Cutler caught her breath, smoothed her hair, straightened her coat, and beamed at the people in the office. She waved a sheaf of photos in her hand. “After a wild and hairy all-nighter, here you go, hot off the press.” She fanned herself. “Okay, let me back up. The very first thing we did when we arrived at the scene yesterday was collect all the samples of the shooter’s blood. We processed some of the blood, then ran the DNA through the CODIS and bang!—look at this photo, it just came through my email.” She beamed as she handed each of them a copy. “Here’s our shooter.”
All of them stared at an eight-by-ten colored police booking photograph of a young bruiser who looked like he’d lost a fight—his face was a mass of blotched purple-and-green bruises, his split swollen lips dark red with dried blood. His head was shaved bald and sat on a neck that looked wider than Sherlock’s waist. The height chart behind him showed he was six foot four inches, and he looked like he had to weigh two hundred and sixty pounds. “His name is Paul, aka Boozer, Gordon. He’s an amateur boxer, has anger management issues. It looks like he lost a fight the night he was booked, doesn’t it? He’s been arrested and jailed for assault three times to date. He lives here in the city, on Clayton.” She beamed at them.
There was dead silence in Cheney’s office.
“What? We’ve identified your guy! What’s wrong?”
Harry said, “Sorry, Mimi, but we don’t think this is our shooter. Our shooter is lots older, lots shorter, weighs maybe half what this guy weighs, and his neck is about as thick of one of this guy’s wrists.”
“But this is an exact match; the probabilities are off the wall. You’ve got to be wrong.”
“I guess it’s time to back up again, Mimi,” Sherlock said. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance of a lab error, or a mix-up with the samples?” She added with a smile, “Maybe more than one person’s blood?”
“Naturally not,” Mimi said, not appeased by the smile. “I collected the blood myself, and we ran samples from three different sites. All the samples matched.”
Savich said, “Let’s find this guy. Cheney, can you get some people working on his last known address? And Sherlock, get on the phone to the hospital, find out if Paul Boozer Gordon was there this week, maybe as some kind of patient?”
Mimi grabbed her hair and tugged on it. “A patient? How would a patient’s blood get in the elevator shaft?”
There was only one possibility, Savich thought, far-fetched, but still. He said slowly, “Mimi, did you happen to test the blood samples for traces of heparin?”
“Heparin? No, why?”
Savich said, “There’s lots of blood in a hospital—in the blood bank, in the laboratories, at nursing stations waiting to be picked up. And that includes heparinized blood that wouldn’t clot right away. You wouldn’t be able to tell as easily if the blood was older, that it was planted there, would you?”
“Are you telling me the shooter brought the blood with him into the elevator shaft? Someone else’s blood, to plant on the scene? That he added heparin to the blood to fool me? Do you realize that would mean this frigging shooter would understand blood analysis? You’re saying he purposefully set out to mislead us? To mislead me?” She paused for a moment, her rocket brain filling in the possibilities. “Goodness, even if he actually managed to get hold of someone else’s blood, think of how careful he had to be to leave blood splattered at the scene in a way that wouldn’t be spotted by the forensic team as looking wrong. All that work, all that study and practice—for what? Nothing, really.”
Savich said, “Unless this Boozer Gordon was shot in the elevator shaft, how else does this make sense?”
Harry said, “If that’s true, Savich, the shooter had to know we’d see through the deception sooner rather than later. He couldn’t have hoped to frame someone else for the shooting that way. It reminds me of that newspaper picture of Judge Dredd we found in his backyard. Another way to give us the finger again, not give you the finger, Mimi, but us. He wanted to show us how smart he is, and what tail-chasing loser dogs we are in comparison. Another thing, apparently the shooter wasn’t wounded after all.” Harry cursed under his breath.
Cheney was off his cell first. “DMV still has Boozer Gordon’s address on Clayton Street. Now, you’re saying our shooter somehow got some of Boozer’s blood, enough of it to create believable blood splatter?”
Savich nodded. “Only explanation I can think of.”