Certain Prey

help.”
    “Did you get the composite?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah. We’re running it against all former suspects, anybody who’s ever been around one of these cases.”
    “Whatever happened to the guy in Wichita? Is he still peddling dope?”
    “Little asshole,” Mallard said. “We’ve still got a watch on him, I still got Malone out there with the team, but she’s bitching thirty-six hours a day about getting back. And if you know the suspect was in Minneapolis, and we know Lopez wasn’t, then I’ll call her off.”
    “She was here, the shooter was,” Lucas said.
    “Then I’ll tell Malone to wrap it up. Still can’t believe it’s a woman. Anyway, I’m gonna drag the files over to witness protection and have a talk with them. We got enough on their boy out there to send him away for three hundred years.”
    “Just because Lopez didn’t pan out, doesn’t mean that some kind of Wichita connection isn’t good,” Lucas said.
    “I know that; and if you’ve got any suggestions, I’d be happy to have Malone look into them. It’ll take her a couple of days to wrap things up.”
    “I’ve got nothing, not at the moment,” Lucas said. “And look, have your guys call our ID guys right now; I’m scared to death about what’s gonna happen when we take that bar of soap out of the crisper.”
    “The what?” Mallard asked.
    “The crisper, you know, where you keep the lettuce and radishes and . . .”
    “Don’t tell me. Please, just don’t tell me.”
    • • •

    A GUY NAMED M ANUEL found Lucas in the Homicide office talking to Sloan, and said, “We’re gonna try to take the prints.”
    “Ah.” Lucas and Sloan both got up and headed down to ID. In the Identification section, they found four people standing around a hippie with shoulder-length hair and a dangly silver earring. He appeared to be about sixteen, and was holding a Nikon F5 camera with a weird lens. The bar of soap sat on a Tupperware lid on the desk.
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked, looking at the hippie.
    “Don’t touch me,” the kid said. “If anything falls on the soap, spit or anything, it’s all over.”
    He was looking down at the soap through the camera, which he held no more than a foot above the bar. “He’s my kid,” a cop named Harry muttered to Lucas. “Great photographer. That there’s what you call your basic ring light, there on the end of the lens. It’s really a flash, and he’s looking right down on the prints, with half the ring light turned off so he’ll get some shadow . . .”
    “Shut up,” the kid said.
    Everybody shut up, and Lucas was about to open his mouth and ask if he knew what he was doing, when the flash went; then again. The kid shot twenty-four pictures in five minutes, using the ring light, then no ring light, and finally with reflected light from a sheet of tinfoil. When he was done, he looked at Lucas and said, “I could see them, pretty good. Three prints, a little smudged, but coming right up at me.”
    “You think you got them?”
    “If I can see them, I got them,” the kid said. “I’m gonna run this over to a one-hour slide processor by Rosedale. It’d help if you could call them and tell them to put me at the front of the line.”
    “You did slides?”
    “Yeah; I get a lot better resolution that way, when I scan them . . .” Lucas must have looked puzzled. The kid added, “I assumed you wanted a digital file. We can phone it to the FBI and they can start the search.”
    Lucas turned to Sloan: “Go find somebody to run this kid over to Rosedale in a squad, lights and sirens. Tell the picture people to start running the film as soon as he gets there. We want it now. ” He turned back to the kid. “I’ll sign you up for a consultant’s fee. I’ll give the forms to your dad. If the pictures come out.”
    The kid left with Sloan, and Harriet Ashler, the chief fingerprint specialist, said, “All right; back in the fridge for a minute, just to firm things up.”
    She put the soap back in the fridge, and they all stood around looking at the refrigerator for three minutes—it was a small brown office model from Sears, with two lunch sacks and an aging apple on one shelf, and a bottle of cranapple juice in the door—and then she took it back out and touched an unmarked piece of it. “Still nice and hard,” she said. “Let’s try it.”
    The technique, which they agreed upon with the FBI, was to blow a light dry graphite dust across the prints, then try