"Okay. Good thinking," Tommy said.
"Rory's idea, actually."
"Still good thinking. And what did Dickerman come up with?"
"You ask all the tough questions. Mo left a message that he had some interesting results. He wouldn't say it was 'interesting' if it was a zero, but I couldn't connect because I've been in court all day. Still, I didn't want him to put it on paper. Around here that would leak in about thirty seconds."
"Also good thinking," said Molto.
Brand explained that they had come to the Hall because Mo had had knee replacement surgery last week and wasn't getting out. Jim figured it was better if Tommy was here to ask whatever questions he wanted to. That wasn't bad thinking either.
They found one of Mo's assistants holding open a fire exit in the basement. She was wearing a crepe witch's hat and a black fright wig.
"Trick or treat," she said.
"Indeed, indeed," said Brand. "I wake up every day thinking that very thing."
Together, the three moved down the dark halls into the realm that Mo Dickerman ruled. Mo Dickerman, aka Fingerprint God, was at age seventy-two the oldest employee of the Kindle County Unified Police Force and without doubt its most esteemed. He was the foremost fingerprint expert in the Midwest, author of the leading texts on several techniques, and a frequent lecturer at police academies around the world. Now that forensic science was hot stuff on TV, you could barely hit the clicker without seeing Mo poking his heavy black-framed glasses back up on his nose on one true crime show or another. In a department that like most urban police forces was always mired in controversy and, not infrequently, scandal, Mo was probably the lone emblem of unimpeached respectability.
He was also frequently a pain in the ass. The nickname of Fingerprint God had not been applied entirely in admiration. Mo regarded his opinions as akin to scripture and would not brook even so much as an interruption. If you made the mistake of cutting in, he would simply wait you out and then go back to the beginning. He was often a difficult witness, refusing to acknowledge seemingly obvious conclusions. And he was wildly unpopular with the brass on the force because of the way he leveraged his public standing with threats to quit unless his lab in the McGrath Hall basement was equipped with the latest innovations, money that sometimes might have been better spent on bulletproof vests or overtime.
Mo hobbled forth on sticks to greet them.
"Ready for the twist contest?" Brand asked.
An angular New Yorker whose thick hair was only beginning to show some gray, Mo bent both elbows and rocked a few inches each way. Brand offered an earnest thank-you for Mo's quick turnaround on their request, and Dickerman clicked his way into the lab, a dim warren of crowded cubicles and pillared boxes and several clear arenas for Mo's high-priced machines.
He stopped in front of his current favorite piece of equipment, a vacuum metal deposition unit. The top commanders had held out against it for several years because they feared explaining to the county board or the public why they needed a machine that literally developed latent fingerprints in gold.
When Tommy was a line prosecutor, fingerprints were nothing more than patterned sweat revealed by ninhydrin or other powders. If the print had dried up, you were generally cooked. But starting in the 1980s, experts like Mo had figured out how to expose the amino acids sweat left behind. These days if you developed a latent print, there was sometimes the possibility of extracting DNA from it as well.
Mo's VMD machine was a horizontal steel chamber about three feet by two. Everything inside it cost a fortune-molybdenum evaporation dishes; combination rotary and diffusion pumps that produced a vacuum in less than two minutes; a polycold fast-cycle cryochiller to speed the process by removing moisture; and a computer that controlled it all.
After an object for examination was placed inside the VMD, a few milligrams of gold were poured into the evaporation dishes. The pumps then created the vacuum, and a high current was passed through the dishes, evaporating the gold. It was absorbed by the fingerprint residue. Zinc was evaporated next, which for chemical reasons adhered only to the valleys between the ridges and whorls of the fingerprint. The high-definition photographs of the resulting golden fingerprints always wowed juries.
Mo, being Mo, insisted on explaining the whole process again, even though both Tommy and Brand had received the tutorial several times. What Mo had placed in the VMD yesterday was the plastic vial from the phenelzine scrip Rusty had picked up. He had four clear prints, one toward the top, three on the bottom. The brown plastic pill bottle, now dusted in gold, was in a sealed plastic envelope on a table beside the machine.
"Whose?" asked Tommy.
Mo lifted a finger. He was going to answer in his own time.
"We compared them with the decedent's. With predictable problems. I've been talking to the guys in the pathologist's office for twenty years, but they still print the dead like they're mopping the floor. They don't roll the fingers, they drag them." Dickerman displayed the ten-cards the techs had prepared as part of the autopsy. "There's nothing resembling an identifiable print on either the middle finger right hand or the right little finger." Within each of the squares Mo pointed to, there was no more than an inky smudge. Dickerman shook his long face in mild despair.
"At any rate, I can tell you categorically that the four prints on the vial you wanted me to examine were not made by eight of ten of Mrs. Sabich's fingers."
"So they could be Barbara's?" asked Brand.
"Not this one," said Mo, pointing to the largest print in the photographs at the bottom, "because that's clearly a thumb. But at that point, I couldn't tell whether either of the remaining prints came from Barbara's middle finger, or even conceivably the pinky."
"And now?" asked Tommy. Brand took a step back behind Dickerman and rotated his eyes skyward. He had no use for Mo's fan dance.
"So the next step was to see if we could identify whose prints these were. I assumed you guys had a guess, but Jim and Rory didn't want to name names. So we ran the prints through AFIS," said Mo, referring to the automated computer identification system that contained images of all the prints from the county for the past several decades. "And we matched impressions on two different print cards." Mo laid down the ten-cards that had been culled out of his own archives. One contained the prints Rusty Sabich had given when he'd begun county employment thirty-five years ago. The others had been taken when Sabich was indicted. "All four prints on that vial are his." Mo touched the cards as if each was a fetish. "I always liked Rusty," he added, as though he were speaking of the dead.
Jim had a small, settled smile. He'd always known. Tommy would have to give him that whenever they talked about the case in the years to come.
"And how do we know Sabich didn't just take the bottle out of the packaging to help his wife?" Tommy asked.
Brand answered that. He had the papers Rory was carrying the other day in Wallach's courtroom.
"The scrip was for ten pills. But when the cops inventoried the bottle, there were only six in there." He picked up the plastic envelope containing the bottle that was next to Mo's precious machine and showed Tom the six orange tablets on the bottom of the vial. "So somebody took four of them out," he said, "and what I'm hearing is that the only person whose prints are here are the judge's."
"Could she have touched the bottle without leaving prints?" Molto asked.
Dickerman smiled. "You know the answer to that, Tom. Sure. But VMD is the most discriminating method we have of identifying any prints that were ever here. And if I'm following what Jim just said, Mrs. Sabich would have to have touched the bottle four times without leaving prints. We've got other bottles from the medicine cabinet that we've started processing. So far we have her prints on eight of the nine we've tested. On the ninth the impressions are smudged."