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SEVENTY

“OKAY, KYLE, WE DID what you asked.” One of the surgeons, whose younger brother Kyle went to high school with, hands him a plastic dish. “The bullet.”

“Thanks.”

“And we left him intact. Whatever you guys are looking for, under his nails or cuts or abrasions or whatever — we kept him as pristine as possible.”

Kyle nods. “How’s it looking for him?”

The surgeon’s eyebrows rise. “Tough sledding. Odds are against survival, much less functionality.”

Kyle puts on a pair of rubber gloves, turns to Officer Risely, his best forensic officer, who is also putting on gloves.

“We need to clean him up for the family,” says the doctor.

“I got you. Shouldn’t take us more than a half hour or so.”

Kyle and Officer Risely enter the room. Kyle tries to remain clinical, pushing away any thoughts he might have about David and Marcie. But personal or not, part of the job or not, it’s never easy to see someone lying with tubes coming out of his nose and mouth, IVs in his neck and arms, machines expanding and contracting, whistling and buzzing.

Ginny goes to work on David’s left hand while Kyle looks him over. The nurses and doctors and surgeons did as he asked, cleaned him up as little as possible. David has significant bloodstains caked on his forearms and hands. Otherwise, most of the blood is limited to the regions below the waist, where the injury occurred, and David’s backside, as the pool of blood spread beneath him on the concrete.

And one small spot of blood above David’s left eye.

“Okay, Ginny, let’s start with prints. Get as many as possible.”

“Sure thing, Sarge. I’ll probably have to clean off his hands. Want me to look under his fingernails before I do that?”

“No, that’s okay. There wasn’t that kind of contact. Go ahead and clean his fingers if you need to. Whatever it takes for a good print.”

He steps back, lets Ginny do her work. Like most people who’ve been grievously wounded, David looks almost like a different person lying in that bed, all color removed from his face. Were it not for his chest expanding and contracting, in fact, he’d look like someone who’d already died.

Marcie, he thinks. Boy, has her life taken a sudden turn for the worse .

“And then one more thing, Ginny,” he says. “When you’re done with prints, let’s maybe get a couple of samples for DNA.”

Yes, he knows Blair already plans to do the DNA testing at the FBI offices. But no reason why he should miss the chance to collect a few more, just in case.

Prints and DNA, ballistics on the bullet — he’s going to make sure HGPD does its part of this case right.