The Dead Room

by Chris Mooney

The security video started. The camera was pointed down at the white corridor. She could see part of the nurses’ station.

  The elevator doors opened and she saw herself and Pine walk out and move down the corridor until they disappeared. A moment later they reappeared with Patrolman White, and the three huddled around the corner from the nurses’ station and began talking.

  Click and the video started fast-forwarding.

  ‘Eighteen minutes elapsed from the time you stepped off the elevator to the time you went to talk to the Hallcox boy,’ Castonguay said. ‘The Fed appears just under twenty-two minutes later.’

  Twenty-two minutes. He must have followed me from Belham. She watched the images fast-forwarding across the monitor and thought about the TV cameraman she’d seen watching the house this morning. If he had been there last night, mixed among the other reporters, he would have seen her getting inside Pine’s Lincoln Town Car.

  Castonguay started playing the video at its normal speed. She looked at the digital timestamp on the bottom-right-hand corner: 1.23 a.m.

  ‘Here’s where it gets interesting,’ Castonguay said. ‘Watch the elevator.’

  She did. When it opened, the video started to fill with static. She couldn’t see the person who got out of the elevator – she couldn’t see anything.

  The static grew stronger and then images disappeared.

  The screen went dark.

  ‘That’s it,’ Castonguay said, and swivelled around in his chair to face her. ‘I checked the tapes for the other cameras. There’s nothing else, just static and then they all go dark.’

  ‘Any idea what caused it?’

  ‘For all the cameras to shut down like that, you’re talking some sort of HERF – a High Energy Radio Frequency weapon – or maybe a directed magnetic pulse. Could even be a microwave pulse. The two people talking to you in the video, they were standing in the corridor while you were talking to the vic. Did they say anything about being burned?’

  ‘They didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘I doubt it’s microwave anyway. Those devices aren’t easy to conceal. Let me ask you this, then: did they report feeling nauseous or dizzy? Any vision problems?’

  ‘Not that I know of, but when I saw them standing in the doorway of the room, they were both struggling to catch their breath – like they had just finished running a marathon.’

  ‘Breathing difficulties are one of the symptoms of close exposure to electromagnetic or HERF exposure.’

  ‘My understanding is that to use a HERF weapon, you have to have a parabolic reflector and aim it at a target.’

  ‘Yes, you’re correct. And I should mention that to build one of those devices, you can find the materials you need in any electronics store. They’re somewhat big and bulky. Not easy to conceal. I was thinking along the lines of the smaller devices I’ve seen over the past year – the ones the size of, say, a paperback book or a pack of cigarettes that use a high-energy radio frequency. These smaller devices act more like a grenade – they have a certain blast radius. The smaller the device, the smaller the blast radius. You hit a button, flood an area with HERF and cook the electronic circuits in the area. That’s the only thing I can think of that would have caused this kind of damage so quickly. I’d be interested to see if the security cameras or any other nearby equipment was damaged last night.’

  ‘I’ll call and ask,’ Darby said. ‘These HERF grenades – can you build them?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. I know the army uses them. They’re part of their non-lethal weapons tactics programme.’

  ‘What about the CIA or the FBI?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ Castonguay turned to the keyboard. ‘Now I want you to look at the pictures you took.’

  22

  ‘I just need a moment to tinker with the file,’ Castonguay said.

  Darby went to her office to use the phone. She called St Joseph’s and asked to be connected to the nurses’ station on the fourth floor. A new rotation had started. After identifying herself to three different people she finally found one left over from the day shift.

  When she came out of her office, Castonguay had a top-down picture of the cameraman loaded on the screen. The TV camera was mounted on his shoulder. Sunglasses covered his eyes and he wore headphones and a baseball cap. She could see blond hair covering the tip of an ear. The man posing as Special Agent Phillips had had black hair and darker skin.

