Mercy

I don’t really see what this has to do with the burglary at Nathaniel Anderson’s house — apart from the coincidence of one of your clients taking it into his head to burglarize the home of one of your employees.”

Alex shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure how much she had surmised or how far her speculations had carried her.

“Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. We can use this passport to prove that Dorothy Olsen went to England. So in that sense, the passport is evidence in a capital case and could save a man who is due to be executed in less than an hour.”

“And you want me to release the passport as evidence in this other case? But why didn’t you just get your client to sign a release for it? Until you told me this, it was listed as one of his possessions, not as an exhibit in the case against him. Now that you’ve told me this it’s a whole different ball game. I have to contact Mr. Anderson and ask him if he wishes to include the passport in the complaint. You can probably file a discovery motion, but I don’t see how we can get anything done in the next fifty minutes.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m not asking you to release the passport. If I’d wanted that, I wouldn’t have told you all this. I’d have just got Kelly to sign a release and got the passport that way.”

“Now you’re really lost me.”

“Look, I’ve had several District Court hearings today, as well as conversations with the governor. And they’re all playing hardball. The consensus seems to be it’s not enough just to prove that Dorothy Olsen left the country alive. I have to establish what happened to her afterward. This passport — Dorothy Olsen’s passport — doesn’t just show that she was alive and went to England. The fact that it was in Nat’s possession suggests that he knew this and that he had some sort of contact with her. The fact that the passport shows no exit stamp suggests that he may have killed her in England and then brought her passport back with him.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Maybe he was planning on giving it to someone else to help him gain access to her money. We know that money was taken out of her account for over a year after she vanished. He might have killed her and got someone to pose as her and used this other girl to milk Dorothy’s bank account.”

“Well I don’t know if I buy this theory. I mean, it’s plausible, but no more than that. And what do you want me to do? This is something you’re surely going to have to take to the governor and argue it out with him — or the courts if that’s quicker.”

She sounded sympathetic, like she really wanted to help. But she also sounded firm, as if to underscore the fact that she couldn’t.

“If I take this to the governor now, the first question he’s going to ask me is if I have any proof that this passport was ever in Nat’s possession in the first place.”

“But I thought you said that Lee Kelly found it there.”

“Yes, he did find it there. He wouldn’t lie to me and there’s no other way he could have got it. But how do I convince the governor of that? The word of a career burglar that he found the passport at the house of a law-abiding citizen isn’t going to cut any ice with a no-nonsense hard-head like Dusenbury. I need to be able to prove that this passport was in Nat’s possession.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“I can’t, Sergeant Nightingale, but you can!” She looked at him blankly. “With fingerprints.”

She swallowed nervously before speaking.

“Do you know how long it’ll take to get fingerprints off that passport?”

“It isn’t hard: you just put it in a sealed chamber, fill the chamber with cyanoacrylic vapor and voila! It’s done all the time. They’ve lifted prints off forty-year-old Nazi war documents.”

“Yes, Mr. Sedaka, I know all about fingerprint science. It’s part of the police exam — at inspector level, let alone sergeant. But it’s not quite as simple as that. First of all, not all paper retains fingerprints equally well.”

“I know, but passports are made of pretty good quality paper.”

“Yes, but that’s the problem. The great paradox is that the worse the quality of the paper, the easier it is to get fingerprints off it. Good quality paper is bad for retaining dabs.”

“Yes, but we’re not talking forty years here. The passport is nine years old, but it’s quite likely that he handled it more recently. We’re still in with a chance.”

“Okay, maybe he did handle it recently, but there are other problems. Just switching on the machine costs money and, like every other department, we’re on a budget. That’s why we usually do batch jobs with several pieces of paper, whether from one case or several. You don’t just put one document in the machine and switch it on. You wait until you’ve got enough pages to run the machine.”

“But a man’s life is at stake here!”

“I know that! And I’m not just brushing you off here but there’s another complicating factor. A passport isn’t like a flat page. It’s a document with pages. We have some machines where you can put in a book — or in this case, a passport — and then turn the pages with robot arms so that every page gets exposed to the cyanoacrylic vapor. But I don’t think we have such a machine available locally. We may have to send it to a lab in SoCal or maybe the one in Sacramento. But they’re not open 24/7 like we are.”

“Well why can’t you just cut the pages out and space them throughout the machine? That’ll also solve the problem of running the machine when it isn’t full.”

“There’s another problem there. The passport is a legal document. Technically it’s the property of the United States government. We can’t just cut it up without authorization from INS or Homeland Security — or at least a District Court order.”

“But it’s a man’s life!”

“I know that, but we’re cops! We have to go by the book.”

“And for that you’re ready to let a man die?”

“Look, we don’t even know that we’ll find what you’re looking for. For all we know we might not even find this man’s dabs on the passport. For all we know he might not have handled it. How do I know you’re telling the truth? You might just be an over-zealous attorney who’s ready to go over the top to save his client’s neck.”

Alex was about to deliver an angry retort, but he cut himself short. He realized that Sergeant Nightingale was right. He was an over-zealous attorney and he had gone over the top to help his client. But he had come too far to drop the matter now.

“Okay, does it have to be a court or DC?”

“Who else could it be?”

“I was thinking about the governor. I know he’s not federal, but the courts’ll take too long and Homeland Security or INS won’t be open till tomorrow morning — and even then it’ll take days to cut through the red tape.”

“How quickly can you contact the governor?”

“I can get him on the phone right now. The question is, if he authorizes it, will you do it?”

Grace Nightingale took a deep breath and thought about it for a couple of seconds.

“If Governor Dusenbury authorizes it, we’ll cut the pages out of the passport and run the fingerprint test now. But how quickly can we get the governor on the line at this time? Is he even awake?”

“Oh he’s awake now. In fact, he’s waiting for my call. Like I said, he gave me his direct line. If you call it and tell him you’ve got me beside you, he’ll speak to me.”

“Do you know if Mr. Anderson’s fingerprints are on file in this state?”

“He has no priors as far as I know, but there should be a thumbprint on file at the CDMV.”

“Good enough,” said Grace, nodding. “We can access their database from the secure terminals here.”

Alex gave her the number and she put in the call. It was the governor who answered, but she spent half a minute verifying it was him. Then she put Alex on the line. He outlined the problem in record time and then held his breath.

“All right, I’ll sign an order for them to run the tests right away and fax it over, but I don’t know how quickly they can do it. ”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, sir. Is there any possibility that you’d consider granting a stay? We’ve found quite a lot even though it’s inconclusive. The airline ticket, the payments to the medical center, the passport, the stamp in the passport, where it was found. I know it’s not enough for clemency, sir. But isn’t it enough to grant