Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “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?

  19

  “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2:00 A.M.

  The following happened between 1:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m.: no sleep.

  I was watching 24 on a portable DVD player in my car. I know I really shouldn’t do that, but it keeps me awake in the wee hours of noncritical surveillance.

  Critical surveillance requires unswerving attention. This didn’t. I was scoping out a house one hundred feet away. I looked up every three seconds, and a second later I looked down. A world-class sprinter couldn’t move to or from the house out of my line of sight.

  Jack Bauer and I are alike. We take down the bad guys. We’re tough as nails, yet tenderhearted. We’re misunderstood, Jack and I, tragic and heroic. We’re both always in trouble with our superiors. We’ve both lost our wives and have complicated relationships with our daughters. We’re both handsome. The ladies love us. But the biggest similarity is this: Neither of us gets any sleep.

  I sat there nursing my Big Gulp, neck aching from turning to the right. If I didn’t reposition the car soon to equalize my neck twists, I’d have a chiropractor on my back.

  I turned my flashlight to my shirt, recognizing a spot from yesterday morning’s Egg McMuffin. The second stain was coffee, probably last night’s venti latte.

  It was the third spot that intrigued me. Using my detective skills, I pulled the fabric up close and put my tongue on the reddish-brown spot. Of course. The steak Burrito Ultimo, Baja Fresh.

  I wondered if the department would cover charges for a cleaner’s bill for food stains. I pictured Sarah Ballenger in accounting rolling her eyes.

  In novels, detectives on surveillance see and hear all kinds of things. Suspects raise their voices and say, “Okay, now that we stole his diamonds, let’s go dump Harvey’s body in the lake.” They may even say “in the lake, eh?” so you know the killer’s a Canadian.

  Unfortunately, in real life people don’t say things they already know for the benefit of the eavesdropper. And if you’re sitting outside someone’s house for the night, chances are they’ll do nothing more exciting than go to bed. They sleep soundly; you don’t.

  But Kim Suda was a light sleeper, I’d heard her say, and seeing her rifle through my papers got under my skin. It would probably be a wasted night, but I was willing to chance it.

  I have nothing against time. Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. But on a stakeout, time can get on your nerves.

  Good thing I had a companion.

  “Want another Cheeto?” I stuck back my hand, and Mulch gratefully closed his lips, taking care not to bite me.

  Clarence called. “Still on your stakeout?” he asked. “Geneva’s asleep.”

  “I’d hope so. It’s 2:10 a.m.!”

  “Thought I’d come join you.”

  “Suda’s light’s still on, but she’s probably reading and won’t emerge from the cave until daylight. This cul-de-sac’s dead.”

  “I want to write up a stakeout.”

  “Imagine sitting in a car doing nothing for eight hours. That’s pretty much it. Just go out in your garage right now and sit there all night. You’ll get the idea. Besides, I don’t want somebody seeing Goliath get in my car.”

  “You said nobody’s around.”

  “Okay. Park around the corner. No lights. Then walk to my car nonchalantly. Knock twice on the passenger window, or I might have to shoot you.”

  Fifteen minutes later the double knock came. I unlocked the door, and the offensive line of the New England Patriots sat beside me.

  Mulch growled as Clarence got in, but I gave him another Cheeto, and soon he was licking Clarence’s face.

  “You bring a dog on a stakeout?”

  “Only when I can pull him away from his poker game.”

  No response.

  “You ever seen that art with the dogs playing poker? I got mine with my velvet Elvis.”

  No response.

  There’s nothing like stakeout conversation. Sports, politics, how to reach out to your pregnant thirty-year-old unmarried daughter, guns, movies—you bounce in and out of stuff. The next hour was a panoply of randomness. (Sharon used panoply once in Scrabble, and I liked it.)

  “Your eyes’ll get used to the dark.”

  He picked up a corn dog wrapper and mustard packet at his feet. “I’m not sure I want them to.”

  Clarence stared behind the driver’s seat at the archaeological dig. He excavated a berry
pie wrapper from the Neolithic era.

  “You are what you eat,” he said.

  “That makes me an Izzy’s pizza,” I replied. “There’s one piece left.” I opened the glove box and pulled it out. “Want it?”

  Clarence refused. I put it back, and pretty soon we were talking about family.

  “I stopped going to my family reunions after my sister’s second marriage,” I said. “She showed up with this guy at a family gathering, called him Bob, but never introduced him. No explanation. It was like Bewitched, with the two Darrins—like if they don’t say anything, we won’t notice this isn’t the same guy! You know what I’m saying?”

  “Who’s Darrin?”

  “Bewitched.”

  “I never saw Bewitched.”

  “It’s on cable. Wouldn’t take you long to catch up.” This was another reminder that Clarence and I grew up on different planets.

  “Daddy wasn’t much for TV. He wanted us to read.”

  “Wish your daddy were here right now. With him, a stakeout would be a pleasure. I could listen to his stories forever.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be telling them forever,” Clarence said. “And there’ll be lots of fresh stories to tell on the new earth. He always said it would be the great adventure. If you’re with us, you’ll get to listen to his stories … and they’ll be better than ever.”

  “You managed to work it in, didn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “The Christian stuff. Heaven. The whole nine yards.”

  “Hey, you pitched the ball to me. I just took a swing.” He tried to stretch, unsuccessfully.

  “For future reference, on stakeouts you need to be shorter than six five,” I said, “or bring your own car. It also helps to have the bladder capacity of five people.”

  After five minutes of silence I said, “Ever notice that stakeout rhymes with takeout? If you get a Bonzer Steak from Outback, like I do sometimes, then it’s a STEAK-out. Get it? I mean, spelled S-T-E-A-K-O—”

  “I get it!”

  “I’ve got a surprise for you.” I pushed the seat back, reached past my coat, and pulled a box from the sealed plastic container I use to keep Mulch out of the food.