Whorl Read online

  “It’s not too expensive, is it?” Kimberly asked him.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not bad. Besides, I’m celebrating.”

  Mickey’s roommate shook his head. “You’re doing this wrong,” Ben observed. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to be upset and miserable when you break up with your girlfriend? Especially if she’s hot.”

  “The fact that I’m not, that I actually feel relieved, tells me that I made the right decision,” Mickey said. Just saying it out loud felt huge to him. And it felt right. If anyone had told him a year ago he’d be happy about breaking up with Rachel, who looked like a runway model and shaved everything, he’d have told them they were nuts.

  “You look happy,” Kim said to him, nodding.

  “At least the two of you won’t be fighting through dinner,” Ben said with a smirk, then winced as his girlfriend punched him in the shoulder. “What? You didn’t like her anyway.”

  “Don’t say that,” she told Ben, giving him a dirty look. She turned back to Mickey. “So what’s the official reason for the breakup?”

  “Heck, I don’t know if there’s just one reason. We were just wrong for each other. She said a lot of things during that last fight, most of which…I don’t even know what she was talking about. She was upset that I liked my job. Like I shouldn’t be happy with my job?” He took a sip from his water glass. “I’ve been thinking about it. I think the real reason we broke up is because she figured out she couldn’t turn me into a different person.”

  “Women always want to change guys,” Ben said, shaking his head. “Bitches.”

  Mickey laughed, he always did when Ben tried to go gangsta, and Ben winced as Kimberly gave his arm another shot. “You’re fine just how and who you are,” she assured him.

  “Whether I am or not, this is who I am,” he told her. It was something he’d figured out during the fight with Rachel. She just hadn’t liked who he was. Or, at a minimum, she couldn’t be happy with him as he was. He had a sneaking suspicion she wouldn’t be happy with anyone. Kimberly and Ben, on the other hand, seemed to be truly happy with each other.

  “Who’d she want to change you into?” Ben asked. “Brad Pitt? You work for the freaking FBI.”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Mickey said. “And…yeah, I work for the FBI, but I’m not an agent. Something she liked to point out. She seemed very aware of it.”

  “It’s not always about looks, or sex,” Kimberly told her boyfriend.

  Ben rolled his eyes. “Maybe not for girls.”

  Their waiter returned with their drinks, and Mickey took a long pull from his Sam Adams. “Are you ready to order?” the waiter asked. He was a slender young man, maybe the same age as Ben and Mickey. Mickey idly wondered how the guy had ended up a waiter. Was he a student late to graduating, just doing this for money, or had his plans for a career, for the future, not worked out? Maybe the young man had never had any plans for the future, which was how he’d ended up as a waiter at a crowded Georgetown bistro. Mickey’d had a good idea what he wanted to do before he graduated high school, and at age twenty-five he was doing it.

  “New York strip,” Mickey announced proudly. Ben looked down at the menu, saw the price of the steak, and squinched his eyes.

  “Hell, make that two. Might as well celebrate with you. She had a great ass, but I’m glad you’re free of that miserable bitch.”

  Mickey and Ben were eating their salads when Ben said, with his mouth full of croutons, “Maybe Rachel ditched you because you don’t have a real job.”

  “What?”

  Ben shrugged, and continued with affected innocence, “I mean, you guys down there just make shit up as you go, sort of like weathermen.”

  “By ‘down there’ I’m assuming you mean the FBI Lab?” Mickey said, raising his eyebrows. Kimberly just rolled her eyes and stayed out of it. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said. “Is that what they call it? Because I don’t know how they can even really call it a lab. I mean, I work in a laboratory….”

  “Here we go,” Mickey said with a sigh. Ben worked as a chemist for the FDA in downtown D.C. Their apartment in Woodbridge was almost exactly halfway between D.C. and Quantico. Mickey wiggled his fingers in a “come on” gesture at Ben. “Okay, let me have it.”

