Nearly Found (5 page)

O
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UESDAY AFTER SCHOOL
, I found Raj where he’d said he would be, sitting in front of a cluttered workstation in the Latent Prints lab. A “Han Shot First” bumper sticker was taped to the side of the desk. He stretched and yawned.

“Feel like bringing me a cup of coffee?” he asked, scratching the Star Wars logo on his T-shirt.

Pecking order was one thing. Being a self-serving asshat was another. “Not really.”

“I had a feeling you’d say that.” He rubbed his eyes and gave me a once-over. I’d followed his lead, opting for sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt Reece had given me for my birthday that said “Stand Back, I’m Going to Do Science.” Raj read my shirt and laughed. “You have much to learn, young padawan. Come on, I’ll show you where we keep the sterilizing equipment. That is, if your commitment to feminism doesn’t preclude you from washing beakers and pipettes.”

“Very funny.” I followed Raj. He handed me a pair of latex gloves and a plastic basin and showed me through the building, lab by lab. We collected dirty glassware and lab tools, hand-washing and loading them into sterilizing machines. “Why can’t I just help you with whatever you were doing in the Latent Prints lab?” I asked. “I know how to work a computer.”

“Believe me,” he sighed, “I would like nothing more than to dump that load on some poor unsuspecting high school gopher, but I can’t. You’d need special clearance and your own password to get into the AFIS system, and gophers don’t qualify.”

“AFIS?”

“The Automated Fingerprint Identification System. It’s a regional database of fingerprint records, most of them collected from crime scenes or arrest records. It’s available through a network to various departments of law enforcement, usually for the purpose of identifying a person suspected of a crime, or linking them to other crimes in the area that haven’t been solved yet. Which is why you’d need a password. Doc can’t let padawans go poking around in there.”

“So that’s what you’re doing? Identifying fingerprints?”

Raj looked sheepish. “I wish. Only licensed fingerprint examiners get to do that. I just scan and enter the data.”

“So we get the mindless cleanup jobs,” I said, setting another full bin of glassware on my cart. “But who gets to do the glamorous stuff?”

“Crime scene investigators get to pull the actual prints from the scene.” Raj cocked an eyebrow and grinned. “Want to see something cool?”

I couldn’t help but smile at the mischievous look on his face. As soon as I did, Raj motioned me to follow. We left the cart and headed back upstairs. He shut the door to the Latent Prints lab behind us and began pulling supplies from a cabinet. Then he drew on a pair of latex gloves.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We’re going to process your fingerprints. The examiner’s on vacation, which is why you haven’t had your fingerprints taken yet. She’ll be back tomorrow, but I can do it now since you’re here.” He was entirely too eager as he fumbled with the supplies.

I looked around for an inkpad but all I saw was a brush and a container of black powder.

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

Raj rolled his eyes. “Please, I’ve watched her do this a million times.”

“Why aren’t we using ink?”

“Because inkpads are for cops and sissies, not scientists.”

“But I thought you said we weren’t doing science.”

“Only when no one’s looking. Here, put your hand on the plastic sheet. Don’t press too hard. It’ll push the ridges too close together. Yeah, that’s good.” He gently lifted the corners of the plastic from the table and carried it to an opening in a large piece of equipment. “Ever heard of cyanoacrylate?”

“No,” I said, watching him clip the sheet inside.

“Sure you have. It’s Super Glue. Now check this out.” Raj locked the chamber door, pressed a few buttons, and we watched the fingerprints process through the glass window. Tiny white crystals began to form ridges and whorls, and from an oblique angle, I could just begin to make out my own fingerprints. “This is a fuming chamber. All you need is a heat source, a little water, and Super Glue. The heated cyanoacrylate changes to a gas, and if there’s enough humidity in the chamber, the Super Glue fumes bond with the proteins in your sweat. You can put all kinds of things in here . . . beer cans, glass, firearms . . . anything non-porous should work. When the Super Glue crystals harden, we’ll be able to handle your fingerprints without smudging them. Then we can use black powder to give them enough contrast to be scanned into the AFIS database, and your prints will officially be on record.”

A sick feeling snaked through me as Raj carefully removed the plastic sheet from the fuming chamber.

“What if I don’t want to be on record?”

