So it came down to “dust,” Locard’s charming word for trace evidence.
Pulaski glanced again at the victim. Fletcher Dalton.
In a gray suit, white shirt and dark tie, he was on his back, dead eyes on the black ceiling. The thirty-two-year-old was a broker at a trading house on Wall Street and lived by himself at 845 East 58th Street. He had not shown up for work yesterday and hadn’t been found at home. His name and picture were put out on the wire. Two hours ago, an officer from Patrol happened to notice the door ajar in the deserted warehouse, which was scheduled for demo. He inhaled just one breath before he knew, and he called Homicide.
While Pulaski typically worked with Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, his crime scene reports and testimony at trial as a forensic expert had been noticed, and he’d recently been recruited to run scenes on his own.
Pulaski was pleased for the chance. He’d been Rhyme’s and Sachs’s assistant for some years, and both of them thought he should branch out. Forensic work proved to be far more engaging than street crime — the province of his official assignment, the Patrol Division. Another advantage: it made Jenny happier. The odds of her becoming a widow were considerably smaller when her husband’s job involved picking up hairs with tweezers rather than confronting meth-addled gangbangers.
Another thing: he was good at crime scene work.
And the icing on the cake? He liked it.
How rare was it for what you love and what you excel at to come together?
Rhyme had told him that some people are born to crime scene work, while others simply do a job.
Inspired versus functional.
Artist versus mechanic.
The criminalist didn’t exactly say aloud which camp Pulaski fell into, but he really didn’t need to; with Lincoln Rhyme, you had to infer much, and the younger officer knew how to read him.
Another scan of the forty-by-fifty room. The nature of the killing seemed clear. Dalton was shot outside on the sidewalk and dragged into the basement — after the killer kicked the door open. Only one perp was present here; the dust on the floor told that story.
It was clear that the shooter had dragged the body from the door, straight to where he’d dumped it, with no detours — but of course Pulaski searched the entire space.
He used a pattern of his own: a spiral, starting at the center of the crime and walking in ever-expanding circles. He then turned and did the same in reverse, moving in shrinking loops. Lincoln advocated the grid pattern; with it, you search the scene back and forth, as if mowing a lawn. Then you turn perpendicular and search the same way, overlapping the same ground again.
Pulaski respected the grid, but he liked his own method better; the idea had come when his wife asked him to serve a spiral-cut ham at Thanksgiving.
He squinted against the glare from the half-dozen powerful halogen lights sitting on tripods strategically placed in the room.
It’s here somewhere...
It has to be, right, Mr. Locard?
But where?
Find it, he told himself firmly now.
The clock is ticking...
His spiral-ham search completed, he concentrated on the most important parts of the scene: the path from the door to the body and the body itself.
And there, on Dalton’s lapel, he found it.
The thing that fell into the vital category of evidence at a scene: different from everything else.
It was a dark blue fiber. A synthetic polymer. Because of that composition and its length, it had come from either a scarf or a stocking cap, which the officer knew because he had spent long hours studying scarves and stocking caps (and most other fabrics, for that matter), so that if he happened upon a sample at a crime scene he would have a good chance of identifying it in the field, rather than back in the lab, where the same results would have been attained, but after considerably more time.
Move. Fast.
Outside, Pulaski quickly stripped off the Tyvek, told the collection techs to get the evidence to the lab in Queens, and released the body to the Medical Examiner’s tour doctor.
He then walked from the site of the murder to the subway station that Dalton — who had a MetroCard in his pocket — most likely would have exited from on his way home the night he died, three and a half blocks away (one did not bus one’s way from Wall Street to the Upper East Side).
And here, along a stretch of warehouses and commercial buildings, he found what he was hoping for.
A Domain Awareness System camera mounted on a lamppost.
He placed a call to Central and was patched through to one of the DAS operators — dozens of them sat before banks upon banks of video screens, as they and their algorithmic partners scanned for bad guys and bad deeds.
Pulaski identified himself and gave the location of the camera, and the date and time Dalton would likely have passed by here.
“Okay,” the man said. “You want it now?”
“Yeah, this number.”
They disconnected. Soon his phone hummed and he called up the clip. Stepping out of the sun to see the screen better, he watched the video.
Ah, there.
A slim man, white, with a fastidious mustache appeared. He wore black slacks and jacket and his head was covered with a dark blue stocking cap, of exactly the same shade as the fiber Pulaski had just found.
As he walked east, his eyes were across the street, perhaps on Dalton; that side was not visible to the camera.
The man’s hand was at his side — and once, he tapped his pocket. This he might have done for any number of reasons, but one would have been to make sure his gun was there, safely tucked away.
He was then out of sight. Fifteen minutes later he returned, quickly, and Pulaski formulated a theory of what had happened: somewhere along this street Dalton had witnessed something. It could not have been a recognizable crime; had it been, the trader would have called 911. Pulaski had checked: the only calls from this neighborhood that day had been reports of two heart attacks and a bad fall.
Whatever the crime was, Blue Hat could not afford to let Dalton live.
Pulaski called the DAS people back and asked if there were other cameras in the vicinity.
No, none.
Then he had an idea. He’d try something that he was sure would not work.
But he did it anyway.
He gave the DAS officer the time stamp of the tape where one could see Blue Hat’s face the most clearly, and told him to take a screen capture and send it to another alphabet operation of the NYPD.
The department’s FIS — Facial Identification Section — is not nearly the invasive operation that people believe it is. Its mission is to match pictures of possible suspects taken from security cameras in the field — or occasional bad-idea selfies — with mug shots or wanted-poster pictures in order to establish identities.
Pulaski had submitted about sixty images over his career, and no matches had been returned.
This one was different.
The officer he was on the line with said, “Well, guess what, Ron. That picture? FIS returned a ninety-two percent likely match.”
“Is that good?”
“Ninety-two’s pretty much gold.” He laughed. “And I’ll give you gold for another reason too. You’re not going to believe who your suspect is. You sitting down?”
“Good morning, this is up-to-the-minute business news with WKDP. Investors came down with a bad case of the jitters following the collapse this morning of a crane at a construction site on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. One worker was killed and a half-dozen injured. Evans Development and Moynahan Construction are the companies involved in building the luxury seventy-eight-story high-rise, where units will start at five million dollars. City officials report that the inspection certificates of all the tower cranes operating in New York are current, but federal regulators have urged that construction at those jobsites be suspended pending an investigation by the Department of Buildings and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST has investigated the World Trade Center collapses and Pentagon attack on 9/11, and the Champlain Towers South building collapse in Miami. Stock in Evans Development, a publicly traded company, fell to an all-time low.”