick?

“He’s actually not that bad a guy,” Mary Beth continued. “I know it sounds weird, but he cares about stuff. Probably too much. After everything, I guess I feel sorry for him more than anything else.”

What?

“How do you mean?” Parker said instead.

“He gave me a list of questions about the horrible direction this world is headed in. Like a test, I guess. Every correct answer I gave made him happier and happier. He was actually crying at the end. He told me how proud he was of me. Told me to try to learn everything I could at Bard. Said that the world was really going to need me. He apologized for having put me through the whole thing and then he drove me to a corner and put me in a cab. He even paid the cabbie.”

Parker had to use effort not to shake her head in bafflement. This guy really was nuts.

“You didn’t happen to get his plate?”

“No,” she said. “It was a light-colored van. Yellow, I think.”

“Anything else at all, Mary Beth?”

“He hand-rolls his own cigarettes. He made a cross with the ashes on my forehead right before he let me out. Look,” she said, reaching up to touch it.

Parker grabbed her wrist tightly as the girl went to wipe it off.

“Mike! Get in here!” she yelled triumphantly. “I think we got a print!”

Chapter 62

BECAUSE WE DIDN’T have time to wait for the Crime Scene Unit to arrive, we lifted the print ourselves. And when I say “we,” I mean Emily.

I stayed with Mary Beth while Special Agent Parker went to the G car and came back with some surgical gloves and 3M fingerprint tape.

“This will just take a second, hon,” Emily said as she laid the tape meticulously across the teen’s forehead. With a light, deft motion, Emily flattened out the tape and peeled off the print.

I had to contain a whoop as she laid the tape on the white fingerprint card. It was perfect. Even taking a print off a pane of cold glass can sometimes be difficult, but Emily had lifted this print as well as any CSU pro. Was there anything this Bureau chick couldn’t do?

Afterward, we headed back to the G car’s trunk, and Emily took out a large gray box. It was a LiveScan 10 printer, a portable fingerprint scanning machine. She connected it to the Fed car’s Mobile Computer Terminal and with one small scan, the print was fired down to the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

If our boy’s prints were among the fifty million the IAFIS contained, we’d get a response within two hours. This was by far our best lead yet. I was stoked.

“We need to get this down to the lab in DC as well for synchrotron infrared microspectroscopy,” Emily said, dropping the print card into an evidence envelope.

“A syncro infra what?” I said.

“It’s brand-new. See, in every print there’s little traces of sweat. The lab techs can now look at the sweat and detect chemical markers. The markers reveal whether a suspect uses drugs and even detect the hormones that indicate the suspect’s sex. If we don’t get a hit on the print, we need to obtain as much info as we can. You’re telling me you never heard of it?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it. Are you kidding me?” I lied. “I just wanted to see if you knew.”

Chapter 63

MARY BETH WAS sitting down with the just-arrived police sketch artist when we left the brownstone. That’s when I noticed that the crowd outside the Haases’ had changed. The teenagers looked much more vicious, heartless, almost hyenalike. Oh, I thought, spotting a news van. That explains it.

I was scanning for a slot to get through the converging newsies, when I suddenly stopped at the town house’s bottom step. Instead of running, I waved the crowd toward me. I had an idea.

“I have an announcement,” I said.

I cleared my throat as lights and microphones leaned toward me. Peering at me from behind the bulky cameras and apparatus, the surrounding press people looked like an invading army of alien cyborgs. The problem I had with them was that they often treated me like I was part of an invading army of alien cyborgs.

“Today another young victim was abducted, but this one was released unharmed,” I began. “First off, if the person responsible is listening, I want to thank them for their mercy in this case. I would also urge them strongly to contact me so that we might be able to resolve this situation once and for all. I’m available anytime day or night. You have my number. Please do not hesitate to speak with me.”

“Do you have any leads in the case?” one of the cyborgs called to me.