“Anything else, Liz?” Sawyer queried her.
“Oh, yes. Lots of goodies. Prints. We used MDB, a compound which is
particularly good at fluorescing latent prints under laser light. Also
used a deep blue lens on the Luma-lite. Got really good results. We
did elimination typing on the three victims. Their prints were
everywhere. Understandably. Found a number of other partials, though,
including one that coincided with those scratches, which seems natural
enough. We also found one that was of particular interest.”
“What’s that?” Sawyer’s nose was almost quivering with anticipation.
“Brophy’s clothes were heavily spotted with blood and other human
residue from his wound. His right shoulder, in particular, was covered
in blood. Makes sense, since his right temple would have been bleeding
heavily. We found a number of prints, thumb, index, pinkie, really
examples of the entire hand, in the blood on his right shoulder.”
“How do you account for that? Someone trying to turn him over?” Sawyer
looked puzzled.
“No. I wouldn’t say that, although I don’t have firm evidence to
support it. My gut is, judging from the palm print I was able to pull
up, it was more like–and I know this sounds pretty bizarre under the
circumstances–but it was like someone was trying to climb over him, or
at least was straddling the guy. But the close placement of the
fingers, the angle of the palm and so on, really strongly suggest that’s
what happened.”
Sawyer looked highly skeptical. “Climb over him? That’s kind of a
stretch, isn’t it, Liz? You can’t really tell that from the prints, can
you?”
“I’m not basing my conclusion simply on that. We also found this.” She
pointed at the screen again. A strange object appeared there. A shape
or pattern of some sort. In fact, a couple of them. The dark
background around the objects they were looking at made it difficult to
understand what they were really observing.
“This was a shot taken of Brophy’s body,” Liz explained. “He’s face
down on the floorboard. We’re looking at his back. You see in the
middle of his back this shape pattern. Again, it’s made possible by a
patch of blood.”
Jackson and Sawyer squinted and leaned close to the screen, trying to
discern what the image was. They finally gave up and looked at Liz.
“A knee.” She magnified the image until it spanned the entire screen.
“The human knee does make a very unique shape, especially when you have
a malleable background such as blood.” She clicked another button and
another image sprang to life. “We also have this.”
Sawyer and Jackson again looked at the screen. This time the pattern
was readily identifiable. “A shoe print, the heel,” Jackson said.
Sawyer looked unconvinced. “Yeah, but why climb all the way over the
dead guy, get blood and who knows what else all over you, leave trace of
yourself behind, when you could just open the left-side passenger door
and step out? I mean, the person we’re probably talking about was
seated right next to Goldman on the left side.”
Jackson and Liz looked at each other. Neither one had a ready answer
for that. Liz shrugged and smiled. “That’s why they pay you the big
bucks, guys. I’m just a lab rat.”
Jackson smiled. “I’d love fifty more just like you, Liz.”
She smiled at the compliment. “I’ll have a written report on all this
for you later today.”
They all took off the goggles.
“I’m assuming you’ve already run the prints?” Sawyer looked at her.
“Jesus, I’m sorry, talk about leaving out the main course. All of the
prints–the one we looked at on the screen, from the probable murder
weapon, and all of the ones in the limo and leading from the limo and on
to the eighth floor and back down–were from one person.”
“Sidney Archer.” Jackson said.
“That’s right,” Liz responded. “The office where the blood trail took
us was hers as well.”
Sawyer stepped over to the limo and peered inside. He motioned for Liz
and Jackson to join him.
“Okay, based on what we know right now, can we assume that Sidney Archer
was sitting about right there?” He pointed to a spot slightly left of
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