FROM THE DIRECT EXAMINATION OF TRACY MACK
By Attorney Lancer:
Q: Dr. Mack, would you please explain these two images that have been set in front of the jury?
A: The print on the right side of this chart was taken of Marcus Creighton’s right thumb at the time of his booking for the murder—
By Attorney Croft: Objection.
The Court: Sustained.
Q: Go on.
A: The print on the left was developed from the plug on the hair dryer found in the victim’s tub.
Q: Would you please briefly explain the process of fingerprint analysis.
A: Print analysis, or in this case latent analysis, is performed by highlighting with a chemical process fingerprints that are not visible to the naked eye. In this case I checked the plug, which was the most likely place to have been touched by the murderer. I used a superfuming technique that revealed the print shown on the left photograph.
Q: And would you please let the court know what your analysis showed.
A: I’ve marked with numbers certain sections of each print. You can see on both the similarity of facets of prints we call whorls. I found twelve identical points between the prints.
Q: And your conclusion was?
A: They came from the same person.
Q: From Mr. Creighton.
A: Even though he denied he had ever touched the hair dryer.
By Attorney Croft: Objection. Hearsay.
The Court: Sustained.
Q: Would you say conclusively that the fingerprint found on the plug of the hair dryer, the presumed last person to touch it, belongs to Marcus Creighton?
A: I conclude it is a match. Yes.
Q: Thank you. Your witness.
CROSS-EXAMINATION OF TRACY MACK
By Attorney Croft:
Q: How many fingerprint analyses have you performed in your career so far?
A: I would say over five thousand. I don’t know for sure.
Q: And in how many of those cases did you exclude the suspect?
A: I’m sorry. I don’t understand your question.
Q: It’s a forensic term, Mr. Mack. It means that you find that the fingerprint you’re looking at does not match the person in custody. In how many of those five thousand cases did you exclude the suspect?
A: I understand that, I just don’t have that number, sir, off the top of my head.
Q: You seem to be in great doubt over numbers, Mr. Mack, but very certain when it comes to fingerprint comparisons.
The Court: Please ask a question.
Q: Never mind. Do you know whether Mr. Creighton is left- or right-handed?
A: No, sir. I do not.
It wasn’t just incompetence, even if Ronald Croft, the public defender, wasn’t the smartest guy in the room. At least he made appeals possible with his objections on record, but at the time of the Creighton trial a forensic technician could get away with the “because I said so” argument. People trusted visual comparison by anyone who could identify himself as a forensic scientist. Those were the days when they were rock stars, riding high on the O. J. Simpson case. If Mack said it was a match, it was a match. These days the defense is challenging whether fingerprints are even unique. They say it’s never actually been proven statistically.
Everyone else had been sucked into the clusterfuck of running hither and yon, following all leads at once, for both suspects and other potential victims. But I thought it was a good idea to return to the scene of the crime, so to speak. What really happened that night? If Creighton didn’t kill his family, then who did? If Creighton was innocent, the mass murder of his family had turned from a solved crime into a cold case. And the killer could still be alive. And trying to silence Shayna Murry? What about Manny Gutierrez? Or even Derek Evers? What about any of the investigators?
Everyone else had forgotten the one piece of evidence that got us all involved in the first place. The hair dryer had finally arrived.
From the outside, on Dixie Highway, you couldn’t tell that Frank Puccio’s lab was a lab. It was housed in a building that looked like a Quonset hut with the long side facing the street and had three separate entrances. It shared space with a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and a place called, plainly, Religious Articles. The lab itself was unnamed, and you could only find it if you had the address that I had given to Derek Evers. Puccio greeted me at the door.
Stocky, without a neck, Frank Puccio looked like he had had the choice of doing this or punching tickets for the mob, and had incongruously, incredibly, decided to do this.
“Dr. Puccio, I’m Brigid Quinn,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Call me Frank, Brigid.” He flung out his arms as if he was going to hug me and then decided against it and took my hand in his dry, warm grasp. “I feel as if I know you. Your brother and I have had some dealings.”
“And not on the same side, I’d expect.”
He said through a half smile, “Regrettably, this is often true. But not always. If I had some advance notice I would have prepared light refreshments.”
The voice didn’t go with the way his ears were attached to his shoulders, but you never know what you’re going to find with forensic scientists. The only thing you can be sure of is that none of them match any of the quirky stereotypes you see on television.