“Everyone who works in the lab has to have a set of elimination prints on file in AFIS. In case evidence was ever contaminated, we’d need to be able to rule you out as a possible suspect.”

“Does that happen often?”

Raj set my fingerprints in a drying chamber. “Do you have any idea how many people go tromping through a crime scene before CSI teams get there? Trust me, you want your prints on file. It makes the examiner’s job a lot easier. Besides, when you graduate and go off to some fancy college next year, some poor schlep like me will have the honor of purging you from the system. It’ll be like you were never even here.”

I held out my opposite hand. Let him press and roll each finger. Watched my fingerprints develop and harden in a box of smoke.

Next, Raj scanned my prints into the computer. Seeing my name on the AFIS screen felt strange, even though Raj had checked the box indicating they were elimination prints. Once my fingerprints were entered, my reasons for being in the system wouldn’t matter. I’d be just another set of random markers in a database of criminals, waiting to be identified and sorted.

Raj looked pleased with himself. “Pretty cool, huh?” His face fell, suddenly serious. “And if anyone asks, we used ink. Okay?”

“Sure.” I’d had enough of fingerprinting lessons for one day. “I’m going to go finish the sterilizing.”

“Do me a favor and stop by the Fridge. Doc had a body coming in today, and he’ll probably have some stuff that needs to be cleaned.”

Raj turned back to his computer and I headed downstairs to pick up my abandoned cart. I followed signs for the Ossuary, remembering that the Fridge was somewhere off the same hall.

I pushed through the set of double doors Raj had pointed out during my tour. A delivery driver waited on the other side. His truck was backed up tightly against an open garage bay; its rear doors swung wide, revealing a long black body bag on a gurney. I stood against the wall with my hands in my pockets while Doc Benoit signed for the delivery.

When he was finished, I said, “Dr. Benoit? Raj asked me to come down and see if you need me to—”

“Here, hold this,” Doc said, plucking a small brown bag with a yellow biohazard sticker off the top of the gurney. I stepped forward to take it, holding it at arm’s length.

“Miss Boswell,” Doc Benoit said, shaking my attention from the bag. “Do you mind?” He gestured to my feet. “You’re standing on my scale.” Beneath me was a large rectangular cut-out in the floor. Beside it, wires climbed up the wall to a monitor that flashed 112.3 lbs. I stumbled out of the way and the monitor flashed back to 000.0. The driver wheeled the body bag onto the scale and Doc Benoit recorded the weight.

“Follow me to the Fridge,” he said.

He wheeled the gurney to a large metal door and swiped his card. A cool rush of air escaped when Doc Benoit pushed it open. It smelled like the air in the biology lab at school during dissection week, but stronger. Formaldehyde and phenol, chemical smells that grabbed at the back of my throat. I blinked, my eyes watering as I stepped into the cold.

The “Fridge” was a storage room containing a row of gurneys. Along the wall were metal shelves, lined with plastic trays labeled with the names of body parts. Teeth, jaws, skull fragments, phalanges. I didn’t look inside.

“Well, first things first,” Doc said, pulling on a fresh set of latex gloves, blue booties, and a surgical cap, then handing me a set. I stared at them, sick at the thought of putting them on.

Doc stood there, waiting.

Make us proud, Boswell.

I put on the booties and cap first, then the gloves, the smell of latex inviting a rush of memories. TJ’s gloved hand over my mouth, his gun at my temple. I breathed through a wave of nausea.

“Ready?” Doc asked.

Don’t screw this up.

I steadied myself against a rolling tray containing various sizes of labels and specimen containers. Doc unzipped the body bag from the middle, pulling it wide to reveal a woman. Her arms were an unnatural color, covered in a film of dirt. Her scant clothes were caked with it. Her hands were covered in paper bags and before I had time to wonder what they were for, Doc removed one.

Her short nails were polished, a garish shade of electric blue, and bitten around the purpling cuticles. Clipping off a small piece of fingernail, he placed it in another paper bag and handed it to me. Doc Benoit carefully inspected both hands, using small tools and swabs to collect trace evidence, he explained. When he was finished, I had a collection of small paper bags, which I labeled according to his instructions. Under the space for her name, I wrote DOE, JANE.