  “I mean,” his roommate continued with a shrug, “normally people who work in a lab are scientists, and scientists work with absolutes. They do work using the scientific method, and part of that method is reproducible results. Mix two chemicals, get a reaction. Every time you do it, provided the proportions of the chemicals are the same, same conditions, you should get the exact same reaction.”

  “Which exact part of my job are you attacking this time?” Mickey asked politely.

  Ben smiled smugly. “There are so many aspects to it open to criticism, but let’s go with fingerprints.”

  Mickey sighed. He worked as a Fingerprint Examiner in the FBI’s Latent Print Operations Unit, although he was low man on the totem pole. In fact, he was still a probationary employee, had only been on the job nine months, but he really enjoyed the work. It paid pretty well, and as it was a government job he was guaranteed pay raises every year. And it wasn’t as if he was doing unskilled labor, he had a freaking Bachelor’s Degree, with Honors, in Forensic Science from Purdue, and was working on his Masters at George Washington University, or “GW” as everyone around D.C. called it.

  He had the scientific background to do the job—and then some—as soon as he got out of college, but getting hired by the FBI wasn’t as easy as working at McDonald’s. There was the yard-long application, the fingerprinting, the background check, the interview, the polygraph…..it had taken him over a year from application to first day on the job. Which seemed totally ridiculous to him, but he’d since learned that was common. His uncle…..he wanted to know why the hell Mickey hadn’t just applied to the Bureau to become an agent. Uncle Mark was a recently retired FBI Special Agent himself, and the fact that Mickey wanted to work for the FBI, but not as an agent, just didn’t compute. Mark wanted someone, anyone in the family to follow in his footsteps, and Mickey was his best bet—heck, Mickey was his only bet, nobody else in the family wanted anything to do with law enforcement.

  Mickey loved forensics, it was interesting as hell, but he didn’t want to chase guys or shoot guns, he just wanted to work in a lab. Blood spatter analysis was gross, DNA was interesting at a very technical level, testing substances to find out if they were actually the drugs they looked and smelled like was so boring and easy a monkey could do it, and tool mark comparison put him to sleep. But fingerprints….he loved fingerprints.

  As he was still relatively new to the job they had him running civil—as in non-criminal—prints through the database. Why? Because nobody else wanted to do it. Usually they were part of background checks for concealed weapons permits around the country, or for employment purposes. It was surprising just how many professions required fingerprinting. He’d also run the prints of some unidentified bodies which had been drowning victims of Hurricane Sandy. The LPOU was part of the FBI’s Laboratory Division, which was a heck of a lot bigger than he would have expected before he got the job.

  Before he was hired, he assumed he’d be working in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. but the FBI Lab was actually located at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, along with the FBI Academy. He worked in a big and relatively new office building, and soon learned how lucky he was not to have to work at the Hoover Building. Regular trips there quickly revealed that the place was a dump, well past its prime and starting to come apart at the seams. Even the GAO, the Government Accounting Office, had recommended the building be destroyed. As much money as the government was throwing around to anyone who asked for it, you’d think they could spare some to get the FBI a new headquarters, but so far no such luck.

  As big as it was, it was still the freaking FBI Crime Lab. There were hundreds of
applicants for every position that opened up, maybe thousands. Mickey had the right degree, but he was pretty sure Uncle Mark had put in a good word for him. And Mark still had hopes that once Mickey saw how wonderful the FBI was that he’d want to join up as an agent. To that end he’d taken Mickey shooting, and given him his FBI-issued Kevlar vest, as he’d retired to the middle-of-nowhere Indiana and wouldn’t need it. Mickey had taken it, not wanting to say no, but what the hell was he going to do with a bulletproof vest?

  Mickey’d been fascinated by fingerprints ever since he was a little kid and saw a blown-up photograph of one at a local museum. He could stare at them for hours, at their intricacies and patterns. Loops, arches, tented arches, whorls…..especially whorls. Plain, accidental, peacock’s eye, central pocket loop whorls…. His favorite—and he knew it was weird to have a favorite type of fingerprint pattern—was the double loop whorl. It looked so much like the Yin/Yang symbol that he wondered if that was how the Chinese philosopher, or whoever it was, dreamed up the famous design—by staring at one of his fingertips.

