The Crime Writer

The range of his knowledge, as always, staggered me. He knew virtually everything's intersection with crime. How swollen the maggot. How rare the dry-cleaning mark. How ripe the blowfly egg in the mouth cavity.

"Why don't you just dust it?" I said. "No point in arguing if there's not even a print."

I'd finally handed him the rationale he was looking for. He went out to the van and returned with a laptop and a case that opened into shelves and levels, like a tackle box. Down on the carpet, he set to work and within minutes managed to raise a single print a fragmentary ridge on the curved outside of the stiff wrapping, right beside the Home Depot price sticker. He sat back on his heels.

"Should have enough points for a match."

I couldn't tell if he sounded regretful or excited. Probably a combination.

I said nothing. Sometimes I actually know when to keep my mouth shut.

After a few moments of internal deliberation, he reached into his case and removed a tape lift, a clear adhesive strip the size of a small cell phone. He peeled it off its backing and applied it to the dusted area, then returned the strip to its backing, locking in the print in two dimensions. He disappeared into the rear of the house and returned with a digital camera. He shot the tape lift and uploaded the image into his laptop. When he angled the screen away from me so I couldn't see him input his password, I felt a surge of excitement. We were going to the fingerprint database.

I waited silently as he tapped away, pictures of him and Janice grinning back at me everywhere I looked. A wicked reversal on Dorian Gray all that wellness preserved behind glass while the real thing languished in a back room.

Lloyd's eyebrows rose and quivered. I resisted the urge to ask, and finally he spun the laptop around. A booking photo stared woefully out at me, a guy with deep-set eyes, a thinning pate, and a square jaw. Richard Collins. His birth date put him at thirty-one, but he looked at least a decade older. He'd gone down on two possession charges, the last three years ago, but he had a clean record since.

My first to-the-investigative-moment glimpse of Genevieve's or Broach's possible killer. I was disappointed that Collins didn't look more formidable; he seemed like a workman who'd do a shitty job on your house and not care when you wouldn't pay him.

"Who's this guy to you?" Lloyd asked.

I'd been asking myself the same question. Had my path crossed Richard Collins's during my days of wine and roses? Had I dated his sister? Elbowed him aside in a cocktail lounge?

"I don't know. I don't recognize him."

"Well, if he's been trying to frame you, it's a safe bet he recognizes you."

"Now what?"

"You hand it off to a detective."

"You can't run with it?"

"This isn't like on TV. The criminalist doesn't solve the case. Even if I didn't have my hands full." Lloyd placed the tape lift and a computer disk containing the digital photo into a Ziploc and said, "Anyone can take it from here. And don't tell them I ran it for you, or the secret handshake guys'll get after me."

His step seemed a little lighter as we headed out. Despite the caveats he'd offered to brake my excitement, he, too, felt the exhilaration of circling a suspect. I was winning him over, one selfish demand at a time.

My shoes crunched on the gravel driveway. "Good luck, Drew," he called after me. His tone was uncharacteristically upbeat, but when I turned around, the door had already closed behind him.

Chapter 17

This is a fingerprint lifted off a piece of evidence found at the Kasey Broach crime scene. It belongs to a convicted felon, Richard Collins. As a free citizen, I am going to his residence to ask a few questions. I think you should accompany me."

Cal stared back at me through his screen door, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He wore a wife-beater that showed off thick shoulders marked with Calvin and Hobbes tattoos that had probably been a good idea when he was eighteen and drunk. The tape lift and computer disk, visible through an evidence bag, made a far more dramatic impression than the Spago take-out bag had the last go-round.

He palmed the screen open. "You out of your fucking mind?"

"Pronounced so by a jury of my peers."

"You have no peers, asshole. Talk."

I gave him a full account, leaving out Lloyd. His silence indicated his interest. Or he'd fallen asleep with his eyes open.

When I finished, he asked, naturally, "How'd you run the print?"

"I just recognized the whorl pattern. Don't you?"

He grimaced, entertained by my wit. "You sure you didn't leave that fingerprint yourself? In a mystically induced trance, of course?"

"I'm currently certified one hundred percent brain-tumor-free."

"Aside from your overactive imagination."

"My overactive imagination didn't produce this." A shake of the bag, in case he'd failed to notice it.

"The chain of custody is shot "