Brass in Pocket (20 page)

“Sounds good to me.”

“Did you know that embalming fluid is a relatively recent invention?” Doc Robbins continued, on a roll now. “It became commonplace during the Civil War. Any liquid works—the point is just to replace the blood with something that will decompose more slowly. For years the liquid of choice was arsenic, which was cheap and widely available. Old cemeteries can be picturesque, but so much arsenic has leached into the soil in some that they can also be hazardous. To anyone not yet dead, that is.”

“I'll, umm, keep that in mind. When I'm doing my planning.”

The medical examiner had turned his attention back to the sheep's insides, but he eyed her over the top of his glasses. “See that you do.”

“Thanks for the swab,” she said. “I've got to get going.”

“Touch DNA?” Doc Robbins asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You're looking for touch DNA—DNA traces left behind when a person touches another person or object.”

“That's right,” she said. “It's a relatively new technique, but I'm trying to get better at it, and figured this might be a case where it would come in handy.” She would use polymerase chain reaction and short tandem repeat on the extremely small specimen she expected to have, to amplify the sample, making enough copies of the cells so that she would be able to analyze the DNA.

“So you're saying that if someone just touches some object, he might leave DNA on it,” David said.

“That's the theory. We leave a little something behind everywhere we go.”

“No more searching for drops of blood or saliva or flecks of skin or tiny strands of hair?”

“Those things still help, don't get me wrong. But they might not be as crucial as they once were, once touch DNA becomes more commonplace.”

“Weird.”

“Anyway, thanks,” Wendy said again. She really wanted to get busy processing the swab, to see what she might have picked up.

“Good luck,” Doc Robbins muttered.

“Let me know if you think of a nursery rhyme sheep with a name,” David called as she was leaving.

“I will, absolutely,” she said. She let the door swing shut.

I am completely surrounded by nerds,
she thought on her way back to her lab.
Like I'm an island in a sea of them. And global warming is raising the sea levels
.…

In science, as in most aspects of life, patience often pays off.

Greg had thought he would go crazy before he finished comparing edged tools to the marks left on the irrigation tube. Even his interrogation of Fred Rosen only offered a short break, and Rosen's knife hadn't come close to being the right tool.

Finally, he found a match.

It was a pair of pruning shears that he had taken from a gardening shed at the airport. The marks he made with them on identical black tubing were a precise fit—the same tool had definitely cut both tubes. It wasn't what a professional landscaper would use to cut irrigation tubing, he was sure, although it was a tool to which that landscaper would have access.

His next concern was who had handled the shears. If the same fingerprint turned up there as on the muffler, canopy, cockpit, or tube, then he would have a solid suspect. There had been no landscaper on duty, so he hadn't yet fingerprinted any, but he did have a list of airport employees and could send an officer out to collect those prints.

Mandy was busy with other things, so Greg checked the shears for fingerprints himself, fuming them in a small cyanoacrylate fuming chamber, which made two friction ridge impressions stand out distinctly under ultraviolet light. He added a little
powder for contrast, photographed them, and lifted them with low-tack tape. Finally, he downloaded the images from the camera and ran them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS.

A short while later, he had his answer. Or part of it, anyway. One of the fingerprints had come from someone who wasn't in the system.

But the other belonged to the night janitor at the airport, Benny Kracsinski.

He realized there could be a perfectly legitimate reason for Benny to use the landscaper's clippers from time to time. Greg had no way of knowing how much overlap there was between the two jobs. Ordinarily a janitor worked inside and a gardener or landscaper worked outside, but he supposed it was possible that the janitor had needed to prune an indoor plant, or wanted to cut back one that had grown too close to a window he had to wash. Any number of other scenarios presented themselves.

Still… since it was the only print he had that definitively linked an airport employee with a tool used in the commission of a homicide, he had to dig deeper.

Benny's prints were in AFIS, he learned, because they had been taken when Benny had joined the Air Force, years before. That was strange in itself—Greg wouldn't have taken Benny for a veteran. He had assumed that Benny's disability had been long term, maybe from birth, but apparently that wasn't the case.

