“I have another idea.” I explain what it is.
“Sure, it’s worth a try,” he says. “We should look around anyway, see what we notice after dark when there’s no one around.”
We end the call, and I have just enough time to have a chat with firearms examiner Faye Hanaday if I can find her. Locking up, I roll my scene case along the corridor, saying good night to people waiting for the elevator. I take the stairs, heading up instead of down, and Faye usually works late but no point in calling to check. It’s not her habit to answer the phone.
On the second floor, I roll my scene case, greeting scientists I pass. Many I’ve yet to introduce myself to, and I don’t know when I’ve ever hated being new on the job as much as I do right now. It’s always been routine for me to make evidence rounds, stopping in at various labs, checking on my cases. But I’ve not been doing that much my first frenetic month as the new chief.
The corridor dead-ends at the tool marks and firearms suite of labs, and the light is green outside the firing range’s thick steel door. I don’t hear the muffled thud of rounds being test-fired inside a long narrow space of thick concrete. There’s a steel bullet trap in back, and the floor is capable of bearing the weight of the water recovery tank.
No one’s home on the range, Faye’s colleagues gone for the day, and I find her alone at her workstation, staring through the binocular lenses of a comparison microscope. She has on a lab coat over her sweater and jeans, and her usual high-tops and loud socks. Her pink and purple highlighted hair is pushed back with a beaded headband, bringing to mind Cyndi Lauper.
Leaving my scene case by the door, I walk through a vast space of black countertops, and microscopes synced with video screens. Walls are crowded with poster-size photographic court displays of lands and grooves, and the marks left by firing pins. On shelves and tables are small scales for testing the pounds of pressure required to pull a trigger. Also calipers and other measuring devices for determining a bullet’s weight and caliber.
There are stacks of bullet-riddled targets used in distance testing. Piled about are tire tracks and footwear impressions cast in dental stone and silicone, and the ATM parked in a corner was brazenly stolen from a kiosk. The quadcopter drone inside a cardboard box leaning against a wall is rigged with a pistol that one angry neighbor fired remotely at another, blowing a hole in the screen door.
Wherever I look I see the ingenuity of modern inventions that can be customized to destroy and kill. Spread over a tabletop are an assortment of 3-D-printed knives, guns, bullets, shotgun slugs, assault rifle parts, and suppressors. Soon enough there won’t be much people can’t print at home, spinning whatever they like from a range of media such as plastics, carbon fiber, resin, Kevlar, and metals like steel and titanium.
“Knock knock.” I announce myself as I approach, not wishing to startle Faye, and she looks up, blinking several times. “I tried to reach you earlier.” It’s my diplomatic way of saying it would be nice if she’d call me back for once.
“Hi, sorry about that.” She leans back in her chair, putting on her glasses. “As you can imagine, I’ve been tied up with that attempted break-in at Dana Diletti’s house earlier today.”
“I was hearing about that while stuck in bad traffic, listening to her press conference,” I reply. Faye and I have worked several cases together since I took over as chief, most recently a suicide committed with an antique rifle.
Ironically, she isn’t into guns even if she’s a savant with them and almost any weapon you can think of. They’re simply what she works with for a living. When she relentlessly visits gun shows and stores, it’s not because she’s an enthusiast or a collector.
Her passion is the prizewinning cakes she bakes, and around her workstation are framed photographs of her imaginatively decorated confections. A mint and chocolate jungle with dinosaurs, rocks and caves. A butterscotch moonscape with astronaut footprints, a flag, a lunar lander. Children ice-skating on a blue candy pond in a winter wonderland of marshmallow snowmen.
I don’t know much about her, only that she’s in her late thirties, single, no pets, just a saltwater aquarium. But I have the sneaking suspicion she and Fabian might have something going. Now and then they arrive at work together, and the other day I noticed them in the parking lot squabbling inside his vintage El Camino.
“A BIG STINK IS what we’re talking about.” Faye sums up the alleged break-in. “Hold on to your hat because it’s coming.”