  “And what’s wrong with friction ridge impressions?” he asked Ben, using the technical term. What people knew as “fingerprints” were actually the patterns of minute ridge formations on the fingertips.

  “Nothing,” Ben admitted. “They make great party gifts, and all you need is paper and ink—and fingerprints—to make some more. I’ve got friction ridges, you’ve got friction ridges, everybody’s got some. It’s just the voodoo you use to compare them—”

  “Voodoo?” Mickey couldn’t let that one slide.

  “Sure. What do you call it? It’s not a science. It’d be complimentary to call it a pseudoscience. What do they call psychology, a ‘soft science’? Nice term. Probably a psychologist came up with it, trying not to hurt anybody’s feelings. How exactly do you compare prints, to find out if they belong to a criminal?”

  “We run them through the computer, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. 55 million prints on file. The computer runs them through our database, and spits out maybe a dozen possible matches. The possibles are ranked with a percentage, likelihood of a match, and then we, me, one of us there goes through and, starting with the most likely one, compares the print with the possible.”

  “And the computer doesn’t actually look at the print, right, it looks at a map of the ‘points of comparison’? Where the ridges split, or arch, or whatever.”

  “Right. Bifurcations, where a ridge splits into two, trifurcations where one splits into three, or the spot where a ridge tops an arch, or the center of a loop or a whorl.”

  “And does the computer decide where the points of comparison are on the print? Or is there human input? How are the points of comparison of a print entered into the database?”

  “By a latent print examiner.”

  “But does your computer pick the points of comparison, all by itself, or is there some human input? Some human discretion?”

  Mickey saw where his roommate was going with this, but found himself unable to shut him down. “There is human input on the points of comparison,” he said grudgingly.

  Ben beamed. “So a human picks what he feels are the important points of the print, and tells the computer. And that’s just the first step in the process. Ever heard the phrase, ‘garbage in, garbage out’? And you’re actually not comparing the prints themselves when you make an ID, you’re comparing the points of comparison. How backward is that? And how do we know no two prints are alike? Just because somebody says so? Just because the odds against it are so high? Does that even sound like science to you? Do you know the odds against a specific sperm reaching an egg? And yet it happens, all the time.”

  “Really? At dinner?” Kimberly said to him. She sat back and smiled at the two of them as they continued to go at it. It was funny, the two of them were so much alike that some people thought they had to be brothers. They were both dark-haired and skinny, and smart, that was how they were similar. Really smart.

  She’d had dumb boyfriends before. She’d been pretty enough in high school to date a few jocks, and didn’t regret it, because it had been a learning experience. While they looked good, and had a lot of repetitive motion capabilities in the bedroom, there wasn’t a whole lot of there there. Ben and Michael weren’t quite geeks or nerds, but they were tiptoeing along the razor’s edge. Smart guys maybe weren’t as pretty, but they were smart. Smart meant they could talk about things other than sports and reality TV, and had real jobs. Real jobs meant careers, and earning potential.

  A few of her more idiotic girlfriends still occasionally asked her, “What do you see in him? He’s such a geek.” Kimberly was quick to point out they were the ones dating bartenders, or retail ‘sales associates’, cute guys who had little to no future.

  “And even the computer can’t say whether or not the print is a match, that has to be done by an individual examiner,” Ben said, making his points in the air with his fork. “How many times have members of the FBI Lab testified in court to a fingerprint identification of a suspect that later has turned out to be completely wrong?” he asked Mickey.

  “Um, I don’t know.” Which was a true, if not quite complete answer.

  “Yeah, right. I’ve got three words for you. Brandon Mayfield.”

  “That’s three words?” Kimberly said.

  “Oh, geez,” Mickey said.

