When she came out of her office, Castonguay had a top-down picture of the cameraman loaded on the screen. The TV camera was mounted on his shoulder. Sunglasses covered his eyes and he wore headphones and a baseball cap. She could see blond hair covering the tip of an ear. The man posing as Special Agent Phillips had had black hair and darker skin.
‘It looks like your HERF theory was correct,’ Darby said, sitting down. ‘I just got off the phone with one of the day nurses at the hospital. When she came in this morning, they were replacing the security cameras on her floor, and the computers and phones at the nurses’ station were down. Some of the medical equipment in the rooms near the elevator had stopped working. They thought it was an electrical surge.’
Castonguay nodded, his attention focused on the monitor. He typed with one finger while the other hand worked the mouse, shifting the picture until the TV camera came into a sharper focus.
‘What do you know about televisions cameras?’ he asked.
‘Not much. I try to avoid them whenever possible.’
‘Lucky for you I know a lot about them. What we have here is called an ENG camera – an Electronic News Gathering video-recording camera. It looks like the real deal except for this.’
Using the mouse, he drew a circle around the handle mounted on top of the camera. Then he moved the chair away from his desk and said, ‘Take a look.’
Darby stood up and moved closer to the screen. Next to the handle and mounted on top of the camera was a small device that resembled a black laser pointer. The end pointed at the house had a small but noticeably bright red light. She saw wires running from the end of the device that fed directly into the camera.
She turned her head to Castonguay. ‘Is this a laser mike?’
‘That’s exactly what it is. You direct the laser to a surface that can vibrate – like glass. The laser picks up pressure waves caused by noises in the room.’
‘I used one during a SWAT surveillance exercise.’
‘And that’s what your cameraman was doing. He was conducting surveillance on the house, trying to listen in on your conversations. The camera looks genuine – has a Sony camera head and a Betacam SP dock. It blended in perfectly with the other TV cameras.’
‘How complicated is it to install a laser mike in a camera?’
‘It’s extremely complicated. I’m even willing to say it can’t be done. This ENG camera was custom-built to conduct surveillance. Whoever you’re dealing with has access to some very high-tech toys.’
He loaded another picture on to the monitor, a shot she had taken of the bald man opening the driver’s door. The cameraman was running around to the back of the van.
Castonguay cropped the front windscreen, then went to work on enhancing it. A moment later she saw someone sitting in the passenger seat. She could see only his hands resting on dark-coloured trousers, a blue tie worn with a white shirt.
Sitting on the dashboard was a device that resembled a police scanner.
‘I’ve tried enhancing the picture from different angles,’ Castonguay said, ‘but I can’t get a lock on his face. But see this shadow here?’ He pointed to the area between the two front seats. ‘This may or may not be part of a leg and an arm. I’ll need more time to enhance it.
‘That’s all I have. I’ll have printouts of the pictures to show you in another hour or so. Just do me one favour. When you get your hands on this camera, you’re to let me know immediately. I’m dying to play with it.’
‘You got it.’
Three men were interested in Amy Hallcox and her son – the black-haired man who had posed as a Fed, the cameraman and the bald driver. Had they been the men she’d seen in the woods last night?
She thought back to the picture of what might be another person sitting in the back of the van. A fourth man. Were there more? How many people were following her?
Darby opened the door of the fingerprint suite. Coop, wearing safety glasses and blue latex gloves, was hunched over a lab bench examining a bullet. He had already tried dusting it for prints.
She saw the bullet’s pitted nose and knew what it was: a hollow-point round. The same ammo had killed her father.
‘It’s a nine-millimetre Parabellum round,’ Coop said. ‘I found it in the kitchen, underneath an overturned sideboard. Someone must have dropped it.’
‘Any prints?’
He shook his head.
‘We could fume it with cyanoacrylate,’ she said. ‘If the Super Glue finds a print, we can try using different luminescent stains, then enhance it in the VMD unit.’ Vacuum Metal Deposition, she knew from experience, yielded better-looking latent prints.
‘I’m going to try something else first.’ Coop picked up the shell casing with a pair of tweezers and placed it on a circular metal dish that sat underneath a probe.
Darby looked over his shoulder. Her jaw dropped.
‘Is that a scanning Kelvin probe?’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I haven’t seen you this excited since the last time U2 came through Boston.’
She placed the bag holding Amy Hallcox’s fingerprint card on the bench beside them, dimly aware that the usual humour was absent from his voice. Her attention was on the probe. She had read about it but had never seen a real-life demonstration of one.
‘How did you get your hands on it?’
‘This unit is courtesy of my new friends in London,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and turn on that monitor.’
She did and then pulled out a chair and watched Coop adjust the controls of a small device resembling a futuristic microscope. Human sweat dried fairly quickly. What lingered was a mix of organic and inorganic compounds. Was Coop suggesting that these compounds and chemicals could be detected by this probe?
‘What sort of developer are you going to use?’
‘You don’t need to use a chemical or a powder.’
‘Then how are you going to find a latent print?’
‘The beauty of this new technology, Darb, is that once you touch metal with your bare fingers, the inorganic salts from your skin corrode the shell casing – you “brand” your print on to the metal. You can’t wipe it away.’
‘What if a shell was fired? The heat would destroy the organic compounds left behind – amino acids, glucose, peptides and lactic acid.’
‘Doesn’t matter. The probe can retrieve prints from fired shells, even detonated bomb fragments, where temperatures can reach as high as five hundred degrees Celsius. The Kelvin probe uses voltage to examine the surfaces where a fingerprint may have been deposited.’
‘So what you’re suggesting is that no matter what, you can’t wipe away a fingerprint.’
‘Exactly.’ He pressed a button on a small box attached to the probe. ‘Watch the monitor.’
Darby saw a magnified image of the bullet on the screen. ‘Looks like you’ve got something.’
Coop studied the faint, spidery lines of a partial latent fingerprint on the monitor.
‘I’m going to have to create what’s called a voltage map,’ he said. ‘It’s a three-dimensional rendering of the latent print. It will take a couple of hours. How’d the autopsy go?’
‘They’re doing it right now.’ Darby’s attention had shifted back to the hollow point lying on the dish.
‘Did you examine the body?’
She nodded, then said, ‘Would a scanning electron microscope destroy or alter the fingerprint in any way?’
‘No.’
‘Then before you do the voltage map, I want to borrow the bullet for a moment and take a closer look at the cartridge’s headstamp. It doesn’t look right.’
Coop, using tweezers, picked up the bullet for a closer look.
‘I don’t see anything unusual.’
She pointed to the round metal base. ‘The spark plug looks smaller than normal, don’t you think?’