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“Yeah Elliott? What’s up?”
“I have something I want to show you. I need your opinion on what we should do.”
“Can’t it wait Elliott? It is Christmas.”
“I don’t think it should.”
He looked annoyed but got up anyway. My mother’s eyes followed me as I lead him to the car. I opened the back passenger door and pulled out my bag. I handed him the gift.
“From Elliott,” he read.
“It’s not from me,” I revealed. “Actually, Jules found it in the passenger seat of her locked car on Christmas Eve after church.”
“You didn’t open it?” He asked.
“No, I thought it would be best to wait for you to look at it.”
“Wow,” he said, surprised. “What amazing self control.”
Ha! You have no idea!
“Yeah. What should we do?”
“I think you and I should take a quick ride to my office and dust it for fingerprints.”
Yes! I thought. Finally, he’s going down! But Jesse was no fool and there was potential for nothing to be found on it at all.
“I’ll run in and tell mom that we’ll be right back.”
We rode to the station in absolute silence. The tires crushed the piled snow against the railroad ties and his headlights produced foggy beams that traced along the red paint of the tiny shack that was the sheriff’s office. He unlocked the door and stomped the extra snow off his boots before stepping onto the creaky wood floor.
“Dang Danny, this place is a regular haunted house in the dark.”
He laughed, “Yeah.” He flipped the lights on, “it also looks like one in the light.”
We both laughed and he lead me to a makeshift lab covered in dust.
“Been awhile?” I asked.
“Of course, not much of a need for it you know? It’s kind of nice to shake off the old cobwebs though.”
He grabbed a full black brush with incredibly fine bristles and a ceramic ramekin. He unscrewed the lid to a bottle full of light black powder and poured a small amount in the ramekin. He took the brush, dipped it in the dust and shook off the excess.
“It’s better to under develop than to over develop the print.”
He lightly brushed the top surface of the box, using a twisting motion to get all of the ridges of the print.
He spun a hinged desk lamp over the top of the box and flipped on the light. He recognized two possible prints, maybe three but he also knew that we had touched the box. He removed a Sharpie from a container above his workstation and marked the edge with the number one. He took a piece of tape and lifted each individual print and marked each one. He repeated the process for each side of the box.
“Looks like they used latex gloves to assemble the box. There’s white powder on the tape I used to lift the print. That’s a rookie mistake.”
“What does that prove?”
“It proves that they handled it with gloves on. Why would someone need to do that? To avoid prints right? I doubt we’ll find anyone’s prints, at least on this side of the paper but I’m gonna’ print you to use as a cross reference anyway just to make sure. “Come here, “ he said and walked me to the fingerprinting station.
“Gosh Danny, you’re a regular CSI.”
“Yeah,” he laughed.
