The Last Detective (18 page)

16
            

time missing: 44 hours, 17 minutes

W
e got our second break when we took Mrs. Luna back to her catering truck. Though Ramón Sanchez was unable to add to what she had already told us, her grill cook, a teenager named Hector Delarossa, remembered the make and model of the van.

“Oh, yeah, it was a sixty-seven Ford four-door factory panel Econoline with the original trim. Crack in the left front windshield and spot rust on the lamps, no caps.”

No hubcaps.

I asked him to describe the two men, but he didn't remember either.

I said, “You saw the van had rust spots around the headlights, but you can't describe the men?”

“It's a classic, yo? Me and my bro, Jésus, we're Econoheads, yo? We're rebuilding a sixty-six. We even got a website, yo? You should check it out.”

Starkey called in the make and model to be included in the BOLO, and then I followed her to Glendale. Chen had gone ahead of us.

The Los Angeles Police Department's Scientific Investigations Division shares its space with LAPD's Bomb Squad in a sprawling facility north of the freeway. The low-slung buildings and spacious parking lot made me think of a high school in the 'burbs, only high-school parking lots don't usually sport Bomb Squad Suburbans and cops in black fatigues. Not usually.

We parked beside each other in the parking lot, then Starkey led me to the white building that belonged to SID. Chen's van was outside, side by side with several others. Starkey waved our way past the reception desk, then brought me to a laboratory where four or five workstations were grouped together but separated by glass walls. Criminalists and lab techs were perched on stools or swivel chairs, one in each glass space. Something sharp in the air stung my eyes like ammonia.

Starkey swaggered in like she owned the place.

“Homie in the house! Look what the bomb blew in!”

The techs smiled and called back when they saw her. Starkey gibed with them like a long-lost sorority sister working the home crowd, and seemed more relaxed and comfortable than any time since I had met her.

Chen had put on a white lab coat and vinyl gloves, and was working near a large glass chamber. He hunched when he saw us as if he were trying to hide inside the coat, and waved at Starkey to keep it down.

“Jesus, paint a target on me with all that noise! Everybody's going to know we're back.”

“The walls are glass, John; they already know. Let's see what you have.”

Chen had split the wrapper along its length and pinned it flat to a white sheet of paper. Jars of colored powder lined the back of his bench, along with eye droppers and vials, rolls of clear tape, and three of the fluffy brushes that women use to apply makeup. One end of the wrapper was smudged with white powder and little brown stains. The outline of a fingerprint was obvious, but the architecture of the pattern was blurred and indistinct. It looked pretty good to me, but Starkey made a face when she saw it.

“This looks like shit. Are you working here, John, or are you too busy hiding inside your jacket?”

Chen hunched even lower. If he hunched any more he would be under the bench.

“I've only been at it fifteen minutes. I wanted to see if I could get anything with the powder or ninhydrin.”

The white smear was aluminum powder. The brown stains were a chemical called ninhydrin, which reacted with the amino acids left whenever you touch something.

Starkey bent for a closer inspection, then frowned at him as if he was stupid.

“This thing's been in the sun for days. It's too old to pick up latents with powder.”

“It's also the fastest way to get an image into the system. I figured it was worth the shot.”

Starkey grunted. She was okay with whatever might be faster.

“The nin doesn't look much better.”

“Too much dust, and the sunlight probably broke down the aminos. I was hoping we'd get lucky with that, but I'm gonna have to glue it.”

“Shit. How long?”

I said, “What does that mean, you have to glue it?”

Now Chen looked at me as if I was the one who was stupid. We had a food chain for stupidity going, and I was at the bottom.

“Don't you know what a fingerprint is?”

Starkey said, “He doesn't need a lecture. Just glue the damned thing.”

Chen went pissy, like he didn't want to miss out on the chance to show off. He explained while he worked: Every time you touched something, you left an invisible deposit of sweat. Sweat was mostly water, but also contained amino acids, glucose, lactic acid, and peptides—what Chen called the organics. As long as moisture remained in the organics, techniques like dusting worked because the powder would stick to the water, revealing the swirls and patterns of the fingerprint. But when the water evaporated, all you had left was an organic residue.

