THE NAKED AND DISMEMBERED CORPSE OF TREYWilloughby lay faceup on an autopsy table in the Regional Forensic Center, a warren of offices and labs in the basement of UT Hospital. The forensic center and the hospital morgue shared space, including the autopsy suite into which Miranda and I had wheeled Willoughby bright and early on this Monday morning. He’d been chilling out in the cooler since Friday afternoon, when KPD’s evidence techs had finished checking the coffin at the cemetery and sent it to UT.
The table—a rectangular stainless-steel counter on wheels, essentially, with a flange around its edge to collect body fluids and a drain to funnel them out—was latched to a large sink along one wall. The drain was set into the foot of the table; it hung over the sink, so any liquid from the body would flow directly into the hospital’s waste system. In Willoughby’s case the drain would be carrying away not blood or other body fluids but vestiges of embalming chemicals. During the seven years since Willoughby’s burial, most of the preservatives had leached out of the body, but enough remained to sting my eyes and nose. Detective Gary Culpepper had arrived a few minutes earlier, accompanied by KPD’s resident fingerprint guru, Art Bohanan. One of Art’s claims to fame was the invention of the “Bohanan apparatus,” for which he was awarded U.S. patent 5395445. The Bohanan apparatus was a boxy, portable superglue-fuming system for detecting latent fingerprints. A heated tray in one chamber of the unit was loaded with a small amount of superglue; when the tray reached a temperature of a hundred degrees Celsius—equal to the boiling point of water—the glue vaporized. A small blower wafted the glue fumes into a second chamber, which contained an object to be checked for prints, such as a murder weapon. As anyone who’s ever superglued his fingers together can attest, superglue bonds strongly with chemicals in human fingerprints. Art was a pioneer in harnessing this particular chemical reaction to reveal latent prints—not just on objects but on human skin, too.
Art hoisted the boxy apparatus onto the steel counter beside the sink and plugged it in. I eyed the fuming chamber dubiously. “How do you aim to fume this guy? Even without his arms and legs, he’s a lot bigger than that box.”
“One piece at a time,” said Art. “I’ve got a chain saw out in the van.”
I laughed. Bending down to the shipping case that the rig had been packed in, Art fished around and removed a flexible plastic hose that sported a boxy plastic attachment at one end.
“That looks suspiciously like the hose from my vacuum cleaner,” I observed.
“Itis the hose from your vacuum cleaner,” he joked. “Used to be, anyhow. The hose connects to this port on the side of the fuming chamber, so I can apply fumes directly to the body through here.” He aimed the hose at me, and I saw that the end of the boxy attachment was open. “This one’s cut to fit the contours of the arm,” he explained, tracing the curved edges of the box with one finger. “Not that our guy’s got any arms to fume.” He removed the attachment and returned it to the case. “I’ve got another one that fits the curve of the thigh and the neck, and this flat one fits the chest and back.”
Taking the flatter attachment from the case, he pressed it onto the hose, then fitted the other end of the hose to the back of the fuming chamber. Next he took a plastic bottle from the case and squeezed a small amount of liquid into a metal tray in the center of the chamber. Closing the chamber, he flipped a switch, and I soon caught the acrid scent of superglue. “The trick,” he said, “is to move the hose over the body slowly and evenly enough so that every part of the skin gets fumed for somewhere between fifteen and thirty seconds. Less than fifteen and the print doesn’t get enough glue to show up; more than thirty and the difference between the ridges and the valleys tends to blur.”
Art slowly, methodically swept the fuming hose over the face, chest, abdomen, taking care not to linger more than thirty seconds in any one spot. Unfortunately, the timing turned out to be irrelevant—there were no prints to be found anywhere on Willoughby’s body. Culpepper was disappointed, but Art seemed unsurprised. “Embalming chemicals are strong solvents,” he explained. “They can dissolve the oils in fingerprints really quickly. Thing is, there might not have been any prints in the first place. Anybody handling this body after death would have worn rubber gloves, unless he was an idiot.”
“Here’s to idiotic criminals,” said Culpepper. “What was it the man said? ‘Nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average criminal’?”
“Not exactly,” corrected Art. “I think the quote dissed all of us, not just the bad guys. ‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,’ or something along those lines. Apparently—at least according to H. L. Mencken, who said it—we’re all idiots.”
Culpepper smiled ruefully. “I guess I just proved his point by misquoting him, huh?”
While Art packed up the superglue unit and trundled it away, I dialed the nurses’ station up on the hospital’s seventh floor. “We’re ready for him,” I said.