'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
