Bones of Betrayal

Emert had called Art Bohanan and asked if Art would mind looking for prints on one more piece of evidence, and Art had agreed. Using a set of tongs he’d taken from an evidence kit, Emert worked the knife from the man’s chest, taking care not to touch the handle. He sealed the knife in an evidence bag, labeled it, and handed it up to me. Even through the bag’s plastic, even through the smear of body fluids and water on the blade, I thought I discerned the distinctive swirls of Damascus steel. “Looks like the missing knife from Novak’s display case,” I said.

 

“It is,” he said. “I’d bet a month’s salary on it.”

 

 

 

A CLOUD OF MIST shrouded the knife handle. Art squeezed the spray bottle twice more. Mopping a few stray droplets from my face, I said, “And why is it you’re wetting it?”

 

“The moisture helps the superglue latch onto the oils from the print,” he said.

 

“I knew that,” I said.

 

He laid the knife in the transparent chamber of a boxy glass and metal apparatus—“the Bohanan Apparatus” was its official name, and it was patented—and switched on the device’s heating element. As the element vaporized the glue, white fumes swirled into the chamber hiding the knife from view. After several minutes Art switched on a fan, which sucked the fumes out of the glass chamber, up through an exhaust hood, and away from the KPD crime lab.

 

Holding the knife by the blade, Art lifted it from the fuming chamber and held it under a magnifying desk lamp. After studying it for a moment, he leaned back. “Take a look at the tang,” he said.

 

“Okay. Where do I look to see the tang?”

 

He laughed. “The tang is the part of the blade the handle is riveted to,” he said. “This knife has a thick blade, so the tang’s thick, too—an eighth of an inch, maybe three-sixteenths. That handle is horn, which is hard to print, but the metal tang can actually be etched by the oil in a fingerprint. Look right there,” he said, pointing to a spot near the guard that separated the tang from the sharpened edge of the blade. Dozens of closely spaced lines crossed the tang, with one tiny swirl at the center. “That’s a pretty good print,” he said.

 

“But it’s less than a quarter-inch wide,” I said. “Is that enough to match to anything?”

 

Art picked up a printout that showed a complete set of prints. “Look at the right thumb,” he said. I took the page and held it under the magnifying glass. “What do you think?”

 

“That loop in the center has the same little break as the one on the knife,” I said. “I think it’s the same print.”

 

“I think so, too,” he said, “and I’m pretty good at this stuff.”

 

I glanced at the words on the paper. The prints had been reproduced from a U.S. government security clearance file. “Damn,” I said. “He didn’t go gentle into that good night, did he?”

 

In his final moments, Leonard Novak—a ninety-three-year-old walking ghost—had stabbed to death a man roughly half his age.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 34

 

 

 

 

THE AUTOPSY OF THE THIRD OAK RIDGE VICTIM—CASE 09-03—was almost redundant, since the cause of death had been sticking out of the man’s chest. According to the Nashville medical examiner, the lungs contained a small amount of water, which suggested (but did not prove) that the victim had drawn a partial breath as his heart shuddered and stopped. Beyond that, the autopsy report contained nothing extraordinary, though it did shed some light on the guy’s life: a middle-aged white male, he stood five feet eleven inches tall, with blue eyes, thinning blond hair, and a gray beard. Thin, whitish scars indicated prior surgeries on the right ankle and left shoulder. A series of whole-body X-rays revealed numerous healed fractures—four ribs on the right side of the chest had been broken, as well as six ribs on the left—two of them in more than one place. The right femur bore evidence of a childhood fracture, the report noted, and was a quarter-inch shorter than the left. The spine, particularly the cervical spine, showed osteoarthritic lipping—ragged fringes of bone rimming the vertebrae in the neck—that was surprisingly severe for a man his age. My first thought, from the variety of skeletal trauma, was too many bar fights. But the victim had well-developed leg muscles and—until the knife blade made its entrance—a robust circulatory system. Maybe not bar fights after all, I thought. Maybe bicycle wrecks. Regardless, the guy seemed to have been rode hard and put away wet.