Chen unpinned the wrapper, then used forceps to place it on a glass dish with the outside surface facing up. He put the dish into the glass chamber.

“We boil a little superglue in the chamber so the fumes saturate the sample. The fumes react with the organics and leave a sticky white residue along the ridges of the print.”

Starkey said, “The fumes are poisonous as hell. That's why he's gotta do it in the box.”

I didn't care what he did or how he did it, so long as we got results.

I said, “How long is this going to take?”

“It's slow. I normally use a heater to boil it, but it's faster when you force the boil with a little sodium hydroxide.”

Chen filled a beaker with water, then put the water into the chamber close to the wrapper. He poured something labeled methylcyanoacrylate into a small dish, then put the dish into the chamber. He selected one of the bottles from his bench. The liquid inside was clear, like water.

Starkey said, “How long, John?”

Chen ignored us. He dribbled the sodium hydroxide over the superglue, then sealed the chamber. The sodium hydroxide and superglue fizzed, but nothing flashed or burst into flames. Chen turned on a small fan inside the chamber, then stepped back.

“How long?”

“Maybe an hour. Maybe more. I've gotta watch it. So much reactant will build up that you can ruin the prints.”

We had nothing to do but wait, and we weren't even sure if anything would be found. I bought a Diet Coke from a machine in the reception area, and Starkey bought a Mountain Dew. We brought our drinks outside so that she could smoke. It was quiet and still in Glendale, with the low wall of the Verdugo Mountains above us and the tip of the Santa Monicas below. We were in the Narrows, that tight place between the mountains where the L.A. River squeezed into the city.

Starkey sat on the curb. I sat beside her. I tried to conjure a picture of Ben alive and safe, but all I saw were flashes of shadow and terrified eyes.

“Did you call Gittamon?”

“And tell him what, that I bailed on a crime scene to come over here with a guy that I was specifically ordered to keep off the case? That would be you, by the way.”

Starkey flicked ash from her cigarette.

“I'll call him when we know what John finds. He's been paging me, but I'll wait.”

I said, “Listen. I want to thank you.”

“You don't have to thank me. I'm doing my job.”

“A lot of people have the job, but not everyone busts their ass to get it done. I owe you. However this plays out, I owe you.”

Starkey had more of her cigarette, then grinned out over the cars in the parking lot.

“That sounds pretty good, Cole. Now what kind of ass-busting did you have in mind?”

“I didn't mean it that way.”

“My loss.”

Starkey ate another white tablet. I decided to change the subject. I decided to be clever.

I said, “Starkey, are those breath mints or are you a drug addict?”

“It's an antacid. I have stomach problems from when I was hurt, so I gotta take the antacid. It messed me up pretty bad inside.”

Hurt. Being blown apart and killed in a trailer park was “hurt.” I felt like a turd.

“I'm sorry. That wasn't my business.”

She shrugged, then flicked her cigarette into the parking lot.

“This morning you asked why I didn't bring you the tape.”

“It's not important. I just wondered why the other guy brought it instead of you. You said you'd be back.”

“Your 201 and 214 were waiting in the fax machine. I started reading while I was waiting for the tape. I saw that you were wounded.”

“Not when I was out with five-two. That was another time.”

I should have gone to Canada. Then none of this would be happening.

“Yeah, I know. I saw you got hit by mortar fire. I was just curious about that, is all, what happened to you. You don't have to tell me if you don't want. I know it doesn't have anything to do with this case.”

She struck up a fresh cigarette to hide behind the movement, as if she was suddenly embarrassed that I knew why she was asking. A mortar shell was a bomb. In a way, bombs had gotten both of us.

“It wasn't anything like with you, Starkey, not even close. Something exploded behind me and then I woke up under some leaves. I got a few stitches, that's all.”

“The report says they took twenty-six pieces of frag out of your back and you almost bled to death.”

