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Rhyme had told him that some people are born to crime scene work, while others simply do a job.
Inspired versus functional.
Artist versus mechanic.
The criminalist didn’t exactly say aloud which camp Pulaski fell into, but he really didn’t need to; with Lincoln Rhyme, you had to infer much, and the younger officer knew how to read him.
Another scan of the forty-by-fifty room. The nature of the killing seemed clear. Dalton was shot outside on the sidewalk and dragged into the basement—after the killer kicked the door open. Only one perp was present here; the dust on the floor told that story.
It was clear that the shooter had dragged the body from the door, straight to where he’d dumped it, with no detours—but of course Pulaski searched the entire space.
He used a pattern of his own: a spiral, starting at the center of the crime and walking in ever-expanding circles. He then turned and did the same in reverse, moving in shrinking loops. Lincoln advocated the grid pattern; with it, you search the scene back and forth, as if mowing a lawn. Then you turn perpendicular and search the same way, overlapping the same ground again.
Pulaski respected the grid, but he liked his own method better; the idea had come when his wife asked him to serve a spiral-cut ham at Thanksgiving.
He squinted against the glare from the half-dozen powerful halogen lights sitting on tripods strategically placed in the room.
It’s here somewhere …
It has to be, right, Mr. Locard?
But where?
Find it, he told himself firmly now.
The clock is ticking …
His spiral-ham search completed, he concentrated on the most important parts of the scene: the path from the door to the body and the body itself.
And there, on Dalton’s lapel, he found it.
The thing that fell into the vital category of evidence at a scene: different from everything else.
It was a dark blue fiber. A synthetic polymer. Because of that composition and its length, it had come from either a scarf or a stocking cap, which the officer knew because he had spent long hours studying scarves and stocking caps (and most other fabrics, for that matter), so that if he happened upon a sample at a crime scene he would have a good chance of identifying it in the field, rather than back in the lab, where the same results would have been attained, but after considerably more time.
Move. Fast.
Outside, Pulaski quickly stripped off the Tyvek, told the collection techs to get the evidence to the lab in Queens, and released the body to the Medical Examiner’s tour doctor.
He then walked from the site of the murder to the subway station that Dalton—who had a MetroCard in his pocket—most likely would have exited from on his way home the night he died, three and a half blocks away (one did not bus one’s way from Wall Street to the Upper East Side).
And here, along a stretch of warehouses and commercial buildings, he found what he was hoping for.
A Domain Awareness System camera mounted on a lamppost.
He placed a call to Central and was patched through to one of the DAS operators—dozens of them sat before banks upon banks of video screens, as they and their algorithmic partners scanned for bad guys and bad deeds.
Pulaski identified himself and gave the location of the camera, and the date and time Dalton would likely have passed by here.
“Okay,” the man said. “You want it now?”
“Yeah, this number.”
They disconnected. Soon his phone hummed and he called up the clip. Stepping out of the sun to see the screen better, he watched the video.
Ah, there.
A slim man, white, with a fastidious mustache appeared. He wore black slacks and jacket and his head was covered with a dark blue stocking cap, of exactly the same shade as the fiber Pulaski had just found.
