The young woman snapped, "Let's assume he did. Look, we can't skip over this. It tells us something else about him--something important: that locked doors don't even slow him up."
Rhyme glanced at Sellitto, who said, "I gotta say, working Larceny I busted a dozen burglars and none of 'em could get through locks that fast."
"Mr. Balzac has me practicing lock picking ten hours a week," Kara said. "I don't have my kit with me but if I did I could open your front door in thirty seconds, the deadbolt in sixty. And I don't know how to scrub a lock. If the Conjurer does he could cut that time in half. Now, I know you like all this, like, evidence stuff. But you're wasting your time to have Amelia go search for something that isn't there."
"You sure?" Sellitto asked.
"If you don't trust my opinion, then why'd you want my help?"
Sachs glanced at Rhyme. He grudgingly accepted Kara's assessment with a stony nod (though privately he was pleased that the woman had shown some grit; it made up a lot for the Look and the Smile). He said to Thom, "Okay, put down on the chart that our boy's a master lock picker too."
Sachs continued, "No sign of whatever the Conjurer used to knock him out. Blunt-object trauma. Looks like a pipe probably. But he took that with him too."
The report from Latents came in. Eighty-nine separate prints from areas of the crime scene near the victim and the places the Conjurer most likely touched. But Rhyme noticed immediately that some of the prints looked odd and, on closer examination, he could see that they were from the finger cups. He didn't bother to scan the others.
Turning to the trace Sachs had collected at the scene, they found minuscule amounts of the same mineral oil they'd recovered at the music school that morning and more of the latex, makeup and alginate.
Detective Kuan from the Ninth Precinct called and reported that a search of the Dumpsters around Calvert's building had turned up no sign of the man's quick-change outfit or the murder weapons. Rhyme thanked him and told him to keep at it. The man said he would but with such fake enthusiasm that Rhyme knew the search had already ended.
The criminalist asked Sachs, "You said he smashed Calvert's watch?"
"Yep. At noon exactly. A few seconds after."
"And the other victim was at eight. He's on a timetable, looks like. And probably has somebody else lined up for four this afternoon."
Less than three hours from now.
Cooper continued, "No luck with the mirror. No manufacturer--that must've been on the frame and he scraped it off. A few real prints but they're covered up by his finger cup smudges so I'd guess that they're from the clerk where he bought it or the manufacturer. I'll send 'em through AFIS anyway."
"Got some shoes," Sachs said, lifting a bag out of a cardboard box.
"His?"
"Probably. They're the same Ecco brand we found at the music school--same size too."
"He left 'em behind. Why?" Sellitto wondered.
Rhyme suggested, "Probably thought that we knew he was wearing Eccos at the first scene and was worried the respondings'd noticed them on an elderly woman."
Examining the shoes, Mel Cooper said, "We've got some good trace in the indentation in front of the heel and between the upper and sole." He opened a bag and scraped the material out. "Horn o' plenty," the tech said absently and bent over the dirt.
It was hardly a cornucopia but for forensic purposes the residue was as big as a mountain and might reveal a wealth of information. "Scope it, Mel," Rhyme ordered. "Let's see what we've got."
The workhorse of tools in a forensic lab is the microscope and although there've been many refinements over the years the instrument isn't any different in theory from the tiny brass-plate microscope that Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented in the Netherlands in the 1600s.
In addition to an ancient scanning electron microscope, which he rarely needed, Rhyme had two other microscopes in his homegrown laboratory. One was a compound Leitz Orthoplan, an older model but one he swore by. It was trinocular--two eyepieces for the operator and a camera tube in the middle.
The second--which Cooper was preparing to use now--was a stereo microscope, which the tech had used to examine the fibers from the first scene. These instruments have relatively low magnification and are used for examining three-dimensional objects like insects and plant materials.
The image popped onto the computer screen for Rhyme and the others to see.
First-year criminalistics students invariably click immediately on a microscope's highest power to examine evidence. But in reality the best magnification for forensic purposes is usually quite low. Cooper began at 4x and then went up to 30x.
"Ah, focus, focus," Rhyme called.
Cooper adjusted the high-ratio screw of the objective so that the image of the material came into perfect clarity.
"Okay, let's walk through it," Rhyme said.