Whorl Page 8

  “Yep. All day and then some.” He wasn’t sure how many FBI agents there were across the country, but he knew it was thousands, and they were always retiring. It was rare that the FBI Academy didn’t run several new classes a year, and for every new agent there were hundreds if not thousands of applicants who made it to the fingerprint and background check stage of the hiring process.

  “Booooring,” she said. “I’ve got a bunch of prints and partials from that plane crash last week. Trying to identify bodies….and body parts. Putting the right arms with the…..left arms. And the right bodies. Doing that with Dave and Shelly.”

  “Ick.”

  “I feel for the families. Some of those bodies…did you see the pictures? Looked like a bomb went off. Hell, at the speed they hit, it was practically like a bomb. They’re doing the DNA tests down the hall on the bits and pieces.”

  “And people say fingerprints are boring. DNA is so much worse. It’s like….I don’t know, watching stock market results in super slo mo.”

  She laughed. “See you on the flip side.” She was gone with a wave.

  Brenda was so bouncy and hyper that Mickey wondered how she’d ever found herself in a job that required sitting still in front of a computer and lab equipment for long stretches of the day, but she seemed to be one of the better techs in the lab. Coffee in hand, he headed out to his desk. Time to get to work.

  The cafeteria was a necessity. Nobody wanted to pack their own lunch every day, but due to the lab’s location on the Marine Corps base heading out to eat would only have been a possibility if they’d been allowed 90 minutes for lunch. As necessary as it was, the FBI had spared none of the taxpayer’s expense when designing the menu. Or at least that’s what Mickey told his friends. Truth was the lowest bidder had won the contract for the cafeteria, and the result was ugly. But at least the mediocre food was expensive. The inflated east coast/D.C prices had unfortunately made their way onto the menu, but if you wanted to eat something other than what came out of a brown bag it was the only option. He’d heard the cafeteria at the nearby FBI Academy wasn’t any better.

  Coming back to his desk after lunch, a little stuffed from too much sticky pasta, Mickey first checked for new emails, then headed over to check the latest print results at the terminal connected to the scanner. He got a little thrill when he saw there were actually some returns on the prints—high percentage matches. “Sweet,” he muttered. But when he sat down and started to review what he had, the results didn’t make any sense. “Wait, two….?” He tried to skim what he had, and saw that wasn’t going to cut it. Taking a deep breath, he waded in.

  “Sir, I’ve got a very agitated young man out here from Latent Prints who says he needs to speak with you. He says it’s an emergency.”

  Boone Stephenson, the Director of the FBI’s Laboratory Division, looked over his half glasses at Maggie, his secretary. She’d been his secretary for six years, and they knew each other as well as any man and woman who’d never had sex could.

  “Agitated? And young?”

  Maggie smiled. “He seems very earnest.”

  “Yes, I’m sure, but about what?”

  “Something about fingerprints.” She waved a hand.

  “Well, that would have been my first guess.” He sighed, and checked his watch. Almost four o’clock. “Okay, show him in, but if he’s still in here in five minutes throw me a rope.”

  “You got it.” She popped out, and a few seconds later Stephenson saw a slender young man walk through his doorway carrying a large stack of folders. He looked excited, almost scared.

  “Sir, I appreciate your seeing me,” Mickey told the Director. He’d met Stephenson before, even spoken to him the day he’d started in the lab, but since then he’d only been a face at the podium or in the halls. He was sweating, and his heart was hammering in his chest.

  “Appreciate it quickly, I’ve got a busy day,” Boone said, not unkindly. “Who are you?”

  “Mickey—uhh, Michael Mitchell, sir. I’ve been here almost ten months.”

  “Yes, but I meant ‘Who are you?’ more in the sense of, ‘What do you do here?’”

  “Oh. I’m in the Latent Print unit sir. And that’s why I’m here.” When he saw Stephenson waiting patiently for him to go on, he did. “For the past few days I’ve been running the fingerprints of FBI Special Agent applicants through the criminal database. I think they’re getting ready to hire another big batch of agents.”

