John Sandford - Prey 10 - Certain Prey

by Certain Prey

  'Could we find out how many single woman are in the hotel, and go from there?' Franklin suggested. 'Then maybe we could talk to the room maids.'

  'Most've them have gone home already,' the manager said. He had a small mustache but otherwise, Franklin thought, looked a lot like PeeWee in PeeWee's Big Adventure. 'I can get the room service people, and the bellhops.'

  Between the available desk people, they narrowed it to four women: two who more or less fit the composite, and two who nobody could remember seeing. The bellhop, who everybody called Louis, didn't know what room she was in, but swore she fit the picture. 'That's her,' he told Swanson. Swanson called Lucas and told him they had a possible ID.

  'Wait for me,' Lucas said.

  They waited, working through people on the restaurant staff: two of them had seen the woman, they thought, but then maybe not. The picture wasn't that good, was it?

  Lucas arrived on the run, left the Porsche at the curb and said, 'If a cop comes along, tell him it belongs to Chief Davenport,' he told the doorman.

  'Right, chief,' the doorman said, and saluted. Just like New York, or something.

  Franklin met him in the lobby and said, 'We're ready to go up.'

  'Any more IDs on her?' Lucas asked.

  'Couple of possibles - but they say they can't quite tell from the photo.'

  'Yeah, but it's the best we've got,' Lucas said. He studied the picture for a few seconds with the same strange feeling of deja vu that he'd experienced when he'd first seen it. He felt that he knew the woman, because, he thought, she was a perfect type: a cheerleader. Cute, busty, athletic. He knew a hundred women just like her: hell, there were twenty just like her on the police force. Sherrill was just like

  her, take away the black hair...

  'Michelle Jones/ the manager muttered, tapping on a door.

  'Just a minute,' a woman's voice called.

  The three cops took a step back, leaving the manager looking quizzically at them. Then he realized that the woman might come out shooting, and started to take a step back. Then the door opened, just two inches, and Michelle Jones looked out: she was black.

  'Sorry, wrong room,' Swanson said. 'We're checking a security problem.'

  There was no answer at the next room. Lucas nodded at the manager, who used his key and stepped hastily away. Swanson turned the door knob and they went in.

  'Christ, it looks like somebody was beaten to death,' Franklin said. Clothing was strewn around the room and across the bed; two pair of panty hose, apparently damp, hung from a door, and a wool sweater lay on the rug, drying on top of a bath towel. Two suitcases, both open on the floor, looked like they'd been rifled by a fast-moving thief.

  'Nah, it just look like my wife's been here,' Swanson said. 'This is just a fuckin' woman.'

  The manager crooked his head out from behind the protective bulk of Franklin: 'I think the gentleman is right,' he said. 'Single women... and you should see what they put in the toilets. Women'll put anything in a toilet. We once had a woman whose dog died, and she tried to flush it down the toilet...'

  'Small dog?' Franklin asked.

  'Well, yeah.' The manager's eyes seemed to cross. 'I mean, nobody'd try to flush a German shepherd.'

  The third room was also empty: but very empty. No sign of a presence other then the disturbed covers on the bed.

  'You're sure there's supposed to be somebody in here?' Lucas asked.

  'Oh, yeah,' the manager said, looking around in disgust. 'She skipped. I know what that feels like. She's skipped.'

  'Then this is her,' Lucas said. 'Let's get the crime scene guys in here.'

  'Four hundred bucks,' the manager said.

  'Yeah, well, don't touch anything,' Franklin growled.

  Franklin and Swanson went to the last room on the list, while Lucas looked around the empty room, and a moment later, Franklin came back: 'Better have a look at this chick.'

  This one fit, too: a cheerleader, with the blonde hair, blue eyes, good shape, a little busty. And again, Lucas had the sense of deja vu: 'Do I know you?' he asked.

  'No,' the woman said, a little angry and a little more scared. 'Who are you?'

  'I'm a deputy chief of police,' Lucas said. 'Where are you from?'

  'From Seattle...'

  Lucas spotted a wedding ring. 'And you're married?'

  'Yes, and I'd like to know...'

  'What are you doing here? Are you in town on business?'

  'What's going on?' she demanded, the fear fading, and the anger growing.

  'Just tell me,' Lucas said patiently. 'Are you here on business?'

  'Yes, I'm here for the perio convention at the Radisson...'

  'What's a perio?' Franklin asked. He was a very large black man in a yellow plaid sport coat, and he loomed in the doorway like a dark moon.

  'A periodontist. I'm a dentist,' she said.

  'Thanks,' Lucas said. He glanced at Franklin and shook his head and said to the woman, 'We've got a situation here, which Detective Franklin will explain to you...'

  Outside in the hall, Swanson said to Lucas, 'A gum gardener.'

  'A what?'

  'A gum gardener. That's what periodontists are called by other dentists.'

  'Yeah? I'll treasure that piece of information.'

  Lucas went back to the empty room to wait for the crime-scene crew. He wanted only one piece of information: that the china handles on the bathroom fixtures had been wiped. If they'd been wiped, this was the room, and they were too late.

