18
“Explain this to me again,” I asked Tony.
“My pleasure.” His nose was pressed against the glass of the vacuum chamber as he repeated the entire exegesis. “We put the floor mat in there with a milligram of gold in the heating element, then sealed it. The pumps suck out the air and create a vacuum. The gold boils, almost into a steam. A thin invisible layer coats the plastic. The gold will sink into the oil from the print, leaving only the ridges uncoated. Then we do it again, this time with zinc in the heating element. The zinc vaporizes, then recondenses only on metal-in other words, the gold from the previous treatment. And the result?” He directed our attention to his nearby computer monitor. “A great big beautiful high-contrast reverse-image print.”
“Nice little gizmo you’ve got here,” I murmured softly.
“Glad you think so, Susan,” he replied. “Because vacuum metal deposition costs a fortune, what with the gold and all. I’m telling Granger you authorized it.”
I hunched over his shoulder, peering at his computer screen, but no matter how much I squinted, no matter which way I turned my head, no matter how long I let my eyes go fuzzy, I couldn’t make out the print. “The lines all look the same to me,” I said, admitting defeat.
“Don’t sweat it,” he replied. “Psychos all look the same to me.”
What we were looking at was a computer enlargement of the print he had found on the floor mat in the car from which Fara Spencer was taken. It wasn’t all there-a chunk from the upper left never came clear-but Tony assured me that was enough to make a match. And this time it was a forefinger, not a palm print. I was trying not to get my hopes up, but we were all hoping this would allow us to identify the killer. With Patrick’s assistance, he’d already fed the print to FINDER, the FBI’s automatic fingerprint reader and processor. If this print or anything like it had been recorded by any computerized law enforcement agency in this country or several foreign nations, they could give us the identification we so desperately needed.
“We’ve got mail,” Tony said, pointing at his screen. “Three partial matches.”
I watched as three more prints appeared on the screen in a vertical column opposite the original. Tony scrutinized each whorl and swirl.
“Well?”
“Give me a minute.”
I saw that each of the match prints had a name beneath it with a hyperlink to a full FBI bio. If we could get a name, maybe even an address, this killer could be behind bars by midnight.
“No,” Tony said, after dragging the suspense out for what I thought was an ungodly length of time. “None of these work.”
“What do you mean?”
“They aren’t him. There are similarities, sure. Enough to pass the computer software match threshold. But they aren’t the same.”
“You’re sure?”
He was still staring at the screen. “Much as I wish I weren’t. Besides, none of these guys comes close to matching your description. This one’s a woman. The next is a guy in his seventies.”
“But we were sure that print came from the man who abducted Fara Spencer.”
He pushed back away from the computer, rubbing his eyes. “So now we know that our guy has never been arrested. Never run for political office. Never taken the bar exam. He’s managed to get through life without being fingerprinted. He’s never done anything like this before.” He slid out of his chair and switched the power off his monitor. “Or if he has, he’s never been caught.”
He ambled up the sidewalk outside Central Division headquarters trying to concoct a suitable conversation starter. As it happened, the young man sitting on the front steps eliminated the need.
“Are you a grown-up person?”
“Ye-es…”
“You must be kind of a short person. Are you kind of a short person?”
“I am as God made me.”
“I’m six foot one. Do you know how tall the Sears Tower is?”
He tugged at his collar. All his initial impressions were correct. There was something strange and more than a little disconcerting about this man’s demeanor. The way he struck up a conversation, albeit a nonsensical one, with a total stranger on a Vegas street. His voice was simple, almost childlike. And yet he was an adult, somewhere in his mid-twenties by appearances.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“It’s one thousand four hundred fifty-four feet tall. One hundred and three floors. It used to be the tallest building in the world. Not anymore.”
“Fascinating.”
“Do you know how tall the Empire State Building is?”
“Not exactly.”
“It’s one thousand four hundred fifty-three feet. One foot shorter than the Sears Tower. One hundred and two floors. Have you ever talked to a midget?”
He stiffened. “I’m not sure what-”
“I saw a midget once and I talked to her. I got in trouble for talking to her but I don’t know why because I didn’t do anything to hurt her.”
There was something wrong with this man, a discernible… vacancy. He didn’t lack intelligence or language. His syntax was skewed, but there was a distinct legerity to his responses. At the same time, there was a profound oddness about him: the way he held his head when he talked, the curious inflection, the unvaryingly excessive volume.
“I’m Darcy O’Bannon the second. My dad named me for my uncle, he’s dead. My uncle, not my dad.”
“Please to meet you, Darcy.” He extended his hand, but Darcy did not take it. Instead he stared at it, as if hesitant to make contact. “My name is Ethan.”
“Are you a jockey?”
“Uh… no…”
“Because I read that jockeys have to be short and they like jockeys to be short so you should be a jockey.”
“No, I’m… I’m an accountant.”
“How tall do you have to be to be an accountant?”
“I’m not aware of a height requirement.”
“I think I’d like to be a jockey. I rode a horse once and I liked that. It went really fast and I like to go really fast. Do you think I could be a jockey?”
“Uh… probably not, given your height. But I’m no expert.”
“Willie Shoemaker won eight thousand eight hundred thirty-three races, did you know that? He was four foot eleven. But he got rich. I think my dad would like me better if I were rich.”
“Darcy… I’m looking for Lieutenant Pulaski. Do you know where she might be?”
Darcy cocked his head to one side. “Do you know Susan?”
“I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her, yes.”
“You’re not going to take her away from me, are you?”
“I’m… not sure what you mean.”
“Whenever I really like someone somebody else takes them away or tells me I can’t play with them anymore. I’ll be sad if Susan goes away. I like her a lot. Do you think she’s pretty?”
“Most striking.”
“I think so, too. But she’s not the prettiest woman ever. Some people say Cleopatra was the prettiest woman ever but did you know archeologists dug up a coin with her face on it and she wasn’t pretty atall?”
“I didn’t know that.” He suppressed a smile. And he had worried that this harmless meshuggener might be a threat, a rival, that he might come between himself and Susan. Obviously, that was not going to happen. What was she doing with this boy? Was he some sort of charity work, a Good Samaritan exercise? Was this Susan’s plan for worming her way back onto the force? Earning Chief O’Bannon’s favor by babysitting his brain-addled son?
“Do you know what the tallest building in the world is?”
“Uh… the Sears Tower?”
“Wrong!” He made a honking noise and pointed. “Faked you out. It used to be the Sears Tower, but now it’s the Petronas Tower in Malaysia. It’s one hundred and ten stories tall. That would be two hundred and sixty-four of me stacked on top of each other.”
“Imagine.”
“Would you like to see the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building stacked on top of the Petronas Tower? I would. Do you know how many stories that would be?”