“Let’s see if we can figure out who Miss Doe really is,” Doc said, rolling the tip of one of her fingers in ink and pressing it to a small white card, then handing it to me. “If her prints aren’t in the system, then we can check against the missing persons reports for distinguishing marks.” Doc pulled a small voice recorder from his shirt pocket and pressed a button.

“Victim is a Caucasian female. Approximate age, late teens to early twenties. Cause of death, strangulation. Ligature marks on the victim’s wrists.” I had the urge to swallow, to keep swallowing to hold down my revulsion. I looked at the tray, and tried to stay focused on the bags that contained her cut fingernails and the residue Doc had dug out from underneath them. The room began to swim.

I heard Doc opening the body bag further.

“Multiple piercings in both ears. Eye color . . . brown. Hair color, light brown at the root,” he said to the recorder. To me, he said, “Put this in a bag and label it ‘hair sample.’”

I turned back to him and reached for the tweezers, struggling to keep pressure on the prongs, focusing hard on the small pointed tip so I wouldn’t see the dead face inside the bag.

The hair in the tweezers was blue.

A sour burn climbed up my throat.

The tweezers clattered to the floor.

Adrienne,
was my last thought as I dropped to the floor beside them.

• • •

“You’re back,” Raj said, pulling smelling salts from my nose.

I wasn’t sure where Raj had come from. I was on a gurney in the hall outside the Fridge. “What happened? Where’s Doc Benoit?” My mouth tasted sour. Raj helped me sit up slowly. My head pounded and the walls were moving a little.

“You passed out cold. Hit your head on the supply cart on the way down. It took both of us to get you off the floor. Anyway, Doc asked me to look after you. Between you and me, he doesn’t deal very well with vomit.”

I wrapped a hand over my stomach, breathing shallowly. My T-shirt and jeans were wet where I touched them, and smelled like puke.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Raj said when I tried to cover them. He bit his lip to keep from smiling. “It’s happened to all of us. Everyone gets sick their first time seeing a body. It just doesn’t normally happen on the first day.”

A body.

Adrienne.

The body in the bag had been Adrienne’s.

I grabbed Raj by the shoulder, ready to tell him. But how would it look to Doc Benoit if I told them I knew yet another victim? Four black bags had already been delivered to him, with the bodies of people who’d gone to my school. People I’d known. Even though Adrienne’s murder had nothing to do with the others, Doc would probably tell me I was too close to the victim to stay involved. They’d probably recuse me from the lab. Maybe from the internship.

I let go of his shoulder.

Raj helped me off the gurney. He walked me to the water fountain and I drank slowly, hoping it would stay down. “I get it now,” I said between small, cautious sips. “No nice shirts in the lab.”

He smirked.

“I’ll be fine next time. I promise,” I said.

Raj scratched his head. “I’m not sure there’s going to be a next time for a while.”

“What do you mean?” My heart fluttered. What if they already knew?

“You’re just an intern, so technically you shouldn’t have been in the Fridge during a procedure. And you definitely shouldn’t have been taking evidence from a homicide victim. I don’t know what Doc was thinking taking you in there with him. Sometimes Doc’s so preoccupied with dead people, he sort of loses touch with those of us who still have a pulse. Veronica’s going to kill me. You haven’t even signed your non-disclosure agreement yet.”

“Non-disclosure agreement?”

Raj sighed and rubbed his eyes. “The very important legal form we all have to sign that says we promise not to tell anyone about the specifics of the cases we’ve worked on inside the lab. I was supposed to have you sign them when you had your fingerprints taken. I guess I sort of forgot. This was a huge breach of protocol.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Of course not,” Raj said with a dismissive wave. “It was my fault. But let’s just keep you out of the Fridge for a while. At least until we get all your paperwork wrapped up.” Raj looked at my eye and cringed. “You should go home, put some ice on that shiner and get some rest.”

I reached up to the small pulsing ache above my right eye. The knot was tender and sore to the touch.

How was I going to keep my word to Lonny if I wasn’t allowed to tell him that Adrienne’s body was here? And if I wasn’t allowed back in the Fridge, how would I find out what had happened to her?

“Do you have a ride home?” Raj asked, shaking me from my thoughts.

“I’ll take the bus. I’ll be fine.” I didn’t want to face Gena or Reece after blowing my first real day.