Fear the Dark by Chris Mooney Read Free Book Online

Fuming Chamber.
    For the next twenty minutes Darby oriented herself with the equipment and the locations of the tools and chemical solutions. Hayes was right: pretty much everything she needed was inside the trailer, including a tank of liquid nitrogen. Perfect. She went to work on the tape.
    In addition to fingerprints, epithelial cells, hair and dead skin, the adhesive side of duct tape also picks up an array of trace evidence. Darby examined all six strips for hair and fibres. She found plenty, along with a lot of blood. After meticulously collecting and labelling each sample, she made very detailed notes on her clipboard.
    Duct tape is notoriously sticky. Even if a killer wearsgloves, often the adhesive is strong enough to pull off a piece of a latex. Tucked into a torn edge of tape she discovered a sliver of latex half the size of a pencil eraser; on one ragged end was a nearly invisible, pin-sized black smear. After marking and photographing it, she used the tip of a knife to carefully prise it away.
    Darby examined the smear underneath a microscope. Given what she saw, she suspected it was ink. The mass spectrometer would be able to identify the sample.
    She placed black fingerprint powder, distilled water and washing-up liquid inside a glass beaker and mixed everything together using a fingerprint brush made of camel hair. She put it aside and, slipping on a fresh pair of gloves, moved to the nitrogen tank. She released the tank’s locking tab, removed the metal dipstick with the cone attached to the end and poured the liquid nitrogen into the stainless-steel container she had placed on the worktop near the sink.
    Carefully she dipped the first strip of tape into the container. She separated the smooth layer from the adhesive side. The smooth layer went into the Superglue Chamber; the adhesive side went on a tray, where she worked the fingerprint solution she’d mixed into it. It went on thick and black, and, after the tape was completely covered, she carried it to the sink. The solution would stick to any fingerprints; the rest would wash away.
    Darby held the tape under the running water.
    No fingerprints. She bagged the tape and then went to work on the next piece.
    ‘That white powder you found on the bathroom floor?’Hayes said. ‘It’s an aminoglycoside antibiotic called neomycin. Not the ointment for skin infections – I’m talking about an actual oral pill, which I didn’t even know existed. It kills bacteria in the intestinal tract. It’s used to treat E. coli infection and a condition called hepatic coma. That’s when the liver stops filtering out toxins and they build up in the blood. It’s also used to treat something called – I’m going to mangle this pronunciation – hepatic encephalopathy, which is a worsening of brain function that happens when the liver fails at removing the aforementioned blood toxins.’
    Darby had just finished hanging the last smooth side of tape inside the Superglue Chamber when the back door opened. It was Otto.
    ‘Cooper wants you in the bedroom,’ he called out over the diesel engine.
    ‘I bet he does.’
    His face coloured slightly. ‘I didn’t mean –’
    ‘Relax, I was just busting your balls.’
    Hayes called out over his shoulder, ‘Hey, Otto, pause the sexual harassment and come on up here and give me a hand with this computer shit. The satellite feed just crapped out. Again .’

11
    While Darby had been in the MoFo, the bodies had been removed and taken to the medical examiner’s office in Brewster, which serviced Red Hill as well as four other nearby towns. The ME’s office, Williams had told them, was, because of years of steep cutbacks, woefully understaffed, and there was a backlog of autopsies. The office had only one full-time doctor on staff. The part-time doctor who had been helping out had retired at the end of last year, and the office’s request for a deputy coroner had been denied.
    She didn’t need to explain the importance of