  Franklin went off to check on the last room again.

  Then the two crime-scene guys arrived, and Lucas told them what he wanted to know. One of them stepped into the bathroom, looked at the china handles on the sink, took what looked like a perfume bottle out of his briefcase and sprayed a steel-colored dust on the handles. Then he stuck his head in the sink so he could get a closer look. When he emerged, he said, 'Wiped. Slick as a whistle.'

  'Goddamn it, I knew it,' Lucas said.

  Franklin returned. 'Last lady came in, from that room that was all torn up. She's fifty, and she'd got a dog. A small one. I offered to flush it for her, but she said no.'

  'Okay,' Lucas said. To the crime-scene guys, 'She probably wiped the place down, but I want you to dust everything. Anything we get..'

  'Look at this,' the second crime scene guy said. He was emerging from the shower, and he was holding a small hotel-sized bar of soap.

  'What?' Lucas asked.

  'I think she forgot to wipe the soap.'

  'She forgot to wipe the what?' Mallard asked 'The soap,' Lucas said. 'A bar of soap.' 'You can't leave prints on a bar of soap. Wet soap?' 'Well, you can one way,' Lucas said. 'If the soap squirts out of your hand and you leave it on the floor, and then get out and dry yourself and remember the soap, and pick it up and put it back in the soap dish, then you can leave prints. At least, that's what we

  think - one corner of the soap was squared off and cracked, like it'd been dropped. The hard part was getting the soap back to the office without screwing up the prints. That was a goddamned nightmare.'

  'How're you processing it?'

  'We put it in a refrigerator down in Identification.'

  'You put it in what?'

  Lucas was irritated: 'Do we have a bad connection or something? I can hear you perfectly.'

  'Why'd you put it in the goddamn refrigerator?' Mallard asked. He was getting loud, for a guy who looked like an accountant, even with the thick neck.

  'We figure if we can harden it up enough, we can dust it and pick up the prints,' Lucas said. 'I mean, we can see them, we're just scared to death of doing anything to them. If you blow on them, they could fade.'

  'Ah, Jesus. I'm gonna call the fingerprint guys here and get them in touch with your guys,' Mallard said. 'Maybe we can help.'

  'Did you get the composite?' Lucas asked

  'Yeah. We're running it against all former suspects, anybody who's ever been around one of these cases.'

  'What ever
happened to the guy in Wichita? Is he still peddling dope?'

  'Little asshole,' Mallard said. 'We've still got a watch on him, I still got Malone out there with the team, but she's bitching thirty-six hours a day about getting back. And if you know the suspect was in Minneapolis, and we know Lopez wasn't, then I'll call her off.'

  'She was here, the shooter was,' Lucas said.

  'Then I'll tell Malone to wrap it up. Still can't believe it's a woman. Anyway, I'm gonna drag the files over to witness protection and have a talk with them. We got enough on their boy out there to send him away for three hundred years.'

  'Just because Lopez didn't pan out, doesn't mean that some kind of Wichita connection isn't good,' Lucas said.

  'I know that; and if you've got any suggestions, I'd be happy to have Malone look into them. It'll take her a couple of days to wrap things up.'

  'I've got nothing, not at the moment,' Lucas said. 'And look, have your guys call our ID guys right now; I'm scared to death about what's gonna happen when we take that bar of soap out of the crisper.'

  'The what?' Mallard asked.

  'The crisper, you know, where you keep the lettuce and radishes and...'

  'Don't tell me. Please, just don't tell me.'

  A guy named Manual found Lucas in the Homicide office talking to Sloan, and said, 'We're gonna try to take the prints.'

  'Ah.' Lucas and Sloan both got up and headed down to ID. In the Identification section, they found four people standing around a hippie with shoulder-length hair and a dangly silver earring. He appeared to be about sixteen, and was holding a Nikon F5 camera with a weird lens. The bar of soap sat on a

  Tupperware lid on the desk.

  'What's going on?' Lucas asked, looking at the hippie.

  'Don't touch me,' the kid said. 'If anything falls on the soap, spit or anything, it's all over.'

  He was looking down at the soap through the camera, which he held no more than a foot above the bar. 'He's my kid,' a cop named Harry muttered to Lucas. 'Great photographer. That there's what you call your basic ring-light, there on the end of the lens. It's really a flash, and he's looking right down on the prints, with half the ring-light turned off so he'll get some shadow...'

  'Shut up,' the kid said.

  Everybody shut up and Lucas was about to open his mouth and ask if he knew what he was doing, when the flash went; then again. The kid shot twenty-four pictures in five minutes, using the ring-light, then no ring-light, and finally with reflected light from a sheet of tinfoil. When he was done, he looked at Lucas and said, 'I could see them, pretty good. Three prints, a little smudged, but coming right up at me.'

  'You think you got them?'

  'If I can see them I got them,' the kid said. 'I'm gonna run this over to a one-hour slide processor by Rosedale. It'd help if you could call them and tell them to put me at the front of the line.'

  'You did slides?'

