“Abducted,” White repeated. “Umm hmm.”
“It’s a setup, Chief. There’s no sign of their bodies. Their vehicles were removed from the property. The girl’s purse and Sladder’s wallet were left behind—deliberately.”
“Why? Why go to all that trouble?”
“To keep us off track. They want to convince you that Sladder was the perp instead of the victim, and it looks like they’re doing a pretty good job. Fortunately, though, the real perps were careless. They took the gun but not the empty brass. They didn’t cover their footprints very well. They left ridge smears on the wallet and purse, proving that those objects were touched, wiped down, and replaced.”
White had inadvertently snapped his King Edward. “And you say Sladder’s arm was cut off? Where’d you come up with shit like that?”
“The fall patterns in the stable are literally textbook perfect.” She laid out snapshots of Sladder’s fall, then slid an opened book across the desk. The book was titled The Investigator’s Guide to Bloodfalclass="underline" Drop Spread Pattern Analysis. The picture she opened to (labeled “Ambulatory dismemberment: right arm”) was almost identical to Lydia’s Polaroids. “See? Sladder’s fall is the same. His right prints are on the pitchfork in the tool stall; that’s what he was reaching for when the perp dropped the ax. He didn’t have time to get his piece out. You can even see the point angles exactly where he changed direction. And from this point on, Sladder stops leaving right hand prints.”
“I’m supposed to believe a sixty five year old rummy tied off his own stump without going into shock?”
“Guys slap tourniquets on themselves all the time. Humans do amazing things in life threatening situations. The girl probably helped him. Besides, Sladder was a marine infantry medic in the war.”
“So where’s the arm?” White asked.
“Probably buried in the woods, with the rest of him.”
“And where’s the car?”
“Probably buried under brush twenty miles away. The girl’s ZX, too.”
White let some time pass to cool off. He picked through her latent photos. “How the hell’d you get prints this clean? Most of the stables are whitewashed or bare wood.”
“Bare wood’s easy,” she said, unenthused. “I fumed the logical areas with iodine sulfate. The tougher ones I jobbed with mercuric oxide. Then I photographed everything with a Kodak 1x1. Each print is labeled and marked.” Actually this job had been easy. At D.C. she’d gotten admissible prints off of human breasts, crumpled paper bags, even chunks of crack. Once she’d sent a multiple rapo up for fifty years by getting his prints off a pair of a victim’s panties with a scanning electron microscope. The agro site had been cake. “This isn’t the stone age, you know,” she finally got around to saying,
White didn’t like that. He snorted smoke. “You show me a few pictures in some A hole textbook, some prints, and some blood types, and now you think you’ve got all the answers.”
“I don’t have anything close to all the answers, Chief. But I reconstructed the steps of the crime, which is what you told me to do. Could your men do better? Shit, Chief, those rednecks don’t know the difference between a fingerprint and a floral print. They think bloodfall is a town in Alabama.”
White didn’t like that either. His temper ticked. “You’re grabbin’ for shit, Prentiss. And if any of this winds up in the papers, you’re gonna be one sorry little girl.”
Lydia was drooping now at the lab table. “I’m not your enemy, Chief. I work for you, remember? Anyhow, I don’t know what you’re getting all whipped up about. The whole case revolves around the one thing we don’t have access to—the agro animals. Until the state finds out what happened to them, we have to tinker with every detail we can. That’s what a police investigation is.”
White toked a new cigar, smirking. “I don’t need you to tell me how to run a police investigation. Leave the concludin’ to me and we’ll get along fine. Go home now, get some sleep.”
It was a good idea; she’d been up twenty four hours now. White was going to believe what he wanted to believe. But there was still one thing… “I need your permission for something first. I want to try to get a line on the ax.”
White squinted. “The ax? You can’t run a make on an ax, girl. Everybody’s got axes.”
“I know, but this ax is different. The line of the blade is straight, and the left hone is planar. There was rust in the initial impactations.”
“Prentiss, what the fuck are you talkin’ about?”
“A rust deposit left by an edged weapon can be analyzed. Different grades of steel are used in different tools and weapons. In other words, by analyzing the rust, you can sometimes determine the ductility and grade of the steel and possibly locate the manufacturer. But I’d need a good crime lab—”
“No,” Chief White said.
“Chief, this ax is so unique I might be able to match the steel grade to a manufacturer and locate the dealer who sold it.”
“No,” Chief White said. “You gotta be outta your mind. I’m not gonna authorize department time so you can run some silly test on a bunch of rust you found in a fence. It’s a dead end, Prentiss. It ain’t nothin’ but a fuckin’ ax.”
“Come on, Chief. I’ve got a hunch—”
“Go home,” White said. That was the final word. “Take tomorrow off. You been up so long you’re numb in the head.” White walked out, drawing a sheen of cigar smoke with him.
Lydia rubbed her eyes. Go home? she thought. What for? All that waited for her at home was her own loneliness.
The rust, she thought desperately. Yesterday she’d coped out the major impactations. Under the Braun microscope, the rust shimmered up at her, actually metallic at 75x. Maybe White was right; maybe the rust was a dead end.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t.
««—»»
“GODDAMN!” Wade shouted.
He stood frozen in his shorts. This morning’s Exham Sentinel shook in his hand. The headline read: “Wade Burned Again.”
The front page picture showed Wade shamefacedly signing tickets, while Officer Lydia Prentiss smiled aside.
Famed campus womanizer, scofflaw, and B.S. artist Wade St. John, above, learns the hard way that Exham police mean business with their new crackdown against drinking and speeding on campus roads. Chief H. C. White told reporters, “A college like Exham, kids tend to take things for granted. Responsible driving habits are part of being an adult, and if students ain’t gonna act like adults, then, by golly, they’re gonna pay. As for Wade St. John, we want to make an example of him whenever we can, since he represents the exact opposite of adult behavior.” Wade, now in his sixth year at Exham but with only a junior standing, averages ten traffic citations per semester, a campus record. It is rumored that Wade was forced by his father to take summer classes as punishment for low marks. A reliable yet undisclosed source stated that an additional punishment was initiated—that Wade has been forced to do something as yet unheard-of in his life: work a job.
“Goddamn!” Wade shouted again. This had to be illegal. Everyone on campus would read this!
Wade is reportedly working as part of the maintenance staff at Exham’s Crawford T. Sciences Center. Sentinel reporters set out to verify this rumor, at the office of Dean C. F. Saltenstall himself, where he was more than happy to address the question of the day. “Oh, it’s quite true. Wade is indeed working at the sciences center, cleaning toilets for minimum wage.”