He delved into what he could find online and in law enforcement databases about Benny Kracsinski, and the picture filled in a little more.
Time to bring Catherine into the loop
, he decided.
We just might have a murderer here
.

W
HEN HER CELL PHONE
rang, Catherine snatched it up, hoping it was Jim Brass with some sort of explanation for his presence in Deke Freeson's motel room. It was already halfway to her ear when she recognized the tone assigned only to Lindsey. She smiled. This late, Lindsey had to be calling back to tell her that the earlier emotional crisis had been resolved. The storms of youth blew furious but passed quickly. “Lindsey? What are you doing up? It's a—”

“It's July, Mom, there's no school tomorrow. And anyway, it's Friday night.”

“Okay, I know that, but still—”

“Jeez, do you want to talk to me or not? Because sometimes you say I don't communicate enough and then when I try—”

“Fine, I'm sorry. What is it?”

There was a long silence, as if Lindsey was reconsidering her phone call. “It's about Sondra,” she said finally.

“Sondra.”

“You know, Sondra. My friend.”

Catherine's turn to reconsider. She wanted Lindsey to be able to come to her with any problem—never wanted her daughter to feel that her troubles were unimportant, or that she would be turned away. But how had Sondra's problems become hers? “I know. Is this still about her and what's his name, Jayden? I tried to call you earlier, by the way. I thought you were in bed.”

“I'm still out.”

“Because?”

“Because Gemma is, like, freaking out over it.”

Now she had inherited Gemma's problem, too. Was this how it worked these days? She didn't think she had ever dumped all of her friends' emotional issues on her own mother. She had given her grief in plenty of other ways, but not that one. “Okay…”

“I mean, when I called you we had just left the club. But then Gemma wouldn't get in the car. She waited around in the parking lot until Sondra came out with that guy she was with, and then attacked her. Like, physically.”

“Was there a fight?”

“I don't know if you could call it that. We pulled them apart pretty fast. I think Gemma got in a punch or two, and Sondra scratched her face a little. It wasn't like anybody called the cops or anything.”

That's good,
Catherine thought,
because the last thing I need tonight is to bail you out of jail
. “Then what happened?” she asked.

“Then I tried to talk to Sondra about it, but she
didn't want to talk. She took off with that guy. She was acting like a stranger, like I don't even know her. And so I came over to Gemma's place and I've been trying to calm her down. She got pretty wasted.”

“Are you okay, Lindsey?” That was the only part of this Catherine found truly important.

“I'm okay. I just… I don't know. Why do people act like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like either of them. It's like two of my best friends have been possessed by aliens or something.”

Catherine couldn't resist. “Do aliens possess people? I always thought that was more of a demonic thing.”

“Whatever, Mom. You know what I mean.”

“I know, honey. I wish I could answer you. People are just—sometimes it's like we're all wearing masks. We show the world the image of us that we want others to see. Or that we think they want to see. Looking inside—getting under the mask to the real person beneath—that's the hard part, because they have to be willing to let us in. If someone wants to keep the mask in place, it's almost impossible to see under it.”

“You're not making any sense, Mom.”

“I'm not?”

“You're talking about masks and stuff. That's crazy. I'm just talking about Gemma and Sondra.”

“It's a metaphor, Lindsey.”

“I know that! But… you really think I don't know my best friends?”

“You tell me. You're the one who said they're acting like strangers.”

“Well, yeah I guess.”

“Did you ever expect to see these things happen to them? To have to pull Gemma and Sondra apart? Over some guy?”

“Of course not.”

“Then maybe you don't know them as well as you thought. That's all I'm saying, Lindsey. People show one face to the world, but that doesn't necessarily represent who they really are. It might take a lifetime to truly know someone, if you ever do.”

“Maybe you don't really know your friends, Mom, but I don't have that problem. We're like family.”

“I'm your real family,” Catherine reminded her. “I'm just saying—”

“Saying what, Mother? That I don't know what I'm talking about? That's how it usually goes, right? You've been through every possible experience, and I don't know the first thing about the world.”

