Snake Eyes by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

7

Saturday, April 2, 2005, 5:45 A.M.

THE MICROWAVE PINGED and Warrick Brown withdrew the bowl of soup like a lab sample whose processing was complete, carted it over to a break-room table, and sat. He was waiting for Mia Dickerson to finish the DNA testing on the sample he’d given her from the scraping under Tara Donnelly’s fingernails.

An attractive African-American of around thirty, Mia possessed straight black hair, large brown eyes, and a formidable IQ. He smiled at the thought of her as he dipped a spoon into his steaming tomato soup. The CSI and the lab technician had flirted from time to time, and she’d alternated ignoring him with giving him a hard time, which he chose to interpret as a sure sign that she dug him.

A buoyant Greg strolled in, removed a bottle of juice from the fridge, shook it up, then joined Warrick. This was Greg’s normal shift, so the graveyard hours weren’t fazing him. Warrick—who had been on the swing shift for a while now—was feeling the hands of his inner clock spinning in confusion.

“Are you tired?” Greg asked, with an impish grin. “Or just laid back?”

“Don’t mistake ‘cool’ for ‘beat,’ Greg—I’m here for the long haul.”

“Don’t feel bad. I’m starting to drag, too.”

If the young CSI had looked any fresher, Warrick would’ve had to dump his remaining soup on him.

Warrick asked, “How’d you do with the glove?”

Greg swigged and swallowed, then said, “I did what you told me—turned it inside out, then hung it in the super-glue chamber.”

“Raise a print?”

Greg grinned in satisfaction. “Oh yeah—two clear ones: middle finger and index.”

Often criminals made their biggest mistakes when thinking they were at their most clever. To avoid leaving fingerprints, a perp would wear gloves—not realizing that cotton gloves had fibers that could be matched, or that leather gloves showed wear in a particular fashion on a particular person and were, therefore, as good as fingerprints.

When criminal masterminds graduated to latex gloves—and once more considered themselves bulletproof (or anyway fingerprint-proof)—they were again proved wrong.

Lawbreaking has a natural tendency to make even the coolest criminal nervous. Sweating, a criminal might wipe his or her brow—then, if touching something at the crime scene, leave a print behind just as if he were wearing no glove at all. The same thing occurs on the inside of the glove; most criminals didn’t realize that the inner latex surface is a perfect place for the energetic crime scene investigator to search.

Warrick asked, “How’d you get those prints?”

Greg worked at seeming matter-of-fact, though Warrick could tell the young CSI was proud of himself. “I filled the fingers of the glove with one-inch PVC pipe, then rolled each finger over a black gel lifter. I got clean prints from those two fingers, and various smears from the thumb and other fingers.”

“Nice,” Warrick said. “Now we’ve got reverse prints from the inside of the gloves.”

“That’s pretty slick procedure, ’Rick,” Greg said. “Where’d you learn that one?”

“Velders and Zonjee—two Dutchmen I saw at the IAI conference last year.

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