Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

Dehan frowned. “What do you mean?”

He leaned back in his chair, so that the back of his head was touching the sickly green wall. “How old is he? A bit older than you, Stone. Late forties, early fifties? He’s married, he has kids, a long standing career with the NYPD and a spotless record. He has everything to lose.

“You tell me he is an old friend of the family of the victim, and the family have a record of tragedies: a schizophrenic daughter, the wife died in childbirth, and the victim herself turned out to be wild.” He shook his head like he was looking at something that defied belief. “If he had met an adult woman and had an affair out of town, at a hotel, on the mature, adult understanding that it was going to go no further than a one night stand, you might be able to accuse him of nothing more serious than poor judgment and bad taste.” He shrugged. “If the department got to hear about it, they might even look the other way, having privately cautioned and reprimanded him.

“But with an eighteen-year-old girl, in her own home, with the risk of a member of her family walking in on them at any moment…”

Dehan was nodding that she understood. “I see what you’re driving at. It’s beyond reckless. But it’s worse than that, the father is ill and confined to bed most of the time, so he was in the house, and her sister would have been just down the hall, in her room.”

He spread his hands. “That is not just poor judgment and bad taste, that is a reckless disregard for consequences, not only to himself, but to the girl and her family. A man in that frame of mind should not be walking around with a gun.”

I sighed. “Frank, is there anything you can tell me about the body? Anything that might help to identify where she was dropped in the river, anything about the killer…”

He sat forward and the jointed mechanism in his chair clunked loudly. He folded his forearms on the desk. “I won’t say I was ahead of you, John, but I remembered the case. It struck me as odd at the time.”

“What struck you as odd?”

“She had been strangled. She had a lot of bruising around her neck and there were marks on her esophagus that were clearly thumb marks. There was no water in her lungs, so it was clear that she had been strangled and dumped in the water post mortem.”

“Yeah, we read that in the report.”

He ignored me and went on. “She had been in the water for about a week. Now, the eccrine glands in the skin’s surfaces on your finger and palms secrete water that contains soluble solids. So prints deposited by only eccrine secretions get dissolved when the print is submersed in water. But it is possible for prints to survive in water or exposure to the elements if a non-water soluble contaminant was present on the fingers, or if it was already present on the surface which has been touched.”

“What are you driving at, Frank? In layman’s terms.”

“Well, for example, sebaceous glands in the skin secrete an oil called sebum into the hair follicles to lubricate the skin and hair. Then, also, women have a tendency to smother their skin in all kinds of oils, from coconut to aloe vera and beyond. All of these might—I stress might—survive a period of submersion in water, especially if it was very cold. So if skin covered in sebum, or aloe vera or coconut oil, for example, were pressed very firmly, the resulting print…”

Dehan’s eyebrows had shot up. “Seriously?”

He frowned and nodded. “The FBI Laboratory’s Latent Fingerprint Section, Knoxville Police Department and the University of Tennessee did a lot of research in the ’90s developing a workable method for getting identifiable prints from human skin, even after prolonged exposure to the elements. What they eventually came up with was the glue fuming chamber. It has a built-in heat source and a small electric fan. You put glue into a small aluminum pan in the chamber and the glue fumes are gently blown out onto the prints for ten to fifteen seconds. After that, powder is applied and often as not, you can lift a print.”

I frowned hard. “Are you telling me that you lifted prints from Celeste’s neck?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m not telling you that. We didn’t, but listen…”

“You’re losing me.”

“I proposed using the glue fuming method to Lenny. I grant you it was a borderline case, she had been in the river for a week, but it was worth a try. We might have got something. The thumbs had been pressed very forcefully into her throat and that would have increased or even caused oil secretion.”

Dehan said, “But he said no…?”

“He said it was a waste of taxpayer’s money. After that much time in the river, he thought there was no chance of getting a print. He might well have been right, but I thought it was worth a try.” He gave a laugh. “Especially as the family were friends of his. Usually what I get is pains in the ass like you two, hassling me to do more and go faster. I don’t often get a detective telling me not to bother with a test.”

I shook my head. “Son of a gun. It’s a shame you didn’t do it anyway. He doesn’t dictate…”

“Oh, I did! I did! I’m not going to be dictated to by the likes of him. I did the tests. He was partially right. We got a few partials that were not really usable—not in court, anyway, though they might have been helpful in an investigation. He