“A fucking church?” Deborah said. “On the Beach, for God’s sake? How did he get the boat in there?”
I pulled up a map on-screen and pointed. “See, the church is right here, by this canal, and the parking lot is on the water.” I ran my finger along the canal from the church and out into the bay. “Ten minutes across the water to Bayfront Park and the Torch.”
Deborah stared for a moment, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense at all,” she said.
“It does to him,” I said.
“Well, shit,” she said. “I’d better get Duarte and get out there.” And then she straightened up and ran for the door without a single word of thanks for my arduous eight minutes of labor. I admit I was a bit surprised—not that my very own sister had failed to display gratitude, of course. That would be too much to expect. But normally she would have dragged a reluctant Dexter along with her for backup, leaving her partner to count paper clips. But this time it was Dutiful Dexter left behind, and Debs had gone to find her new French-speaking partner, Duarte. I supposed that meant she liked working with him, or maybe she was just being more careful with her partners now. Her last two had been killed on the job while working a case with her, and I’d heard more than one cop muttering that it was very bad luck to work with Sergeant Morgan, since she was obviously some kind of black widow or something.
Whatever the case, there was really nothing to complain about. Debs was actually doing things the way she was supposed to for once, working with her official partner instead of her unofficial brother. And that was fine with me, because it truly was dangerous to hang around with her when she was at work; I had scar tissue to prove it. And it wasn’t my job to run around in the big, bad world dodging slings and arrows and, apparently, hammers. I didn’t need the adrenaline; I had real work to do. So I just sat and felt unappreciated for a few minutes, and then went back to doing it.
Just after lunch, I was in the lab with Vince Masuoka when Deborah rushed in and dumped a large hammer on the counter in front of me. I guessed from the loud thump that it weighed about three pounds. It was in a big plastic evidence bag, and a film of condensation had formed on the inside surface of the bag, but I could still see that it was not an ordinary carpenter’s hammer, and it did not quite look like a sledgehammer, either. The head was round and blunt at both ends, and it had a yellow, well-worn wooden handle.
“All right,” Vince said, peering in over Deborah’s shoulder. “I always wanted to get hammered with you.”
“Go piss up a stick,” Debs said. It was not up to her usual high standards in a put-down, but she said it with considerable conviction, and Vince scuttled away quickly to the far corner of the lab, where his laptop sat on a counter. “Alex found it,” Deborah said, nodding at Duarte as he trickled in the door. “It was lying in the parking lot at that church, St. John’s.”
“Why would he drop his hammer?” I said, poking carefully at the plastic bag to see better.
“Right here,” Debs said, and I could hear barely suppressed excitement in her voice. She pointed through the plastic to a spot on the handle, just above where the yellow color was partially faded away from use. “Lookit,” she said. “It’s cracked a little bit.”
I bent over and looked. On the worn wooden handle, just barely visible through the misted bag, was a hairline crack. “Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe he cut himself.”
“Why is that wonderful?” Duarte said. “I mean, I’d like to see the guy hurt, but a little cut? So what?”
I looked at Duarte and very briefly wondered if some malignant personnel computer always assigned to Debs a partner with the lowest possible IQ. “If he cut his hand,” I said, carefully choosing one-syllable words, “there might be some blood. So we can get a DNA match.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said.
“Come on, Dex,” Deborah said. “See what you can get from it.”
I pulled on gloves and took the hammer out of its bag, placing it carefully on the counter. “Unusual kind of hammer, isn’t it?” I said.
“It’s called a club hammer,” Vince said, and I looked at him. He was still sitting on the far side of the room, hunched over his laptop. He pointed to an image on the screen. “Club hammer,” he repeated.
“I Googled.”
“Very appropriate,” I said. I leaned over the handle of the hammer in question and carefully sprayed on some Bluestar. It would reveal any trace of blood, no matter how small. With any luck, there might be just enough for me to get a blood type or DNA sample.
“They use it for demolition, mostly,” Vince went on. “You know, like knocking out walls and things?”
“I think I remember what demolition means,” I said.
“Cut the shit,” Deborah said through her teeth. “Can you get anything from it or not?”
Deborah’s hands-on management style seemed more profoundly annoying than usual, and I thought of several stinging remarks to slap her back into her place. But just as I was about to let fly with a really good one, I saw a dim smudge on the hammer’s handle, brought out by the Bluestar. “Bingo,” I said.
“What,” Deborah demanded, and she was suddenly so close to me I could hear her teeth grinding.
“If you’ll take your foot out of my pocket, I’ll show you,” I said. She hissed out a breath, but at least she did back up a half step. “Look,” I said, pointing at the smudge. “It’s a trace of blood—and even better, it’s also a latent fingerprint.”
“Pure dumb luck,” Vince said from his stool across the lab.
“Really?” I said. “Then why didn’t you find it?”
“What about DNA?” Deborah said impatiently.
I shook my head. “I’ll try,” I said. “But it’s probably too badly degraded.”