“Tomorrow morning I’ll nail down the fellows who killed that girl.”
“There’s more than one?” Ronnie asked.
“I’m sure of it,” Longarm told him.
“And you’ll catch them tomorrow morning?”
“That’s right.” Longarm gathered in his cards and tipped them up so he could see. Two pair, kings and sevens. It could have been worse.
“I’ll open,” Jason Tyler said. “Five cents to get this game rolling.”
“Who is it, Marshal?” Benson asked. “C’mon, you can tell us.”
“Who killed her? Oh, I don’t know that yet. Won’t until tomorrow morning, like I said.”
“I’m confused. If you don’t know now, what makes you think you’ll find out come morning?” Benson persisted.
Longarm smiled and gave the boys a wink. “Can you fellows keep a secret?”
“Of course.” The four pals leaned expectantly forward, all ears now, their poker hands forgotten in the excitement of the moment. The marshal was about to let them in on a secret of his trade.
“Now that the storm has eased off, I can apply a new technique the Secret Service has come up with.”
“What d’you mean, Marshal?”
“You’ve heard of the Secret Service, I suppose? Properly speaking, they fall under the Treasury Department, while my boss and me work for the Justice Department. Same government, though, so they shared this technique with the rest of us. They worked it out as a tool they can use if somebody ever again tries to assassinate a President of the United States. That’s what the Secret Service does, you see. They protect the President. Other stuff too, I suppose. As for my crowd, it’s their newly developed technique that interests us.”
“Technique? What kind of technique would that be.”
“I can’t explain exactly how it works. We aren’t allowed to do that. But the upshot of the deal is that they’ve worked out this technique … it’s real scientific … that identifies each individual human being. You can use anything of his. Or hers. Works just as good on women as it does on men. They tell me it’s foolproof. And it works on any part of the person too. Hair, spit, fingernail cuttings, anything at all.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I most certainly am not. You examine any tiny particle of … well, of any damn thing. You have to examine it close, see, under a microscope. And the instrument has to be absolutely stable. It can’t wobble or vibrate even the least little bit or this technique won’t work. That’s why I couldn’t do it so long as the wind was blowing like it did. Even a house with a perfect foundation might wobble enough to throw everything off. But now that the wind is quiet, I can bring out my instruments and take readings off all the samples I can find out at that cabin where the girl was killed. It don’t matter what I examine. If the guys left a speck of pecker cheese behind, a pubic hair, if one of them took a piss or spit on the floor, just anything at all … I got ‘em cold. I can not only identify them, I can get the evidence to stand up in a court of law. Think of it, will you. One unnoticed hair picked up off the blanket that girl was wrapped in and some dumb son of a bitch will go to the gallows.”
“The gallows, Marshal? For killing a whore? Come on now. We all know better than that. It isn’t like it was a regular person that died. The girl wasn’t but a lousy little whore.”
“We all know better, do we?” Longarm scowled. “It might’ve worked like that. If the killers hadn’t been so god-awful stupid. I mean, right in the beginning, just after the girl died, whoever done it could have gone to Mayor Parminter and confessed. Claimed she died by accident. You know there wouldn’t have been any fuss, likely not even any formal charges. He’d of had an inquest, if that, and let it drop. But whoever did it, they walked away and tried to hide what they done, and that made things serious. Then they compounded their stupidity by trying to kill me. You may not realize it, but that’s a federal offense. The government takes a kinda dim view of anybody that tries to kill a federal officer. And then, if all that wasn’t bad enough, the dumb sons of bitches went and burned down that livery stable. Endangered the whole town when they did that, and broke a good half-dozen state and local laws in the process. No, boys, whoever is on the string for this thing is more than likely gonna hang for all the trouble they’ve caused. And I will get them started on their way to the gallows myself, personally, come daybreak tomorrow morning when I collect my samples from that cabin.”
“Why don’t you go get them tonight?” Billy Madlock asked. “Wouldn’t that be the sensible thing to do?”
“It might, except I wouldn’t be able to see everything as good by lamplight as I can in natural daylight tomorrow. Besides, the microscope requires an awful lot of light to work right, and I have to be able to testify in court that I conducted the examination right by the book and that every tiny detail was followed. There can’t be any mistakes allowed when it’s a man’s neck on the line. I owe that much consideration to whoever the dumb bastards are that are gonna swing for these crimes.”
“Damn, Marshal, that’s really interesting.”
“Yes, but mind, you promised me to keep this just amongst ourselves. Don’t go whispering it around, not even to your very best friends.”
“No problem about that with us, Marshal. We all are our very best friends, all of us right here together.”
“All right then. Uh, where were we in the card game?” Longarm puffed on his cheroot and leaned forward, trying to concentrate on his play.
Inside, though, he was about to get a bellyache from having to hide his laughter.
Good Lord, these dumb kids were buying it. He couldn’t believe it. Gullible? He reckoned. Surely anyone with half a grain of sense could recognize that there wasn’t, there couldn’t be, any such “scientific technique” as what Deputy Marshal Custis Long was describing. Individual identification. What a dumb fucking idea. Hell, anybody knew that blood was blood and spit was spit and peter fuzz was just all peter fuzz.
But these boys were buying the yarn lock, stock, and barrel, and Longarm thought that was one of the funniest damn things he’d come across yet.
He’d made the whole thing up himself, starting with the germ of an idea planted by way of Jim Jennison Junior’s innocent comment about criminals leaving an identifying mark behind. And before midnight, Longarm
