force. There wasn’t going to be a lot of finesse in the finished job.
Wet paint is a pretty good medium for trapping fingerprints, and the
techs knew they weren’t going to have a lot of trouble. But for the
sake of completeness, they ran every process they had, from fluoroscopy
down to the traditional gray powder. They ended up with three and a
half good prints, clearly the thumb and the first two fingers of the
right hand, with the extra bonus of a lateral half of the little
finger. They enhanced the focus in the computer and sent the prints
down the digital line to the Hoover Building in Washington. They added
a code instructing the big database down there to search with maximum
speed.
In the labs at Quantico the hunters were divided into two packs. The
burned pickup had been torn apart and half the staff were examining the
minute physical traces unique to that particular vehicle. The other
half were chasing through the fragmented records held by the
manufacturers, listening out for the faint echoes of its construction
and subsequent sales history.
It was a Dodge, ten years old, built in Detroit. The chassis number
and the code stamped into the iron of the engine block were both
original. The numbers enabled the manufacturer to identify the
original shipment. The pickup had rolled out of the factory gate one
April and had been loaded onto a railroad wagon and hauled to
California. Then it had been driven to a dealership in Mojave. The
dealer had paid the invoice in May and, beyond that, the manufacturer
had no further knowledge of the vehicle.
The dealership in Mojave had gone belly-up two years later. New owners
had bought the franchise. Current records were in their computer.
Ancient history from before the change in ownership was all in storage.
Not every day that a small automotive dealership on the edge of the
desert gets a call from the FBI Academy at Quantico, so there was a
promise of rapid action.
The sales manager himself undertook to get the information and call
right back.
The vehicle itself was pretty much burned out. All the soft clues were
gone. There were no plates. There was nothing significant in the
interior. There were no bridge tokens, no tunnel tokens. The
windshield stickers were gone. All that was left was the mud. The
vehicle technicians had cut away both of the rear wheel wells, the full
hoop of sheet metal right above the driven tires, and carried them
carefully across to the Materials Analysis Unit. Any vehicle writes
its own itinerary in the layers of mud it throws up underneath. Bureau
geologists were peeling back the layers and looking at where the pickup
had been, and where it had come from.
The mud was baked solid by the burning tires. Some of the softer
crystals had vitrified into glass. But the layers were clear. The
outer layers were thin. The geologists concluded they had been
deposited during a long journey across the country. Then there was a
couple of years’ worth of mixed rock particles. The particular mixture
was interesting. There was such a combination of sands there that
identifying their exact origin should be easy enough. Under that
mixture was a thick base layer of desert dust. Straightaway the
geologists agreed that the truck had started its life out near the
Mojave desert.
Every single law-enforcement agency in forty-five states had the
description and the plate number of the stolen white Econoline. Every
single officer on duty in the whole nation had been briefed to look for
it, parked or mobile, burned or hidden or abandoned. For a short time
that Wednesday, that white Econoline was the most hunted vehicle on the
planet.
McGrath was sitting at the head of the table in the quiet conference
room, smoking, waiting. He was not optimistic. If the truck was
parked and hidden, it would most likely never be found. The task was
too huge. Any closed garage or building or barn could hide it for
ever. If it was still somewhere on the road, the chances were better.
So the biggest gamble of his life was: after forty-eight hours, had