  ‘It looks like your HERF theory was correct,’ Darby said, sitting down. ‘I just got off the phone with one of the day nurses at the hospital. When she came in this morning, they were replacing the security cameras on her floor, and the computers and phones at the nurses’ station were down. Some of the medical equipment in the rooms near the elevator had stopped working. They thought it was an electrical surge.’

  Castonguay nodded, his attention focused on the monitor. He typed with one finger while the other hand worked the mouse, shifting the picture until the TV camera came into a sharper focus.

  ‘What do you know about televisions cameras?’ he asked.

  ‘Not much. I try to avoid them whenever possible.’

  ‘Lucky for you I know a lot about them. What we have here is called an ENG camera – an Electronic News Gathering video-recording camera. It looks like the real deal except for this.’

  Using the mouse, he drew a circle around the handle mounted on top of the camera. Then he moved the chair away from his desk and said, ‘Take a look.’

  Darby stood up and moved closer to the screen. Next to the handle and mounted on top of the camera was a small device that resembled a black laser pointer. The end pointed at the house had a small but noticeably bright red light. She saw wires running from the end of the device that fed directly into the camera.

  She turned her head to Castonguay. ‘Is this a laser mike?’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is. You direct the laser to a surface that can vibrate – like glass. The laser picks up pressure waves caused by noises in the room.’

  ‘I used one during a SWAT surveillance exercise.’

  ‘And that’s what your cameraman was doing. He was conducting surveillance on the house, trying to listen in on your conversations. The camera looks genuine – has a Sony camera head and a Betacam SP dock. It blended in perfectly with the other TV cameras.’

  ‘How complicated is it to install a laser mike in a camera?’

  ‘It’s extremely complicated. I’m even willing to say it can’t be done. This ENG camera was custom-built to conduct surveillance. Whoever you’re dealing with has access to some very high-tech toys.’

  He loaded another picture on to the monitor, a shot she had taken of the bald man opening the driver’s door. The cameraman was running around to the back of the van.

  Castonguay cropped the front windscreen, then went to work on enhancing it. A moment later she saw someone sitting in the passenger seat. She could see only his hands resting on dark-coloured trousers, a blue tie worn with a white shirt.

  Sitting on the dashboard was a device that resembled a police scanner.

  ‘I’ve tried enhancing the picture from different angles,’ Castonguay said, ‘but I can’t get a lock on his face. But see this shadow here?’ He pointed to the area between the two front seats. ‘This may or may not be part of a leg and an arm. I’ll need more time to enhance it.

  ‘That’s all I have. I’ll have printouts of the pictures to show you in another hour or so. Just do me one favour. When you get your hands on this camera, you’re to let me know immediately. I’m dying to play with it.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Three men were interested in Amy Hallcox and her son – the black-haired man who had posed as a Fed, the cameraman and the bald driver. Had they been the men she’d seen in the woods last night?

  She thought back to the picture of what might be another person sitting in the back of the van. A fourth man. Were there more? How many people were following her?

  Darby opened the door o
f the fingerprint suite. Coop, wearing safety glasses and blue latex gloves, was hunched over a lab bench examining a bullet. He had already tried dusting it for prints.

  She saw the bullet’s pitted nose and knew what it was: a hollow-point round. The same ammo had killed her father.

  ‘It’s a nine-millimetre Parabellum round,’ Coop said. ‘I found it in the kitchen, underneath an overturned sideboard. Someone must have dropped it.’

  ‘Any prints?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘We could fume it with cyanoacrylate,’ she said. ‘If the Super Glue finds a print, we can try using different luminescent stains, then enhance it in the VMD unit.’ Vacuum Metal Deposition, she knew from experience, yielded better-looking latent prints.

  ‘I’m going to try something else first.’ Coop picked up the shell casing with a pair of tweezers and placed it on a circular metal dish that sat underneath a probe.

  Darby looked over his shoulder. Her jaw dropped.

  ‘Is that a scanning Kelvin probe?’

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Jesus, I haven’t seen you this excited since the last time U2 came through Boston.’

