Vertical Coffin

Chapter 15

I closed up the apartment using the button lock, wondering how many prints Nan smudged on the way in. I had been careful not to touch anything, but I was pretty sure she had left prints everywhere.

"Whatta you doing?" she asked, as we walked across the street. I still had the cartridge casing upside down on my pen tip. I fished out the key to my Acura and opened the trunk, withdrew a small crime scene evidence kit, then headed toward the back door of Billy Greenridge's house where I knew Beverly King had found the hide-a-key under a pot.

"Aren't you supposed to put that in a bag or something?" she said, dogging my footsteps.

"Latent prints typically fall into two categories," I told her, showing off a little, "porous and nonporous."

"You mind if I get this down?" She fished a notebook and pen out of her purse, flipped to a clean page, and started writing. "I might be able to use some of it." She was scribbling: "Nonporous-okay, go on."

"Porous prints appear on soft surfaces like paper or cardboard, unfinished wood. You can bag a porous print because the finger oil has sunk into the material, basically setting it. If this shooter wasn't wearing gloves when he loaded this cartridge, then any prints he left on here will be nonporous. Nonporous is any hard surface. Nonporous prints are fragile. Anything can wipe them off, even the evidence bag, so I have to fume it first, to set the print before I transport it."

"This is fascinating. Fume it. Okay…" She was scribbling in her notebook. "So our bullet is nonporous."

Suddenly it was our bullet-of course it wasn't a bullet, it was a cartridge case.

I unlocked the back door of Billy Greenridge's house and walked into his kitchen. She was hot on my heels, writing as she went. I handed her "our bullet."

"Hold the pen like that, don't touch the brass," I instructed.

I removed a pair of latex gloves from the kit and snapped them on, then moved around the kitchen, taking what I needed. I took a coffee cup out of a cupboard, filled it, and put it in the microwave, setting it to boil. Next, I found some aluminum foil in a drawer.

I reached into my evidence kit, removed a tube of superglue, and dabbed about a nickel-sized glob on a square of foil. Then, I shut off the microwave and put the foil inside, next to the steaming cup of water, took the pen with the bullet casing out of Nan's hand, and carefully placed it tail down in the microwave. The microwave was acting only as an enclosed space to hold the superglue fumes and the steam from the cup of boiling water. I closed the door and looked at my watch.

"This is amazing," Nan gushed. "But what on earth are you trying to do?"

"Harden the print. Superglue is basically a chemical called cyanoacrylate. The fumes get heated slightly by the cup of boiling-hot water. They float around in there-attach themselves to the amino and lactic acids, the glucose, sweat, and peptides that are the print residue. You can see the white ridges from the fumes starting to form on the cartridge already. Looks like maybe we got something."

She leaned down and looked through the glass of the microwave door, smiling. "This is so cool," she said. "You're like Bill Nye the Science Guy with a badge."

I groaned at that, then looked at my watch. Long enough. I opened the door, and with my gloved hand removed the cartridge case and held it up to the light. We had a slightly smudged partial print. It looked like an index or middle finger. Besides the print were some striated action marks, which had been left when the casing ported. They could also prove helpful.

"Not a clean print," I said, "but maybe the lab can raise it some more. At least now it's hardened." I took out an evidence baggie and dropped the casing with its preserved print inside.

"I never knew you could do that."

"Easier than getting a crime tech out here, waiting for an hour, and getting the same result. Let's go."

I cleaned up the mess in the microwave, placed the coffee cup back in the cupboard, then took everything else with me as I exited the house and locked the door. I walked Nan Chambers over to her green Suburban parked on a side street and watched while she unlocked the car and opened the door.

"What was your name, again?" she asked, turning back and smiling. "Scully or something?"

She started to write it down, but I took the notebook out of her hands. "Don't bother. It won't be good if we see each other again, or if my name shows up in your paper."

I started thumbing through her notes. Aside from my lecture on latent prints, she had a page on each of the ATF SWAT members.

Date of birth, education, time in service-with background information: married, how many kids, etc. She also had a few other statements from the neighbors at Hidden Ranch-and notes from an interview with William Palmer. We had covered a lot of the same terrain. I finished flipping through the book. It looked legit.

"Isn't this illegal search and seizure?" she said, interrupting my thoughts.

"Probably, but it doesn't matter unless I arrest you for this crime and try to get your book submitted as evidence in court. But since I'm in a charitable mood, I'm gonna let you take a pass. Unless you ignore my warning, we should have no problem."

She was pinning me with those strange mismatched eyes. Her expression had hardened. "I haven't committed any crime."

"The crime is interfering with a police investigation, breaking into that apartment without permission, and the possible destruction of evidence."

"What crime scene?"

"That apartment. If it's the shooting position, it's a secondary crime scene."

She didn't look handsome now. She looked pissed and a little frightening. "I went to the manager, got his permission to look inside," she said. "He opened up for me. I didn't see any crime scene tape and I don't need your permission to go inside an" a place I'm thinking about renting when I have the manager's permission."

"Ms. Chambers-"

"It's Miss. I'm not much on feminism. I do okay without it."

"You are not an uninformed bystander who is interested in renting an apartment, you're a newspaper reporter. You pushed into a room that you knew might be connected to a homicide, possibly disturbing fingerprints or trace evidence. Now I'm going to have CSI contact you and get a set of elimination prints. I'm not going to put up with any more of this from you. If I ever see you again, I'm filing those charges." I handed her notebook back. "Good-bye."

She got into her Suburban and drove out of my life-I hoped. On my way back to the Glass House, I got a radio call instructing me to switch to TAC-2 for a message from my C. O. Cal came on and told me that I had a "forthwith" from the chief to meet him and Alexa at the U. S. Attorney's office. "What's cookin'?"

"Your ass. Twelfth floor, Office twelve eighty-nine."