She pierced the lid with a heavy-duty syringe, extracted air that had been confined with the ashes, and injected the air directly into the gas chromatograph. She made minute adjustments. As the sample moved along the machine’s five-hundred-foot column, the stylus jiggled on the wide graph paper.
“Unleaded . . .” she said. “It’s gasohol, unleaded gasohol. Don’t see much of that.” She flipped quickly through a looseleaf file of sample graphs. “I can’t give you a brand yet. Let me do it with pentane and I’ll get back to you.”
“Good,” Zeller said. Pentane would dissolve the fluids in the ashes, then fractionate early in the chromatograph, leaving the fluids for fine analysis.
By one A.M. Zeller had all he could get.
Liza Lake succeeded in naming the gasohol: Freddy Lounds was burned with a “Servco Supreme” blend.
Patient brushing in the grooves of the wheelchair treads yielded two kinds of carpet fiber—wool and synthetic. Mold in dirt from the treads indicated the chair had been stored in a cool, dark place.
The other results were less satisfactory. The paint flecks were not original factory paint. Blasted in the mass spectrometer and compared with the national automotive paint file, the paint proved to be high-quality Duco enamel manufactured in a lot of 186,000 gallons during the first quarter of 1978 for sale to several autopaintshop chains.
Zeller had hoped to pinpoint a make of vehicle and the approximate time of manufacture.
He telexed the results to Chicago.
The Chicago police department wanted its wheels back. The wheels made an awkward package for the courier. Zeller put written lab reports in his pouch along with mail and a package that had come for Graham.
“Federal Express I’m not,” the courier said when he was sure Zeller couldn’t hear him.
The Justice Department maintains several small apartments near Seventh District Court in Chicago for the use of jurists and favored expert witnesses when court is in session. Graham stayed in one of these, with Crawford across the hall.
He came in at nine P.M., tired and wet. He had not eaten since breakfast on the plane from Washington and the thought of food repelled him.
Rainy Wednesday was over at last. It was as bad a day as he could remember.
With Lounds dead, it seemed likely that he was next, and all day Chester had watched his back; while he was in Lounds’s garage, while he stood in the rain on the scorched pavement where Lounds was burned. With strobe lights flashing in his face, he told the press he was “grieved at the loss of his friend Frederick Lounds.”
He was going to the funeral too. So were a number of federal agents and police, in the hope that the killer would come to see Graham grieve.
Actually he felt nothing he could name, just cold nausea and an occasional wave of sickly exhilaration that he had not burned to death instead of Lounds.
It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years: He had just gotten tired.
He made a big martini and drank it while he undressed. He had another after his shower while he watched the news.
(“An FBI trap to catch the Tooth Fairy backfires and a veteran reporter is dead. We’ll be back with details on Eyewitness News after this.”)
They were referring to the killer as “the Dragon” before the newscast was over. The Tattler had spilled it all to the networks. Graham wasn’t surprised. Thursday’s edition should sell well.
He made a third martini and called Molly.
She had seen the television news at six and ten o’clock and she had seen a Tattler. She knew that Graham had been the bait in a trap.
“You should have told me, Will.”
“Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“Will he try to kill you now?”
“Sooner or later. It would be hard for him now, since I’m moving around. I’m covered all the time, Molly, and he knows it. I’ll be okay.”
“You sound a little slurry, have you been to see your friend in the fridge?”
“I had a couple.”
“How do you feel?”