  Stephenson nodded. No shortage of money for federal agencies under this administration.

  “Well, when I got back from lunch, I saw I had a hit. A match. Two, actually.”

  “Two applicants came back with criminal records?” It shouldn’t surprise him, it seemed like people were getting stupider by the day.

  “No, sir, it was two matches on the same set of prints.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “This applicant, his right thumb, a plain whorl, came back at a 97% match to Juan Alfredo Rodriguez, and his left middle finger, which is a tented arch, came back at a 98% match to Jerome Beiers.”

  That got Boone’s attention. He sat up a little straighter. “And I’m assuming that the person applying for a position as a Special Agent has indicated that he is neither Jerome Beiers or Juan whoever.”

  “Right. The applicant in question is David Anderson, of Troy, Michigan. I’ve got his whole hiring packet.”

  “No aliases listed for him? Wait, why did you pull his hiring packet? And why are we having this conversation? Shouldn’t I be having this conversation with your group supervisor?”

  “Sir, honestly, I didn’t tell my supervisor initially because I thought I had screwed up. Anything over a 95% match on the computer and it’s pretty much a lock, but we always compare the prints ourselves to double-check. Final verification is always done by a properly trained examiner. I re-ran the prints through the computer. And got the same results.”

  “Who took the prints?”

  Stephenson didn’t know that? “Sir, all applicant prints are taken at the local FBI office. In this case, Detroit.” Pretty much because the FBI didn’t trust anybody else to do it right.

  “And are these Live Scan or ink-and-paper?”

  “Ink and paper.”

  “Why not Live Scan? Since we’re doing them ourselves. Quicker, easier, no ink smudges, scan ‘em and they go straight into the computer.”

  Mickey had asked that question himself less than a month before. “With the Live Scan system, the field office has to send in the print digitally. If someone, either at their end or at ours, makes a mistake in how the prints are addressed or sorted, they could end up in the criminal records, the CJIS system. It’s apparently happened more than once, and nothing will screw up your job application with the FBI quicker than getting your prints entered as that of a criminal simply because someone pressed the wrong button on a keyboard. So all the Special Agent applicant prints are still being done with ink and paper.”

  “Were the submitted prints smudged?”

  “No sir. Whoever did these in the Detroit office, ummmm, looks like Special Agent Hoff, he’s a pro. There are no smears, no smudges, no light or dark spots, these exemplars are nearly textbook perfect.”

  “Okay, so what you’re telling me is that there’s a screw-up somewhere. It happens. More that I’d care to admit. I’m still not sure why you thought this was an emergency.”

  “Sir, I’m a mediocre driver and I can’t carry a tune, but when it comes to prints I’m good. I’m damn good. I know what I’m looking at. I double-checked them. Hell, I quadruple checked them. I went over the prints at every magnification I could, using my eyes, not a program. I matched twenty-eight points of comparison on David Anderson’s right thumb to the print taken from Juan Rodriguez. As you know that is far more than what we need to consider it a perfect match. I matched thirty-three points on Anderson’s left middle finger to the print taken from Jerome Beiers.”

  Boone frowned and leaned forward. �
�Are you saying he’s got multiple identities?”

  “No sir.” Mickey spread out all the files in front of his boss, and pointed as he explained. “Juan Alfredo Rodriguez, born January 13th, 1936 in Mexico City, Mexico. He was arrested in 1982 by us, the FBI, for wire fraud. He was three months from release in 1987 when he died of a heart attack, in federal prison. David Anderson’s right thumb print is not a match to Rodriguez’s right thumb, it is a match to Rodriguez’s left ring finger. Jerome Beiers is thirty-eight years old, Jewish, obese, six inches shorter than Anderson, and currently living in Newark. He has eight months left on his probation. Four years ago he was convicted of embezzlement from his law firm. The print on David Anderson’s left middle finger matches the print taken from Beiers’ right ring finger. As you can see from the photos, none of the men looks anything like the other.”

