Deception (22 page)

“Ready?” I asked Clarence.

I grabbed handfuls of newspaper that had blown up against the apartment, stepped in the back door, found a metal garbage can in the hallway, then pushed it into a tiled alcove. I put in about half the day’s
Tribune
, flicked a BIC lighter I keep in my trench coat, and watched the smoke rise. No one was in the hall, so I let the smoke build. The alarm didn’t trigger, so I pulled the alarm on the wall.

This alarm was … well, alarming. Really loud. I yelled, “Fire!” and the manager yelled, “Fire!” and pretty soon a dozen people were yelling, “Fire!” Within ten seconds residents were rushing out their doors. Some took longer, getting kids, pets, pictures, and iPods. Several ran
into
the building, past the manager who was waving everyone out. Clancy Baines rushed in, turned the corner, right through the smoke, and ran up the stairs, three at a time.

Within a minute, Baines was back down the stairs, a bulging Nike gym bag in hand. He ran pell-mell toward the back of the building, where he was met by the hulking frame of Clarence Abernathy. Baines pivoted and ran out the front door, clutching that gym bag like it held ten grand.

I stepped to the front door and watched Baines run into the street, where Anderson and Griffin grabbed him. I watched Anderson zip open the bag and smile broadly. Griffin was talking to Baines while he handcuffed him.

I went to the manager and identified myself as a cop. “The fire’s in that garbage can,” I said, pointing. Fifteen seconds later he had a fire extinguisher on it, and within a few minutes the smoke was clearing.

I walked out the back to Clarence. “Who says the
Tribune
is worthless? It makes first-class smoke. A man’s brought to justice, and we’ve got a day’s work each from two grateful cops.”

We walked to my car. Clarence turned back to gaze at the smoky apartment and then at me. We heard the sirens of the approaching fire truck, and when it flashed past, I pulled out and headed to Baja Fresh for lunch. A Steak Burrito Ultimo, with four containers of those chopped tomatoes, was callin’ my name.

As I drove, Abernathy looked back at the scene and a couple of times opened his mouth like a goldfish. In a way unusual for journalists, he didn’t know what to say.

18

“It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
A
DVENTURE OF THE
B
RUCE
-P
ARTINGTON
P
LANS

T
UESDAY
, D
ECEMBER
3, 1:45
P.M
.

ON OUR WAY BACK
to the Justice Center from the fire and Baja Fresh, Phil Oref called.

“You’re not going to believe this. First, those
are
the fingerprints of Noel Barrows on the murder weapon.”

“So what am I not going to believe?”

“I studied the prints with a close-up lens. I found traces of plastic.”

“So?”

“Somebody took the detective’s fingerprint, made a plastic mold, then pressed it down to leave Barrows’s prints. In other words, the prints are his, but he never touched the gun. The prints were planted.”

“You’re certain?”

“I found definite traces of the kind of moldable plastic you can duplicate a print from. It’s exactly what I’d use if I were framing somebody.”

“I’ve heard that could be done. But it’s rare, isn’t it?”

“Extremely. I’ve never seen it. I’ve played with doing it myself, to see how hard it would be. But I never would’ve looked for it if you hadn’t told me about the alibi. You have to look for it to see it. And you’d really need to know what you’re doing to plant it.”

“Who would know how to do that kind of thing?”

“People like me. Or you, if you did your homework.”

“Can you show me how it’s done?”

“Sure. I’ll have to pick up a couple of things. Meet me in my office at four.”

I set up a five o’clock appointment with Noel Barrows, who wanted to know why. I told him I might have good news for him, but we’d have to see.

At 2:40 I got a call from the security desk. “Someone from the
Tribune
is asking to see you.”

“If his name’s Mike Button, have him shot and handcuffed; then dump him on my desk.”

“It’s a she. Name’s Lynn Carpenter.”

“I’m on my way.” I sucked in my gut and greeted her at the door. “Sit down,” I gestured to the empty table by the coffee and donuts, twelve feet from the entrance. Everybody was busy, and it offered more privacy than my workstation.

“What a view,” she said, gazing down at the city below.

“Only the best for my special guests,” I said, charmer that I am. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” They say stuff like that in the movies.

“I’m really bugged by that photo in the Trib.” She pulled out an eight-by-ten enlargement of the infamous picture.