  'Yeah; I get a lot better resolution that way, when I scan them...' Lucas must have looked puzzled. The

  kid added, 'I assumed you wanted a digital file. We can phone it to the FBI and they can start the search.'

  Lucas turned to Sloan: 'Go find somebody to run this kid over to Rosedale in a squad, lights and sirens. Tell the picture people to start running the film as soon as he gets there. We want it.' He turned back to the kid. 'I'll sign you up for a consultant's fee. I'll give the forms to your dad. If the pictures come out.'

  The kid left with Sloan, and Harriet Ashler, the chief fingerprint-specialist, said, 'All right; back in the fridge for a minute, just to firm things up.'

  She put the soap back in the fridge, and they all stood around looking at the refrigerator for three minutes - it was a small brown office model from Sears, with two lunch sacks and an aging apple on one shelf, and a bottle of cran-apple juice in the door - and then she took it back out and touched an unmarked piece of it. 'Still nice and hard,' she said. 'Let's try it.'

  The technique, which they agreed upon with the FBI, was to blow a light dry graphite dust across the prints, then try to softly pick up the dust with a piece of Magic Mending Tape. Ashler sprayed dust on the smallest, least-clear print, then squatted next to the bar of soap. 'Tape.'

  Somebody handed her the roll of Magic Mending tape. She gently lowered a loop of the tape across the first print, let it rest on the carbon particles for a moment, then lifted it.

  'Shoot,' she said, squinting at the tape. She picked

  up a magnifying glass and looked again.

  'What happened?'

  'No print,' she said. She looked back at the soap. 'It just sorta pulled little tiny pieces of the soap away... it's totally wrecked.'

  'All right, stop,' Lucas said. 'Let's get it back in the fridge, and talk to the Feebs again. Maybe we ought to do some experiments on another bar of soap with our own fingerprints before we try again.'

  Ashler nodded. 'That'd be best - but I thought we needed it in a hurry.'

  'Maybe not, if Harry's genius kid came through-'

  Harry's genius kid came through. Sloan had personally taken him to the Roseville store, because Sloan liked to drive fast in city cars with lights and sirens, and they were back in less than an hour. 'Four of them are pretty good,' the kid said. 'If Mr. Sloan can take me back to my place, I'll scan them in and we can ship them over to the FBI.'

  Lucas was looking at the slides, holding them up to a fluorescent light. They didn't look like much, but they looked better than other prints he'd seen. They looked better than what he'd been able to see with the naked eye. 'Harry,' he said to the kid's father, 'Your kid is a fuckin' genius.'

  Rinker got to Des Moines a little after five o'clock in the afternoon, checked into a Holiday Inn, and called Carmel on the cell phone.

  'More bad news,' Carmel said. 'My guy in the police department says they've got your fingerprints.' 'I wiped everything,' Rinker said, but she could feel the uncertainty in her own voice.

  'He says they took them off a bar of soap they found in a room at the Regency-White,' Carmel said. 'Davenport's guys.' 'A bar of soap?'

  'Yeah. He said they were sending them to the FBI.' 'I'll call you back,' Rinker said. She remembered picking up the soap. She hadn't thought to wipe it. She rang off before Carmel could protest, and sat quietly on the bed, pulling herself together for a moment. Despite her self-control, a tear trickled down her cheek: that fuckin' Davenport. She took three deep breaths, exhaled, then punched nine numbers into the phone. 'This is Rinker,' she said, when the man answered. 'I gotta pull the plug.'

  After a long silence, the man said, 'You're sure?' 'It's the Minneapolis deal. They've been to my place, even if they don't know it; but they're sniffing around Wichita. They've got a bad picture of me, but it's a picture, one of those computer deals. Now I think they might have my fingerprints.'

  'How could this happen?' Disbelief in his voice. 'You wouldn't believe it. But you tell Wooden Head to get out to Wichita with the money. I'm gonna clean out the bank there, go to my bottom-line ID - I'm shredding everything else - and I'll leave him the papers. He can take the bar and find a new manager;

  but my prints'll be all over the place. He should try to wipe everything he can, but I don't think he'll get everything.'

  'What about your apartment?'

  'I'm gonna try to get in and out, quick,' she said. 'I'll check the place first.'

  'I didn't think anybody had your prints.'

  'They don't. I've never been printed. That's the good news. But they've been getting too close, and sooner or later, they just might put things together. I can't take the chance.'

  'All right. Jeez, Clara...'

  'Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get back in touch, when I can.'

  'Where are you now?'

  'Minneapolis. I'll be leaving here in a couple of hours, I've got some cleaning up to do. But if I drive straight through the night, I ought to be in Wichita by the time the banks open.'

  When she finished, she called Carmel back: 'I'm closing down my life,' she
said. 'I'll just be a figment of your imagination by this time tomorrow'

  'You mean you're... giving up the bar?'

  'Everything,' Rinker said: 'Now listen: do you still think we go for Plan B?'

  'Well, if you got caught, or if there's something more on me... I mean, that'd settle things.'

  'All right. I've got to run to Wichita. I'll see you tomorrow night, probably.'