Pulling out the big gun of daughter/mother arguments: the “Mother” word. Once it had been considered a sign of respect. Now it signified sarcastic dismissal at best, and often outright antagonism.

“That's not it at all, Lindsey—” she began.

Lindsey cut her off again. “Mom, Gemma's puking. I gotta go.”

“Take care, Lindsey. Get her to bed, then go home!”

The phone clicked midway through her final sentence. Lindsey was gone. Catherine pictured her holding Gemma's long blond hair as she knelt over
the bowl. Not an image she had ever had of her daughter before.

But then, the things she had been trying to say applied to mothers and daughters as well as to friends. There had been a time, years really, when she had known Lindsey. Or believed she did, anyway. Then the teenage years had struck with the force of a hurricane, erasing that knowledge and trust like floodwaters did names scrawled in beach sand.

Now? Not quite strangers, not quite friends. They loved each other, she was sure of that.

She wasn't sure of much else, though. Not much at all.

Her life seemed to be coming untethered around her. Sara and Warrick were gone. Gil was away from the lab, and in his less guarded moments, she thought she sensed an increasing distance there, as if he was working toward a departure as well. Lindsey would one day be an adult, and while that wouldn't mean Catherine was no longer her mother, it would change their relationship. A child and an adult were two different people, she believed—there was continuity there, but Lindsey would have her own interests, her own life, and Catherine would be less a part of it than she had been for all these years.

Then there was Jim Brass, seemingly mixed up in a murder. She wanted to find him, grab him by the collar, and make him tell her what he was up to. She couldn't control the people she loved, but the more they seemed intent on straying away from her, the more she found herself wanting to do just that.

She wasn't the sort of person who liked to dwell on self-analysis, but if she were she might put it down to abandonment issues, because of her father's absence from her childhood. Not wanting to be left again, her first reaction was to grab hold, to refuse others permission to move away from her gravitational orbit.

That, no doubt, was an unhealthy response. Unhealthy and unhelpful.

Which didn't mean it wasn't real. It was just something she would have to deal with, on her own terms, on her own time.

She put her phone away, and looked up to see Greg standing in the doorway.

“You there?” he asked.

“I seem to be.”

“You looked a little lost in space for a minute there.”

“It's… it's nothing. What's going on, Greg?”

“What's going on is Benny Kracsinski.”

“Who?”

“The night janitor at Desert View Airport.”

“Oh,” Catherine said. “The Dunwood case, right? You think he's your guy?”

“I'd bet on it,” Greg said. “He handled the garden shears used to cut the tube that was jammed into the muffler. Everyone at that airport hates everyone else, as far as I can tell, even though they all claim to get along, but he's the only one I can positively connect to the murder weapon.”

“The first part sounds familiar. How many workplaces are any different? Present company excluded, of course. I think a lot of people get along with their
coworkers, but a lot of them would just as soon never see them again when they go home at the end of the day.”

“Probably so,” Greg said. “Here's the clincher to me. Benny and Jesse Dunwood were in flight training together at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. They knew each other almost twenty years ago, which Benny never mentioned, to me or Grayson Williams, when he was being interviewed. He didn't even say anything about being in the service, much less knowing the victim decades ago.”

“That's definitely suspicious.”

“But wait,” Greg said, imitating an infomercial spokesman. “There's more! Turns out they even hung out together off duty. At least, they did until one night when they went out to a couple of bars in San Antonio. On the way back, Benny was driving, Jesse riding shotgun, and there were a couple of other flyboys in the backseat. Benny, according to the newspaper accounts I found online, was sober—designated driver—but the others weren't. The drunk ones were arguing about the radio, Jesse cranking it up and another guy reaching up from the back to turn it down, and Jesse bumped Benny's arm just enough to send the car skidding into the path of an oncoming truck. Benny tried to correct course, but the truck rammed into his car, front left. Jesse and the guys in the backseat sustained minor injuries, but Benny was crippled for life. Obviously his flying career was over. He got an honorable discharge.”