His hand swept me inside with that come-on-come-on scooping gesture. I stepped through the door and found what I would have expected, a small but unmistakable place where science was done. It couldn’t compete with the shiny gizmos at the county level, but good enough to get the odd piece of defense evidence analyzed.
Puccio was unapologetic but still felt the need to put any hesitation on my part to rest. “I’m certified. When the big guys get swamped I even get some overflow if urgency is needed. My setup is the modest minimum, but I do some good work now and again, and there’s a thriving business in DNA analysis for paternity tests and veterinary work. I even got into pet DNA analysis in case you want to know whether your dog with a head like an anvil is part pit bull.”
Assurance finished, he indicated where he had a little workstation set up for the Creighton evidence. We stood before a slab of wood laid out over a couple of two-drawer filing cabinets with cinder blocks on top to give it good height for standing. Frank picked up an eight-by-ten glossy of a smudge that just barely looked like a print.
“Is that what got him?”
He sneered. “That’s the one.” He picked up in his right hand a similarly blown-up image of another print, this one fairly perfect in its detail. “And here’s the exemplar they got of Creighton’s thumb. You can see how the one they lifted from the dryer plug is marked with twelve points? That was the minimum they needed at the time to show a conclusive match. However, only five of them actually match, in my opinion. The bastard guessed at the remaining. He may as well have pinned it to the wall and thrown darts.”
“Creighton’s appeals attorney should have been able to secure a stay of execution with this, then?”
“On the strength of point comparison? Unfortunately, no. Since his trial the standards have become less rigorous rather than more.”
“But you’re sure it’s not Creighton?”
“There’s no way to tell who it is. I could possibly commit to a cautious opinion that it’s human.”
“Thanks for doing this, Frank. I know it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.” He dropped the hail-fellow-well-met aspect and looked as serious as anyone can get. “It may be too late for Creighton, but not for the next poor schmuck who comes up against the system.”
“And it’s never too late to find out who killed that family.”
“Yes, indeedy.” As if to show me a just-discovered archaeological artifact, he turned both palms up in a balletic gesture at odds with those pudgy hands. I looked where he directed and saw a rickety metal frame covered from top to bottom with clear plastic. From a hook at a crossbar over the top of the frame hung a silver metallic hair dryer. The cord stretched out and off the platform. A plastic cup, the kind you’d keep in the bathroom to rinse your mouth, sat next to the dryer.
“I’ll do the DNA test that Will Hench wants, but first I’m processing the latents. It looks like the dryer is finished, and I’ve vented the cyanoacrylate.” He drew on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted the plastic sealing that had kept the superglue from escaping its plastic cell. “Nonporous, so it’s an ideal surface,” he said, with the hushed tone of a connoisseur. “The little cup of water rehydrated the prints after being in the evidence locker for such a long time.” There’s something about a forensic scientist that always makes them want to teach you something. “Looks like there’s a lot of story here.”
Still examining the dryer, which was dotted here and there with what you could tell even now were fingerprints, Puccio reached for some black dusting powder and lightly covered the spots with it, revealing them more.
“There are so many prints we’ll be lucky if we can find one that’s isolated enough,” he said, turning to me. “I’m sure the majority of them are the victim’s. But see this one? I’ve been looking at prints a long time, and this one looks different from the rest.” He had a little smudge of dusting powder on his chin. I resisted wetting my thumb and rubbing it off, that thing mothers do. Must be hardwired.
I said, “The testimony of the examiner said he didn’t look at the dryer because it had been submerged and there would be nothing to see.”
“Well,” Puccio said, with satisfaction, “this shows he was either ignorant or lying.”
“Which is worse?”
Puccio gave a small smile in acknowledgment. “If the current isn’t too fast to wear away the body oils, you can get prints off a gun that’s been in a river for three weeks. Only this guy, Tracy Mack, once he found evidence to support the suspicion of Creighton he didn’t look any further.”
I thought of Delgado. “It appears that was going around at the time.”
Puccio shook away his satisfaction and looked sad. “Poor Tracy, I heard he was a good scientist, once.”
I called Todd. He said he wanted to see me.
I thought of calling Laura, but didn’t. I told myself she didn’t need to have her flames fanned any more than they were already.
I got assurance from Frank Puccio that he would compare the prints against the exemplars he had on file for Kathleen and Marcus Creighton, and confirm there was at least one that didn’t match up to anyone in the family. He promised to call Delgado and let him know what he found. As I let myself out he was softly singing “Ruby Tuesday” and reaching for some tape to lift the prints off the hair dryer.