Backfire

24

SAC Cheney Stone’s office

Federal Building

Thirteenth floor

San Francisco

Sunday morning

Five-foot-nothing veteran forensic blood expert Mimi Cutler rushed into the room, her wrinkled lab coat flapping, her short spiked dark hair sticking up at odd angles where she’d run her fingers through it countless times throughout more hours than she wanted to count. But she was smiling, and that made Sherlock’s heart leap. She looked ready to make everyone’s day.

Cutler caught her breath, smoothed her hair, straightened her coat, and beamed at the people in the office. She waved a sheaf of photos in her hand. “After a wild and hairy all-nighter, here you go, hot off the press.” She fanned herself. “Okay, let me back up. The very first thing we did when we arrived at the scene yesterday was collect all the samples of the shooter’s blood. We processed some of the blood, then ran the DNA through the CODIS and bang!-look at this photo, it just came through my email.” She beamed as she handed each of them a copy. “Here’s our shooter.”

All of them stared at an eight-by-ten colored police booking photograph of a young bruiser who looked like he’d lost a fight-his face was a mass of blotched purple-and-green bruises, his split swollen lips dark red with dried blood. His head was shaved bald and sat on a neck that looked wider than Sherlock’s waist. The height chart behind him showed he was six foot four inches, and he looked like he had to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds. “His name is Paul, aka Boozer, Gordon. He’s an amateur boxer, has anger management issues. It looks like he lost a fight the night he was booked, doesn’t it? He’s been arrested and jailed for assault three times to date. He lives here in the city, on Clayton.” She beamed at them.

There was dead silence in Cheney’s office.

“What? We’ve identified your guy! What’s wrong?”

Harry said, “Sorry, Mimi, but we don’t think this is our shooter. Our shooter is lots older, lots shorter, weighs maybe half what this guy weighs, and his neck is about as thick of one of this guy’s wrists.”

“But this is an exact match; the probabilities are off the wall. You’ve got to be wrong.”

“I guess it’s time to back up again, Mimi,” Sherlock said. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a lab error, or a mix-up with the samples?” She added with a smile, “Maybe more than one person’s blood?”

“Naturally not,” Mimi said, not appeased by the smile. “I collected the blood myself, and we ran samples from three different sites. All the samples matched.”

Savich said, “Let’s find this guy. Cheney, can you get some people working on his last known address? And Sherlock, get on the phone to the hospital, find out if Paul Boozer Gordon was there this week, maybe as some kind of patient?”

Mimi grabbed her hair and tugged on it. “A patient? How would a patient’s blood get in the elevator shaft?”

There was only one possibility, Savich thought, far-fetched, but still. He said slowly, “Mimi, did you happen to test the blood samples for traces of heparin?”

“Heparin? No, why?”

Savich said, “There’s lots of blood in a hospital-in the blood bank, in the laboratories, at nursing stations waiting to be picked up. And that includes heparinized blood that wouldn’t clot right away. You wouldn’t be able to tell as easily if the blood was older, that it was planted there, would you?”

“Are you telling me the shooter brought the blood with him into the elevator shaft? Someone else’s blood, to plant on the scene? That he added heparin to the blood to fool me? Do you realize that would mean this frigging shooter would understand blood analysis? You’re saying he purposefully set out to mislead us? To mislead me?” She paused for a moment, her rocket brain filling in the possibilities. “Goodness, even if he actually managed to get hold of someone else’s blood, think of how careful he had to be to leave blood splattered at the scene in a way that wouldn’t be spotted by the forensic team as looking wrong. All that work, all that study and practice-for what? Nothing, really.”

Savich said, “Unless this Boozer Gordon was shot in the elevator shaft, how else does this make sense?”

Harry said, “If that’s true, Savich, the shooter had to know we’d see through the deception sooner rather than later. He couldn’t have hoped to frame someone else for the shooting that way. It reminds me of that newspaper picture of Judge Dredd we found in his backyard. Another way to give us the finger again, not give you the finger, Mimi, but us. He wanted to show us how smart he is, and what tail-chasing loser dogs we are in comparison. Another thing, apparently the shooter wasn’t wounded after all.” Harry cursed under his breath.

Cheney was off his cell first. “DMV still has Boozer Gordon’s address on Clayton Street. Now, you’re saying our shooter somehow got some of Boozer’s blood, enough of it to create believable blood splatter?”

Savich nodded. “Only explanation I can think of.”

Sherlock closed her cell. “Medical records has Boozer Gordon discharged from the hospital late Friday morning, the day before Ramsey was attacked in the elevator. He came in through the ER, apparently looking beat up as badly as in that mug shot. I spoke to an ER nurse. She was not very happy with my question. She said no one had ever walked in and stolen blood from them, for heaven’s sake, that it simply couldn’t happen. Then Miss Manners got huffier, told me it was ridiculous to think someone could simply waltz in there or into a patient’s room and draw his blood. Couldn’t happen, never in this lifetime. But I agree with Dillon. I think that’s exactly what happened, I’d bet my hair rollers on it.”

“No,” Savich said, “not the hair rollers.”

Harry said, “So our guy put on a white coat, walked in, and drew Mr. Gordon’s blood?”

Sherlock thought for a moment. “However he got it was an elaborate pretense, especially with the huge risk he took in that elevator shaft. I’m thinking that even if he’d planned Ramsey’s murder for a long time, there was very little planning in that attack on the elevator, since of course he couldn’t know he needed to play it.

“Would a professional take on an armed guard like that? We’re working on the assumption that Sue is a professional, but, you know, this really feels like it’s personal.”

“Personal, or maybe desperate,” Savich said. “An act of rage, or delusion.”

Harry nodded. “And he didn’t leave that blood behind on the fly, since he added heparin to make us think it was fresh. It’s like some kind of crazy what-if scenario that he’d played through in his mind, maybe even read about and practiced. That would have taken time, and that could be the key here, he had to have time on his hands. Sherlock’s right, why would Sue the master spy go to all this trouble?”

Sherlock’s eyes locked with Savich’s.

He said matter-of-factly, “You mean the shooter was in prison.”

Harry said, “Until recently, I suspect. If Sue the spy has nothing to do with this, then we may be talking about a guy who came out of prison knowing exactly what he wanted to do, everything all laid out.”

Cheney said, “And, bottom line, what he wants to do is to kill Judge Hunt.”

“A guy,” Harry said. “I’d just gotten my brain wrapped around this Sue. Doesn’t matter, if he was in jail, we can find him.”

Mimi Cutler, who’d been standing by the door, began pulling on her hair again. “Do you guys know I had to cancel a date last night-my first date in four and a half months-and the guy is hot. I didn’t tell him what I do for a living, since he’d probably freak. He’s a stockbroker and only sees blood if he nicks himself shaving. I gave him a lame excuse about a sick mother, and would you look at this-it turns out I couldn’t even find my mom.”

She shook Boozer Gordon’s photo and ripped it in two.

Sherlock said, “Mimi, tell your guy you do blood analysis for DNA, that you were working on the Judge Hunt incident at the hospital yesterday-it’s all over the news. He’ll be so impressed and excited to know someone in the thick of things, he’ll be camping out on your front porch. Trust me on this.”

Mimi stopped pulling on her spikes of hair. “You think?”

At Sherlock’s solemn nod, Mimi smoothed down her hair. “You don’t mind if I tell him about Judge Hunt? Give him the gory details?”

“Like I said,” Sherlock added, “it’s all over the news, so why not cash in?”

Mimi left, fluffing her hair and humming “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Harry stared after Mimi, shaking his head, marveling at how you could be in the pits one second and laughing out loud the next.