“I was slightly bugged by that myself.”

“Somebody got hold of a digital photo file and gave it to Button. He won’t tell who. To tell you the truth, I figured they knew my password and got into my computer files at the
Trib
. But they didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I went through every single picture I took. There’s no match. Same subject matter, naturally, but always the angle’s slightly off or the flash shadows next to the corpse aren’t quite long enough. There’s even something on the ground in the picture that wasn’t there when I took mine.” She pointed to a rectangular object near Palatine’s right leg. “Looks like one of those bags the criminalists carry.”

“Yeah. An evidence bag.”

“But my point is, I didn’t take this picture.”

“You’re certain?” I asked.

“Positive. But you and I and the ME were the only ones taking pictures, right?”

“I wonder who has access to Carlton Hatch’s photos?”

“Look,” Carp said, “why not get me all your photo files, and the ME’s? I’ll go through them one by one and make the match. I’ll be able to tell you exactly which photo and who took it.”

“You’d do that?”

“I can’t have the
Trib
pay me for it, but I’ll do it on my own time.”

“I’ll call Hatch and get his photos. I’ll give you mine on a thumb drive right now—they’re on my laptop. But I took a few hundred. That’s tons of work … are you sure?”

“It’s really bugging me,” she said. “Besides, I figure I’ll get a pizza or two out of it.”

“Or three,” I said. “Double pepperoni, double cheese.”

She smiled at me with her eyes.

Man. Things were rollin’.

At four o’clock, an animated Phil Oref welcomed us into an evidence lab. He was happy to see Clarence, who might make him famous once he got cleared to tell the story in the
Trib
. I’d invited Carp to join us, so Phil might see his picture in the paper too.

“Faking a fingerprint 101. Here’s how it works.” Phil rubbed his hands together. “First you need an original. Latent fingerprints are just body sweat and fat, oil left on items you touch—glasses, doorknobs, ceramic coffee mugs.” He pointed to a glass of water. “Hand me that.”

Clarence grabbed the glass and passed it to Phil, who wore gloves, and held it up to the overhead light.

“You’ve just given me your thumbprint, index finger, and a partial of your middle. Let’s use the index finger. I sprinkle it with colored powder, which sticks to the oil, and there you see a clear print.”

Sure enough, there it was.

“You can spread the powder with a thin brush, but not necessary in this case. You can also use cyanoacrylate, the main ingredient in superglue. It reacts with the fat residue; then it forms this solid white substance. See?

“You can use black tape to grab the substance. You scan it or photograph it with a digital camera.”

He demonstrated, then took a few close-ups and downloaded them.

“Once it’s digitized, you can do graphic refurbishment to brush up the print’s image.” He pointed at an enlargement of the fingerprint on the wide-screen monitor. He cleaned up a smeared print line. “The goal is to get an exact image of the fingerprint. Then you can use a standard laser printer to print it out on a transparency slide.”

He made the print, pointed, and said, “The printer toner forms a relief.” He took us through two more steps involving wood glue, glycerin, and the creation of the dummy print. Then he said, “Now, you pull it off the foil and cut it to finger size. And use this theatrical glue to attach the dummy to your finger.”

As Carp took pictures, Phil held up his right hand with the dummy fingerprint on his index finger, rubbed it on his left palm, then picked up a coffee mug from the desk. “And now, with the help of a little body oil, everything I touch leaves the fingerprint of Clarence Abernathy.”

“You make it look easy,” Clarence said.

“Actually, it’s tough. Little mistakes can distort the print. Whoever did this knew what he was doing. Probably practiced.”

“But you didn’t figure that out when you first saw it?” Clarence asked. “Nobody would. It was only when I thought to look for trace chemicals that I hit the jackpot. I found traces of glycerin and a little cyanoacrylate.”

“You normally don’t test for those?” I asked.

“Why would I? This is a one in a million. When you called and told me he had a solid alibi, that’s when I checked.”

“Eventually Noel would have come forward and admitted where he was, assuming he wasn’t willing to endure capital punishment rather than admit to Jack he’d had some drinks. But suppose he’d been home alone that night. The scary thing is, if he didn’t have the alibi, Noel could have been prosecuted.”

