Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(65)

“We’ll look first thing,” she said.



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—

Sawyer and her partner, Baldwin, got out and looked at the garage door, then Baldwin asked Virgil, “Tell the truth. Did you touch that door?”

“Yeah, but I was wearing gloves.”

“Still, wouldn’t have done a lot of good for any fingerprints on it,” Baldwin said.

“You know how many times prints have helped me with a case? I can count the times on an imaginary finger,” Virgil said.

“Be quiet, and get the door open,” Sawyer said.

Inside the garage, the two crime scene specialists did a walk-around before touching the car, then Baldwin said, “Whoa!” and, “Bea, I think Virgil was telling the truth, for a change. He didn’t mess with the crime scene.”

“How so?”

“Because if he’d messed with the crime scene, he probably would have seen this .223 shell on the floor and picked it up.”

Virgil said, “What?” and he and Sawyer walked around the car and looked where Baldwin was pointing: a brass .223 shell had rolled against the garage’s outer wall. “Let me get my camera,” Baldwin said.



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—

Five minutes later, Sawyer had inserted a five-inch steel turkey lacer into the end of the shell to pick it up, and they examined the case under a bright beam of an LED flashlight. “Nothing I can see,” she said.

Virgil said, “There’s a partial.”

“There’s no partial.”

“Yes, there is, and I’m going to put the word out that I’ve got a partial,” Virgil said. “And that I bagged it, and that I’m carrying it around town with me.”

Sawyer said, “That, mmm, could be dangerous if the killer . . .”

“I need something to happen,” Virgil said.

“You might want to wear a vest under that T-shirt,” Baldwin suggested. “This guy is supposedly a long-distance shooter.”

Virgil ignored the advice. “Listen, you guys got your fuming wand with you?”

“Yes, but we don’t have a print yet,” Baldwin said.

“You will,” Virgil said.

Virgil drove to Bob Martin’s house, the elderly gunsmith. He was home. “I need an empty .223 cartridge, and I need you to keep your mouth shut about me needing it,” Virgil said.

“The first is easy, the second is harder,” Martin said.

“Yeah, well, if you don’t keep it shut, you could hurt the town even worse than it already has been.”

Martin agreed to keep his mouth shut, retrieved an empty shell from his workbench, and said, “Listen, Virgil, I think I know what you’re planning to do and I don’t like it.”

“About keeping your mouth shut,” Virgil said, “I wouldn’t mind if you told your friends I came over and fingerprinted you and cleared you when I compared your print to a picture that I had on my cell phone . . . that I got off this shell . . . You gotta lie sincerely.”

“I can do that . . . But, jeez, Virgil, you gotta be careful.”



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—

When Virgil got back to Van Den Berg’s house, Sawyer and Baldwin were examining the streak of blood in the back of the Jeep.

“That nails down the Jeep transporting the body,” Sawyer said.

“Good work,” Virgil said, not mentioning that he’d already seen the blood and knew that the Jeep had been used to transport the body, and that none of that helped. He showed the .223 cartridge to Sawyer—she wouldn’t have let him use the actual cartridge found in the garage—and rolled his thumb across it. “I need you to fume this and pull the print.”

“I don’t like this,” she said. “You’re going to get hurt.”

“Nah, I’m gonna live forever.”

“I’ll only do it under protest,” she said. “Then when I visit you in the hospital, or at the funeral home, I can tell you that I told you so.”

“I’ll take it any way you want to do it.”



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—

The fuming wand looked like a black, industrial-strength dildo but was actually a butane torch with a brass tip filled with Super Glue. The idea was to heat up the glue and then fume the .223 cartridge; the glue’s fumes would stick to the fatty acids in Virgil’s print and would then harden. When it was hardened, Sawyer dusted the print with a black powder, making it more visible. The process took only a few minutes, and, when it was done, Virgil took a photo of the print with his cell phone.

“And I need one of your tiny evidence bags. Plus, one of those fingerprint ink pads,” Virgil said.

The pad looked like a woman’s compact, except it was made of plastic and half as large. The pad inside was filled with purple ink that would make a nice, readable fingerprint on ordinary paper. The .223 cartridge went in a transparent four-inch ziplock bag.

“You think the shooter will believe you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket?” Baldwin asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’d be more believable if I let out the word that you’re walking around with evidence in your pocket,” Virgil said.