The police station, where her car was parked, was seven blocks from the hospital. Alexa, clutching the evidence bags and the crime kit, walked in what she thought was the right direction, oblivious to the shops, traffic, and pedestrians.
Slept with my friend. Didn’t say he was married.
The phrases blared on repeat in her head.
The throaty growl of a motorcycle didn’t penetrate her numbness. She stopped at a town square and sank onto a bench. A sign next to the trashcan said, DON’T BE A CHEEKY CHUCKER; DISPOSE OF YOUR RUBBISH PROPERLY. No wonder Bruce was divorced. His wife—that Sharla person—hadn’t put up with infidelity like Harlan Quinn’s harem had.
Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. It was probably Bruce, wondering where she was. She’d never asked him why he had divorced. She had trusted it was for mutual, mature reasons and not because he was a cheater from one of Sergeant Atkins’s country songs.
She’d broken a cardinal rule of policing: never make assumptions.
Bruce was rubbish; she’d dispose of him properly.
She thought of the lab and the evidence she had to process. Science was something she could count on. In her mind she pulled Bruce out of the rubbish and pushed him off a cliff.
A thought broke loose, swam to her brain like a clot. Katrina might have been pushed off the cliff. Maybe by a jealous Lynn Lockhart. She had a temper; Alexa and DI Steele had witnessed her chucking a wineglass over the abyss.
Despite her throbbing knee, Alexa jogged the last blocks to the station and found the electronic crime lab. She gave the officer the phone bag. “It was recovered from Katrina Flores, the woman who fell at Black Reef. It’s part of Operation Bunker.” Her own recorded message might be on the phone. “I don’t know if it still works.”
“Heard of a phone that survived a forty-two-story plunge,” the officer said.
They filled out the chain of custody transfer and then Alexa hurried to the lab.
She wondered where Pamela-Not-Pam was as she washed her hands. The soapsuds stung. Cuts and scrapes from her rock-climbing speckled her palms. The back of her right hand had two ruby punctures. That seagull had pecked to see if she was dead. The image of the gull hopping toward Katrina’s face blossomed in her mind. She shuddered.
After logging in the remaining evidence, she extracted Katrina’s prints and scanned them in to the computer. Then she pulled up the prints from the duct tape, adjusted the scale, and compared them.
No match.
Next she compared them to the picnic basket prints.
She detected enough corresponding minutiae to determine that Katrina’s fingerprint and the fingerprint from the handle represented the same finger. But Katrina had admitted she’d delivered it, so it wasn’t breaking news.
She cleaned up, slipped on gloves, and turned to Katrina’s black leggings and the pink jacket. At first she thought the jacket was thin leather, but the label said viscose/poly with poly lining. Faux leather. It was shortish and maybe stylish—Alexa lacked the fashion sense to know—and featured lace-up sides, a narrow collar, and shallow pockets that Alexa double-checked. They were empty. The right elbow and sleeve had tears. The left shoulder had what looked like a smear of blood on it.
If someone had pushed Katrina off the cliff, they might have left a palm print. Palm prints were as unique as fingerprints and common at crime scenes. The FBI even had a palm print registry. But where on the jacket would a palm print be?
Alexa imagined different scenarios: a sneak attack from behind or, if Katrina had known the person, a shove on the front of the jacket.
Lifting prints from fabric was difficult because of fiber distribution, weave patterns, and porosity. But it wasn’t impossible. She thought of the forensic gurus at Abertay University in Scotland. Alexa planned to make a pilgrimage there. Maybe sooner rather than later. She might see if any jobs were available and leave New Zealand behind. Good riddance, Bruce.
The Scottish team—the ones who figured how to lift fingerprints from bird feathers—discovered how to do the same from fabric. They used vacuum metal deposition. In technician slang, vacuum metal dep, and Alexa thought the process was hella cool. They hang the sample—say a work shirt—in a vacuum chamber. Then minuscule gold particles are inserted in the machine and turned to vapor.
She thought of someone she wanted to vaporize.
The gold particles are sprayed into the chamber where they adhere to the ridge-free surface of a fingerprint or palm print. Then the process was repeated with zinc…
“What’s up?”
She hadn’t even heard Pamela enter. The lab tech’s mouth dropped as Alexa filled her in on this morning’s events.
“Quinn’s girlfriend is dead?”
“The second girlfriend. The one who worked at The Retreat. There’s a chance she was pushed,” Alexa said. “I was thinking about the possibility of palm prints on her jacket.”
Pamela studied the garment. “You’ll want the vacuum chamber, then. Do you know VMD develops latent prints better than superglue fuming?”
Alexa beamed. “I know. And it doesn’t mess up DNA.”
“Not even! In one case, VMD worked on a garbage bag fished out of water.”
Alexa looked around the lab. The chambers were extremely expensive. “Do you have one?”
Pamela pointed to a squat machine taking up half a work counter. It was roughly three by two and a half feet with a viewing window. The one at Auckland Service Center sat on the floor and was three times larger. “I didn’t know they made a smaller one.”
“It’s the compact unit. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have one, given the price tag.”
Alexa rubbed her palms together. Her phone buzzed as Pamela gloved up. She ignored the call. “If I came at you from behind, I’d aim for the middle of your shoulder blades and use both hands. Let’s hang it so we can watch the back side.”
Pamela hung the jacket from wires in the vacuum chamber as Alexa watched, rapt.
“It’s fully automated.” She nudged Alexa to the side and pushed a button on the touch screen. The chamber lit up so they could watch the process. “It won’t take long. Ten minutes max.”
Particle by particle, as the sprayed metal settled, a palm print emerged on the back of the pink jacket.