  She placed the bag holding Amy Hallcox’s fingerprint card on the bench beside them, dimly aware that the usual humour was absent from his voice. Her attention was on the probe. She had read about it but had never seen a real-life demonstration of one.

  ‘How did you get your hands on it?’

  ‘This unit is courtesy of my new friends in London,’ he said. ‘Do me a favour and turn on that monitor.’

  She did and then pulled out a chair and watched Coop adjust the controls of a small device resembling a futuristic microscope. Human sweat dried fairly quickly. What lingered was a mix of organic and inorganic compounds. Was Coop suggesting that these compounds and chemicals could be detected by this probe?

  ‘What sort of developer are you going to use?’

  ‘You don’t need to use a chemical or a powder.’

  ‘Then how are you going to find a latent print?’

  ‘The beauty of this new technology, Darb, is that once you touch metal with your bare fingers, the inorganic salts from your skin corrode the shell casing – you “brand” your print on to the metal. You can’t wipe it away.’

  ‘What if a shell was fired? The heat would destroy the organic compounds left behind – amino acids, glucose, peptides and lactic acid.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. The probe can retrieve prints from fired shells, even detonated bomb fragments, where temperatures can reach as high as five hundred degrees Celsius. The Kelvin probe uses voltage to examine the surfaces where a fingerprint may have been deposited.’

  ‘So what you’re suggesting is that no matter what, you can’t wipe away a fingerprint.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He pressed a button on a small box attached to the probe. ‘Watch the monitor.’

  Darby saw a magnified image of the bullet on the screen. ‘Looks like you’ve got something.’

  Coop studied the faint, spidery lines of a partial latent fingerprint on the monitor.

  ‘I’m going to have to create what’s called a voltage map,’ he said. ‘It’s a three-dimensional rendering of the latent print. It will take a couple of hours. How’d the autopsy go?’

  ‘They’re doing it right now.’ Darby’s attention had shifted back to the hollow point lying on the dish.

  ‘Did you examine the body?’

  She nodded, then said, ‘Would a scanning electron microscope destroy or alter the fingerprint in any way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then before you do the voltage map, I want to borrow the bullet for a moment and take a closer look at the cartridge’s headstamp. It doesn’t look right.’

  Coop, using tweezers, picked up the bullet for a closer look.

  ‘I don’t see anything unusual.’

  She pointed to the round metal base. ‘The spark plug looks smaller than normal, don’t you think?’

  He shrugged, then pushed his chair away from the table. ‘Go for it.’

  23

  Darby picked up the dish holding the bullet and carried it across the room to the lab’s brand-new scanning electron microscope. She loaded the cartridge into the chamber, shut the small door and then sat down, turning her attention to the console. Coop wheeled a chair next to hers.

  The SEM’s terminal screen showed a magnified black-and-white image of the bullet’s headstamp. A thick white ring glowed in the middle, around the primer cap. Printed in the centre were two neat rows containing both letters and numbers:

  GLK18

  B4M6

  ‘What the hell is that?’ he asked. ‘Some sort of stamp?’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is.’ She printed off two copies of the image, then created a digital copy and sent the jpeg to her email. ‘What we’re looking at here is what’s being hailed as the latest technological advance in ballistics identification – microstamping.’

  ‘That technology hasn’t made its way into mass production.’

  Darby nodded. ‘At the moment, the gun lobbyists have successfully prevented microstamping from seeing the light of day, but that may change soon. California is trying to push through a bill that would require microstamping to be implemented on all firearms over the next five years. If the bill gets passed, it’ll be the first state in the nation to have this.

  ‘Currently, we need to find the handgun and examine it to see if a particular bullet was fired through it. Microstamping eliminates that. It creates a ballistic fingerprint. A handgun’s firing pin is engraved with a unique microscopic code that stamps the gun’s make, model and serial number on the primer cap. The first row – in this case, GLK18 – is supposed to be the stamp for the handgun, the bottom row the code for the shop that sold it.’

  ‘So I’m assuming there’s going to be some sort of database that’ll store these numbers and codes.’

