The Missing by Chris Mooney Read Free Book Online Page A

wallets and belts – they even came out with a kids’ line of clothing and accessories. They’re like a very upscale Timberland for the high-society set.’
    ‘How do you know all of this? You own stock in the company?’
    ‘During my teenage years, I was a big-time hiker. My parents gave me a pair of Ryzer boots one Christmas. The ones they make now are mass produced and are crap, but the originals? You take care of them, they’ll last you a lifetime. I still have mine.They are, hands down, the most comfortable pair of boots I’ve ever owned. That’s why I recognized the logo – it’s their old logo. These boots we’re looking at, they don’t make them anymore.’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do to track them down. Thanks, Mary Beth.’
    ‘You’re wrong about Coop. He likes smart women. Like you, for example.’
    ‘We’re just partners.’
    ‘Whatever you say,’ Mary Beth said. ‘By the way, you really need to take a shower. And a couple of breath mints wouldn’t hurt, either.’

Chapter 12
    The lab’s footwear database consisted of a collection of three-ring binders.
    Darby spent the rest of the morning poring through lifted samples of men’s boots gathered from Boston cases. The footwear impression Mary Beth recovered didn’t match any local cases.
    During her lunch hour, Darby went online and sifted through two forensic message boards devoted exclusively to footwear evidence. While hunting, she found the name of a former FBI agent whose specialty was identifying footwear impressions. He had been used as an expert in court on several high-profile criminal cases.
    Head pounding from hunger – she had skipped breakfast – Darby rushed down to the cafeteria and came back with a tuna salad and Coke. She swung by Leland’s office to give him an update. He wasn’t in.
    The message light on her office phone was on. It was a message from her mother. Sheila had seen the morning news and wanted to know if everything was okay.
    Sturgis ‘Pappy’ Papagotis popped his head into the office. ‘Got a moment?’ he asked.
    ‘Come on in.’
    Pappy pulled out Coop’s chair. He had the curse of being the world’s youngest-looking man. He was a breath over five feet and had the kind of boyish face that made bouncers take a serious look at his license.
    ‘I ran your white flecks through FTIR,’ he said. ‘Aluminum and alkyd-melamine.’
    ‘Automobile paint,’ Darby said. ‘What about styrene?’
    ‘No, this was a factory job. It wasn’t done in an auto body shop. How familiar are you with automobile paint?’
    ‘Melamine’s a resin added to paint to improve durability.’
    ‘Correct. Acrylic-melamine and polyestermelamine are the main polymers that make up paint. Alkyd-melamine is one of the super alkyds enamels they started using in the sixties. A lot of the automakers today favor using a polyurethane clear-coat system. It has higher gloss retention, for one, but the biggest reason is cost. Polyurethane is a fast air-drying top coat while melamine top coats need to be baked. The paint chip you found, it’s the original paint job.’
    ‘What about color?’
    ‘That’s where I hit a dead end,’ Pappy said. ‘I ran the chip through FTIR and it came up blank.’
    ‘But that doesn’t mean anything.’
    ‘Yes, I know what you’re going to say – Fourier Transform Infared Spectroscopy is only as good as our computer library, and my failure to identify it, all it means is that we couldn’t connect the paint chip to a local case. So I tried the Paint Query Database system run by our Canadian friends. No dice. I’ll send a sample to the feds. Their lab stores the lesser-known, harder-to-find paint samples on their National Automobile Paint File database.’
    ‘Have you used the feds before?’
    ‘I’ve never had to go to them since PDQ generally does the job. If we strike out there, we could try that Farfegnugen-thing run by the Germans. Supposedly, they have the largest known paint sample