  The head of the FBI didn’t say anything. His eyes were darting back and forth over the files. “What about Anderson himself?”

  “David Matthew Anderson is twenty-five years old. Graduate of Michigan State University, degree with honors in Criminal Justice. Initial background check shows he’s never been arrested. Parents dead, no siblings. He has two very glowing recommendation letters from FBI agents in his hiring packet, plus one from the Chief of the Warren, Michigan police department, and because of that it appears he has been fast-tracked.”

  The young tech had printed out samples of the fingerprint matches, and Stephenson could see from the photos in the file that none of the three looked like they could even be related, but that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly good enough. “Where’s the nearest AFIS terminal?” he asked Mickey.

  Forty-five minutes later Boone Stephenson leaned back from the hi-def monitor and rubbed his aching eyes. The door behind them was closed—Boone had closed it ten minutes after sitting down, when he started seeing things he didn’t want to see. “This can’t be the first time he’s been printed. He works for an armored car company for Christ’s sake. We’ve probably run his prints before.” He was trying to find something, anything, that would take away from what he’d just seen with his own eyes. He glanced down at the files in front of him, but they were no help.

  “I don’t know what to tell you sir. He has a concealed weapons permit as well. I’m guessing that if anybody got an AFIS match before, they looked at the age of the person at the other end of the match, maybe just looked at the photos, and automatically discarded it as a…I don’t know, false positive.”

  “Who’s your supervisor over there?” Boone asked him.

  “Frank Fortney, sir.”

  “And what did he have to say about this?”

  “Nothing, sir, I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t say anything to anybody, I’ve just been working on it all afternoon. Like I said, at first I was afraid I’d screwed up. Now I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  “You know it’s impossible, right?”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Two people can’t have the same prints.”

  Mickey sighed. He’d been thinking about just that for several hours. “I know that’s what we say. But, really, there’s no way to prove that. There are tens of millions of people living in this country alone who have never been printed, so how do we know that their prints don’t match somebody? We’ve always said no two prints are alike because we’ve never found any. Because nature almost never makes identical copies of anything. Because the chances against it are astronomical. Just like we say that no two snowflakes are the same—it’s an unprovable hypothesis.” He scratched his head. “I think it was Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, back in the 1890s, who declared the odds of two people having the same fingerprint were one in sixty-four billion. But then I came to work today.”

  “Do you know how…..” Boone searched for the right word. Nothing seemed sufficient for what he needed to say. “….important this is?”

  “Yes sir, I think I do.”

  “Okay, tell me.” Boone turned in his chair and stared at the young man.

  “We’ve just discovered that fingerprints are not individualistic. One person has, for all intents and purposes, fingerprints which are identical to those belonging to two other people. If that’s the case, who knows how many other matches there are out there in the world? This completely turns the science of fingerprinting on its ear. Uh, so to speak.”

  Boone regarded the young man for three long beats. “You’re talking about the science side of it….but the science doesn’t happen in a vacuum. People are fingerprinted for very specific reasons. Mostly for a very specific reason. People are fingerprinted because it is an undisputable technique to uniquely identify them. More crimes have been solved with fingerprint evidence than for any other reason, short of actual confessions. If the general public finds out that two people can have the same fingerprints…what do you think will happen?”

  “I…hadn’t really thought about that sir.”

  Boone nodded. “Yes, I see that.”

  “Sir, what do you mean if they find out? If Anderson’s prints match two other people, what are the chances that he’s the only person like this in the world?”

  “People have been getting fingerprinted for over a hundred years, and there’s never been a match before. Maybe Anderson is the exception to the rule.”

  “Actually, sir, I’ve been thinking about that, and I wonder. Anderson had to have been printed before, but somehow whoever ran his prints either didn’t find the match or discounted it. Maybe the reverse has happened as well—people getting blamed or arrested for something because of fingerprints, and yet they insist they’re innocent. Who’s to say they aren’t, and the fingerprints belong to someone else?”