“Any expert would’ve testified these were his prints on the murder weapon,” Phil said. “It could’ve been enough to put him away.”

Clarence, Carp, and I were walking out of Criminalist Detail when Mike Bates poked his head out a door. “Chandler? Just got the results on that voice comparison you gave me. The one where they both use the word
fishy.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a probable elimination. It’s not the same voice.”

“You’re sure?”

“No. Probable means not sure. But I’m 98 percent sure it’s not the same guy.”

Double elimination for Noel, in the space of twenty minutes.

True, there was a one in fifty chance Noel was the caller. More likely, though, the caller knew Noel and his quirky use of
fishy
. Who would know better than one of the detectives? And if they went to the trouble to plant his fingerprints, why not put another nail in his coffin with the 911 tape?

And if Noel was being framed … why not somebody else?

Clarence went back to homicide, where he’d be joining me for my five o’clock appointment with Noel. Carp lingered at the elevator. She said the magic words “double cheese” as we parted. On the way back, I stopped to scope out the donut situation. As usual, the one with colored sprinkles was the only one left. Why do they even make them?

While contemplating this mystery at 4:45, I noticed my workstation fifteen feet away. I happened to be in a position to see something under it. Specifically, a pair of legs. And whoever they belonged to was wearing panty hose. Tentatively, I eliminated Cimma, Manny, and Clarence.

The top of the divider panel above my desk has thin cracks. I sometimes look through them from the desk side to see who’s stalking the donuts, but I’d never looked through from this side.

The head was definitely female, bent over, searching my file drawers. My instinct was to say “Gotcha,” but I decided to watch. If you stop people then ask them what they were doing, they lie to you. The best way to find out what they’re doing is to watch them do it.

Apparently she wasn’t finding what she was looking for. She stood up and went through the papers on my desk—notes and messages, business cards and mail. I had the feeling she’d done this already, and this was a retry.

She looked up at the crack and seemed to stare right at me. I froze. She glanced back down and quickly shuffled papers again.

Was she looking for my case notes? I had them. This was a wake-up call never to leave them at my desk, not even for a bathroom break. She walked to the aisle, turned and looked toward the security entrance, and returned to her desk, which fortunately is on the far side of where I was hunched over.

Now I had another question to deal with.

Why was Kim Suda snooping in my files?

At 5:00 p.m., Noel, Jack, Clarence, and I met in the conference room. I’d baked the crow, now I had to eat it. I explained Phil’s demonstration of how Noel’s fingerprints had been faked. I said that since Clarence had been there when I accused Noel, it was only right that he witness my apology. So … I apologized.

Noel took it pretty well. Jack? Not so well.

“They said it was one in a million,” I told Jack, my oldest friend on the force. “The fingerprints seemed definitive. I was just following the evidence. What would you have done?”

“I’d try knowing the people I work with,” he said. “And maybe trusting them.”

I extended my hand to Noel, and he shook it.

“No hard feelings?” I asked.

“No.” He blushed.

“Jack?”

I stuck out my hand. He shook it unenthusiastically. I saw the hard feelings in his eyes. He walked out the door behind Noel.

“I may have just lost a friend,” I said to Clarence.

“You were doing your job.”

“Things are not as they appear. Another of my mottoes, but I was blindsided. What bugs me is I didn’t think to ask the forensic guys to look for a fake print. I’d read it could be done, but it never occurred to me.”

“You can’t think of everything,” Clarence said.

“When it’s this important, I have to. Whoever did this isn’t dumb enough to leave their prints on a gun. And if they do, they’re not going to dump it two blocks from the scene. Why not dump it in the river three miles away? They knew we’d check Dumpsters. That’s standard procedure.”

I flipped to my list of five observations that pointed to a detective. I wrote down two more beneath.

6. The killer knew how to fake fingerprints and place them on the gun.

7. The killer knew it would be SOP to search all Dumpsters within four blocks of the scene. He knew where to put the murder weapon so it would be found, while appearing that he didn’t want it to be found.

So far the killer had planted evidence against at least two of us, Noel and me. Was this his joke, trying to send the department into confusion, give us bad PR? Or was he really trying to put me or Noel away?

Why Noel? And why me? What did we have in common? Were we arbitrary choices? Or did the killer have an ax to grind? And if so, was he planning to grind it again?