"How about his coworker?" Allison asked. "Victoria--" She consulted her notes. "Victoria Hanawa. I saw her outside the studio, being hosed down by the hazmat team."
"The hospital kept her for a few hours as a precaution, but all tests were negative," Nic said. She looked at the end of the table. "What about the package and its contents, Karl? Any sign of sarin?"
He shook his head. "Initial tests were negative, but we're running a more sophisticated battery."
"What was the delivery device?" Nic asked.
"A modified smoke grenade." Karl held up a printout. It showed a photograph of a black cylinder with a wire trigger loop. "It was in one of those envelopes with a red string you pull to open. The end of that string was tied to the trigger of the smoke canister. So when Fate pulled the string and opened the package, the contents of the smoke canister sprayed directly into his face."
Nic thought they were finally catching a break. "Okay, who uses those--military, law enforcement? Can we trace it?"
Karl had a drooping, lined face that made him look like a hound dog. Exhaustion and frustration only heightened the resemblance. His mouth turned down.
"That's what I thought too. But it turns out that smoke grenades are also used by serious paintballers. They're available all over the Internet. Some sellers only deal with professional personnel who have been vetted in advance. But for every one of those, there are a dozen sites who just want a purchaser to click on a box that says they're eighteen or older."
"What about markings on the canister? Lot numbers, manufacturer's name, anything like that?" asked Dwayne Flannery, a Portland police officer.
Karl said, "There are some numbers on the canister, and we're trying to trace them, but it looks like a lot of this stuff is sold as surplus that changes hands dozens of times. And/or it's sold in big lots that are broken down again and sold individually. I've talked to a couple of sellers. Their record keeping seems deliberately vague, like if they don't keep track of what they sell, then they can't get in trouble for what someone does with it." Karl measured a space with his hands. "The canister itself was fairly small, about the same length as a paperback book. That's one reason they packed them together, so that anyone who handled the package wouldn't get suspicious."
"And then there's the book itself,"said Owen Simmons, a Multnomah County sheriff. "Remember that movie Talk Radio? It was based on a real case, and later they put out a book. The same book they sent Fate. Alan Berg was a Denver talk show host who was gunned down in his driveway in the early 1980s by neo-Nazis. Maybe it's a sign that we're looking at some kind of extreme right-wing group like The Order?"
"Except Fate was pretty conservative himself," Heath said. "Maybe the left-wingers have decided to play catch-up. He certainly ticked enough of them off."
"Or it could be just one guy, trying to throw us off the scent by putting that book in," Leif said. "Have you ever listened to his show? Probably every day Fate made somebody mad enough to at least think about killing him. He even taunted listeners who threatened him. He had something he called the Nut of the Day award. Maybe one of those guys snapped."
"We're just beginning to follow up on the NOD winners," Nic said. "If yo.0 want to call them winners. Unfortunately, the records the station kept about their actual identity are spotty. And in a lot of cases they were anonymous, which let them be even more outrageous." She turned to Rod Emerick, another FBI special agent. "How about fingerprints?"
"No latents on the canister or the book. The envelope had a dozen fingerprints on it. We'll be printing everyone at the radio station as well as the carrier and the sorters at the mailing facility. But whoever prepared this clearly wore gloves. Unless we catch a lucky break, I would say that we're not going to get a match on IAFIS."
IAFIS, or the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, was the FBI's national fingerprint and criminal history system. It was the largest biometric database in the world,with fingerprints for more than fifty-five million criminals.
"We also recovered one piece of what might be carpet fiber. If we're lucky, we can get a hit on FACID."
FACID, or the Forensic Automotive Carpet Fiber Identification Database, was still being developed by the FBI's Laboratory Division. Once a carpet fiber was analyzed, it was possible to search by fiber type, color, or microscopic characteristics to see if there was a match. That was if it came from a vehicle. There was no comparable database for other carpet fibers, as there were far too many. In that case, the only means of identifying it would be to find the suspected source and compare the two.