  “Mr. Mitchell,” Boone said to him very seriously, “that’s the very thing I want you to think about. Go home now,” for he could see on the clock above the door that it was after 5 p.m., “and think about the ramifications of releasing this discovery to the public. Think very hard on it. Come and see me tomorrow morning in my office, and we’ll talk. Between now and then, don’t talk to anyone about it. Not your wife, your girlfriend, your priest, not Fortney, no one. That’s an order. Are we clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Good. Go home and think about what this means to you, to your career, to the Bureau, to law enforcement in general. Go ahead and close the door behind you. I’ll take care of these.” He waved his hand over the files on the desk. Boone also needed to clear the terminal so there was no immediate evidence of their activity.

  “Okay. Good night, sir.”

  “Good night.”

  After the door closed Boone put his head in his hands. “Oh sweet Jesus,” he whispered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dave pulled up in front of the doors and waited. A few seconds later one of the bouncers, Quentin, stuck his head out and waved at him, then disappeared back inside. Dave yawned and blinked. The dashboard clock read 2:44 a.m. He had to get up in three hours to head out on a surveillance, and knowing Gina, he wouldn’t be getting any more sleep tonight. It was a good thing he’d crashed early, and already gotten five hours of sleep.

  The door of the club opened and Gina came practically skipping out, big purse in hand. She had on white tights, high heels, but had nothing on above the waist but her orange bikini top. “Hey Sweetie!” she said, swinging open the door. “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “Yeah.” Her Acura was at the dealer for a problem with the passenger side window motor. He glanced over as she sat down in the seat. Didn’t look like she had anything on underneath the tights.

  “Aww, is baby sweepy?” She leaned over the center console and gave him a wet kiss, pushing her tits against his arm. She tasted of whiskey, and smelled of cigarettes, although she didn’t smoke. He knew a lot of the noise about the dangers of second-hand cigarette smoke was bullshit, but most non-smokers weren’t working a stripper pole, breathing heavily in a dense cloud of smoke every night.

  “Buckle up,” he told her, tr
ying not to smile. He looked to his left coming out of the parking lot, but at that hour of the morning there was only one set of headlights visible, far down the eastbound lanes of 8 Mile. “I should be done by about noon today, short day, so I can take you to pick up your car then.”

  “Okay.”

  He drove across the four eastbound lanes and hit the boulevard turnaround. There was nobody in sight in the westbound lanes, so he coasted through the Stop sign in second gear. He’d just shifted the Mustang into third when he saw the red and blue lights in his rearview.

  Shit, he thought to himself. He signaled, then angled across the lanes and turned into a parking lot. He couldn’t see anything in his mirrors other than the flashing lights even before the cop turned on the spotlight and aimed it at his side mirror to illuminate the inside of the Mustang.

  “This is such bullshit,” Gina grumbled. “Why are they stopping us?

  “Shhh,” he said. Even without him running the stop sign, he knew that a black Mustang coming out of Detroit at that hour of the night was probable cause. By the time the cop walked up to his door he had the car shut off, the window down, and his hands on the steering wheel, his driver license and CPL in one of them.

  “License, registration, and proof of insurance,” Dave heard over his left shoulder.

  “Yes sir. I’ve got a CPL,” he told the officer. Michigan law required a person with a Concealed Pistol License to tell a law enforcement officer immediately if he was armed. Dave took his hand off the steering wheel and held his cards out for the officer. He glanced over his shoulder, but the officer was just a silhouette behind a bright flashlight.

  “Are you armed?” the officer asked, taking the cards from Dave’s hand.

  I wouldn’t tell you about my CPL if I wasn’t, Dave thought, but only said, “Yes sir.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On my right hip.”

  The cop swung his flashlight beam around inside the already well lit car. “Okay, just keep your hands on the—” the flashlight beam paused on the cards in the officer’s hand, then swung up to Dave’s face. “Cobb? Hey, man, how you doing?”