  “I’m just saying, one of your high-falutin’ FBI agents testified that he was involved in the Madrid train bombings in 2004. What was the phrase the agent used? Oh, yeah, a ‘100 percent positive match’. One hundred. Not ninety-eight, not ninety-nine, but one hundred. And the actual fact was it wasn’t Mayfield’s fingerprint at all. How many millions of dollars did the FBI have to pay out for that debacle? I mean, in addition to the formal apology they issued.”

  “Do you do research or something so you can give me more shit?” Mickey asked his roommate. “I mean, come on, give me a break.”

  “But you know that it happened. You’re right, I did look it up. The Department of Justice report on that train wreck said that the error was caused by a ‘misapplication of methodology’. Which I’m pretty sure means that you guys were just making shit up. And that’s far from the only time it’s happened.”

  Mickey had to nod. In addition to Mayfield, every member of the lab quickly learned the name of former Special Agent Dr. Frederick Whitehurst, the biggest whistleblower in the history of the Bureau. He’d been Supervisory Special Agent at the lab, and his testimony on scientific misconduct at the lab affecting as many as ten thousand cases had resulted in dozens, if not hundreds of overturned convictions.

  Ben sat back. “If identifying fingerprints was a science, how can that be? You shouldn’t call it the FBI Crime Lab, you should call it Fantasy Land.”

  “We’ve had some problems, but all that’s in the past,” Mickey said. He shook his head. “You’re such a dick sometimes. Remind me, why am I your friend?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Aaron stood by the fence smoking, just staring out at the street. He was early, the truck wasn’t ready, and Dave wasn’t even there yet, so there was nothing for him to do but wait. Just past seven A.M, the sounds of the city were fainter than the repetitive banging sounds echoing out of the service bay behind him. Trash twisted along the curbs from a light breeze, fast food wrappers mostly. He heard her before he saw her, coming down the sidewalk in front of the building. She saw him standing inside the truck yard, hesitated a second, and then angled toward him.

  “How you doing?” she asked him.

  Aaron just smiled around the Marlboro. “Not bad.”

  She eyed the uniform shirt, then the trucks in the yard behind him and the building. “You just starting, or getting off, or looking for something to do?”

  Aaron pulled the Marlboro out and let the smoke curl around his face. “No thanks, officer, I don’t think I want to go to jail today.” She might as well have been wearing a badge for all the red flags she was
throwing up. And they had nothing to do with the time of day, a lot of the local hookers were busy taking care of executives on their way downtown before a busy day of work. The GM Headquarters was only a few miles away.

  Her eyebrows went up. “What makes you think I’m a cop?” she asked him. “I’m not a cop, I’m just looking to party.”

  Aaron squinted at her, then stepped close to the fence. With exaggerated care he looked first one way up the street, then another, then back at her. He spoke quietly. “Look,” he told her, “you’re obviously new at this, so let me help you. First thing, your hair is washed, or at least looks clean and brushed. You’ve got all your teeth, too, although I know you can’t do anything about that. But your jeans, seriously? You’ve got a crease in your jeans. You actually look like someone I’d want to have sex with, which for damn sure means you’re a cop. You’re in the Cass Corridor, not pretending to be an escort in Windsor. You’ve got to blend with your environment. Your sergeant’s not doing his job if he didn’t tell you that, and if you’re miked up I hope he heard me.” He stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and waited. He hadn’t seen the covering cars, but knew they had to be out there somewhere.

  The woman stood there for a few moments, not saying anything. Then, a rueful smile growing on her face, she said, “Thanks,” and, after a second’s hesitation, moved off down the sidewalk.

  “Anytime.” Aaron moved his head close to the chainlink and watched her walk away. Her jeans were just as tight as he’d thought. He tossed his cigarette away and headed back toward the metallic banging sounds, which weren’t getting any quieter. The mechanics they had working here were morons.

  Dave ran into Aaron just leaving the vault, pulling a cash cart. “Guess who we’ve got again today?” Aaron asked his partner.