Michael Prescott: Deadly Pursuit

Lovejoy nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. There’s no hope of tracking the purchase. The manufacturer reports moving thirty thousand units a day.”

“What about the syringe? You can’t just walk into a store and buy one, can you?”

“Under normal circumstances, no. Syringes are prescription items. There was some preliminary speculation that our man could be a doctor, but the M.E.’s who’ve done the postmortems don’t think so. He shows no unusual skill or knowledge in the placement of the needle. Possibly he’s an orderly or he works at a medical-supply firm.”

“Of course,” Moore added, “anybody can obtain needles on the street.” She’d seen enough of that in her childhood years.

Gifford frowned. “Dead end.” He seemed about to say something more when Ashe’s phone shrilled.

The desk sergeant transferring the call said there was a guy on the line who seemed to know something about the Tyler case. Ashe put him on speaker.

“Detective? Name’s Wallace Stargill. Call me Wally.” His voice, coming over the cheap speaker, had a hollow sound. “I tend bar over at the Lazy Eight on Second Street. Think I saw that girl in here last night.”

By this time Veronica Tyler’s family had been notified of her death, and her most recent photo had been released to the local media.

“Okay, Wally,” Ashe said, nicely composed. “You pretty sure it was her?”

“Yeah, damn sure.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“This guy. I mean, she was by herself at first, and then he sat down next to her. Seemed to be coming on pretty strong.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Not too good. It was crowded in there. The girl I noticed; she was a looker. As for the guy-I don’t know. He was dressed nice, I remember that.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the bar. I’m just opening up. Saw the report on TV while I was getting the kitchen ready for Julio.”

“Who’s Julio?”

“Substitute dishwasher. Our regular guy, Pedro, came down with the flu last night and had to go home early. Got a mess of dirty glasses here.”

Moore was out of her seat. “Tell him not to wash anything. We’ll be right over.”

The bar had a friendless, disconsolate quality in daytime. Upended chairs rested on rows of tables. Sunlight struggled through high, frosted windows. The smell of stale booze hung over the place like the odor of disinfectant in a morgue.

There was a kitchen at the rear where the overworked waitresses had deposited trays of used glasses. “Slow nights, I wash ’em myself,” Wally Stargill said to the small mob of agents and cops crowding in for a look. He was a tall, laconic man, his fleshy forearms crossed awkwardly over a spreading gut. “But Fridays and Saturdays are crazy here.”

“Crazy,” Gifford echoed, perhaps thinking of Veronica Tyler with an ampule of toilet cleaner in her neck.

Moore asked if the victim and the man who’d picked her up had left before or after Pedro went home.

“After.”

“So the glasses they used weren’t washed?”

“Probably not, unless I cleaned them in the sink under the bar. Like I said, I do that when we’re not too busy. Last night I doubt I got a chance.”

Moore pointed at the rows of glasses. Only Lovejoy knew her well enough to see that she was worked up. “He handled one of those.”

Ashe frowned. “What are you going to do? Print them all?”

“Right.”

“You serious?”

“Sure am.”

“There must be three hundred glasses here.”

“Then we’ll print three hundred glasses.”

Lovejoy cleared his throat, a tentative sound. “Conceivably we can narrow it down.” He turned to the bartender. “You happen to recall what the man was drinking?”

Stargill thought for a moment. “Beefeater on the rocks.”

“You’re certain?”

“Oh, yeah.” A sheepish smile. “I never forget a drink.”

“So it was a lowball glass,” Gifford said.

“That’s how we serve ’em.”

Lovejoy coughed again. “There would appear to be no more than thirty or forty of those.”

“All of a sudden this sounds a lot more practical,” Ashe said. “Got to warn you, though, our lab is pretty backed up. Staff cutbacks. You know the story.”

“Possibly we can requisition some help, expedite the process.” Lovejoy sneezed. “Damn. I hate this climate.”

“You hate all climates,” Moore said briskly. “Come on, let’s talk to I.D. Wally, may we use your phone?”

Identification Division flew in the Latent Fingerprints section chief, Paul Collins, to assist the Phoenix P.D. crime lab in the tedious procedure.

Collins, an East Coast native who thought of Arizona as cow country and the local constabulary as rubes, was pleasantly astonished to find an argon laser at his disposal, along with cyanoacrylate fuming cabinets, iodine fume guns, and gentian violet baths. By the end of the assignment, he was humming “My Darling Clementine” and considering retirement in the Grand Canyon State.

One hundred forty-six latents were recovered. It took three days to run cold searches on them all, using a modem link between the Phoenix P.D. computer and the FBI’s FINDER system, a database of eighty-three million prints. FINDER did the gross preliminary work, but the final, subtle matching had to be done by visual comparison, a time-consuming process.

Lovejoy and Moore stayed busy while the print searches progressed. Lovejoy flew home to brief the Denver SAC and wound up in a conference call with a deputy director and the Behavioral Science section chief. He appeased the media with a thirty-minute briefing in which he conveyed the impression of speaking substantively while actually saying nothing at all. He made no mention of the massive fingerprinting procedure already well underway.

Moore read a transcript of the news conference and felt a familiar blend of irritation and bemusement. She knew that Peter was good at what he did, a competent agent and a decent man, but he was too willing to play the game on others’ terms, to stifle his own personality in a numbing quest for blandness. Fundamentally he was weak, crippled by insecurity; and a hard life had taught her to despise softness of any kind.

In Phoenix she kept the other members of the task force updated by phone, fax, and e-mail. She was dealing with police departments in three cities, sheriff’s offices in three counties, and the FBI field office in each of the states where a killing had occurred. The logistics were maddening.

Most of the effort was wasted anyhow. So far there was little news to report, as she informed Lovejoy when he called. “Ashe’s people interviewed the two waitresses at the bar; they don’t remember Veronica or her date. Her car has been dusted. Smooth glove prints on the passenger-side door handle.”

“Evidently he wore gloves, as usual.” Exhaustion dragged Lovejoy’s voice down.

“Of course he did. There were some viable latents in the car that don’t belong to the deceased. For elimination purposes Phoenix P.D. is printing Veronica’s friends, neighbors, coworkers, anyone who might have ridden with her. But we both know he doesn’t leave prints.”

“How about the autopsy protocols?”

“Just delivered. No sign of anal or oral intercourse, but penile-vaginal contact is certain. Penetration was postmortem and rough. No semen was found; he’s careful, used a condom.”

“As usual,” Lovejoy said again. “He doesn’t seem to give us much to go on, does he?”

“You got that right.”

“Well”-Lovejoy tried to sound hopeful-“possibly the bar angle will pan out.”

“Speaking of which, Wally Stargill spent two hours with an Identikit artist and gave us a vague but not totally useless sketch.”