“So he mailed it to you or delivered it?” she asked.
“Mailed it. It came Saturday by certified mail,” Higgs said.
“Do you by any chance still have that packaging?”
Ballard was thinking in terms of being able to document the chain of custody of the evidence. It could become important if there was a trial. Higgs thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“No, it’s trashed. The cleaners come through here on Saturday night.”
“And where is the button?”
“Let me go get it. I’ll be right back.”
Higgs got up and left the office. Ballard waited. She heard a drawer in the lab open and close and then the professor came back. He handed her a small plastic evidence bag containing what looked like a small black cap that was threaded on the inside of its edges.
Ballard was sure it was the bag and object that she had glimpsed Chastain with at the crime scene early Friday morning. Chastain had obviously recognized what it was and knew its significance.
She turned the bag to study the object. It was actually slightly smaller than a dime, with a flat head and a word stamped across it.
It was a word familiar to Ballard but she couldn’t immediately place it. She pulled her phone so she could plug the word into a search engine.
“It came with a note,” Higgs said. “In the package. It said, if something happens, trust Renée Ballard. So when you called—”
“Do you still have that note?” Ballard asked.
“Uh, I believe I do. Somewhere around here. I’ll have to find it but I know I didn’t toss it.”
“If you could, I’d like to see it.”
Ballard pressed the search button and got two hits on the word. Lawmaster was the name of a motorcycle used by Judge Dredd in a series of comic books and movies. It was also a company that made leather equipment belts and holsters geared toward the law enforcement community.
Ballard clicked on the link to the company’s website as she remembered the brand. Lawmaster specialized in leather holsters, particularly the kind of shoulder holsters favored by the gunslingers in the department — the testosterone-enhanced hard chargers who put form over function and were willing to take the discomfort of having leather straps crisscross their backs over the simple ease and comfort of a far less macho hip holster.
Most of these gunslingers were the young up-and-comers who never missed a chance to check their looks in a mirror or take their jackets off at a crime scene to impress onlookers as well as themselves. Still, there were also some old-school cowboys who preferred the gunslinger look. And Ballard knew Lieutenant Robert Olivas was among them.
The website showed a variety of shoulder holsters, and Ballard clicked on one that counterbalanced the gun under one arm with double ammo clips under the other. She enlarged the accompanying photo and studied the workmanship of the holster. She saw several adjustment points for giving the holster a custom fit and positioning the weapon at an angle offering easy access to its wearer. These adjustment points were held in place by shallow screws and threaded black caps with the Lawmaster logo stamped on them.
It was a cascade moment, when all the details of the investigation came together. Ballard now knew what Chastain knew and understood his moves in surreptitiously taking evidence from the crime scene and attempting to analyze and safeguard it from afar.
Ballard held up the plastic bag containing the Lawmaster cap.
“Professor Higgs, were you able to get a print off this?”
“Yes, I was. I got one good solid print.”
39
Ballard stayed in the Miyako again Wednesday night, taking sushi for dinner in her room once more before going to sleep. She had enough clothes in her bag for another day without replacement and in the morning made the quick drive over to the Piper Technical Center, which was home to the Latent Print Unit as well as the department’s aero squadron.
Every detective with more than a few years on the job has procured a tech in each of the forensic disciplines who can be counted on for an occasional favor or a jump in the waiting line when needed. Some of the disciplines are more important than others because they are more common to crimes. Fingerprints are found at just about every crime scene and therefore the Latent Print Unit was the most important place to have a connection in the entire forensic sandbox. Ballard’s go-to was a supervisor named Polly Stanfield.
Five years earlier, Ballard and Stanfield had worked a difficult case where fingerprints were the link between three separate sex-assault murders, but while the prints from each scene matched, Stanfield could find no match in the various databases that housed print records around the world. Only the relentless efforts of both women finally resulted in an arrest when Stanfield surreptitiously accessed a database of rental applications for a massive apartment complex in the Valley that was geographically central to the murders. Renters at the complex were required to give fingerprints with their applications, but nothing was ever done with them. It was just a way of discouraging applicants who might lie about having criminal records. Once Stanfield’s work identified the suspect, Ballard and her then-partner, Chastain, had to find another way to come up with his name so as not to reveal Stanfield’s hack of the apartment complex’s rental applications. They resorted to the tried-and-true anonymous call from a burner cell revealing the suspect’s identity to a department crime-tip line. And no one ever knew the difference.
Ballard got Stanfield in the divorce. That is, when she and Chastain split as partners, most people in the department and ancillary agencies chose a side to stand with. Stanfield, who, in a long career in law enforcement, had encountered her share of overly aggressive men and sexual harassment, sided with Ballard.
Ballard knew Stanfield worked seven to four, and she was there at the door of the LPU with two lattes at 6:55 a.m. An earlier phone call between the two women had covered the basics of what needed to be done, so Stanfield was not surprised by Ballard’s appearance or by the high sugar content of her latte. It had been special-ordered.
“Let’s see what you’ve got,” Stanfield said by way of a greeting.
As a supervisor, Stanfield had a small cubbyhole office but it was still better than the open work pod most of the other print techs got. Stanfield was well versed in how to deal with what Ballard was bringing in. The VMD process resulted in a fingerprint being temporarily identifiable on a surface of the holster cap. It had then been photographed under oblique lighting conditions by Professor Higgs.
What Ballard had for Stanfield was a photograph of a thumbprint.
Stanfield began her work with a magnifying glass, looking closely at the photo to confirm there was a usable print.
“This thumb is really good,” she finally said. “Good, clear ridges. But it’s going to take a while. It’s a scan-and-trace job.”
That was more than a hint from Stanfield that she would prefer not to have Ballard looking over her shoulder the whole time. She needed to scan the photo into her computer, then go through a tedious process of using a program to trace the lines and swirls of the thumbprint so that a clean print could be run through the Automated Fingerprint Index System. There were more than seventy million prints in the AFIS data bank. Sending a print through did not bring instantaneous results. And often the results, when they came, were not singular. A search often kicked out several similar prints, and that required the print tech to make the final comparison under a microscope to determine if there was a match.