“Count on it.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I mumbled.
“She just knows your track record, white man,” he turned back to me. “Just one question. Why’d you hafta pick spiders? You know I can’t stand the things.”
“Actually, I didn’t, you did. All I said was ‘what’s that crawling on your arm?’ Your own fears and imagination did the rest of the work for me.”
He shook his head. “Just what I needed ta’ hear.”
I was still clipping my visitor’s badge onto my pocket when Carl Deckert met the two of us at the door to the MCS command post. His normally laid back demeanor had been replaced by one of frantic urgency as he held the door open and hustled us into the room.
“I’ve got something you might want to have a look at,” he told us as he excitedly waved a sheaf of papers at us. “You’re not gonna believe it.”
“What?” Ben queried, following him to a nearby desk. “Whaddaya have?”
Shadows fell darkly across the corner area from the flickering fluorescent tubes in the ceiling lights as they dimly sputtered away towards uselessness. Deckert reached out and craned the flexible neck of a small lamp forward and switched it on, effectively illuminating at least part of the desk’s scarred surface.
“I just got this right after you hung up,” he spoke rapidly as he shuffled through the papers and slid an eight- by-ten photo beneath the puddle of light. “The lab lifted this from the little girl’s vinyl book bag.”
The black-and-white-toned image depicted a curving pattern of lines arcing around into what might have been a tight whorl. Might have been, because they abruptly ended in a blank, smeary looking splotch.
“This one is from the Barnes woman,” he continued and slid a similar grey-toned image in next to the original.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Ben slowly enunciated the words as he leaned forward to inspect the fingerprint photos more closely.
Not being familiar with fingerprint analysis, I appealed, “Somebody want to fill me in?”
“It’s a partial right thumbprint,” Detective Deckert explained. “The one you turned us on to with your vision or whatever you call it.”
“Yeah, I kinda caught on to that,” I acknowledged. “But I thought it was too smudged to do anything with.”
“That’s what we thought,” he continued. “But that was before we got the second print which just happened to be quite a bit clearer.”
“They both look smudged to me.”
“It’s a scar,” Ben volunteered, completing the explanation for me, then turned to Deckert. “Any hits from AFIS?”
“Not yet,” he returned. “It’s been scanned, and they’re trying to do a digital image match, but that takes a little longer. The first one didn’t hit, but this one is clearer, so maybe…”
“One of you Detective Storm?” a voice issued from behind us.
We turned to find a uniformed officer peering at us expectantly, a manila envelope tucked under his arm.
“That’s me,” Ben answered.
“Got something here from Capitol Bank for you.” The officer held out a clipboard and pen. “I need ya to sign for it.”
Ben quickly scribbled his signature on the paperwork then exchanged the clipboard for the envelope and muttered a quick “thanks.” He was already ripping it open before the officer was out the door.
“Hey Storm!” another voice called from across the room. “Got a cellular call from a Special Agent Mandalay on line two. Wants to talk to you.”
“Tell ‘im I’m not here,” he shouted back as he rifled through the contents of the envelope.
“He’s a she,” the voice returned.
“Then fuckin’ tell HER I’m not here,” he shouted back angrily.
“What are you looking for?” I queried as I watched him quickly shuffling through the papers.
“Ten print card,” he answered. “All bank employees are printed for security and exclusionary purposes.”
“Exclusionary purposes?”
“Like if the bank gets broken into or robbed,” Deckert explained. “Employees’ prints are going to be all over the place, so we need copies in order to exclude them from any of the prints lifted during the investigation.”
“Here it is,” Ben intoned urgently and tossed the heavy stock card face up on the desk.
Each of the outlined squares contained a neatly inked copy of Roger Henderson’s fingerprints. The black and white study of irrefutable personal identification stared back up as the three of us brought our eyes to bear on the right thumbprint.
What met our triple-barreled gaze was a curving pattern of lines arcing around into what might have been a tight whorl. Might have been, because the lines ended abruptly in a blank, smeary looking splotch.
“It’s him,” I whispered.
“Get the prosecuting attorney on the horn,” Ben ordered Deckert calmly as he handed the rest of Roger Henderson’s employee file to him. “Then call Benson. I want a warrant yesterday.”
“I’m on it,” Deckert was already dialing the phone.
“Detective Benjamin Storm?” a demanding, almost angry, female voice came from behind us.
We turned once again and were greeted by an attractive brunette woman who appeared to be in her late twenties. She was dressed in a nicely fitted grey suit that scarcely managed to conceal the forty-caliber bulge at her right hip.
“Yeah,” Ben answered.
She thrust her hand forward. In it was a large leather case, held deftly open with her index finger as she prominently displayed her badge and FBI identification.
“Special Agent Constance Mandalay,” she announced indignantly. “I thought you weren’t here?”
Ben looked her coolly in the eyes without blinking and answered her accusation head on. “I lied.”
CHAPTER 22
The two of them engaged in a short-lived staring contest as Agent Mandalay slipped her identification back into her jacket and folded her arms across her chest. Petite-framed and standing no taller than five-foot-six, she was forced to look up at Ben, but that wasn’t unusual as most everyone else had to do the same.
Ben stood with his hands on his hips, eyes tightly locked with hers. To the outside observer, they seemed to form a brief living caricature of David and Goliath. Had the urgency and gravity of the current situation been of a lesser degree, I am certain the standoff would have elicited a number of laughs.
“Well, at least you’re honest about that.” Agent Mandalay maintained her resentful demeanor as she spat the comment. “How long did you plan to keep ducking my calls? You had to know I’d show up here eventually.”
“For as long as I needed to,” Ben retorted, continuing with the precedent he had set for truthfulness. “And unfortunately, yes, I knew some Feeb would come walkin’ through the door at some point. Hell, I’m surprised ya’ waited this long.”
“Had it been up to me, we wouldn’t have,” she shot back. “I was ready to come down here when you made your queries through VICAP. You should have called the Bureau for help with the first homicide. We have a lot more experience in this field than you do. We have experts on occult practices that…”
Ben cut her off mid-sentence, “I got my own expert, thank you.”
“Who? Him?” she stated incredulously as she waved her hand in my direction. I assumed she recognized me from the media coverage. “He claims he’s a Witch, for Chrissake! I’m talking about people with PhD’s, not some flake you picked up off the street.”
I was mildly insulted, but then, I was also quite used to the ridicule and demeaning commentaries from
