"Okay," Faith agreed. God knew she'd taken more on face value than this. She glanced around the room, feeling a desperate need to change the subject. "I don't mean to pry, but do you mind my asking why you have two bags of home pregnancy kits by your window?"
He actually blushed as he turned around to look at them.
Faith rushed an apology. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said-"
"I forgot they were over there."
Faith saw the boxes peeking up from the bags, their happy little logos. If only she'd had access to a kit when she was pregnant with Jeremy. Maybe Faith wouldn't have waited until she was in her third trimester to tell her parents. She put her hand to her neck, wondering where that awful thought had come from. She must have been more exhausted than she realized.
He said, "I think my girlfriend might be pregnant."
His words hung between them, and Faith tried to pin down when exactly their relationship had gone from coolly professional to personal. There was something so kind about him under his awkward manners and social ineptness. Despite her best intentions, Faith realized that she could not hate Will Trent.
She glanced at the myriad kits. There had to be a dozen of them.
"You can't just dip those in the toilet. You have to have a fresh sample."
Will opened his desk drawer and reached his hand all the way to the back. "I've got this," he said, pulling out a test stick. "I found it in the trash. Do you know what this signifies?"
Faith stopped herself before touching the stick, remembering at the last minute that someone had actually urinated on it. She looked at the result panel. There was a single blue line. "I have no idea."
"Yeah," he said. "Anyway, I got all these so I can figure out which brand it is and get the results."
The obvious question hung in the back of her throat-why don't you just ask her?-but Faith figured the fact that Angie Polaski hadn't mentioned the test to Will in the first place was proof enough that there was a serious breakdown in communications.
She said, "Let's go through them now."
He was obviously surprised by the suggestion. "No, I couldn't ask you to do that."
"We can't do anything until Bernard calls. Come on."
Will only made a show of resisting. He emptied the bags onto his desk. They started opening the boxes, breaking the plastic seals, finding the test sticks, comparing them to the one on Will's desk calendar. They were nearly to the last one when Will said, "This looks like it."
Faith looked at the plastic-wrapped tester in his hand and compared it to the used one on his desk. "Yep," she agreed.
He unfolded the directions that came with the test, skimming them to find the right section. He glanced up at Faith nervously, then looked back at the directions.
"Let me," she finally said, putting him out of his misery. There was a drawing on the back side. "One line," she said. "That means it's negative."
He sat back in his chair, hands gripping the arms. She couldn't tell if he was relieved or disappointed. "Thank you for helping me with that."
Faith nodded, sticking the directions back in the box.
"Spell-check."
"What?"
"Yesterday, Bernard said that computers make it easier for dyslexics to hide their problem." He shrugged. "It would make sense that someone who was functionally illiterate would do the same thing."
Faith closed her eyes, remembering the threatening notes. "The way the words were jumbled together-they were spelled correctly, right? Is l-e-v a word?" She pointed to his computer. "Type it in."
Will didn't move. "It's a word."
"What does it mean?"
His phone rang. He didn't move to answer it.
Faith had seen him acting strangely, but this took the cake. The phone rang again. "Do you want me to get that?"
He reached over and pressed the speakerphone button. "Will Trent."
"It's Beckey in the lab," a woman with a pronounced Yankee accent said. "Gordon Chew is here."
Will pressed the off button on his computer monitor. He stood up, straightening his jacket. "Let's go."
THE FORENSIC LAB took up the entire second floor of City Hall East. Unlike the rest of the building, which was likely filled with mice and asbestos, the lab was clean and well lit. The air-conditioning actually worked. There were no cracked tiles on the floor or jagged pieces of metal sticking out from the desks. Everything was either white or stainless steel. Faith would've eaten her gun if she'd had to work here day in and day out. Even the windows were clean, missing the great swaths of grime that covered the rest of the building.
At least two dozen people buzzed around the room, all of them wearing white coats, most of them in goggles and surgical gloves as they handled evidence or worked on their computers. There was music playing, something classical that Faith did not recognize. Other than this and the hum of electronics, there was no other noise. She supposed processing blood and combing through carpet fibers didn't call for much conversation.
"Over here," a slim Asian man called across the room. He was sitting on a stool beside one of the lab tables. Several trays were laid out in front of him and a large black briefcase that she was used to seeing lawyers carry was on the floor at his feet. Faith wondered if he'd brought the white lab coat he was wearing or if someone had let him borrow it.
"Gordon," Will said, then introduced Faith.
He offered her his hand. "Nice meeting you, ma'am."
"Likewise," Faith said, thinking she hadn't heard such a lovely, soft drawl since her grandmother had died. She wondered where Gordon had picked it up. He was probably a few years older than Faith, but he had the manners and bearing of a much older man.
Will indicated the notes on the table. Gordon had taken them out of their plastic bags. "What do you think?"
"I'm thinking it's a good thing you called me. This paper is in terrible condition. I'm not going to even try iodine fuming."
"What about DFO?"
"I already put them under the light. It's a mess, man."
"Is there anything special about the brand or the watermark or-"
"Generic as a pair of loafers."
Faith decided that hiding her ignorance was only punishing herself. "I'm not really familiar with chemical processing. Why can't we just dust the paper for prints?"
He smiled, obviously pleased at the question. "I bet you dusted a cigarette butt for prints at the academy, right?" He laughed at her expression. "They've been doing that for as long as I can remember." He leaned back on the stool behind him. "Paper's porous. The natural oil in your fingertips leaves a good, readable print on a hard surface, but when you're dealing with fibers, the oil penetrates and migrates. Dusting it with powder is not going to bring out any latents. You use something like ninhydrin, which reacts with the amino acids in fingerprint residue, and hopefully, you get a pretty little print and we bring home your little girl."
The mood turned decidedly somber as they all considered how important these next few minutes would be.
Will said, "Let's get started."
Gordon took a pair of goggles out of his bag and a pair of green gloves. He told Will and Faith, "Y'all may want to step back. This is pretty toxic stuff." They both did as he advised, but Gordon still handed them paper masks to cover their mouths and noses.
He leaned down and took a small, unmarked metal container out of his bag. He unscrewed the cap and poured some of the contents into one of the pans, careful not to splash. Even through the mask, the fumes hit Faith like a flash of gunpowder. She had never smelled anything so blatantly chemical.
Gordon explained, "Ninhydrin and heptane. I mixed it up last night before I headed down." He capped the metal container. "We used to use Freon, but they outlawed that a few years back." He told Will, "I used the last of my stash two months ago. Hated to see it go."