In Desperation

37

Clarksburg, West Virginia

“W hat the hell’s the holdup?”

Phone pressed to his ear, Steve Pollard, a latent fingerprint specialist at the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, shifted uncomfortably at his workstation.

Earl Hackett had ignored procedure and called him directly.

Again.

“I’m sorry things were miscommunicated,” Pollard said. “We advised ERT in Phoenix that their first submission was rejected. The prints were not legible.”

“What about the others?” Hackett said. “There has to be something there to identify these guys. I can’t believe that it’s taking us this long to get a hit. What about the stuff from the motel? ERT found prints on all the items in the trash.”

Pollard eyed his computer monitor, the split screen showing enlargements of two fingerprints.

“Yes, these newer samples are clear. We’re processing them now.”

“How much longer?”

Both men knew that electronic submissions typically received responses very quickly, within two hours at most. Typically.

“We’re moving as fast as we can. We had a system crash.”

“Do you grasp what’s at stake here?”

Pollard glanced at the framed picture of himself with his wife and their ten-year-old son at the West Virginia Blackberry Festival. Since the Phoenix case broke, Pollard and his team had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting the Phoenix investigation, going flat out to process every impression they submitted in order to get a lead on the suspects who kidnapped Tilly Martin.

He’d taped her photo next to his son’s.

“I’m aware of the stakes, Agent Hackett. I’m aware everyone’s on edge. We’re working as hard as we can.”

“Just be damned sure you alert us the instant you’ve got something.”

After hanging up, Pollard looked out his window at the hills of West Virginia. He massaged his temples, repositioned his glasses and resumed working. Pollard’s section, known as the IAFIS, was part of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services and was housed in a sprawling three-story modular complex, some 250 miles west of Washington, D.C.

The IAFIS used state-of-the-art hyperfast databases designed to match latent fingerprints. Pollard’s job as a specialist was to analyze impressions, study comparisons and help with identification for the requesting agency.

The information Pollard obtained was processed through regional, state and national crime databases, such as the National Crime Information Center and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which was a repository for details on unsolved homicides. And he could make requests through international agreements to search databases of other countries.

At the outset of Tilly Martin’s kidnapping, crime scene techs had tried to get clear impressions off the duct tape the kidnappers had used to bind Cora. The techs had also tried lifting prints from the kitchen table, chairs, counters; off the furniture in Tilly’s room; everywhere in the house.

But nothing was usable.

All Pollard had was the set of elimination prints, those from people whose prints would be expected in the house. Cora and Jack Gannon had volunteered theirs. Tilly’s were lifted from her dresser mirror. Lyle Galviera’s were taken from the fridge door in his condo.

Pollard would later compare those prints with any new ones that emerged, then run the new ones through the gamut of databases.

The development concerning the Sweet Times Motel had yielded a break. The FBI’s Evidence Response Team had lifted a series of good, clear impressions from the right hand off soda cans discarded in the trash.

Pollard made a visual point-by-point comparison between the impressions on his monitor, studying the arches, whorls and loops, and compared them with the elimination prints.

He determined that some of the smaller latents matched Tilly’s, confirming she had been in the motel room. Two other sets of latents were unidentified.

Now we’re talking.

With the first, he started with the right thumb, which in a standard ten-card is number one. He coded its characteristics, then those of the other fingers. Then he scanned the prints and entered all the information into his computer.

Then he submitted it to the automated fingerprint-identification system for a rapid search through massive local, state and nationwide databanks for a match. Then he did the same with the second set and his computer hummed as it processed his data for a list of possible matches to study.

It would take some time. The IAFIS stored several hundred million impressions from law enforcement agencies across the country.

Pollard went to the coffee room to start a fresh pot of coffee, then returned to his workstation. The search was done. In the first set, he was given a list of three possibilities that closely matched his first unidentified submission.

He started working on it right away.

Again, Pollard made a visual point-by-point comparison with the first set of soda can mystery prints and the three offered by the database as potential matches. This was the part of the job Pollard loved, concentrating with enormous intensity on the critical minutiae points, like the trail of ridges near the tip of the number two finger. No similarities, there. That eliminated the first two candidates right off. For the last one, he enlarged the samples to count the number of ridges on the number three finger.

Pollard’s eyes narrowed. All the minutiae points matched. The branching of the ridges matched. He began tallying the clear points of comparison where the two samples matched. Some courts required ten to fifteen clear point matches. Pollard stopped at twenty, knowing that one divergent point instantly eliminated a print.

All right.

He had a match on the first print.

For the second mystery print, the databases offered two possible matches.

For the next ten minutes, Pollard when through the same exacting process until he was satisfied he had a match.

Pollard then confirmed the identification numbers of the matching prints and submitted a query for each of them into a number of databanks.

It shouldn’t take long. He reached for his coffee.

In about a minute, the first result came back and the hardened face of a man in his thirties stared back at Pollard from his monitor. He went to the subject’s file summary. It came through a DEA database by way of Interpol and Mexico’s Centro de Investigacion y Seguridad Nacional.

The man was Ruiz Limon-Rocha, a Mexican National. The second result brought a younger face, which glowered at Pollard. He was Alfredo Hector Tecaza, a Mexican National. Pollard had their photos and abstracts of their files.

This was the break that Hackett needed. These two should be run through the Intelligence Center in El Paso.

Pollard reached for his phone.