  Darby nodded. ‘The database gives us not only the make and model of the handgun but where it was sold, who purchased it – everything.’ She worked the small joystick mounted on the keyboard in an effort to examine the edges of the cartridge’s headstamp. ‘And the database will also provide us with information about other crime scenes where cartridges with the same stamp were found. The beauty of this new technology is that you can see the stamp only through a scanning electron microscope.’

  ‘But since this technology isn’t in mass production yet, there’s no way we can trace it.’

  ‘This bullet has to be a part of a batch of test ammo.’

  ‘A prototype, in other words.’

  ‘Exactly. Only a handful of companies are doing microstamping, so this prototype or whatever it is should be easy to narrow down.’

  ‘The stamp on this first row here, GLK18,’ Coop said. ‘I’m guessing it’s a Glock eighteen.’

  ‘That would be my guess too.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of a model eighteen.’

  ‘That’s because they’re not sold here. It’s a military-issue weapon commissioned by the Austrian Counter-Terrorism Unit, EKO Cobra. As far as I know, they’re the only ones who use it. Take a look at the engraved letters around the headstamp.’

  Coop put his arm around the back of her chair and leaned forward for a closer view. She could feel his arm touching her and was suddenly pierced by the thought of his moving away – not to another state but to another country.

  ‘R… E… and what looks like an S,’ he said.

  She took a deep breath, trying to wash away the sinking feeling in her stomach. ‘There’s a company called Reynolds Engineering Systems that’s one of the leading developers of microstamping. They’re based in Washington, I think. Or Virginia.’

  He turned to her. Their faces were inches apart.

  ‘How do you know all of this stuff?’

  ‘I do a lot of reading.’ She turned to the keyboard to print off more copies.

  ‘You need a hobby.’

  ‘This is my hobby. Have you seen the Wonde
r Twins?’

  ‘They’re in Exam Room 2 working on the binoculars.’

  ‘What binoculars?’

  ‘Randy found a small pair of binoculars in the woods.’

  Darby wondered if one of the men she had seen last night had accidently dropped them.

  She stood up. ‘I’ll get on the horn and see what I can find out about this microstamp.’

  ‘Wait.’ Coop grabbed her wrist as she stood. ‘When you were examining Amy Hallcox’s body, did you see a tattoo?’

  ‘She had one above her left breast. A small heart.’

  ‘Did it have a black arrow through it?’

  It did. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I need the fingerprint card for Amy Hallcox.’

  ‘It’s on the bench near the Kelvin probe.’

  He walked across the room, grabbed the bag containing the Amy Hallcox fingerprint card and disappeared around the corner. Darby followed.

  Coop stood at the last bench, his favourite spot, a small corner suite arranged around a grouping of windows that offered strong sunlight. Not today. The sky was black and heavy rain continued to pelt the windows.

  He already had a fingerprint card set up on the bench. He slid Amy Hallcox’s card from the bag and examined it with a fingerprint magnifier. By the time she stepped up next to him, he had pushed the magnifier to the side.

  ‘It’s a match,’ he said, more to himself than to her.

  ‘A match to what?’

  He slid a fingerprint card yellowed by age across the bench. She looked at the name typed at the top: KENDRA L. SHEPPARD. White female. No age or other information was listed.

  ‘Who’s Kendra Sheppard?’

  ‘She was… she was from Charlestown,’ he said. ‘Got busted a couple of times for prostitution. When you and I went inside the house and I saw her, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. That I was imagining it.’

  She remembered Coop standing in the dining room wiping his sweaty forehead, his face as white as a sheet.

  ‘When you were outside talking to Pine, I took a closer look at Amy Hallcox’s face,’ he said. ‘Kendra had a small mole on her cheek – I told her she looked like a blonde version of Cindy Crawford. And Kendra also had a scar underneath her bottom lip. She got that when she was eighteen. We came out of Jimmy DeCarlo’s house and she fell down drunk on a piece of glass. I had to take her to the hospital for stitches.’