Robert Crais - The Last Detective

Starkey swaggered in like she owned the place.

"Homie in the house! Look what the bomb blew in!"

The techs smiled and called back when they saw her. Starkey gibed with them like a long-lost sorority sister working the home crowd, and seemed more relaxed and comfortable than any time since I had met her.

Chen had put on a white lab coat and vinyl gloves, and was working near a large glass chamber. He hunched when he saw us as if he were trying to hide inside the coat, and waved at Starkey to keep it down.

"Jesus, paint a target on me with all that noise! Everybody's going to know we're back."

"The walls are glass, John; they already know. Let's see what you have."

Chen had split the wrapper along its length and pinned it flat to a white sheet of paper. Jars of colored powder lined the back of his bench, along with eye droppers and vials, rolls of clear tape, and three of the fluffy brushes that women use to apply makeup. One end of the wrapper was smudged with white powder and little brown stains. The outline of a fingerprint was obvious, but the architecture of the pattern was blurred and indistinct. It looked pretty good to me, but Starkey made a face when she saw it.

"This looks like shit. Are you working here, John, or are you too busy hiding inside your jacket?"

Chen hunched even lower. If he hunched any more he would be under the bench.

"I've only been at it fifteen minutes. I wanted to see if I could get anything with the powder or ninhydrin."

The white smear was aluminum powder. The brown stains were a chemical called ninhydrin, which reacted with the amino acids left whenever you touch something.

Starkey bent for a closer inspection, then frowned at Chen as if he was stupid.

"This thing's been in the sun for days. It's too old to pick up latents with powder."

"It's also the fastest way to get an image into the system. I figured it was worth the shot."

Starkey grunted. She was okay with whatever might be faster.

"The nin doesn't look much better."

"Too much dust, and the sunlight probably broke down the aminos. I was hoping we'd get lucky with that, but I'm gonna have to glue it."

"Shit. How long?"

I said, "What does that mean, you have to glue it?"

Now Chen looked at me as if I was the one who was stupid. We had a food chain for stupidity going, and I was at the bottom.

"Don't you know what a fingerprint is?"

Starkey said, "He doesn't need a lecture. Just glue the damned thing."

Chen went pissy, like he didn't want to miss out on the chance to show off. He explained while he worked: Every time you touched something, you left an invisible deposit of sweat. Sweat was mostly water, but also contained amino acids, glucose, lactic acid, and peptides – what Chen called the organics. As long as moisture remained in the organics, techniques like dusting worked because the powder would stick to the water, revealing the swirls and patterns of the fingerprint. But when the water evaporated, all you had left was an organic residue.

Chen unpinned the wrapper, then used forceps to place it on a glass dish with the outside surface facing up. He put the dish into the glass chamber.

"We boil a little superglue in the chamber so the fumes saturate the sample. The fumes react with the organics and leave a sticky white residue along the ridges of the print."

Starkey said, "The fumes are poisonous as hell. That's why he's gotta do it in the box."

I didn't care what he did or how he did it, so long as we got results.

I said, "How long is this going to take?"

"It's slow. I normally use a heater to boil it, but it's faster when you force the boil with a little sodium hydroxide."

Chen filled a beaker with water, then put the water into the chamber close to the wrapper. He poured something labeled methylcyanoacrylate into a small dish, then put the dish into the chamber. He selected one of the bottles from his bench. The liquid inside was clear, like water.

Starkey said, "How long, John?"

Chen ignored us. He dribbled the sodium hydroxide over the superglue, then sealed the chamber. The sodium hydroxide and superglue fizzed, but nothing flashed or burst into flames. Chen turned on a small fan inside the chamber, then stepped back.

"How long?"

"Maybe an hour. Maybe more. I've gotta watch it. So much reactant will build up that you can ruin the prints."

We had nothing to do but wait, and we weren't even sure if anything would be found. I bought a Diet Coke from a machine in the reception area, and Starkey bought a Mountain Dew. We brought our drinks outside so that she could smoke. It was quiet and still in Glendale, with the low wall of the Verdugo Mountains above us and the tip of the Santa Monicas below. We were in the Narrows, that tight place between the mountains where the L.A. River squeezed into the city.

Starkey sat on the curb. I sat beside her. I tried to conjure a picture of Ben alive and safe, but all I saw were flashes of shadow and terrified eyes.

"Did you call Gittamon?"

"And tell him what, that I bailed on a crime scene to come over here with a guy that I was specifically ordered to keep off the case? That would be you, by the way."

Starkey flicked ash from her cigarette.

"I'll call him when we know what John finds. He's been paging me, but I'll wait."

I said, "Listen. I want to thank you."

"You don't have to thank me. I'm doing my job."

"A lot of people have the job, but not everyone busts their ass to get it done. I owe you. However this plays out, I owe you."

Starkey had more of her cigarette, then grinned out over the cars in the parking lot.

"That sounds pretty good, Cole. Now what kind of ass-busting did you have in mind?"

"I didn't mean it that way."

"My loss."

Starkey ate another white tablet. I decided to change the subject. I decided to be clever.

I said, "Starkey, are those breath mints or are you a drug addict."

"It's an antacid. I have stomach problems from when I was hurt, so I gotta take the antacid. It messed me up pretty bad inside."

Hurt. Being blown apart and killed in a trailer park was "hurt." I felt like a turd.

"I'm sorry. That wasn't my business."

She shrugged, then flicked her cigarette into the parking lot.

"This morning you asked why I didn't bring you the tape."

"It's not important. I just wondered why the other guy brought it instead of you. You said you'd be back."

"Your 201 and 214 were waiting in the fax machine. I started reading while I was waiting for the tape. I saw that you were wounded."

"Not when I was out with five-two. That was another time."

I should have gone to Canada. Then none of this would be happening.

"Yeah, I know. I saw you got hit by mortar fire. I was just curious about that, is all, what happened to you. You don't have to tell me if you don't want. I know it doesn't have anything to do with this case."

She struck up a fresh cigarette to hide behind the movement, as if she was suddenly embarrassed that I knew why she was asking. A mortar shell was a bomb. In a way, bombs had gotten both of us.

"It wasn't anything like with you, Starkey, not even close. Something exploded behind me and then I woke up under some leaves. I got a few stitches, that's all."

"The report says they took twenty-six pieces of frag out of your back and you almost bled to death."

I wiggled my eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

"Wanna see the scars, little girl?"

Starkey laughed.

"Your Groucho sucks."

"My Bogart's even worse. Want to hear that?"

"You want to talk scars? I could show you scars. I got scars that'd make you shit blue."

"What a pleasant use of language."

We smiled at each other, then both of us felt awkward at the same time. It wasn't banter any more and it somehow felt wrong. I guess my expression changed. Now both of us looked away.