Read Online Carved in Bone:Body Farm-1 by Jefferson Bass - Free Book Online Page B

wanna tug for yourself, or you gonna help?”
    “Hold on—oh, wait, that’s what you’re doing already,” I teased. “When’s the last time you got pantsed? You got a camera somewhere?”
    “Great, now I’m supposed to help you humiliate me even further? Thanks.”
    “Don’t mention it.”
    “Come on, Bill, this light’s hot. Durn it, I’m not kidding.”
    I picked up a small can of acetone and dribbled a bit over the edges of Art’s fingers, starting with the ones gripping the metal housing of the light source.
    “So what’s the flash point of acetone? And what’s the temp of that light?” As the solvent soaked in, Art’s taut skin slowly peeled free. The fingers were an angry red. He rubbed them with a rag, then some hand lotion.
    “Thanks a lot,” he said. “I owe you.” I wasn’t sure whether he was thanking me for setting him free or threatening me for dragging my feet about it. Both, knowing Art. I made a mental note to sniff my steering wheel in future before grabbing hold of it.
    “Next time you really oughta read the label. That stuff sticks to your fingers.”
    “Ha-ha. Very funny.”
    If anybody knew about superglue and fingers, it was Art. Not only was he KPD’s senior criminalist, he was one of the nation’s leading fingerprint experts. In crime labs all over the country, technicians were using superglue-fuming gizmos to coat objects with sticky fumes that could pick up latent prints. And the gizmos they were using had been designed and patented by my buddy Art. Even the FBI had taken a shine to Art’s superglue gizmo, which in forensics is like Michael Jordan taking a shine to your basketball shoe. Spread on the counter beside the scope was a batch of photos. Most looked to be crime scene photos showing the interior of a car, a battered blue Impala. One, though, was a school portrait of a girl, maybe eight years old. Little girl, big smile. I recognized the photo: I’d seen it in the paper half a dozen times in the past two weeks, which is how long Stacy Beaman had been missing. She was last seen getting into a rusty blue car. The one in the photos belonged to a registered sex offender who’d been seen near the girl’s school three times in the days before her disappearance.
    I looked at Art’s scope. There was a car window crank clamped to the specimen stage. It didn’t take a forensic genius to figure out that the crank had come from the passenger door of that rusted Impala.
    “You getting anything?”
    “Hell, no. Not even a partial. Not from her, anyhow. His, they’re all over the place. Not surprising—it’s his car—but it’s killing me that we missed hers.”
    “Missed ’em? Sounds like you think they’re in there somewhere.”
    “ Were in there; aren’t anymore. Hell, she was in there—three witnesses saw her. We just didn’t move fast enough. By the time we got the warrant and got the car, the prints were gone. Vanished into thin air.”
    He wasn’t speaking figuratively. It was a phenomenon he had told me about before, one that had baffled investigators in child abductions for many years: why were children’s fingerprints so elusive, so fleeting? It had baffled Art, too, but the second or third time he found himself coming up empty-handed, he had vowed to figure it out. He’d enlisted the brain trust over at Oak Ridge National Lab—he pulled together a team of organic and analytical chemists—plus some parents and kids from a local elementary school. This cobbled-together team had done a research project to ferret out the differences between adult fingerprints and children’s prints. Once Art had gotten the ball rolling, it didn’t take the chemists long to figure out what was going on. Adult prints are oilbased, they found; kids’ prints, on the other hand—before puberty kicks in and activates all those acne-producing oil glands—are water-based. And water evaporates, taking the prints with it. The explanation was simple; the ramifications