Tommy, October 31, 2008
McGrath Hall had been the police headquarters since 1921. The redstone heap might have passed for a medieval fortress, with stone arches over the massive planked oaken doors and notched battlements on the roof.
Brand, who was still on trial, had sent a message across the street from the courtroom asking if Tommy could meet him outside the County Building at twelve thirty, and the Mercedes had slid to the curb and taken off again so quickly that it looked like a getaway. Brand zagged through the lunch-hour traffic as if he were hopped up. Tommy got a call from the FBI, and he and Brand had gone past the security gate and parked behind the Hall before he was free again to talk to his chief deputy.
"So what are we doing here?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Brand. "Not for sure. But the day Rusty called in Barbara's death, the Nearing coppers took all the bottles in Barbara's medicine cabinet and swept them into a plastic bag, instead of doing an inventory there. So I had Rory ship every vial over here on Wednesday to see if Dickerman could turn anything from them."
"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."
"Could be hers?"
"Could be. There are points of comparison, but it looks like somebody else touched it, too, which may make DNA hard, distinguishing the alleles and getting enough to test."
"That would be a tough argument for a defense lawyer," said Brand, "saying she got anywhere near the phenelzine, if her prints show up on every other bottle and not this one."
Brand and Molto headed back to the same rear exit through which they'd come in. Tommy still didn't want to encounter the dozens of cops he knew who would be coursing around upstairs and would ask why the PA was down here off Mt. Olympus. At the door, Brand took a moment to thank Dickerman again and discuss the next round of examinations, while Tommy went out into the slashing wind to think over what he'd just heard. The steely sky that would prevail in Kindle County for the next six months, as if the Tri-Cities had fallen under a cast-iron pot lid, was closing around them.
He did it again. The words, the idea, stretched out through Tommy like a piano key with the damper pedal compressed. Rusty did it again. The son of a bitch did it again. No "once burned, twice wise" for him. Standing here, Tommy felt so many things that he was having difficulty sorting them out. He was enraged, of course. Rage had always come easily to Tommy, although less so as the years passed. Yet it remained a familiar, even essential, place to him, like a firefighter who was most himself as he entered a burning house. But he also lingered with the thought of vindication. He had waited. And Rusty had shown his true colors. When it was all proved in court, what would people say to Tommy, the people who for decades had looked down on him as some law enforcement rogue who'd gotten off easy the way bad cops so often do?
But the strangest part, amid all these predictable responses, was that as Tommy stamped his feet in the cold, he suddenly understood. If he could not have been with Dominga, what would he have done? Would he have murdered? There was nothing people wanted more in life than love. The wind came up and went through Tommy with the icy directness of a pitchfork. But he understood: Rusty must have loved that girl.