“Good ol’ Grease. Your new buddy.” He shot me a black look.
“Look, Art, I hate what he does, and I hate how he does it, as much as you do. Most of the time. If he’s helping a child predator, he’ll burn for that someday. But this stabbing case he’s got me working on, it’s different. The ME screwed it up, plain and simple, and the DA’s covering for him. And if you don’t know that, you’re not as smart as I think you are.” I glared at him, furious that he would tar me with the same brush as DeVriess.
He glared back, then looked away and sighed. “I know. You’re right. I understand what you’re doing. I respect it. I respect you—hell, you know that. It’s this little girl—it’s tearing me up. I want to kill the son of a bitch that snatched her, and I want to dismember the son of a bitch that kept us from dusting that car until the kid’s prints had evaporated.”
“I don’t blame you for that.”
“Sorry I jumped on you.”
“Forget it.”
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, then blew it out loudly. As if from another life, the phrase “deep cleansing breath” popped into my head, unbidden and unwelcome. Art rubbed his raw fingertips. “So, aside from the pleasure of my cheery conversation, Bill, what brings you here?”
I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out a ziplock plastic bag and handed it to him. “This.”
“What’s the story?”
“It was around the neck of a corpse. Is it what I think it is?”
He squeezed the outline gently in every direction: the narrow side, the long side, and the thin edge. “Probably. Was he a veteran?”
“Not a he. A she. And no, I don’t think so.”
“What’s she doing wearing a military dog tag?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“And whose is it?”
“That, too.”
“And you brought it to me because you can’t read?”
“Exactly. Also, I’m hoping there might be a print somewhere under that gack.”
“Gack—is that one of those technical anthropology terms you Ph.D.s throw around to impress and intimidate us common folks?” I nodded. Art fingered the tag, frowning. “A print. Sheesh—you don’t ask much, do you?”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, for starters, we’ve got to figure out how to remove the gack without removing the print. If there’s even a print under there. Which I very much doubt.”
“How come?”
“The metal may have corroded or oxidized, though dog tags are supposed to be corrosionproof. If the metal did corrode, it’s undergone both chemical and physical changes that could destroy or distort the print. And if it didn’t corrode, the gack—adipocere, we lowly criminalists call it—will have either absorbed or smeared any prints that might have been there once upon a time.”
I nodded glumly. “So what you’re saying is…”
“…not a snowball’s chance.” I’d pretty much expected him to say something like that—he was a criminalist, after all, not a wizard—but until he actually said it, I’d held out some hope. “But still, let’s see what we can see.”
He laid the bag on a lab table and donned a pair of latex gloves, then slid the ziplock open and extricated the waxy tag. After studying it awhile, he leaned toward a tray of tools and selected a pair of tongs, then rummaged under a counter and hauled up a small torch, the sort a chef might use to caramelize the sugar atop a dish of crème br?lée. Holding the tag by the slightly curved end—
where the chain once threaded through—he began playing the torch gently over the adipocere. As it began to melt, the reek of decomp rapidly replaced the acrid fumes of superglue. “Dang, Bill, you might’ve warned me. Switch on that fan, will you?”
I reached for the switch he’d nodded toward as he moved the fragrant object under an exhaust hood. Then I brought over some paper towels, which I folded and positioned underneath to catch the foul fluid beginning to drip from the lower end.
“Art?”
“Yeah?”
“Couldn’t you have just put it in an autoclave, wrapped in some paper towels?”
“Sure. But where’s the fun in that? It’s not every guy who gets to play with fire on the job.”
“Are you never going to grow up?”
“I sure hope not. My childlike immaturity’s the only thing standing between me and a major midlife crisis.”
Art extinguished the torch and set it down, then withdrew the rectangle from under the hood. It was discolored and slightly bent, but it was a dog tag, all right, its stamped-in lettering still crisp. Art moved to a lab table with an illuminated magnifying glass, just like the one in my decomp room, and studied both sides. “Well, shoot.”
“What?”
“As usual, I was right. Unfortunately, in this case. Sometimes fingerprint oils will etch metals, so even after the print itself is gone, there’s still an image of it left behind. Not here, though—this tag really is corrosionproof. Wish they made cars out of this stuff.”