I wiggled my eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

“Wanna see the scars, little girl?”

Starkey laughed.

“Your Groucho sucks.”

“My Bogart's even worse. Want to hear that?”

“You want to talk scars? I could show you scars. I got scars that'd make you shit blue.”

“What a pleasant use of language.”

We smiled at each other, then both of us felt awkward at the same time. It wasn't banter any more and it somehow felt wrong. I guess my expression changed. Now both of us looked away.

She said, “I can't have kids.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Jesus, I can't believe I told you that.”

Now neither of us was smiling. We sat in the parking lot, drinking our caffeine as Starkey smoked. Three men and a woman came out of the Bomb Squad and crossed the parking lot to a brick warehouse. Bomb techs. They wore black fatigues and jump boots like elite commandos, but they goofed with each other like regular people. They probably had families and friends like regular people, too, but during their shift they de-armed devices that could tear them apart while everyone else hid behind walls, just them, all alone, with a monster held tight in a can. I wondered what kind of person could do that.

I glanced at Starkey. She was watching them.

I said, “Is that why you're on the Juvenile desk?”

She nodded.

Neither of us said very much after that until John Chen came out. He had the prints.

time missing: 47 hours, 04 minutes

W
hite concentric circles covered the wrapper in overlapping smudges. People don't touch anything with a clean, singular grip; they handle the things they touch—pencils, coffee cups, steering wheels, telephones, cigar wrappers—their fingers shuffle and slide; they adjust and readjust their grip, laying fingerprint on top of fingerprint in confused and inseparable layers.

Chen inspected the wrapper through a magnifying glass attached to a flexible arm.

“Most of this stuff is garbage, but we've got a couple of clean patterns we can work with.”

I said, “Is it going to be enough?”

“Depends on how many typica I can identify and what's in the computer. It'll be easier to see when I add a little color.”

Chen brushed dark blue powder on two sections of the wrapper, then used a can of pressurized air to blow off the excess. Two dark blue fingerprint patterns now stood in sharp contrast to the white smudges on the wrapper. Chen hunched more closely over the magnifying glass. He grunted.

“Got a nice double-loop core here. Got a clean tentarch on this one. Couple of isles.”

He nodded at Starkey.

“Plenty. If he's in the system, we can find him.”

Starkey laid her hand on Chen's back and squeezed his shoulder.

“Excellent, John.”

I think he purred.

Chen pressed a piece of clear tape on the blue fingerprints to lift them from the wrapper, then fixed the tape onto a clear plastic backing. He set each print onto a light box, then photographed them with a high-resolution digital camera. He fed the digital images into his computer, then used a graphics program to enlarge them and orient them. Chen filled out an FBI Fingerprint Identification Form that was basically a checklist description of the two fingerprints with their characteristics identified by type and location—what Chen called “characteristic points”: Every time a ridge line stopped or started it was called a typica; when a ridge split into a Y it was a bifurcation; a short line between two longer lines was an isle; a line that split but immediately came together again was an eye.

The FBI's National Crime Information Center and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System don't compare pictures to identify a fingerprint; they compare lists of characteristic points. The accuracy and depth of the list determines the success of the search. If a recognizable match is even in the system.

Chen spent almost twenty minutes logging the architecture of the two prints into the appropriate forms, then hit the Send button and leaned back.

I said, “What now?”

“We wait.”

“How long does it take?”

“It's computers, man. It's fast.”

Starkey's pager buzzed again. She glanced at it, then slipped it into her pocket.

“Gittamon.”

“He wants you bad.”

“Fuck him. I gotta have a cigarette.”

Starkey was turning away when Chen's computer chimed with an incoming E-mail.

Chen said, “Let's see.”

The file downloaded automatically when Chen opened the E-mail. An NCIC/Interpol logo flashed over a set of booking photos showing a man with deep-set eyes and a strong neck. His name was Michael Fallon.

Chen touched a line of numbers along the bottom of the file.

“We've got a ninety-nine point nine-nine percent positive match on all twelve characteristic points. It's his cigar wrapper.”